Happiness Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

Hagedorn’s line doesn’t romanticize hardship; it refuses to let hardship dictate the last word. The detail of “my stomach’s growling” is deliberately unglamorous, almost embarrassing in its bodily honesty. It drags “joy” out of the realm of inspirational poster language and back into the material world: hunger, precarity, the daily accounting of what’s missing. Then she pivots - “I’m going to dance” - with the kind of defiant pleasure that reads as both coping mechanism and quiet rebellion.

As a playwright, Hagedorn is also talking about craft. “That’s what I want to leave people with at the end of the play” is an argument against neat catharsis or trauma-as-spectacle. The intent isn’t to provide comfort so much as to engineer an exit velocity: audiences should walk out carrying an image of vitality that doesn’t erase pain, but metabolizes it. Dancing becomes staging language, a physical thesis: the body persists, the community gathers, the rhythm keeps time when politics and economics don’t.

The subtext is immigrant and diasporic, too, in the way it treats survival as cultural practice. “After all this” implies histories that can’t be summarized in a single plotline - colonization, dislocation, racism, family fracture - and yet the final claim is collective. Not “I can endure,” but “people still know how to live.” It’s a rebuke to narratives that only allow marginalized characters to be wounded or wise. Hagedorn demands they be alive, messy, hungry, and still moving.