SOURCE: '"Twin Gods Bending Over': Joy Harjo and Poetic Memory," in MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 41-9.

Contemporary Native American poet Joy Harjo expresses and reflects patterns of ongoing, multilayered and multivocal memories within the narratives of her poems. These memories flow and interweave on a continuum within a metaphysical world that begins deep within her personal psyche and simultaneously moves back into past memories of her Creek (Muskogee) heritage, as well as forward into current pantribal experiences and the assimilationist, Anglo-dominated world of much contemporary Native American life. Harjo's poetic memories may be personal stories, family and tribal histories, myths, recent pantribal experiences, or spiritual icons of an ancient culture and history. And, while Harjo writes using both an "alien" language, English, and within expected structural and narrative formats of contemporary poetry, her poems also frequently resonate with the distinctive chanting rhythms and pause breaks associated with traditional Native American oralities. As with other contemporary Native American women poets such as Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo/Sioux), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), and Wendy Rose (Hopi/Chowchilla Miwok), Harjo's past memories and present experiences seamlessly fuse together within individual poems; and when read together as a group, her poems construct in the reader's mind a single consistent, cohesive, and unified poetic utterance.

The importance of memory to Harjo's poetry best reveals itself through a survey and examination of one of her most important ongoing tropes, the contemporary American city. Within her varied urban landscapes, Harjo's poetry most clearly illustrates the multivoiced nature of any marginalized poetry, and of Native American women's poetry in particular. On the one hand, after a first reading Harjo may seem to be writing out of the city-as-subject tradition of American poets like Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams. On the other hand, her city landscapes do not reflect promise and optimistic excitement, as do many urban settings of earlier white male American poets. Rather, Harjo's cities resonate with Native American memories of an endless and ongoing history of Eurocentric and genocidal social and political policies: war, forced removal, imposed education, racism, and assimilationism.

While Allen, Hogan, and Rose often use the contemporary city as negative physical setting in a variety of ways, Harjo especially foregrounds the psychological and spiritual impacts, and the resulting personal chaos, of urban life on the Native American survivor. As Patricia Clark Smith and Paula Gunn Allen note, Harjo's "particular poetic turf is cities" (193), perhaps because she grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has spent much of her adult life in cities. In any case, the speakers within her urban narratives roam freely throughout the United States on a life's journey reflecting simultaneously Harjo's own current travels on the urban/academic lecture-powwow-poetry reading circuit, as well as the age-old, traditional wanderings of her Creek ancestors.

What sustains Harjo's contemporary speakers in such an alien environment are memories—memories of ancestral lands, family and tribal life, traditional spirituality, and a pantribal heritage. In Harjo's poems the multi-voiced city experiences of Native Americans living within indifferent and often hostile urban landscapes offer a strikingly different reading from contemporary Anglo experience of the American city, and thus they make an important statement about current American societies. Moreover, we can also trace a distinct growth in the richness, complexity, and tone of Harjo's city trope from her earliest to her most recent poetic texts.

Even in her first chapbook collection, The Last Song (1975), Harjo begins to develop a clear but subtle city-as-negative motif, as her speaker wistfully looks out from the streets of Albuquerque, off toward the distant natural world. In "Watching Crow, Looking South Towards the Manzano Mountains," the speaker yearns for the freedom of a crow "dancing" with a New Mexico winter wind; and in "3AM," she seeks both a physical and a spiritual escape from Albuquerque's airport, back to the Hopis' Third Mesa. This pattern of wanting to leave cities continues in What Moon Drove Me To This? (1979), where Chicago, Kansas City, Gallup, Albuquerque, and nameless bars in Oklahoma towns serve as meeting grounds for often negative and superficial social encounters between men and women. Here also, in "The First Noni Daylight," appears the first statement of Harjo's early poetic "otherself," Noni Daylight, a beautiful young Native American urban woman caught in the assimilationist trap of contemporary life, while trying to hold on to her man by faking a suicide and thus tying him to her by guilt.

In his article "Nightriding with Noni Daylight: The Many Horse Songs of Joy Harjo," Andrew Wiget focuses on the specific "otherself" persona of Noni Daylight as an important clue into understanding Harjo's early poetry. Concentrating as he does on the growth in Harjo's poetic voice from What Moon Drove Me To This? (1979) to She Had Some Horses (1983), Wiget examines the developing complexities of Harjo's poetic voice by looking at several of her characteristic images. Noting that the otherself motif grows out of early descriptions of social and psychological alienation, especially of bar life and of troubled love relationships in What Moon Drove Me To This?, Wiget sees Harjo's more complex She Had Some Horses as developing a self/otherself dialogue that begins to build a "cyclic quest of a voice looking for a home" (186). While he foregrounds the importance of Harjo's using natural landscapes and the moon as recurring identifications with the earth and sky, Wiget also sees Noni Daylight as an early Harjo expression of the suffering individual who longs for the total ecstasy that might be found in a past of eternal comfort, "the womb-worn memory of her mother's heartbeat" (188).

Wiget's ideas help to give clarity to much of Noni Daylight's seemingly erratic behavior. For example, because of the psychological and spiritual hopelessness of her life, Noni Daylight often turns at night to high-speed interstate driving, which for her becomes a perfect form of escape into a soothing, rhythmic mindlessness. In What Moon Drove Me To This? "Origin" describesx her driving west, toward Flagstaff, into a mysterious darkness, "where stars have come down into rocks" (33) and into memories of old Native American stories that tell of mythic origins as Noni tries to construct a pantribal map leading back into an understanding of herself and her mixed-blood heritage. But her efforts bring her no answers, and Noni's unnamed and unstated fears increase as she continues the journey of her life. In "heartbeat" she drives through a silent nighttime city, obediently waiting for red lights to change at empty intersections, and toying with the trigger of the pistol cradled in her lap. In the "Evidence" of She Had Some Horses, her nighttime flirting with the highway's yellow line becomes more than just a veiled hint pointing toward Noni's dimly-formulated thoughts of suicide. Still, while the lure of complete oblivion tempts her, Noni Daylight also "needs / the feel of danger, / for life" (46). Unlike the bilingual little girl of "For Alva Benson, and For Those Who Have Learned to Speak," Noni Daylight freezes into an inarticulation far surpassing that of words and language.

Wiget sees Harjo's ongoing and often contradictory dialogues of and with the poetic self as best reflected in the more mature, seemingly paradoxical language and imagery of "She Had Some Horses," one of Harjo's most powerful poems, and also a poem that illustrates Wiget's idea of "crossing over to apocalypse" (192). Through its often paradoxical juxtapositions, "She Had Some Horses" also foregrounds the important truths of borders and living on the borders, or what Gloria Anzaldua in her "Preface" to Borderlands: La Frontera defines as that place where "two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch" (np). The interwoven and often violently clashing images in "She Had Some Horses"—"She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses. / She had horses who licked razor blades." (63)-—also offer a broader, more all-encompassing statement of those fears and silences which so wracked Noni Daylight's unhappy, cramped life.

It is with the poems of She Had Some Horses, and especially with one of her most powerful poems, "The Woman Hanging From the Thirteenth Floor," that Harjo fully articulates the interlocked problems of unnamed fears and the resulting speechlessness of an oppressed and dispossessed woman. Told in the flat, seemingly unemotional voice of a dispassionate observer, this highly rhythmic prose poem tells the story of a young Native American mother caught in the trap of her life and trying to find some way, any way, out of her nightmare. Memories of her own traditionally-oriented childhood, her family, her children, and her lovers no longer sustain her, as "her mind chatters like neon and northside bars" (23). Hanging in space, thirteen floors up from the city streets of an East Chicago ghetto, she hears some people screaming that she should jump, while others try to help her with their prayers. At the end of the poem "she would speak" (23), but will she take charge of her own life? Or, is she doomed to death and oblivion?

In an interview with Laura Coltelli, Harjo tells the story of how "The Woman Hanging From the Thirteenth Floor" came to be written. Growing out of a private experience she had at the Chicago Indian Center, the poem reflects Harjo's invented persona and voice, yet people continue to come up to her at readings and say they know a woman like that; or they have read such a story in the newspaper, but the incident occurred somewhere else (62). Whether by accident or by design, Harjo has constructed a folkloric, urban Native American example of every woman's ultimate fear, the fear of being totally and absolutely frozen and helpless, without the power to speak, unable to function, and therefore not able to choose either life or death for herself.

Harjo writes a deliberately incomplete ending to the unnamed woman's story, because the woman considers letting go and falling, as well as trying again by climbing back through her apartment window. In this way, Harjo gives her readers the freedom to become writers, since the unnamed woman's story has the potential to become every woman's multi-voiced yet muted struggle against fear, depression, death, and oblivion.

These same urban stresses and fears also echo in Harjo's final development of Noni Daylight's ongoing life story. In "Kansas City," now a much older and no longer beautiful woman with many children by many fathers, Noni watches the trains roll by, remembers her past life, and vows that she still would choose to live her life as she always has. Yet her bravado seems hollow and pathetic, since she, too, is still spiritually and psychologically inarticulate, trapped in unnamed and unresolved fears, and still watching the trains roll out of a city where she is destined to live out her life.

In "Anchorage," a poem dedicated to Audre Lorde, Harjo's speaker, now seemingly free from fear, strides purposefully through this Alaska city "of stone, of blood, and fish" (14). Speaking in a powerfully articulate voice, and sustained by memories of a once-strong, now lost and buried Native American heritage echoing along the streets and lying under the earth, Harjo's central figure also knows that the spirit world still lives. While on the surface the Anchorage of Harjo's poem appears to be a city of mountains, ancestral Athabascan voices, and creatures of the air and ocean, the speaker also knows that lying "underneath the concrete / is the cooking earth" (14), or the earth of suppressed volcanic forces barely held in check by the thin concrete skin of the modern city. Like the unarticulated stories of "someone's Athabascan / grandmother" (14), the smothered earth and native peoples of Alaska are muted for now. Yet even so, sometimes a story breaks through, and someone pays homage to life. Within the 6th Avenue jail a man named Henry tells his story of surviving eight shots aimed at him outside an L. A. liquor store, and the other inmates laugh at the impossible truths in his tale. Like the earth itself, Anchorage's poor and oppressed native people somehow continue to survive by creating bridges of ongoing dialogue with each other and the land.

In the same vein, but now within the radically different Deep South world of New Orleans, Harjo continues her travels. Unlike Hopi poet Wendy Rose's "Searching for Indians in New Orleans," a poem that comments on the unfamiliar "silence of petroglyphs, / stiff birds and stick women" (What Happened When the Hopi Hit New York 21), Harjo's poem returns to its spiritual Creek home through memory. Moving through an ancestrally familiar landscape, her memory "swims deep in blood, / a delta in the skin" (42), as the speaker moves from Oklahoma into the French Quarter, looking for Creek voices echoing along the streets of the present-day city. As she searches for historical or spiritual echoes of her Creek ancestors, she discovers a Spanish horse, frozen speechless as a statue, juxtaposed against a man in a rock shop selling magic stones and unaware of their power. Over and over again, Harjo refers to careless Anglo supremacist behavior, like the contemporary rock shop salesman and the historic Spanish explorer DeSoto, both of whom exert a strong but superficial power over deeper, more private native Creek and natural world powers. And always lying just under the surface of Harjo's New Orleans are those ancestral Creek "stories here made of memory" (43), waiting once again to be told.

Especially in "She Had Some Horses," "Anchorage," and "New Orleans," Harjo's ongoing circularities of memory, story, history, and ancestral voices all work together to create and explain natural cycles underlying human existence, and thus to define the interconnectedness of life itself. Out of the earth and ancestral lands and peoples comes memory, out of memory comes the present, and the resulting interplay of tensions fuses together into story and life. Throughout the poems of She Had Some Horses, landscape and story often merge into an individual voice tied simultaneously to memories of a traditional past, as well as to the life of the present; and it is this voice that helps one to survive in the city.

While one may survive in the city, Harjo believes that one truly lives only on the land, or within memories of the land. In Secrets from the Center of the World (1989), she and photographer Stephen Strom together create an interlocked picture celebrating the fundamental importance of landscape and story within the Native American world view. Harjo begins her prose poem by remarking that while New York, Paris, or Tokyo may operate as the center of the earth for some people, for her "my house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world"; and even more important, "words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form" (2). This inherent spirituality of place, this cosmic spiritual link with a sentient being that is greater and more powerful than humanity (and indeed is the source of all humanity), serves to explain Harjo's deep reverence for specific landscapes in the Navajo Nation. While signs of an alien and dominating Anglo world may intrude—telephone and electricity poles, power plant smoke, and concrete highways—nonetheless "the land-scape forms the mind" (22), and "stories are our wealth" (24). Thus, Harjo's memory fuses together dinosaur tracks, an individual lifespan, and linear time into an ongoing spiritual dance of life.

With her most recent book, In Mad Love and War (1990), Harjo leaves her home once again and returns to the city as significant setting; and the sheer mass of those urban centers that she names underscores her vision of herself as wanderer in an alien Anglo land. From "Climbing the Streets of Worcester, Mass." to New York City, Denver, Anchorage, New Orleans, and especially Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Harjo is constantly moving through cities and almost never settling into them, but always aware of where the earth is, how the people are feeling, and what the spirit world is doing.

In "We Encounter Nat King Cole as We Invent the Future" Harjo speaks of an old friend, Camme, and the experiences they share of music, love, and old times. Within these seemingly rather ordinary shared memories, Harjo suddenly juxtaposes a dramatically heart-lifting, precisely described personal vision:

What to non-Native Americans might be just a beautiful sight here speaks in a multi-voiced, spiritual discourse to Harjo. As she sees the double-arched rainbow dancing across the sky, the speaker simultaneously remembers stories describing the eternal Navajo yei bending down to the earth in rainbow curves, planting themselves as seeds and thereby fulfilling the sacred promise of life and renewal. Much the same sudden flash of spiritual insight also appears in "Fury Of Rain," where in an unnamed city thunder-as-gods, "naked to their electric skeletons" (16), dance in the streets and shake their rattles of memory during a violent summer rainstorm.

Experiencing such sights and memories as these through a pantribal vision often leads, in turn, to Harjo's increasing awareness of time and space, as well as to ongoing dialogic patterns of latent and shared strength among oppressed peoples. In "Hieroglyphic," a poem addressed to African American poet and activist June Jordan, Harjo describes a flash of personal insight that she experienced within the Egyptian Room of New York's Metropolitan Museum. As her memory connects stories of ancient Egypt, her own childhood in Oklahoma, and her present life, she recognizes the ironic surrealism of an interlocking human pattern—while who holds power over others may change, oppression remains. Sometimes the clownish humor of "Anchorage's" Henry may temporarily relieve this surreal tension, but such humor is not the Eurocentric, Bakhtinian-related carnivalization of explosive laughter leading to release and relaxation. Rather, Native American clownish humor may often deliberately play the Fool in order to mask and subvert rising hysteria. For example, in "The Book of Myths," the speaker sees the traditional Creek Trickster "Rabbit sobbing and laughing / as he shook his dangerous bag of tricks / into the mutiny world on that street outside Hunter [College]" (55). Trapped on the "stolen island of Manhattan" (55), both the speaker and Rabbit struggle to stay alive and hang on to their self-control in a dangerous place; and foolish behavior and stories help to keep terror at bay.

This postmodern humor of Harjo's "Anchorage" and "The Book of Myths" varies from Rose's angry, sardonic humor in "Stopover in Denver." Here Rose's speaker, embarking from a plane flight, sees herself caught in the tacky world of Plastic Kachina. Running the gauntlet of tourists, who "scrape my skin with / a camera lens" (What Happened When the Hopi Hit New York 10), she remembers childhood tricks of making and selling fake prayersticks, as the pain of ongoing cultural exploitation and personal alienation continues unabated in her life. Like Harjo's clownish Fool, Rose's sardonic poetic voice chooses the release of active laughter rather than passive tears.

When underlying and often unstated personal anger and fears link up with the shocks of urban socio-cultural experience, a highly distinctive, intensely personal poetic statement often results. The rich complexities of Harjo's most recent postmodernist voice are particularly evidentin "Santa Fe," a surreal and sensuous prose poem juxtaposing memories of lilacs, Saint Francis Cathedral, the De Vargas Hotel, a cocaine-addicted fox-woman, and a man riding a Harley-Davidson, all swirling in and out of a spiral dance through the speaker's memory, as time "is here …is there," and "space curves, walks over and taps me on the shoulder" (In Mad 42). Whereas Harjo's early city poems are usually set physically in bars, apartments, or automobiles and often describe aimless and alienated drifting, her later poems tend to be set in the mind and its memories of an urban experience, and to describe both a clear-eyed acceptance of life as it is and a quiet but fiercely unwavering commitment to the Native American belief in the inherent spirituality within all life forms.

Thus memory, what Paula Gunn Allen refers to as "that undying arabesque" (Shadow Country, 9), underlies all of Harjo's poetry. While all Native American cultures value the powers of memory, the contemporary urban pulse-beats and incidents recorded in Joy Harjo's poems bring memory most fully and dramatically into the non-Native American reader's awareness and understanding. When she juxtaposes her Native American memories of the earth against present-day urban life experiences, Harjo creates a uniquely surreal, yet frighteningly accurate and familiar picture of modern American cities and their alienated citizenry. As Harjo explains memory, one has no authentic voice without memory; and without an authentic voice, one is speechless, hardly human, and unable to survive for very long. Thus, Harjo's braided strands of multilayered memory and poetic voice intertwine into the very warp and woof of her poetic creation.

WORKS CITED

Allen, Paula Gunn. Shadow Country. Los Angeles: U of California American Indian Studies Center, 1982.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.

Coltelli, Laura. "Joy Harjo." Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990. 55-68.

——, ed. Native American Literatures. Pisa: Servisio Editoriale Universitario, 1989.

Harjo, Joy. Furious Light. Cassette tape. Watershed C-192, 1985.

——. In Mad Love and War. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P, 1990.

——. The Last Song. Las Cruces, NM: Puerto del Sol, 1975.

——. "Ordinary Spirit." I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays By Native American Writers. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. 263-70.

——. She Had Some Horses. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1983.

——. What Moon Drove Me To This? New York: I. Reed, 1979.

——, and Stephen Strom. Secrets From the Center Of the World. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1989.

Hogan, Linda. Savings. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1988.

Jaskoski, Helen. "A MELUS Interview: Joy Harjo." MELUS 16.1 (1989-90): 5-13.

Norwood, Vera, and Janice Monk, ed. The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes In Women's Writing and Art. New Haven: Yale U P, 1987.

Rose, Wendy. What Happened When the Hopi Hit New York. New York: Contact II, 1982.

Scarry, John. "Representing Real Worlds: The Evolving Poetry of Joy Harjo." World Literature Today 66.2 (1992): 286-91.

Smith, Patricia Clark, with Paula Gunn Allen. "Earthy Relations, Carnal Knowledge: Southwestern American Indian Women Writers and Landscape." The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes In Women's Writing and Art. Ed. Vera Norwood and Janice Monk. New Haven: Yale U P, 1987. 174-96.

Wiget, Andrew. "Nightriding With Noni Daylight: The Many Horse Songs Of Joy Harjo." Native American Literatures. Ed. Laura Coltelli. Pisa: Servisio Editoriale Universitario, 1989. 185-96.