36 pages • 1 hour read
Joy HarjoCrazy Brave: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Joy Harjo
As this is her memoir, the author Joy Harjo is the protagonist of the narrative and the central focus throughout the book. While the book frequently jumps forward and backward through time, it generally follows her life and development from birth to adulthood, when she began writing poetry. Because the narrative is autobiographical, Harjo informs the reader of the thoughts and motivations behind every decision she makes. She also frequently reinterprets her motivations based on her perspective decades later. For example, when she endures her poet boyfriend’s drunken abuse on various occasions, she makes excuses at the time. Later, she reflects on her reluctance to leave him, writing that when she would take him back, she did not think of him as a monster, but instead as the man she fell in love with. The monster was only a temporary “bad dream.”
Harjo is a deeply spiritual person, to the point that she has dreams and visions of other people and other times that reflect back on her own life. These stories and visions frequently serve to warn her of danger or serve to heal her of her pains and torments. After she begins having intense panic attacks and fear of death as a mother, for instance, she has a dream of a Pacific Islander shaman who heals through song and dance. This vision acts as an epiphany that her fear is in her control, and that her poetry and art can help her to dispel this fear. Her connection to the spiritual realm also allows her to see events at which she was not present. At IAIA, she has a vision of herself on the moon, where she watches her mother waiting for her father to come home while her father is out dancing and kissing a strange blond woman.
While Harjo is a bright and creative person, she is also flawed. Her worship of her alcoholic father leads her to carry on relationships with similarly alcoholic, abusive men. She allows these men to manipulate her and control her, pulling her away from her own dreams and ambitions. By the end of the narrative, when she is an adult mother attending university, she finally breaks this cycle and releases herself from this destructive pattern through poetry and art.
Harjo’s Mother
Harjo’s mother is not named within the narrative text, although her name is revealed as Wynema Jewell Baker in the Acknowledgments section. The fact that her mother’s name is not revealed within the story gives her an archetypal quality as a mother figure; the reader is subtly encouraged to think of her as a mother before anything else. This technique assists in putting the reader in the mindset of Harjo as a child and young adult, when she looks to her mother as the archetypal mother figure. Harjo often judges herself by thinking about how her mother sees her, particularly in adulthood, when her mother is disappointed by her teenage pregnancy and lack of success.
While leaving her unnamed, Harjo also characterizes her mother with great detail. She frequently illustrates her mother as a beautiful, vibrant woman. She notes her mother’s attractiveness frequently throughout the book. She also presents her as a hard worker, working long hours at an industrial cafeteria as well as at home. Harjo uses the metaphor of fire when describing her mother at the time she met Harjo’s father, in that fire is vivacious, bright, and purposeful. Fire also has the unfortunate likelihood of burning up one’s dreams, however, and her mother loses her dreams in taking care of two alcoholic, abusive husbands.
Harjo’s Father
Like her mother, Harjo’s father is not named within the narrative, though Harjo reveals his name as Allen W. Foster, Jr. in the Acknowledgments. Like her portrayal of her mother, this lack of a name portrays him as an archetypal father figure. Harjo describes him as a mysterious and distant, though also loving, man. She uses the metaphor of water for her father when describing his first meeting with her mother, as water is drifting and lost and never finds stability. Her father is indeed alcoholic and cannot find stability in his home with his family. He is a womanizer who cheats on Harjo’s mother, and he also physically abuses her. Harjo notes that this drifting, unstable quality is probably due to the fact that her father’s mother died when he was very young. Physically, Harjo’s father is “a handsome god who smelled of Old Spice” (17), with well-groomed black hair and well-pressed, fine clothes.
Harjo worships and adores her father as a young girl, despite being aware of his flaws. This adoration likely causes Harjo to be attracted to similarly charming but alcoholic, destructive men in her young adulthood. Her friends even tell her that she has married her father when her poet boyfriend begins drinking and abusing her.
Harjo’s Stepfather
Harjo’s stepfather is also unnamed within the story, and he fulfills the archetype of the abusive stepfather. He charms Harjo’s mother, as well as Harjo and her siblings, until he marries her mother and they move to a new house. At this point he exercises complete control over Harjo’s mother and the children, forcing them to do all the housework and denying them individual freedom. He is alcoholic and frequently beats Harjo’s mother and the children. He is also manipulative, attempting to sabotage Harjo’s success at IAIA, for example. He isolates Harjo from her mother later in life, eventually banning Harjo from their house. Harjo’s stepfather is also sexually abusive, rubbing Harjo’s back perversely when she reaches adolescence. Harjo takes great care to avoid being sexually abused by him but lives in constant fear of it.
The role of the stepfather in the narrative, and in Harjo’s life, is to quell her dreams and diminish her creativity and connection to the spiritual realm. While she lives with him, she mostly stops having dreams and visions, and she does not explore her spiritual side as she did as a younger child. Only by breaking away and escaping to IAIA is Harjo able to recover her creativity and spirituality, although she remains largely disconnected from her mother until the end of the book due to her stepfather’s influence.
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