![]() ![]() Well-known as a poet, Harjo is also an acclaimed musician who has produced several award-winning albums. In Harjo’s work, her mother’s singing lives as songs of healing and survival. Through Harjo’s insistence on the interconnectedness of all soul-stories, this memoir becomes a map, a vision, a brave compendium of what is possible in being human. But Crazy Brave does not simply reenact childhood pain and suffering. “Every soul has a distinct song,” Harjo writes, and she says it was her mother’s song that drew her to this life, even as those songs were cut short by abusive and neglectful husbands, chaos and poverty. She retains elements of poetry - for example, naming the four sections of the book East, North, West, and South as a respectful calling of the four directions of sacred balance - and she weaves poems and tribal myths throughout, but her memoir is Harjo’s first attempt to tell her life story from her birth in 1951 until early adulthood.Ĭrazy Brave actually begins before Harjo’s birth, when she “traveled far above the earth.” The first scene takes place in a car outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, as Harjo feels herself come alive through the music on her father’s radio and her mother’s transcendent singing. Joy Harjo’s new memoir, Crazy Brave, fourteen years in the writing, continues to explore this theme, but moves from poetry to prose. It struck me at the time that Harjo’s poetry in particular touched something more emotional than intellect-centered academe could grasp, and I went on to write my dissertation about the ways contemporary American multicultural poetry like Harjo’s helps us bear witness to traumatic history. ![]() I first learned of the poet Joy Harjo during a graduate school seminar on contemporary American poetry in which I studied writers - Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Harjo - who would become essential to understanding myself as a woman, an American, a mother, and a poet. ![]()
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