Joy Harjo's Poetics of Memory and Resilience

Abstract

This article examines Joy Harjo’s autobiographical memoir Crazy Brave: A Memoir (2012), where the author narrates the processes through which she was able to claim her own voice and construct her identity as a woman and as a writer, within a context dominated from her early childhood by violence, fear and silence. Those structural factors, together with the various forms of resilience Harjo developed, which included a variety of creative expressions, would eventually give cohesion to her identity, in a long-term, resilient creative process that involved integrating and then releasing through her writings her experiences of violence. Some poetry works by Harjo are also explored as examples of an alterity resilient to the experience of violence and fear. Keywords: Joy Harjo; indigenous literature; violence; memoir; poetry; resilience