The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry

3. Finding the Way Back

       ฀      Finding฀the฀Way฀Back฀ ฀ ฀ Joy฀Harjo in the albuquerque airport trying to find a flight to old oraibi, third mesa TWA is the only desk open bright lights outline new york, chicago and the third attendant doesn’t know that third mesa is a part of the center of the world and who are we just two indians at three in the morning trying to find a way back and then i remembered that time simon took a yellow cab out to acoma from albuquerque a twenty five dollar ride to the center of himself 3 AM is not too late to find the way back —Joy Harjo, “3 AM” 46 Finding the Way Back ฀“฀,” from her 1990 volume In Mad Love and War, Muscogee -Creek poet Joy Harjo blasts her reader with a barrage of images depicting the pain and frustration of contemporary Native American life. Relating a memory from a “bar in the middle of winter,” the poet describes herself and her companions as “Indian ruins” gathered at “the bar of broken survivors , the club of shotgun, knife wound, of poison by culture” (5). She says she wants to describe the pain in detail but knows that “in this language there are no words for how the real world collapses.” So instead, responding to a standard pickup line she overhears—“What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”—the poet asks a question of her own: “That’s what I’d like to know, what are we all doing in a place like this?” (6). This question, with its larger implications concerning contemporary Western civilization, is central to Harjo’s work. Since her earliest poems she has grappled with the dilemmas, alienation, anger, and (at times) hopelessness of living “in a place like this.” In response, Harjo attempts to “go back” to what she calls “the mythic world.” This response accords with the work of Wendell Berry in that Harjo demonstrates a keen sense of place- and space-consciousness. Yet she differs from Berry in how she addresses the rift between self and nature, for she views modern alienation as largely a verbal, cultural construct that she attempts to bypass by going back, not in the sense of regressing, but of recovering a worldview that is mindful of both place and space. ฀฀฀comprehend Harjo’s ideal of going back, we must examine what she finds so unsettling about the contemporary world. A good point to begin is a passage from Carol Lee Sanchez’s “More Conversations from the Nightmare,” where the poet calls herself one of the Urban Indians feasting out of context multilayered collages of who we used to be. (Hobson 249) Harjo too situates her work amid the numerous problems contemporary American Indians face as they interact with modern technological civiliza- Joy Harjo 47 tion and its resultant violence, poverty, alcoholism, and brutality. We observe these afflictions throughout her verse, in which speakers again and again decry the horrors endemic to this “land of nightmares” (WWF xv) that divorces her and her people from the nonhuman world and all it offers. Harjo repeatedly names and explores the numerous divisions, divorces, and inconsistencies that mar the effort to live meaningfully at “the ragged end of this century” (WWF 30). In “Anchorage,” for example, she writes of walking through the city and coming upon a Native homeless woman, describing her as someone’s Athabascan grandmother, folded up, smelling like 200 years of blood and piss, her eyes closed against some unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache in which nothing makes sense. (SHSH 14) This scene, epitomizing the worst of a meaningless modern existence with its disintegrated relationships and families, points out that the oppression of American Indians did not end at the completion of the Trail of Tears. As Harjo puts it, “The landscape of the late twentieth century is littered with bodies of our relatives” (WWF 19). This littered landscape is part of what Harjo calls “the psychic wound of the Americas” (139). The wound has two primary sources, the first being a loss of roots and connection: humans live alienated lives, isolated from each other and from the other occupants of the planet. Harjo figures a world where “casual murder[s]” of immigrant taxi drivers are ordinary, everyday events (WWF 36); where the Ku Klux Klan lynches African Americans, both young and old...