Race and the Politics of Joy
The major things black art has to have are these: it must have the ability to use found objects, the appearance of using found things, and it must look effortless.
—Toni MorrisonBlack joy is also a strategy. The wider world dismisses and disregards it as frivolity at its peril. It is a mechanism for resistance, a method of resilience, and a master plan for restoration.
—Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts, Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration
One night after a performance Louis Armstrong was asked, “What’s new?” Without missing a beat, he replied, “Nothin’ new. White folks still ahead.”
Decades earlier in 1909, Louis Armstrong entered a talent show at the Iroquois Theater, a black vaudeville house on So. Rampart St.
Just before going on stage, Little Louis dipped his face in a flour sack. Yes, at eight-years-old, Louis Armstrong, whom Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis would charge with being a “plantation character,” performed in white face, making fun of the minstrelsy that would burden his reputation in the black community for much of his career. In 1954 Armstrong recorded one of his many signature songs, “Laughin’ Louis.”
Louis, it would seem, was born a Trickster, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century.
For Miles, Armstrong’s “personality was developed by white people wanting black people to entertain by smiling and jumping around.” Later, Miles came ’round: “You can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t played.”
In his autobiography, Dizzy, too, acknowledges his misreading of Armstrong’s minstrelsy-influenced performance style:
Hell, I had my own way of Tomming. Every generation of blacks since slavery has had to develop its own way of Tomming, of accommodating itself to a basically unjust situation.... Later on, I began to recognize what I had considered Pops’s [Armstrong’s] grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life and erase his fantastic smile.
Armstrong had his own answer: “Showmanship does not mean you’re not serious.”
Kamala’s Joy
In similar fashion, Vice President Harris’s campaign refuses to allow Donald Trump to steal the joy from American life. “Suddenly,” Michelle Goldberg writes in The Times, “a campaign that felt like a bleak death march has become fun, even exuberant.”
George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis inspired not only the Black Lives Matter but also the Black Joy movement. In 2020, Brandy Factory, co-founder of Upset Homegirls, wrote, “Black Joy affirms that I am not a victim. I am an agent of change. It rejects the idea that violence… injustice, discrimination, prejudice, and dominance over others are normal and acceptable actions.”
Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts adds, “[T]hrough our demonstration of joy, we hope to be seen as fully human. We want our laughter to be contagious instead of treated like an audible plague.”
Àshe, Spiritual Command, and Itutu, Mystic Coolness
While Winging It focuses on improvisation in Western culture, improv is not only perennial — dating to Antiquity — but also universal, widely present in non-Western cultures. Charisma plays as equal a part in spontaneous discourse outside the west, suggesting the universality of improv and its metaphors. Trickster’s charisma is deeply inscribed in African American culture. But what shaped the pen that did the inscribing is West African culture.
Robert Farris Thompson, African culture’s leading expositor, declares that the Yoruba of West Africa “assess everything aesthetically” and “appreciate freshness and improvisation per se in the arts.” Their gods embody charisma, àshe, “spiritual command, the power-to-make-things-happen.” To have àshe is to connect to a god’s charisma. It is a boast.
The goal of Yoruba religion is to become possessed by a deity. To be possessed is, Thompson explains, “‘to make the god,’ to capture numinous flowing force within one’s body.” It is to be filled with the god’s charisma.
In the New World where Yoruba religion became voudoun and voodoo, the goal is to be “mounted” by the divine horsemen, known variously as the “loa,” the mystères, or the invisibles. To be mounted is to be possessed by the archetype, to wear the god’s mask (in Latin, persona means mask). For, as anyone donning a mask or persona knows, we have many selves. To give oneself to a god or archetype as it enters us, as the situation calls for, is not to negate the other gods. It is to embrace that god’s charisma in the moment, for the moment.
Who knows what loa will mount us tomorrow? One thing is sure, it will be the one we need at that moment. If we are ready. If we are open. If we are present.
Àshe is a boast and we may associate voodoo possession with violent ritual. But possession of àshe confers the “sovereign concept” of Yoruba culture: itutu, “mystic coolness.” Thompson writes:
Coolness, then, is a part of character, and character objectifies proper custom. To the degree that we live generously and discreetly, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts gradually assume virtual royal power. As we become noble, fully realizing the spark of creative goodness God endowed us with—the shining ororo bird of thought and aspiration—we find the confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is àshe. This is character. This is mystic coolness. All one.
”Outwardly mischievous but inwardly full of overflowing creative grace,” Hermes’s Yoruba cousin, Eshu or Eshu-Elegbara, wears a red feather (or sometimes a knife) above his forehead to commemorate “the limitlessness of his àshe.”
The origin myth of that red feather helps explain itutu and àshe. The gods face a crossroads. They have to determine who will be supreme under the high god Ọlọrun — who will be number two. All the gods make their way to heaven to present rich sacrificial offerings on their heads.
All save one. Eshu-Elegbara, wisely honoring beforehand the deity of divination with a sacrifice, had been told by him what to bring to heaven — a single crimson parrot feather (ekodide), positioned upright upon his forehead, to signify that he was not to carry burdens on his head [i.e., is free of the burden of purpose, utility]. Responding to the fiery flashing of the parrot feather, the very seal of supernatural force and àshe, God granted Eshu the force to make all things happen and multiply (àshe).
Outward signs of submission and material bounty which the other gods presented were no match for Eshu’s wisdom and humility. Once granted his powers of dominion, Eshu, instead of arrogantly subordinating everyone to himself, did the “cool” (generously appropriate) thing: he threw a vast commemorative feast to share his newfound prestige, and to honor Ọlọrun for the priceless treasures of àshe.
Eshu’s extra measure of àshe and itutu sets him apart, frees him from drudgery. Yet he uses this charisma to inspire community with a commemorative feast. Charisma sets apart but properly expressed, avoids the kind of high status that alienates or diminishes others. It creates community.
“The force to make all things happen and multiply (àshe)” is comparable to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s idea of homeostasis that through embodied emotions charges all life to seek a state of flourishing.
It is charisma that, legend has it, the devil gives bluesman Robert Johnson at the crossroads, enabling him to play the guitar better than he, or anyone, had ever done before. Johnson’s devil-at-the-crossroads is a Christian syncretic version of Eshu, the devil’s horns an echo of Eshu’s red feather or knife worn on the forehead to signal his charisma. So inspired, Robert Johnson in his short life helped shape the blues idiom with its bent notes that challenge the solfège scale of Western music (do re mi). Long after his early death, Johnson’s style, widely imitated, helped shape that great disruptor, rock and roll.
Kamala’s Cool
Kamala’s sudden transformation from a — let’s admit it — somewhat disappointing vice president to a presidential candidate fully self-possessed displays all the marks of her African heritage. It is perfectly in tune with the Black Joy movement.
Of course the transition would look effortless, a sign of its deep authenticity. Like 8-year-old Louis at the Iroquois Theater, like Robert Johnson at the crossroads, Kamala has been touched by Eshu. With a laugh at once warm and cool — blessed by itutu — she rebuilds the Obama and Biden coalitions, and then some. Kamala’s community puts aside Trump’s fear mongering, embracing generosity and joy.
One hopes her charisma, her mystic coolness, the joy she has brought to her communities and to the presidential race, will be touched not only by Eshu, but by Thēmis, the Greek Titan, Zeus’s wife before Hera. Thēmis, whose names means what’s right, is the blindfolded figure holding the scales of justice before our courthouses.
A fit emblem for a former prosecutor with a felon in her sights.
