Reviewed by: Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo Belinda Acosta (bio) Joy Harjo. Crazy Brave: A Memoir. W. W. Norton. Reading one of this nation’s most critically acclaimed and award-winning poets, we should not be surprised at how much is accomplished in Joy Harjo’s slender volume Crazy Brave: A Memoir (164 pages). A Native American of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation, Harjo has written in her newest work more than a conventional memoir. It’s a multifaceted creation story. At one moment, it’s a dry-eyed autobiography of a young Native American girl coping with her harsh reality; in the next, it’s a spiritual journey; in another, a slice of political history; and finally, it’s a testament to the saving grace of the arts. In between, Harjo contemplates what she’s lived with: introspection, empathy, and when necessary, mercy. Divided into four sections, each opens with a tribute to one of the four directions (as is common in Native American traditions). In this context, the practice also orients readers to the period of her life that she will be covering: East is the direction of beginnings. It is sunrise. When beloved Sun rises, it is an entrance, a door to fresh knowledge. Breathe the light in. Call upon the assistance you need for the day. Give thanks. . . . East is also the direction of Oklahoma, where I was born, the direction of the Creek Nation. In this enchanting first section, Harjo captures the reality of childhood with unsentimental clarity, yet this inviting opening may also be the most challenging. Commingling the language of myth, history, and memory, Harjo takes readers back and forth through time, from her prebirth when she “heard the soul that was to be my mother call out in a heartbreak ballad” and on to her birth and childhood. Working her narrative like a bellows, she expands on the particulars of her life with moments from her familial and native people’s history to create a text that is both personal yet anchored in the larger world—the physical and the spiritual. Everything is connected, Harjo reminds her readers. Each life touches another, no matter the span of time separating them. “North is the direction where the difficult teachers live” is how Harjo begins the next section. Guided by the mothers in her life—her mother, grandmother, and other matrilineal elders—Harjo directly benefited as well as suffered from their past deeds. Poor choices in men, grinding poverty, and self-doubt are recounted [End Page 160] at the same time that she celebrates her mothers’ unique gifts, gifts that Harjo as a young girl is unconsciously but purposefully cultivating in herself. Drawn to Earth by her mother’s singing, music did and still plays a huge role in her life (her readings often include her playing sax). Painting, dance, theater, and finally poetry would later make their mark as she struggled to understand her world and her place in it. In each section of the book, we come to appreciate just why Harjo is admired for her use of mythic language influenced by her Native American worldview and the orality of her culture. (“Written text is, for me, fixed orality,” she said in Soul Talk, Song Language, Conversations with Joy Harjo, 2011.) At turns magical and sublime, Harjo nonetheless maintains a writer’s allegiance to unadorned truth telling. Make no mistake, Harjo’s early life was difficult. She did have an alcoholic father. She did have a menacing stepfather. She did get pregnant as a teenager. She did leave home too soon. She did give birth without the benefit of a personal, caring friend or relative in a facility where, in addition to being treated as if she were sure to be an incompetent mother, sterilization was matter-of-factly suggested as birth control. The beauty of Harjo’s prose—thoughtful, lofty, yet hard and lovely as polished stones—sweetens these bitter moments. In the end, Harjo’s memoir offers a study of how the arts not only influenced her life, they saved it. “It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the...