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Book
Joy Harjo · 2012
Joy Harjo, the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote Crazy Brave (2012) as the story of how she found her voice — and of the violences, personal and historical, that tried to take it from her, because for Harjo silencing a Native girl is itself a form of colonization, and reclaiming song is survival.
Sequence ladder
Narrative Intelligence sources live outside the figurative image sequence ladder. Adaptive placement applies to image sequences, not this reading library.
Appears in
What this book knows
Silencing a Native girl's voice through violence is itself a form of colonization—and reclaiming song is survival.
trauma-and-survival
He forbade me ever to sing in the house again. Then he beat me. I stopped singing. I didn't write.
CBM-005I froze in terror. He swung our sister around, unbuckled his belt in one slick motion. His buckle made a satisfied click.
CBM-002He called out drunkenly from the back seat of the police car, 'I love you, Joy.' I did not get him out of jail that time.
CBM-013shame
He read my day-to-day musings aloud in front of the family. I was humiliated. Violated. I swore I would never write anything again.
CBM-004My knowing said in a loud voice: do not walk alone with this boy. I must be imagining things, I said to myself. I walked with him.
CBM-006belonging
My house became the safe house for many of my Indian women friends whose husbands were beating them. There were no shelters then for native women.
CBM-014Editor’s framing
The memoir moves the way Harjo's poetry does — by image, vision, and the four directions that structure the book — refusing the linear arc in favor of something closer to ceremony. She traces a childhood marked by a violent stepfather, an early marriage, poverty, and the long work of finding the art that would let her speak. The throughline is voice: who is permitted one, who is silenced, and what it takes to sing anyway. The personal story is never separable from the historical one; the silencing of the girl rhymes with the silencing of her people.
What to attend to: the structure, which is Native and ceremonial rather than confessional-linear, and which is part of the book's argument about how a life is told. The treatment of fear, which Harjo neither denies nor lets win — the title's crazy brave is the posture of moving forward afraid. The presence of vision and the more-than-human world as real sources of knowledge, not metaphor.
In Vela's reading Crazy Brave sits in the memoir corpus among the accounts of survival and reclaimed voice, read on the trauma-and-survival ground and into grief and belonging. We hold it for the way it makes the recovery of a voice an act of both personal and historical survival.
Featured passage
The next Saturday morning I followed my five-year-old sister’s cries to the kitchen and found her being held aloft by one leg by my stepfather. I froze in terror. My brother closest in age stood with me. “This is what will happen to you if you misbehave.” He swung our sister around. He unbuckled and pulled off his belt in one slick motion. I still see the sweat crescents under the arms of his work shirt. I hear him grunt with the effort as he whips her. When he was done he put her down, then slid the belt back carefully around his girth. His buckle made a satisfied click. Then he went into the living room, back to watching golf on the television.
The next Saturday morning I followed my five-year-old sister’s cries to the kitchen and found her being held aloft by one leg by my stepfather. I froze in terror.
Read alongside · the magazine
The historical and personal grief Harjo carries, and the song that answers it, sits inside the larger reading of grief.
15 published passages · book excerpt · lived experience
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