liking with a purpose


LIKING WITH A PURPOSE



Harjo, Joy.  Crazy Brave: A Memoir.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.





*I like Harjo's memoir.  It emits complex simplicity and simple complexity in equal measures. Those are qualities possessed by the writing of spirit renewal.  That is an achievement to be admired and to yearn for.  few of us have reached that level of achievement.  I truly haven't; my writing is allusion-laden, dense, and demanding.  Harjo uses her artistry to swerve away from my limitations.



**I like the book, but I don't like the title.  The title holds no charm for me.  It tempts me to think a finger of color is pointed like a gun at someone's face or back.  At any moment, passion or fear or hatred might squeeze the trigger and order the gun to kill an innocent person.  I doubt that the title was a random choice.  I imagine Harjo was fully aware of how the title issues a challenge  I imagine she is sending herself and us  message of some import.



***I discover pleasure and wisdom in many of her turns of phrase and sentences ----



·         "stretching the length of that rhapsody" (18)

·         :…music is a language that lives  n the spiritual realms…" (19)

·         "Every soul has a distinct song." (19)

·         "In the end, we must each tend to our own gulf of sadness…" (23)

·         "to gauge the emotional  atmosphere of the house" (45)

·         "Though black America inspired us, Indian peoples were different.  Most of us did not want to become full-fledged Americans.  We wished to maintain the integrity of our tribal cultures and assert our individual tribal nations.  We aspired to be traditional-contemporary twentieth-century warriors, artists, and dreamers." (139)



****I like Harjo's secure accounting for her ancestry, which is remotely African and immediately indigenous.  A story from ancient Nubia.  A saga out of Florida regarding her kinsman Osceola who "did not subscribe to the racist politics of blood quantum that were and continue to disappear us as naïve peoples.  He was Seminole, and he acted in that manner." (149)  So clean.  So honest.  Crazy Brave is a godsend in my time of need.





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            November 13, 2019


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