On Joy
Yesterday, I sat outside eating strawberries on a hot afternoon, and I felt it. The roses hanging drunk and heavy over the wall, the neighbour’s cat curling on its back in the dusty street. I looked up at the sun sliding out of the sky like a melting blob of butter and there it was: joy.
Would I have been so alert to that moment if I hadn’t recently re-read Edwin Morgan’s Strawberries? But I had, and so it was impossible for things not to become muddled with it. The poem is one of my favourites. A snapshot of two lovers sharing strawberries dipped in sugar on a doorstep, it’s a poem about the immediate, forceful beauty the world can sometimes contain, about joy as a stowaway in life’s pockets. “Let the sun beat on our forgetfulness,” Morgan writes. Occasionally - whatever else is going on - right here and now is something good.
We live in dark times, and in this context seeking out joy in art might seem frivolous, a distraction from the gravity of world events. And yet it might be that when things are hardest that the need to see joy recognised and reflected in art is even more acute. The best artworks, I think, remind us that joy doesn’t exist in isolation, but as a counterpoint to the darkness. Its light defines the edges of human experience more clearly.
Morgan was gay; Strawberries was published in 1968, twelve years prior to homosexuality being decriminalised in Scotland. The gender of Morgan’s lover here is ambiguous, but the electric charge of the poem surely comes from the precariousness of the joy they share. The knowledge that the society they live in conspires to deny it. In Morgan’s poem, joy is snatched from the jaws of history. The questions implicit in his poem are: where do we see joy? And who gets to experience it?
The same questions animate Kay Rufai’s Smile-ing Boys Project, which I recently encountered on display in Brixton Village. Rufai’s photographic series shows Black, South London schoolboys grinning at the camera. Against brightly coloured backdrops, their joy seems to explode through the lens. Looking at these images, you can’t help but smile too.
If a smile can be infectious so too can a damaging stereotype. What haunts these photographs is the knowledge that mainstream culture so rarely presents images of Black teenage boys smiling. When art fails to recognise joy in Black lives, it skews the narrative of human experience. A smile, Rufai reminds us, is more than just a smile. It is a bridge, acknowledging something shared. It is political.
Joy matters in art, because art teaches us how to look at the world and one another. If we find joy in the books we read, the paintings we look at and the films we watch, we may begin recognising it more frequently in our everyday lives too. We may become more open to it, and that openness may make it possible.