Birdyline Book Blog

The command of Joy Harjo’s poem Remember is exactly as stated in its title- but why? What power and what necessity lies in memory? Harjo’s writing is saturated with poetic devices including anaphora, asyndeton, and anthropomorphism, all creating an emotionally impactful narrative influenced by her native heritage. As a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation, her background is present in all of her work and is key for understanding the full message. 

Here is the link to read the poem I’ll be discussing today: Remember by Joy Harjo – Poems | Academy of American Poets

In an interview with Janice Gould, Harjo states, “I don’t believe that we come into this world naked of knowledge.” (Gould, 140) This plays out visually from lines 7-10. “Remember your birth, how your mother struggled/to give you form and breath. You are evidence of/her life, and her mother’s, and her’s./Remember your father. He is your life, also.” Applying Harjo’s expressed understanding of the state in which humans are born, it appears that within this poem the essence of self from the moment you first exist is your family context and history. Her use of the word “naked” drives in a point. We are literally born naked, with no physical belongings. The only thing that could possibly be ours in that moment- the only thing we can carry from the very instant we’re born to death- that thing must be external. What are we born with according to Harjo? Throughout the rest of her poem, it appears to be knowledge, specifically as a form of identity. We are born as an extension of our parents’ stories and their parents’ before them. We are born with the advantage to approaching life that is we can observe the past and learn from there. 

The interaction between place and self in Remember is circular. Rather than simply asking the question “what is life-”, an individual in Harjo’s narrative is yet another piece of the answer. She writes “you are the earth… all people… the universe…” In other words, you are the product of your environment and a contributor to your environment simultaneously. In the same interview, Harjo shares a story of a Shaman who tells a story so creatively and immersively that he became, in her words, a part of the story. She shares only a few pages prior that “At Indian School everyone I knew wrote poetry. It was natural because our cultures were carried in us in poetic terms. That’s how concepts, ideas found root, landed, and grew. Images and patterned sounds ensure memory and connection. It was and is natural to write and think in poetry.” (Gould, 132) She draws this same conclusion seeing the shaman in action. These two notably cultural experiences are what led to her feeling the way she does about poetry, about self, about everything. 

It would be the equivalent of an oxymoron to remove the cultural context from Harjo’s work and still understand the meaning behind it. Native Americans as a whole have a violent history, most of which was caused by the same settlers whose ancestors are the majority in this country today, both in government and in population. Early settlers to the Americas frequently pushed Native Americans off of land, and the early US Government largely turned a blind eye. Some protective laws were passed, but some politicians openly expressed their desire to obtain more land from Natives and remove them from the land already being inhabited. The most infamous of these politicians was our seventh president, Andrew Jackson. Likely the most bloodthirsty president who had yet to take office, and arguably still holding that title to date, Jackson was directly responsible for 100,000 deaths and displacements in one of his anti-Native acts alone. Under a leader who enthusiastically supported the removal of Native Americans, state leaders started following suit and passing laws benefiting their own people regardless of where Native people were settled or how long they had been settled there for. In 1830, Georgia passed a law requiring any white men living on Cherokee land to obtain a license and swear an oath to uphold the sovereignty of Georgia. This was an obviously divisive law that discouraged the sharing of culture, and two men in particular opposed it. The legal case that followed was raised all the way to the Supreme Court. Worcester V. Georgia is now a case that has lasting impact on all Native tribes, not just Cherokee, and all US citizens rather than just Georgians. Matthew L. Sundquist wrote for the American Indian Law Review that “The narrow question before the Court was whether missionaries committed a crime by failing to acquire a license. The broader questions were whether Georgia law applied to Cherokee lands and whether the Cherokee Nation had sovereignty over its lands.” (Sundquist, 240)

The court case ended favorably for the Native Americans on a surface level. However, ideologically early colonizers’ theory of “manifest destiny” gave them a perceived divinely appointed entitlement to the entire continent. Framed as a God-given unifying quest, people who did not subscribe to the same religious, cultural, and linguistic practices were not unified and instead suffered the side effects of the ever-expanding and needy population. According to newspapers at the time, President Andrew Jackson himself “had threatened to ignore the ruling.” (Sundquist, 246) Georgia threatened to hang anyone who came to enforce the law and President Jackson conveniently noticed that the court had not made any ruling on how the president should intervene in the case of rebellion, so he did nothing. Jackson went on to initiate the infamous “trail of tears,” which targeted thousands of those Cherokee Natives in Georgia as well as the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, and Creek peoples. This was not an unorganized effort. In The American Journal of Legal History, Ethan Davis writes that “…the removal of the Southern Indians in the 1830s required the assembling of a corps of Federal Removal Agents, the purchasing of hundreds of thousands of pounds of supplies and provisions, and the construction of supply depots along the road to the West.” (Davis, 50) 

With such a meticulous and powerful attack against the Native Americans’ land ownership, there was little they could do with a disadvantage in population number and weapon quality. Harjo is a descendant of the Creek nation, one of the groups diminished and displaced by Jackson’s trail of tears and Western expansion by white settlers. As she writes about the knowledge a person is born with, the theme of identity and history is prevalent. Her readers must acknowledge the attempted erasure of her culture. Many physical “belongings” were indeed stolen, specifically land. However, she is evidence of history’s existence as the daughter of a daughter of a daughter and so on as read in line 9. Harjo’s use of asyndeton in lines 12-13 address land directly. “Red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth/brown earth, we are earth.” Something cannot be stolen if it is a part of you. The knowledge of the past and how that impacted your identity is a power. Perhaps the most emotionally impactful tool used in this essay is the anaphora present throughout the entire piece. Remember is repeated time and time again, followed by Harjo’s beautiful descriptive language. What is moving is subjective to each reader, but on a personal level it is reminiscent of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Both address a marginalized audience while specifically and purposefully using anaphora as a call-to-action. While King repeats “now is the time,” Harjo commands her readers to remember. Remember- because the knowledge of your identity is the only power you are born with. 

Works cited:

Davis, Ethan. “An Administrative Trail of Tears: Indian Removal.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 50, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49–100.

Gould, Janice, and Joy Harjo. “An Interview with Joy Harjo.” Western American Literature, vol. 35, no. 2, 2000, pp. 130–42.

Harjo, Joy. “Remember by Joy Harjo – Poems | Academy of American Poets.” Poets.org, 2015, poets.org/poem/remember-0.

Sundquist, Matthew L. “WORCESTER V. GEORGIA: A BREAKDOWN IN THE SEPARATION OF POWERS.” American Indian Law Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2010, pp. 239–55.