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Joy lands

Abstract
For as long as I can remember, I have been sad. When I moved from India to Aotearoa alone at eighteen, I hoped something would sand down the grief – the Pacific, green air, sidewalk lichen. I created my own displacement and I did not know how to initiate my return. This is what precedes joy. I had not yet learned that you have to look for joy. You have to recognise it when it arrives. Before I could see that it was joy that ate wonton soup with me and found me by the lake in fur slides – it ended. I was on a one-way plane to India and my body would never be these joys again. This is what follows the end of joy. When joy ends, it is impossible not to notice the ways in which the world demands suffering from us. We lean on no one, cry in bathrooms and eat alone. The world spins sadder. This is why you must pursue joy. JOY LANDS is a poetry collection about finding joy across lands and inside bodies through language, girlhood, queerness, and long-haul flights. While these poems are forever in motion across time and space, they are rooted in the presence of other people and in small, indelible moments of tenderness – an almost-wishbone neck, yolk-yellow tulips, taking turns to piss. The collection is split into three sections, each querying the conditions for joy: something unjoyful, if not terrible, must precede it; some form of hurt must always follow the end of it, and you must continue to pursue joy. JOY LANDS is a pursuit – I enter joy. I witness joy. I make joy. These poems are lonely and dream-like, funereal and moon-shaped, and bright hot orange. Joy is a build-up and I am just getting started.
Type
Thesis
Series
Citation
Date
2024
Publisher
The University of Waikato
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