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cpoole's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.75
I’m typically not a reader of poetry but I’ve been interested in Joy Harjo, so this seemed like a perfect start to her work. And it is beautiful! Featuring imagery from her own personal life (an especially moving scene at her mother’s deathbed), as well as the collective Native American experience, ie the Trail of Tears. The audio (read by Harjo) is perfection!
Content Warnings
Moderate: Violence, Grief, Death of parent, Colonisation, and Forced institutionalization
stevia333k's review against another edition
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
3.75
I listened to this at single speed because it's a poetry book, not necessarily an information book. It was hard to listen to because of my own experiences of gender dysphoria of school faculty telling us how people in however-many years would surveil our corpses & determine our sex & maybe gender expression, but not our personalities.
Also there is actual information in here, such as about the trail of tears, and mechanisms of genocide. Like there was a quote given from 1937, and it felt so recent. (Currently there's an escalation of ethnic cleansing on the gaza strip.)
So like seeing this indigenous work is important for not doing self-indigenization when processing trauma (such as from genocide against lgbtqia+ people, disabled people) as a settler.
As a sign of the times (2019) & settler-fragility, this book uses the term immigrants to refer to european settlers who as a community, chose to be colonizers instead of welcome guests. I'm not sure how to feel about that due to how "immigrant" has still been weaponized by said white settlers, and because I've become less patriotic than I was when I thought AOC/Bernie Sanders/DSA had a chance at being administrators.
That being said, the blues is connected to residential school trauma (at least hers) & it's like... This poem book is from 2019, and I read this in 2023. I learned this year that the blues was titled the blues because west africa (where a lot of black people were kidnapped from during the trans-Atlantic slave trade) uses an 11-note music scale while Europeans used a 7-note scale. European supremacists were like white is universal so anything that isn't the 7-note frequency is odd/blue.
At first listen I'm sure which way Harjo means to go with the saying the blues are American. (To be clear, I think this is referring to after the label of blues was applied to the 11-note scale brought by kidnapped black peoples.) Like is this is a re-up of "new americana" (2015) by halsey? Is Harjo meaning how an audience & feedback between the audience & performers is part of theater? Because to be clear, she does include samples she tries to sing herself of the songs she's talking about & it does feed into some papers I read once about decolonizing music & decolonial art.
- (this one is about public art) Dylan Robinson (2022) Reparative interpellation: public art’s Indigenous and non-human publics, Journal of Visual Culture, 21(1), pp.69– 84
- (this is the one about decolonizing music. I found Harjo gave a better sampling than this essay gave because it's like in order to learn about different standards had by colonized peoples, you need to learn those standards, etc.) Dylan Robinson (2022) Giving / Taking Notice, Performance Matters, 8(1), pp.24–36
So point being, this is kind of a book for when thinking about 2019-esque DSA & "new americana". While IDK if I'd recommend the entire book to people, I'd definitely recommend some of the poems, especially about surviving residential school. (Basically they would escape the campus, listen to blues, and drink, self-medicate, and imagine/dissociate.)
Also there is actual information in here, such as about the trail of tears, and mechanisms of genocide. Like there was a quote given from 1937, and it felt so recent. (Currently there's an escalation of ethnic cleansing on the gaza strip.)
So like seeing this indigenous work is important for not doing self-indigenization when processing trauma (such as from genocide against lgbtqia+ people, disabled people) as a settler.
As a sign of the times (2019) & settler-fragility, this book uses the term immigrants to refer to european settlers who as a community, chose to be colonizers instead of welcome guests. I'm not sure how to feel about that due to how "immigrant" has still been weaponized by said white settlers, and because I've become less patriotic than I was when I thought AOC/Bernie Sanders/DSA had a chance at being administrators.
That being said, the blues is connected to residential school trauma (at least hers) & it's like... This poem book is from 2019, and I read this in 2023. I learned this year that the blues was titled the blues because west africa (where a lot of black people were kidnapped from during the trans-Atlantic slave trade) uses an 11-note music scale while Europeans used a 7-note scale. European supremacists were like white is universal so anything that isn't the 7-note frequency is odd/blue.
At first listen I'm sure which way Harjo means to go with the saying the blues are American. (To be clear, I think this is referring to after the label of blues was applied to the 11-note scale brought by kidnapped black peoples.) Like is this is a re-up of "new americana" (2015) by halsey? Is Harjo meaning how an audience & feedback between the audience & performers is part of theater? Because to be clear, she does include samples she tries to sing herself of the songs she's talking about & it does feed into some papers I read once about decolonizing music & decolonial art.
- (this one is about public art) Dylan Robinson (2022) Reparative interpellation: public art’s Indigenous and non-human publics, Journal of Visual Culture, 21(1), pp.69– 84
- (this is the one about decolonizing music. I found Harjo gave a better sampling than this essay gave because it's like in order to learn about different standards had by colonized peoples, you need to learn those standards, etc.) Dylan Robinson (2022) Giving / Taking Notice, Performance Matters, 8(1), pp.24–36
So point being, this is kind of a book for when thinking about 2019-esque DSA & "new americana". While IDK if I'd recommend the entire book to people, I'd definitely recommend some of the poems, especially about surviving residential school. (Basically they would escape the campus, listen to blues, and drink, self-medicate, and imagine/dissociate.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Drug use, Child abuse, Colonisation, Confinement, Forced institutionalization, Sexual harassment, Genocide, Emotional abuse, Injury/Injury detail, Police brutality, Racism, Sexual assault, Animal cruelty, Drug abuse, Rape, Cultural appropriation, Animal death, Child death, Death, Grief, Religious bigotry, Trafficking, War, Alcohol, and Alcoholism
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