Crazy Brave By Joy Harjo Sparknotes

“A story matrix connects all of us. There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part” - Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave
Stories are the way humans share, create, and explore their many experiences and identities with each other. When a story is told, the original content lingers depending upon how the storyteller recalls the content. Once the story is retold, it often takes on different details and meanings, because each storyteller adds their own perspective, experience, and meaning. The story then begins to have its own life. Each storyteller has a connection to the beginning and the end of the story.
Stories were first explored and shared through oral

tradition. Humans have told creation stories to explain their own existence, and that of the natural world, throughout history. An example of a storyteller who integrates multiple genres of story in every aspect of her being, is Joy Harjo. She is a multi-genre genius who is a writer, musician, poet, and inspirational storyteller. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she is a member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation. As a member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation, Harjo was born into a practice of storytelling that has been the cornerstone of her tribal, familial, personal, and cultural, history and identity. Harjo has written (and performed) many artistic works that combine, and move away from, traditional definitions of ‘genre’.
Genre is a term used to categorize works of art, literature, and music, among other creative works and forms. Rhetorical Genre Studies, as presented by Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff in their publication “Rhetorical Genre Studies and Approaches to Teaching Writing” published in Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (2010), is defined as a sociological approach to understanding genre as an analytical tool. “Rhetorical Genre Studies has been used to study academic, workplace, and public environments” (Bawarshi and Reiff 135). Bawarshi and Reiff present their ideas on how the field of rhetorical genre studies can be applied to the teaching of writing, especially in college composition courses. Most college writing programs introduce the practice of writing through the reading of different author’s styles, content, technique, and tone. However, Bawarshi and Reiff feel that writers can learn as much from the expression and transfer of genre in their own writing.
Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave, weaves multiple visions and experiences of her life through the transfer of genre in the heartwarming story of her own birth. She writes in and out of her own body, as she is both a spiritual and a natural human ‘being’, simultaneously. Her style of writing crosses over many realms, including the other-wordly, the tangible, the natural, and the possible. Her humanity and connection to the directions she has taken in her life remain the forefront of her narrative and story.
Writing of her ‘birth’ into this world, she is able to craft the characters of her soon-to-be parents with compassion and connection. She already knows who will be her parents, yet chooses them anyway. In the following quotes, Harjo describes the elements of her soon-to-be parents: “My mother-to-be was fire. Those of fire move about the earth with inspiration and purpose. They are creative, and can consume and be consumed by their desires. They are looking for purpose, a place in which to create” (Harjo 25). “My father-to-be was of the water, and could not find a hold on the banks of earthiness. Water people can easily get lost. And they may not comprehend that they are lost” (Harjo 25). Harjo writes with ancestral wisdom when she attempts to understand her impending birth to parents who are so apparently opposite. parents. “Within the year, I was born to earth, of water and fire. Because I came through them in this life, I would be quick to despair, and understand how to enter and emerge from ancestor realms. I had no way to translate the journey and what I would find there, until I found poetry” (Harjo 25). This realization of the interconnectedness of life seems to be the thread that weaves so seamlessly through all of her stories. Writing about all of her connections to ancestors, the earth, the spirit-world, the elements and the directions in her life, she allows the reader to access her story with their senses. When Harjo lands in this earthly realm to parents of water and fire, the genre of memoir, as it is traditionally presented, is cracked wide open.
When reading a memoir, a writer can learn what types of events are included, as well as how to use language in order to best represent the experiences and emotions of the events detailed in the memoir. Harjo, in Crazy Brave, writes using poetic verses as well as traditional narrative. Her style, tone, and content illustrate the different experiences in her life through expressions that result in her own unique narrative and ‘genre’ within the genre of memoir.
Dawn Latta Kirby and Dan Kirby, in their chapter “Memoir as Genre” from the book New Directions in Teaching Memoir provide tools to analyze memoir. They suggest that specific elements of a memoir can provide opportunities for in-depth literary analysis, as well as personal connection to what the author chooses to ‘reveal and conceal’ in their own narrative process. Kirby and Kirby define the merits of analyzing the title, the front materials, table of contents, the visual materials, the textual materials, and the end materials within each memoir. (Kirby and Kirby 9) The title may not seem as important as other elements of a memoir, however for Harjo her title illuminates her identity, her reflective process, and a sense of resistance to her ‘given’ name.
Her last name Harjo means “so brave, you’re crazy” (The Poetry Foundation Website). By using the meaning of her last name as a title, she begins her story with the history of her family members - even if only in name. Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave reveals so much in just two simple words. The title of her memoir is so fitting, as she writes with such ‘crazy’ courage and bravery, and also with conviction to the meaning of her name.
Harjo also utilizes the new ‘forms’ of contemporary genre through the textual stories she tells about her parents and grandparents. Harjo describes how the music, beats, and rhythms that she experiences through her parents’ interests and exposure to the radio, dancing, and other cultural events eventually lead to her love of poetry. Harjo recounts how her love of music began by listening to the radio in her father’s Cadillac. These reflective sensory memories and poetic narratives bring the reader into the moments and feelings of discovery along with Harjo.
By writing in the style of contemporary memoir (CM), Harjo takes the reader on a journey into her personal experiences that even she has not yet fully understood. Kirby and Kirby realize the merits of (CM) in that “through the author’s recounting of the unfolding of family members’ lives over time - sometimes over multiple generations - a larger, more compelling story emerges” (Kirby and Kirby 2). Harjo’s personal story is revealed through each of textual memories of her family members and their experiences, as well as those of her own.

Bawarshi and Reiff (2010) present the strategies for analyzing genre. Collecting samples of different genres is the first step. Once a selection has been made across different styles and ‘forms’ of writing, it will be easier to notice patterns between and within genre. The next step is to identify the scene in which the genre is being used, such as the settings, the subjects involved, the participants in the genre (writers and readers), and the purposes the genre fills for the writers and the readers. The next step is to look for patterns. Patterns may be the type of content that is included (or excluded) in the samples, or how the sentences are structured. Looking at patterns helps to determine what is presented and how it is presented, and can be effective when analyzing a genre. Once the patterns are seen, they can be analyzed as to what they reveal about a certain genre.
The settings and subjects of Joe Suina’s memoir And Then I Went to School: Memories of a Pueblo Childhood reveal the patterns of distinct sensory memories and importance of place to Suina. His first memories, similar to Harjo, are around family members and their households. “During those years, Grandmother and I lived beside the Plaza in a one-room house. Inside we had a traditional fireplace, a makeshift cabinet for our few tin cups and bowls, and a wooden crate carried our two buckets of all-purpose water” (Suina 84). However, some of his most memorable descriptions are of settings that revealed negative experiences and emotions. “The classroom, too, had its odd characteristics. It was terribly huge and smelled of medicine like the village clinic I feared so much. The walls and ceilings were artificial and uncaring. They were too far from me and I felt naked” (Suina 86). His descriptions are so detailed and full of imagery that he places the reader in each specific physical setting. Suina’s descriptions of certain ‘places’ throughout his memoir, reveal a pattern of memories and emotions attached to places in his life.. Similar to Harjo, he also tells much of his own story through the experiences of his family members. His story cannot be told separately from the settings and subjects around him, most notably his grandmother.
In Joy Harjo’s memoir, Crazy Brave, analyzing the settings and subjects of her stories can reveal the patterns with which she sculpts, sings, remembers, and narrates the important moments and elements of her life.

Harjo uses wisdom of the medicine wheel to reveal her life lessons and their often misunderstood, yet meaningful, directions. The first direction she writes of in Crazy Brave is that of ‘The East’. She opens the memoir with The East as being ‘the direction of beginnings, and the direction of where she was born, on the Creek Nation in Oklahoma” (Harjo 15). Setting the beginning of her story ‘at the beginning’ is rather misleading, as the direction she goes with her story does not follow an expected chronological order. Instead, she tells her story through patterns, memories, and settings that seem to come and go in and out of her consciousness. Her natural way of telling a story is very poetic and does not follow the standard rules of genre or memoir. The use of poetry and italics reveal these types of wanderings and ‘stanzas’ in her own life. Life to Harjo is not linear, and it shows in the beautiful rhythms, words, feelings, and experiences that she so ‘bravely’ places on each page of her

‘story’.
Memoir as a genre is very creative and can be sculpted into multiple meanings and expressions by the author. As illustrated by Harjo and Suina, a memoir can provide an open door for a reader, as well as a writer to explore the patterns of their lives. Memoir, as a genre, allows a writer to portray their story through subjects, settings, and patterns that can be recognized and understood in many ways by the reader. In this way, ‘contemporary’ memoir is an accessible and fluid form of storytelling. It connects all that is human: the beginning, the present, and the end.