Illustration by Agathe Bray-Bourret
When Jay Pitter, author of Black Public Joy: No Permit or Permission Required, seeks a night out of pure happiness, she gets dressed up and heads straight to the movie theatre to see a film celebrating Black stories.
But the public space expert doesn’t watch quietly on her own: She yells boisterously at the screen and interacts with others in the audience – the louder, the better.
In this instalment of Joy Diaries, Pitter, who is also an adjunct urban planning professor at the University of Waterloo, explains why shared experiences such as this carry special significance.
Black expressions of joy are distinctly cultural and universal. We tend to be louder, first of all, and we give permission for people to be expressive and audible in spaces you’re not supposed to. A great example of this is the movie theatre.
So much Black cinema is trauma-based, so when we get a fun film, we go all out. Take Black Panther. It’s set in Wakanda, a mythological place that centres Black brilliance, Black joy and Black agency in a way that you don’t see in most films. Obviously, we’ll be getting all decked out.
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I wore a mini-skirt, knee-high boots and a forest-green leather bomber jacket. Bright red lip. A little black clutch with silver spikes. And very large hoop earrings, the Black women’s jewelry classic. We were all dripping in gold, actually. Gold chains, gold earrings, big gold rings. Black women wear whatever they want at any age. Tina Turner wore micro-minis in her 70s.
“Rolling deep” is the term for when we go out to public spaces, celebrations or events that we’re really excited about, with a large group of friends. I’ll go by myself to see a sad art movie, but at least 12 of us are going to Black Panther. We roll deep and we go downtown to the late show.
Opening night of a Black film in a Black community is literally a call and answer. We don’t watch movies; we interact with movies. We critique the characters’ choices. If we know the soundtrack, we sing along. We cheer for who we want to win and we predict the plot before it happens. Like, He’s gonna betray him! Don’t trust that guy!
In another theatre, this behaviour might not be considered culturally appropriate. You’ll have the white lady shusher tell you to please be quiet. It’d be so weird if a Black person started shushing; that’s not even part of our vocabulary. Public joy for us is a collective experience to be shared.
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But we’re not yelling, we’re actually expressing joy in ways that are deeply, culturally Black. Traditional public call and answer is very rooted in African culture. Someone calls and then a person or group of people answer back. It happens in hip-hop and poetry. The tradition came over to North America through the transatlantic slave trade and is still very common in Black Baptist and Pentecostal churches. The pastor will say something and the whole congregation answers in a super lively way. Just like the movies, you’re preaching with the pastor. He’s not having a one-way conversation.
When you go to a Black movie, that’s the public joy you’re witnessing. Some people might take that sort of thing for granted, but for us it’s not to be taken for granted. It is a very particular and special public joy that’s different from personal joy. Not just for Black people, but for women and queer folks, it’s so important to develop a healthy sense of spatial entitlement to cultivate public joy in their daily lives, every single day.
As told to Rosemary Counter