SOURCE: "Notes towards a New Multicultural Criticism." A Gift of Tongues, Marie Harris and Kathleen AGuero, eds., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987, pp. 155-95.

In her early writing, Joy Harjo already addressed themes of land and people, fear and healing. Speaking of her native landscape, she remarked:

What is breathing here is some sort of dangerous anger that rises up out of the Oklahoma landscape. The earth is alive with emotions, and will take action on what is being felt. This way of seeing is characteristic of most native poets and writers of Oklahoma. That which has happened to the earth, has happened to all of us as part of the earth….

What Oklahoma becomes, in a sense, is a dream, an alive and real dream that takes place inside and outside of the writer…. Our words begin inside of the dream and become a way of revealing ourselves within this landscape that is called Oklahoma. Language becomes all of the people that we are. Living voices surround us and speak from the diverse and many histories we have been, the ones we have become, and most of all, how we will continue. There are those voices among us who will assume the cadence of an ancient and living chant.¹⁵

Nothing in Harjo's early work quite prepares the reader for the overall arrangement—a plot structure operating on several levels—of She Had Some Horses, her third book, published in 1983.¹⁶ The book begins by confessing the poet's fear. It then describes the fate of other "survivors" like herself who have had to deal with such fear. It introduces intermediary figures—human and symbolic—who negotiate between the poet and her fear. It tells a story of the breakup of the poet's relationship with a man and her discovery of the love of a woman. It ends with the freeing of the horses, who are the symbols of her frightened spirit, and the freeing of the poet from old, repressive images to live her own life. The end is a ritual prayer, closing off the matter begun with the first poem.

The first poem, "Call It Fear," introduces most of the thematic material in the book.

The "edge" of fear is the subject of the book. The fear is protean, taking many shapes: notably the backwards-talking Holy Rollers on the radio and the nightmare of the horses pulling the poet's entrails out of her belly ("Or name it with other songs"). The people of Harjo's acquaintance sit by the volcanic cliffs outside Albuquerque trying to propitiate this fear ritually by talking and singing and "walking backwards." Still it persists ("Under our ribs / our hearts are bloody stars"). Someone who might stand as an intermediary between the poet and her fear, Goodluck, her friend and a symbolic figure, has been unable like her to "[break] through the edge of the singing at four a.m."

Succeeding poems speak of those who survive even in a hostile environment. The poet quickly establishes her sense of identity with people of color in America in her poem to Audre Lorde, "Anchorage":

The survivors take many forms, but perhaps the most stirring image in these poems is the relationship of women to the earth. It begins in the poem "For Alva Benson, and for Those Who Have Learned to Speak":

And the ground spoke when she was born.
Her mother heard it. In Navajo she answered
as she squatted down against the earth
to give birth. It was now when it happened,
now giving birth to itself again and again
between the legs of women.

The image is heightened in a later stanza, the action of which makes a completed circle, with Mt. St. Helens the governing symbol:

The child now hears names in her sleep.
They change into other names, and into others.
It is the ground murmuring, and Mt. St. Helens
erupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning
inside her mother's belly waiting to be born
to begin another time.

Contrasting to this woman-image of cyclic restoration is the tragic image of the man, drinking and out of control, which repeats itself in several poems. In "Night Out" it is a man in a barroom on New Year's Eve:

The poet takes pains to universalize and understand the figure:

These poems show separate ways of knowing: a man's way, harsh and fatalistic, of meaningless rebellion, or a woman's way, embracing the history of the whole earth of which one is a part. It is the second way the poet will choose to follow as the book develops.

The figure of Noni Daylight appears in three poems near the end of the first section. Old and shrunken, the mother of many children by as many fathers, she is first cited as the woman who stayed where she was to raise her family:

In the next poem where she is mentioned, Noni is afraid of familiar voices.

In the third poem in which she appears, Noni reveals her true character to the poet and proposes the key to the poet's rescue.

"We are closer than
blood," Noni Daylight
tells her. "It isn't
Oklahoma or the tribal
blood but something more
that we speak."

She speaks directly to the poet of her "cure" and reveals herself as a spiritual intermediary.

"Should I dream you afraid
so that you are forced to save
yourself?

Or should you ride colored horses
into the cutting edge of the sky
to know

that we're alive
we are alive."
("She Remembers the Future")

The poet must now seize the initiative.

The second section, "What I Should Have Said," focuses on the poet's changing of her relationship from a man to a woman lover and the confusion, disruption, and difficulty she has in "commuting" (literally from Albuquerque to Santa Fe and back again) to teach, care for her children, and be with her new lover. The moon becomes the symbol of her new consciousness, but also her new fate:

In her acceptance of the promiscuity of the moon, the poet affirms a new existence, one which Noni Daylight unlocked when she told her she must "know / that we're alive / we are alive." In a new poem, written while driving between her lover and home, the poet begins to explore the meaning of this.

Alive. This music rocks
me. I drive the interstate,
watch faces come and go on either
side. I am free to be sung to;
I am free to sing. This woman
can cross any line.
("Alive")

The horses which figured in the first poem in the book return in the third section, bursting forth in a terrible and wonderful emergence.

The title poem of the section "She Had Some Horses" is an extended catalog of "horses"—personal traits, poetic images, manifestations of fear and anxiety or danger from external forces—known to the poet. She writes it with bare logical connection, in the manner of Christopher Smart's "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeffrey." The ending of the poem gives some of its most important elements, threats from within and without and what they actually have amounted to.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her
bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

Several more poems treat horses in their different aspects. In the fifth poem, the remarkable "Explosion," all the horses are set free—those belonging to others and to the poet herself.

The explosion—on a highway—takes place in the poet's home country. (We may recall what Harjo saw elsewhere as "some sort of dangerous anger that rises up out of the Oklahoma landscape.") She first tries to associate it with an apocalyptic future event of significance to her people.

Finally she sees what has happened.

It is important to view the horse poems not as simply a hodgepodge of loosely related material but as ceremonial shapes, from the naming of the horses to their freeing, which make it possible for the poet and others who believe her to look to the future with hope and to "see who they have become" (the "they" of the last line is, I believe, purposely ambiguous). This freeing is the climax of the book, leading to the concluding poem, which echoes the beginning.

"I Give You Back" works at many levels. The first level is the ritual release of the fear that was expressed in the beginning.

I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don't know you
as myself….

You are not my blood anymore.

Also released are paralyzing memories of genocide and the poet's susceptibility to future harm at the hands of the oppressor.

I give you back to the white soldiers
who burned down my home, beheaded my children,
raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.
…..

I release you, fear, so that you can no longer
keep me naked and frozen in the winter,
or smothered under blankets in the summer.

There follows a sequence in ritual repetition, first declaring simply, "I release you" and then itemizing what the poet is "not afraid to be." Then the poet admits her own past complicity in her fear:

After another sequence announcing her separation from her fear, the poet ends with a passionate inversion, showing the formerly weak element to now be the strong and the strong the weak. It is a note of triumph and even of compassion for the enemy.

Harjo's indebtedness to traditional storytelling devices, such as her use of ceremonial elements at the beginning and end of the poem, her use of symbols like the horses, the moon, and the spiritual guide Noni Daylight, and her use of multilevel narrative are integral to the structure of the poem: they establish the naming of the fear at the beginning, the intervention of Noni Daylight in the middle, and the freeing of the horses at the end. Two levels of the narrative are literal: the story of the author's changes in lovers and the historical thread running through the book, reminding the reader of the history of white oppression. In both these cases it is important to notice the author's point of view. When she says, "You have gutted me but I gave you the knife," she is making a point both personal and political. Both she and her people, as she has come to understand them, are learning not to be victims.

Optimism is conveyed at the end of She Had Some Horses through the notion brought first by Noni Daylight, "We are alive." The poet pronounces this for herself in the course of the discovery of her new love while driving between Alburquerque and Santa Fe one day. Armed with the knowledge, she banishes fear: "I am alive and you are so afraid / of dying." We should recall again what Paula Gunn Allen describes as the "magic" involved in the enactment of ceremony. "Since all that exists is alive and since all that is alive must grow and change, all existence can be manipulated … according to certain laws." We may conclude that the method and content of Harjo's book are the same.