Exposed at a Slant: On Nuar Alsadir’s “Animal Joy”

Nuar Alsadir | Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation | Graywolf Press | 2022 | 296 Pages

A joke, Nuar Alsadir says, is a “neutral container that seems innocent, unalarming.” While reading her latest work of nonfiction, Animal Joy, I wondered if much of the book was a neutral container, too: an unalarming, clinical analysis of why people need to laugh, create, and be their true selves.  

Nuar Alsadir is a poet and psychoanalyst, and Animal Joy accordingly blends memoir with research and scholarship. While she refers to Freud most frequently, the book consults thinkers and artists across disciplines from Plath to Nietzche to the cast of Saturday Night Live. Alsadir moves associatively from reflections on the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and Donald Trump’s authoritarianism to laughter yoga. Intermittently, she writes of motherhood. Snippets of the personal punch unexpectedly, unshielded by research. This is when Alsadir as narrator is most alive. 

Animal Joy begins with Alsadir’s experience in clown school, where she learns that clowning is a vulnerable profession. “The process of trying to find your clown involves going through a series of exercises that strip away layers of socialization to reveal the clown that has been there all along—or, in Winnicott’s terms, your ‘True Self.’” One’s True Self seems to be the keystone of laughter and what makes certain language and gestures funny. The neutral container of a joke transforms potential pain into laughter. “It's a way of flipping passive into active—a common defense against trauma,” Alsadir says. Our True Self makes for the funniest jokes, which is why “the clown gets up before an audience and risks letting whatever is inside them seep out.”

Alsadir explores how truth leaks out of us when we are creative: “Poetry… should be composed not of words, but of intentions, and all the words should fade away before the sensation.” Maybe valuing a poem’s sensations over its linguistics relates to why Alsadir resists her toddler’s learning accurate names for colors. Before knowing each color’s name, the child can only experience its sensation. Alsadir argues that “learning the words for colors is perhaps a process of unseeing.” Language falls short, and so often misses “the real thing.” We imagine Alsadir’s daughter not naming, not labeling, but experiencing. 

“Adjectives are the canned laughter of language.” Conversely, art—and laughter—is built on uncovering. Just as clowns, poets and artists display their True Selves in the name of craft. “Bringing one’s creative projects to light is a way of exposing the True Self, which most people—out of a desire to protect what is most precious—keep hidden.” Perhaps this protection plays a role in Alsadir’s writing “a book of laughter and resuscitation” rather than a straightforward memoir or series of personal essays. The True Self is exposed at a slant: researched material cushions the story and welcomes the personal. It is a neutral container for the precious interior. 

But revealing the True Self isn’t easy. Alsadir references her own anxiety: “Maybe we are all afraid of bleeding,” she writes. “I picture the pages of this book streaked with red and cringe.” In many ways, the pages are indeed red. She discloses her desire to be a good mother; she begs her daughter to tell her that she is. At the conclusion of clown school, her instructor renames each student; the new name refers to something he believes they need to discover about themselves. Alsadir becomes “Next!” “The name incorporates the inflection of a director calling the next actor onto the stage for their audition, being dismissed, sent away, an irrelevant number. If you’re not going to bring it, really give it your all, let yourself be most self beautiful, seen, then get off the stage.” Alsadir bled in front of her clown class, and in retelling her story, she bleeds in front of us.

Beyond the bleeding, Alsadir insists that creativity can save us, can keep us fully alive. She quotes James Baldwin: “The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” To this, Alsadir adds, “The same can be said of living—or, rather, of remaining alive.” She uses Baldwin to anchor her conclusion that something forces artists to discover and display their True Selves. She analyzes Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, how “Anna downplays her knowledge … [Her] behavior is choreographed to manage the impression others have of her.” Alsadir’s biggest revelations tend to come through analysis of an outside figure or character more than analysis of her own life. Associative turns to research add a layer between narrator and subject, a container to funnel the discomfort. 

Surrendering control seems to be the key to connecting with our True Selves. Clowns aren’t the only ones to let themselves seep in front of others. We all laugh so hard we cry, an inability to contain the joke inside us. Alsadir writes of laughing as a bodily vulnerability—our mouth open, letting others see in. Laughter—genuine laughter—is not something we choose or control. Instead, it is an “abandoning [of one’s self] to laughter.”  

She quotes Plath: “Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it.” Alsadir asserts that the need for artists to create is the need to make themselves known. She urges, “You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.” Creativity makes us bleed, the precious interior now exposed, but Alsadir believes we have to do it, that the vulnerability of creativity is worth it for the authentic experience of the True Self. I wonder if Alsadir’s inclusion of Plath’s advice is her own True Self bleeding on the page. Maybe these outside texts are a collage of what resonates within Alsadir’s True Self, such that they aren’t actually neutral at all, but constitute their own gutsy abandonment.