Crazy Brave: A Memoir
Written and Narrated By: Joy Harjo
Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
What a surprise! What a real treat!
Well, Crazy Brave is a treat if you love well-crafted sentences, stunning imagery, strong use of language. It’s not a treat to listen to about how poorly life has treated Harjo or some of the dire circumstances she’s faced. But don’t most people?
Joy Harjo, the first Native American United States Poet Laureate, shows her literary flair from the get-go in this brilliantly written Memoir. Her words and sentences soar and bring myth to life, her prose is pure poetry, which is wildly apt (And not at all a given. Annie Dillard, another writer with noteworthy poetry canNOT write about writing…!). Harjo, on the other hand, writes about writing, art, creativity so very well, so very vividly.
But the best writing within this book comes when she discusses the emotionally devastating. Home life did not go well when her mother married again, a white man who became abusive to Joy and her siblings from day one of the marriage. He was a towering figure of rage run amok, of moral depravity, or willful vindictiveness, and it took Harjo just about everything to escape from that life, seeking refuge in a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school as a teenager, seeking love and stability from an early marriage and pregnancy.
Naturally, the marriage didn’t go well; she married a young man who was incapable of holding down a job, who already had a child from another teen-aged young woman, who had a mother who was vile and scathing to Harjo throughout the relationship. And Harjo went on to have another destructive relationship with a volatile man, poet Simon Ortiz, whose alcohol abuse and emotional instability caused great upheaval in her life. But he really spoke to her when they discussed the struggles of Native Americans and the need for unity and action.
The most stunning part of the book comes at the end with her descriptions of anxiety and what she easily could’ve simply dubbed mental illness and treated as such, but which she finds to be rifts in her soul and within her psyche that only art and poetry can heal. By getting in touch with her creative side, by actively creating, she has partnered with the universe and found healing.
I kinda sorta don’t have much patience with poets, maybe because to me it smacks of University-types who take themselves FAR too seriously, and maybe because my own dabbling with that art has been when I’ve felt utterly crushed by life, so I went into Crazy Brave with a rather jaundiced eye, thinking it was going to be a bit artsy fartsy (I know! I’m absolutely appallingly shallow, I admit it!). I did have a moment or two when Harjo does some singing and chanting where I thought: Uh oh…
But seriously. She has such a way with words, and she has so much insight and self-awareness that it would’ve been impossible not to feel for her, to feel moved by her words. She’s of a different era, and she’s of a different world than my own, but the way she writes invites communion and inclusion. I truly respect that she could’ve come away from her background and her experiences bitter and blaming, but instead she’s open to life, and she shares Light.
A fairly short book, but truly a great experience. And to hear her narrate it herself was awesome. It was like someone sitting by a crackling fire, sharing, exposing, singing, dancing.
All with grace and such an utter lack of self-aggrandizement. A beautiful, beautiful woman.
Can I be her when I grow up? Please?
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