Crazy Brave

Transcendent is a big word that I see bandied around often in the literary world but if it could ever legitimately apply to anything, it's Joy Harjo's writing. This memoir straddles the spaces between reality and myth, and I am a sucker for the liminal. Harjo weaves together stories of violence and alcoholism and pain and loss with uplifting tales of ancestral magic, poetic joy, and love. She is an incredible woman, who made it, against the odds, against the world, despite them all, and we're lucky she did.

That first cry opens the earth door.We join the ancestor road.With our pack of memoriesSlung slack on our backsWe venture into the circleOf destruction,Which is the circleOf creationAnd make more-

Joy Harjo's story of her childhood and teenage years depict the harrowing experience of growing up indigenous on stolen land. Her early life is a microcosm of the devastation that white people have brought to Native Americans, filled with abuse, alcoholism, racism, and poverty. Yet through it all, she has art, poetry, and an innate spirituality and sense of truth in herself that carries her through the hardship.

Her poetry doesn't particularly resonate with me, but it is very evocative of her culture and her Native history. I very much so enjoyed her story and the power with which she told it, even if some of it felt a bit like word soup to me.

I always feel weird rating memoirs, but this was just so well done and beautifully written.

I struggle with Joy Harjo's poetry. Maybe I haven't heard it read properly, or maybe I'm just a troglodyte who will deservedly be kicked out of my favorite book club for sacrilege. Crazy Brave, though, was a whole nother matter: I found myself drawn in, loathing her story — the abuse, the drama, the senselessness — but adoring her words. In the process, gaining a deeper understanding of and compassion for Native women and the circumstances that so relentlessly push them into heartbreak.