Finding Freedom from the Ugliness of Shame and Loathing – Oprah Mag

My first published poem as an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico was formed from anguish. It was not yet a poem, even as it appeared to be a poem. Like starts for tomato plants or zucchini, I had been writing poem-starts on bar napkins to open conversation, like looking around the room and wondering where everyone came from and how they wound up here on this corner of desperation. Natives are always asking: Where you from? Id write lyrical notes to decipher the messages that emerged through the mess of colonized wilderness, sometimes even a startled S.O.S. signal.

I was a university student, arriving on campus after a year of major antiwar demonstrations that had galvanized the student community. The National Guard had been called out. Native rights movements were beginning to emerge, especially in the Plains and upper Midwest. At the University of New Mexico, we were mostly southwestern Native peoples, from the pueblos perched along the edges of the Rio Grande, or the Athabascan Navajo and Apache peoples to the south and west. There were a few of us Oklahoma Indians, including a handful of other Mvskoke, and others from tribal nations all over the country.

Many of us were within a generation of coming up in traditions of orality, of knowledge systems that managed to survive nearly intact if not in shards. What held it all together appeared to be grease and humor, and always a deep sense of awe and respect for life, for this thing called living.

There was the Indian bar across town where I was often being eyed for a fight by other women. Another bar for dancing was farther up on Central, which was across the street from the gay bar with the best music and a dance floor of color-lit plexiglass. The preferred hangout was Okies. It was close to the university, and it was the Indian, biker, and poet bar, a direct line to higher education. We all met there to vision together or apart on beer, wine, and whatever else we found and brought through the doors, swinging through the nights at the corner of Yale and Central. Mainly it was just to get together, tell stories, laugh, and hang out. In the beginning, I wasnt old enough to enter those doors legally. And even then, some places still wouldnt serve American Indians alcohol. Thats a different story.

Most of our Native student community never set foot in any of these places. I grew up in a family in which bars were the community social gathering places, though it never worked out well in the end. Ive come to believe that they are so attractive because they hold stories, jukeboxes, or bands that share songs. We need stories, music, and companionship to feed our spirits. Add the loosening up elements of alcohol and pool games and a bar can be a refuge. Yet it can also be a tricky island of forgetfulness. Its dangerous. You can easily go too far or get trapped into returning night after night, to repeat a high that will never be the same again. After a few hours in this atmosphere, I would feel I belonged. I could be myself on the dance floor. This kind of high has a wide-open trapdoor if there is no one or nothing there to catch you.

Catching the Light (Why I Write)

Catching the Light (Why I Write)

My first poem came from navigating the party after the party, the one for the hardcore who had no place else to go but despair. Those parties could happen in someones home or on the street. I wont name the poem. It was an attempt to salvage the embers of living. The poem was not strong enough to hold it.

Like everyone else there, I was looking for a vision, for freedom from the ugliness of shame and loathing. I was looking for a language to speak my way out of there, hence the scribbling on bar napkins, my face covered by my long hair. I made a cave of silence in the mess and found poetry there.

Excerpted from Catching the Light, Yale University Press; Reprint edition (October 4, 2022).

Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd poet laureate of the United States, from 2019 to 2022.

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Finding Freedom from the Ugliness of Shame and Loathing - Oprah Mag