Joy Harjo's Web Log

Woke up this morning in a shine after being with a group of native people I know and love on the other side of this reality show. I didn't want to leave. The visit nourished me. This reality show co-starring all of us, lately seems beset by an especially nasty family of demons. They've infected the country, from our so-called leaders to smaller local bureaucrats and would-be bureaucrats who get inside our heads. They are beastly with greed and the need for attention. They infect with blindness, lack of ability to hear clearly. Lies appear to be truths.

I've had to remind myself that my name is "joy", not greed or envy or sadness or grief. If I think "love" then there's no room for any other thoughts. And it's the nature of love to connect and grow more love. If I think "revenge" or "envy" then they revenge and envy grow immense and stick their butts in my face and I can see nothing else and I'm miserable. They also have a tendency to fight, and fart particularly malodorous streams.

REPORT from my contact in Durango, Colorado: Her sister who's had heart trouble grew herself a new pathway to her heart. Her doctor has never seen anything like it. We know it's possible. We can grow ourself a peaceful nation. Heart by heart.

What does this have to do with poetry, music, and writing? It's all part of the process. What we think, so, do and are becomes the stuff of our poetry, music and writing.

And this from an interview with Cecile Pineda: “…I am viewed by people eager to claim me as a Latina writer, and this acclamation certainly makes me proud. But it is not entirely representative. My mother bore me. She was as mired in the notions of the Old World, in its rationalities, its explanations, its conventions, its certainties, and its Protestantism, as my father was a product of his Catholicism and of his own colonial past. Perhaps in the tension between the two I managed to find a voice. But more than more genetic or cultural considerations, I claim necessity. I live in a world in which 40 men control wealth equal to that of nearly 80 countries where, to maintain their hegemony, countless acts of mayhem and massacre must occur every day. This is the reality that forms and re-forms my days as it does those of all the people on this hapless planet. I do not think anymore that writing—mine or another’s—can change the world. Perhaps in their small way, writers can answer for those who are voiceless in their extreme deprivation and suffering. But at best, in the very smallest scheme, writing can provide a moment of grace, both for her who writes and him who reads, in a very dark world.”

From The Bloomsbury Review Interview September/October 2004

Check the Poetry Africa site to see what's happening there. I'll be performing there in a few weeks.

More later.