Laugh, Dance, & Cry
I just finished reading Toni Morrison’s, Beloved, a tragic novel about slavery and freedom, written in the genre of magical realism. Ultimately hopeful, Beloved is ruthless in its portrayal of torture, humiliation, degradation.
Beloved
While ex-slaves clawed their way out of their history, Baby Suggs – grandmother, sage, and self-proclaimed preacher – gathers her community every week in the Clearing where they hide cautiously behind the trees and brush of the perimeter. In her curious religion, she doesn’t tell her kin to sin no more but calls them, instead, to laugh, dance, and cry with every ounce of passion they have. Slowly, one-by-one, they leave their protective hiding places and join in the rave, releasing a wild and uninhibited spirit that seemed to be lost for a lifetime, but now was found, if only for a moment.
Lauging, Dancing, Crying
“It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, woman laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her big heart (p. 103).”
Feeling All Our Feelings
This passage, and the story surrounding it, touched me deeply. In their newfound freedom, laughing, crying and dancing seemed like the right thing to do for Baby Suggs and the men, women, and children who were no longer shackled technically but still imprisoned by their past. Slavery may have numbed their capacity to feel all their feelings, but liberty –growing tentatively from the soil of suspicion, disbelief, and lack of self-worth – relit the fire.
Do you think the same may be true for us? Has our palette of emotions been warped and distorted on the canvas of abuse, but never extinguished? Hidden in one part of us or another. is the passion to feel all our feelings lurking behind our catatonia? As my therapist told me many years ago, “everything everybody feels is okay, valid, and important.” Beyond the numbness of dissociation, can we laugh, dance and cry with the best of them?
Visceral Responses
In my opinion, laughing and crying are not so far apart on the emotional continuum. Both of them grab us by the gut. Full belly laughter can lead to guttural sobs and vice versa. Dancing, too, is a wonderful antidote. Unihibited participation distracts us from our numbness and peels away the layers of fear so we experience the rhythm of the music and the movement of our bodies. Everything else fades into the background. When we release these visceral responses, there’s space for more feelings, new feelings, good and bad feelings which are so much better than no feelings. It’s never all at once. Dissociation is replaced by clarity, and back again, over and over again.
Laughing, dancing, and crying --- the authentic response to imprisonment and release.
Love
Baby Suggs tells her community to love. “Here in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” She explains further, “Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face.” No matter what other people think of them (in this case, white property owners), “You got to love it, you!”
It took me awhile to understand the true meaning of this novel but as I closed in on the complicated ending, I realized it’s the story of rising up from death to life, from fear to fulfillment, from being bound by the past to creating a new tomorrow. It is not an easy journey. There are many dark shadows to walk through. Laughing, dancing, and crying carry us a long way along the road where we wrestle with the past until there’s nothing else to do but leave it behind.
And loving ourselves. Loving all of ourselves to get ready for tomorrow.
Self-Care
How do you prepare for tomorrow? What helps you through the dark journey, holds you steady, picks you up when you fall?
Choose one of these words: laugh, dance, cry, love. Write whatever comes to your mind as you imagine the visceral action the word embodies. Let the word take you wherever it wants you to go.
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🕊
More than eyes or feet.
More than lungs that have yet to draw free air.
More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart.
For this is the prize.”
~ Baby Suggs in Beloved by Toni Morrison
Lyn