The American Century: Literature since 1945 781continue to be put on display. The poem, spoken by Julia, is a plea for love: “tell me,
husband, how you love me,” she begs. It also reveals the power of song: in asking for
acknowledgment of herself as a human being, Julia manifests just how complexly,
poignantly human she is. Through the telling of her story, Julia confirms the truth
of her self; and Rose, in fact, sees her own project in that of Julia. Storytelling, she
tells us in “Story Keeper” (1985), is something she learned from her family and her
tribe. “I feel the stories / settle under my bed,” she confesses. The stories “go a winding
way” back to “the red clouds / our first / Hopi morning.” They offer a return to
origins, and a means of rediscovering the personal by reconnecting it to the
communal, a shared tradition and a shared humanity.
Joy Harjo (1951–), a poet born into the Creek Nation, also mixes Anglo and
Native American influences in her work. Her poems (gathered together in such
volumes as How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975–2001 (2002))
deploy a free verse line that connects her with the tradition of Whitman; they are
also marked, however, by a cadence that recalls the repetitions of the Indian
ceremonial drum. There is song here, and chant, as Harjo describes Native American
women living on a knife edge (“The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor
Window ” (1983)), the tragic past and grim present of most Native Americans
(“New Orleans” (1983)), or rehearses her own memories and metamorphic sense of
her own identity. “Remember that you are all people and that all people / are you,”
she writes in “Remember” (1983). “Remember that you are this universe and that
this / universe is you. / Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you,” she
concludes. “Remember that language comes from this.” “The dance that language is”
is, in effect, the key for Harjo: the way to unlock what Native Americans have been,
are, and may become. Her work is packed with the dire particulars of Native
American history: “I have a memory, / ” she says in “New Orleans,” “It swims deep
in blood.” But it is also brimming over with visions. So, in the appropriately titled
“Vision” (1983), Harjo transmutes a rainbow touching down “somewhere in the
Rio Grande” into “horses / of color / horses that were within us all of this time.”
“The thunder of their beating / hearts” and hooves becomes an emblem of the
vitality lurking within her, her people, and all life. Similarly, in “Deer Dancer”
(1990), a beautiful Indian woman who appears in a “bar of misfits” suddenly, dances
naked and then vanishes, seems to figure old dreams and new promises. Linked
with elemental, elusive creatures of Native American myth, she is, we are told, “the
deer who entered our dream in white dawn, breathed mist / into pine trees, her
fawn a blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left.” “Give me back my language,”
Harjo demands in “We Must Call a Meeting” (1990). She is, she indicates, like her
fellow Native American poets in search for the right words that will enable her to
tell the truth, the tale of her tribe. With those words found and carefully fashioned,
the tale she tells is, she confesses, an almost incredible one, of a people still here
despite everything, including war, disease, and famine. “Everybody laughed at the
impossibility of it, / but also the truth,” Harjo admits in “Anchorage” (1983).
“Because who would believe / the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival /
those who were never meant / to survive?”GGray_c05.indd 781ray_c 05 .indd 781 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM