Joy is the Resistance

Defiance works...sort of. But joy might be the big Fuck You.

I have the word “joy” tattooed on the inside of my left wrist. I went all in on that investment because at the time joy scared me. I can’t control joy, and I have a long history of holding things I can’t control at arms’ length. Intentional, then, that joy be permanent, but still a safe arm’s distance away.

But “joy” isn’t the first word I got tattooed on my body.

I have a larger, bolder word etched in big block letters down my side.

D-E-F-I-A-N-C-E

Fresh ink circa 2017

A tribute to the state of being that had shuttled me through my first year of marriage, and honestly, probably the previous thirty-six years as well. Defiance felt like survival then. Determination, strength, dedication, sass. The armor assembled to both resist and accept my new life as an Army wife. I wanted to be one of and not like simultaneously, assimilating in order to make friends and build community, while setting myself apart as one whose career mattered, ambitions mattered, life mattered. Little did I know, if the Army wanted me to have a career, ambitions, or a life, they would have issued them to me. The Army is designed to crush defiance, and it almost shattered mine.

At the time, taking a stand, drawing a line in the sand, putting my foot down, marching, yelling, defying was the only way I knew how to create a boundary. To live in a world not of my choosing while grasping desperately for any agency I could retain over myself and my actions.

It sort of worked.

Except, I was often exhausted and despondent because despite all of the energy I was pushing out in to the world, nothing about my situation was changing very much. I made a lot of noise and talked a big game, made nice with the wives of those in charge, and managed to be better informed most of the time than my husband, but in reality, I had almost no control over what happened to us, to me. This was unequivocally proven when four weeks before my daughter was born, the Army laid down an ultimatum disguised as a choice. Defiance wasn’t going to be enough. If my husband was going to be present for the birth of our daughter, we would have to rely on the good will and unconditional love of our friends, family, and colleagues. We would have to believe in the power of that one unforgettable moment.

We would have to trust joy.

---

Defiance did not a fucking thing to help me hold on to my mother or heal my husband. One was a ship already sailed and the other a long walk through the desert without water.

I was livid the entire time my mother was sick, anger and Reese’s Pieces my only meals. Defiance had no power in that place. It was like standing up to the Army, except more futile, because cancer sucks and it already had an unfair advantage.

You know what would have helped then? What would have been a better choice than fury? What might have made things easier for her and I?

Joy.

She knew that. It’s why she asked for the same Snoopy’s chicken salad sandwich on white bread with a sweet tea every time someone offered to bring her lunch. That meal brought her joy. For one, she could actually taste it, largely because the tea was so sweet you felt cavities forming while you sucked. And two, she was dying, so all she cared about was crushing crunchy ice between her teeth and rolling around a dough ball of white bread filled with homemade chicken salad with her tongue.

Why didn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I let her have that? Why couldn’t I let myself?

At my mother’s makeshift funeral, a COVID-dictated affair where a bunch of people tried to casually walk in the same general direction towards a plot we didn’t own while we illegally spread her ashes over her father’s headstone, I sang.

“Dance, then, wherever you may be. I am the Lord of the dance said He. And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be, and I’ll lead you all in the dance said He.”

It was my mother’s favorite hymn. She didn’t do hard things well. But she sang off key with fervor and she danced like no one was watching.

Joy. Her resistance.

---

I don’t purport to know what we need to save the world today. I can say for myself it feels eerily similar on a much grander scale to that day I sat in my kitchen, tears rolling off my distended stomach, as the realization that the Army was going to fuck us without remorse washed over me.

At times, I look down, expecting to see those letters literally bleeding in to my organs, D-E-F-I-A-N-C-E. It fills my chest, bloats my belly, makes my legs antsy. I want to yell, to take a stick and draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary.

And that might work. Sort of.

But what I know about forces that operate outside of humanity is that they thrive on chaos, confusion, and despair. They are designed to break you, first by force, and then by fear.

Helpless…and then hopeless.

---

There is a poem by Toi Derricotte titled, “Joy is an act of resistance.”

With this one statement, this observation, Derricotte effectively changed the arc of Black feminism. Instead of being resigned to shoulder the burden of the work of countering systemic racism, these words offered another way. As Austin Channing Brown so epically states, “We were given permission to also see our joy as giving a middle finger to white supremacy.”

Resisting…with joy.

Here’s the thing, though. The poem’s about a fish. Telly the fish, to be exact.

Telly the fish finds joy in a painting outside his fish bowl. An open window with a bright yellow shade and a vase of flowers.

Still Life, Rose of Sharon by Alice Neel, 1973

At first, the fish and the flowers, and the fact that the fish dies (sorry, spoiler alert) threw me off. How does that title go with this poem.

But, of course its about a fish…and flowers…and death.

Because joy is available to all of us, and it will sustain us until it cannot.

Joy is a gentle hero, the quiet cousin of defiance, a literal laugh at people and systems and circumstances that desire to strip away our agency. Joy exists beyond the boundaries of control, and as such is an acute antidote for perceived power.

Last night, I sat at our kitchen table next to our daughter, alive and well, belly laughing at something silly my husband was doing, her half eaten dinner getting cold in front of her. A framed picture of a donkey sat in the middle of the three of us. Peanut, our new adoptee. Our dogs begged semi-patiently at our feet, ready to stick their tongue in my daughter’s mouth to catch a stored nibble if she bent over too far. My husband with his third face leaked liquid from the more broken of his eye sockets as he cajoled my daughter. He winked at me with the better eye. With his wink softening my smile and her laughter reverberating in my ears, all I could think is…

FUCK. YOU.

Joy wins. Every time.

Because joy is not just an act of resistance. Joy is the resistance.