"We are alive": (Mis)Reading Joy Harjo's Noni Daylight as a Yellow Woman

Running on the Edge of the Rainbow, a 1978 film produced by the University of Arizona, opens with Leslie Marmon Silko sitting on a porch swing, regaling an audience of three with a version of her poem "Storyteller." The poem features three versions of the Yellow Woman, a figure who originates in the Keres Pueblo oral tradition. Delighted giggles punctuate Silko's words, echoing the story's playfulness. As Silko's voice fades, the camera zooms in, framing the storyteller and her fellow porch-swinger, Joy Harjo, whose laughter trails the tale. The film intimates the strong connection to storytelling that binds Silko and Harjo. Harjo named Silko as a particular influence early in her literary career as she added poetry to her artistic repertoire (Bruchac 228).1 Literary criticism that discusses the two artists, however, has surprisingly not followed suit. Beyond comparing Silko and Harjo as women writers of native descent, with some emphasis on thematic overlaps, critics have yet to sustain an exploration into Silko's influence upon Harjo's poetry as contemporary writers interrogating gender norms to which dominant culture and the presiding feminism (also called "sisterhood feminism") adhere in the immediate aftermath of the late twentieth-century's women's liberation movement.2By drawing out Noni Daylight's Yellow Woman characteristics, I hope to illuminate another layer of complexity in Harjo's early poetry, which current scholarship predominately overlooks. I also aim to reify the importance of Yellow Woman and Noni Daylight for feminist literary scholarship and teaching. In the midst of sisterhood feminism's universalizing rhetoric that privileged a white liberal agenda, Silko and Harjo approach womanhood as polyvocal and uniquely situated. Like the Yellow Women in Silko's oeuvre, the Noni Daylights of Harjo's poetry insist that wom- en must learn how to tell one's story in order to reject both the normative narratives Anglo-American culture projects that restrict women's sexual expression and the counter-narratives posited by mainstream feminists.3 Noni Daylight and Yellow Woman exist between the phenomenology of their lived experiences and the storytelling event. Somewhere among the differences and similarities that attend each story they tell as representations of the culturally-inflected idea of "woman," Noni Daylight and Yellow Woman legitimize women's unsaid and previously unsayable encounters. In so doing, Yellow Woman and Noni Daylight assert that each woman's experiences, as they simultaneously reflect and reject normative gender narratives, deserve listening. They employ a poetics of survivance, a concept with which Gerald Vizenor describes interventions by people of native descent into dominant identity politics and the inextricable lived violences that accompany colonization. Silko and Harjo's figures, like mainstream feminism, reject exceptionalism in favor of community, but do not repeat sisterhood feminist's liberal homogenizing impulse. Each Noni Daylight and Yellow Woman extends, contradicts, and compromises how dominant American culture and liberal feminist counterculture define womanhood. Their voices call out in radical cacophony, expanding the definition of feminist storytelling, of stories worth telling.Historical Contexts: Who Nightrides with Noni Daylight?Critical conversation that engages Silko's work overflows with ruminations on her depiction of Yellow Woman (also called Kochininako), who Silko showcases in her 1981 memoir Storyteller. The name "Yellow Woman" does not only refer to a specific woman, but translates roughly to "Woman-Woman": in the Pueblo tradition the color yellow signifies woman, much in the same way that pink and blue connote gender for Anglo-European Americans (Allen 88). In comparison to scholarly engagements with Noni Daylight, the criticism that accompanies Silko's Yellow Woman on her journeys predominately celebrates her nuances. Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson and Malcolm A. …