Dear Friends,
There’s something special about poetic memoirs. Or memoirs by poets. I’ve found that these create a kind of bridge or common ground for readers who are unused to poetry and perhaps intimidated by it.
Much like Mary Oliver’s Long Life, Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave is primarily a narrative of her life, told in four parts, but one that includes poems in the telling. To me, this seems like a great way to experience poetry in context, especially for those not used to reading poems.
In the excerpt included above, for example, there’s a powerful myth-inspired poem on pages 28 and 29 that recounts the creation of man by the indigenous American deity, Rabbit. Harjo leads into this poem by explaining the importance of stories to any culture, and to the foundations of individual personhood. She writes, “the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin,” but it’s important to remember those stories and songs, to ground us in who we are and where we came from. To forget is to disconnect, to become unmoored, to lack a place.
To explain that importance, then, she includes the story-poem of Rabbit and its incredible message about humanity, which is a story of power and colonization. It reads to me almost like a merging of Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Buddhist concept of hungry ghosts. “His wanting made him want more . . . the wanting infected the earth.” What’s truly fascinating to me about this poem is that it’s included, also, right in the middle of Harjo’s reflections on bravery. She combines two ideas: the power of stories and the importance of bravery to the lives of her family and ancestors and relates them directly to the circumstances of her birth and childhood.
It makes me wonder if Harjo is recalling the story of Rabbit as a reminder to herself about the power of motive and craft. Like rabbit, she too is a creator. Rabbit creates man, who takes on a life of his own and is both corrupted and corrupting. Does she worry that her creations, her poems and stories, have the power to do the same? Will she lose control of them after she releases them into the world?
“East is the direction of beginnings,” she writes. And that’s what this first section of the book is all about. Who is Joy Harjo and where did she come from? We learn much about her parents and her hometown, her family history and the circumstances of her upbringing. Through this retelling of her origins, she has or reveals epiphanies about important moments in her life that shaped her and her beliefs. Two that stood out to me were her relationship to language and her realizations about anger.
Near the end of the section, she writes, “I loved poetry. It was singing on paper.” Harjo was introduced to poetry at a very young age. She had revealed earlier the “lessons” she had been taught about gender and what’s acceptable for a man or a woman. As she grew up, for example, she realized there was a certain age at which she was no longer allowed to play shirtless with the boys, and one where it was no longer alright to be a dreamer, to have visions. It seems to me that her love for poetry became an outlet to express what is true for her, that she is a woman who is both “body and breath” but who is also “more awake in dreaming” than in reality.
She does awake to one reality, though, this one about her father. After a chapter reflecting on her parents and describing how difficult it was to build a relationship with her father in particular, she concludes “East” with the realization that what strained their relationship, and his ability to relate to anyone, was his anger. She explains that he would get angry at any little thing that went wrong, likely because of all the very large things that had gone wrong and his inability to express his pain in a healthy way.
His anger that dinner was not right, or the kids were not where they were supposed to be, or his wife was not as he thought should be, was directly connected to his anger that his mother died young, that his father used to beat him, and that he was an Indian man trying to live on land that had been stolen from his people. “He learned anger to control his sensitivity,” she writes near the beginning of the chapter.
His anger was a facade of bravery, and young Joy Harjo seems to think the reason her father was always angry with her is she was “not brave at all.” But what this really seems to mean is that she allowed herself to be sensitive–to speak and feel the things that mattered, and isn’t that the bravest thing of all?
Meditation
“Everyone wanted the same thing: land, peace, a place to make a home, cook, fall in love, make children and music. Every soul has a distinct song.” -Joy Harjo
May you be sensitive and brave,
~Adam
Contemplative Reading Project 
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