Healing through laughter
Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation Nuar Alsadir Graywolf
Animal Joy is at once prose poem, manifesto, sociological study and therapy session. Poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir's first nonfiction book advocates for the liberating power of spontaneity, curiosity, humour.
The exposition jumps for intellectual joy, hopscotching from literary criticism to philosophy and psychology to political analysis. It urges you to shred the filters of propriety — personally, socially, creatively. The text's segments become a game of connect the dots. The completed picture shows how humour, like any instinctual act, is subversive.
It is our spontaneous expressions — gaffes, jokes, dreams and the candid insights of children — that are the most authentically human, Alsadir contends. These emanate from the True Self, a concept borrowed from psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. Outbursts are paths to our animal nature, that sensual essence unconstrained by social code and psychological defence.
Creativity, too, arises from this primal place — the book is equally a paean to art. Summoning considerations of poems, dreams and comedy, the author suggests that these are emblems of the same impulse. Namely, to approach the rich, or uncomfortable, complexities of the subconscious with the help of symbolism.
As Alsadir explains, the best poetry — like the best humour — is concise. We feel a rush of pleasure (technically, dopamine) when we arrive at poetic closure or a punchline.
Alsadir also discusses the variety and uses of the laugh, as deflection, pressure valve, social glue. Laughter can indicate discomfort or affection. It can be genuine and unprocessed or put on, sarcastic and offensive. Alsadir describes examples of the latter, when, during former U.S. president Donald Trump's rallies, he derided victims to shockingly uproarious laughter from the audience.
Elsewhere Alsadir engages with intellectual notables, including Nietzsche, Sartre, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin. Freud, Jung and Winnicott make repeat appearances; a range of poets and literary works, notably Anna Karenina, also inform her argument. Although the concepts can be knotty, the writing isn't.
Not that all is high-flown or esoteric. Threaded throughout are accounts both personal and experiential. She goes to clown school and laughter yoga. She chronicles several disturbing episodes of the diminishment known as othering. Particularly illuminating are the lessons drawn from her experience as mother to two daughters.
The book is a gift to the courageous. It offers a chance for self-reflection and growth that necessitates a head-on collision with pain.
Great art mainly makes you not think but feel. Animal Joy made me do both. Its author practices two disciplines — poetry and psychoanalysis — that she argues are essentially the same. In a neat corollary, her book forms a bridge between art and reason.