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36 pages 1 hour read

Joy Harjo

Crazy Brave: A Memoir

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2012

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Part 3 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3 Summary: “West”

The epigraph describes west as the direction of endings and tests and calls it “the doorway to the ancestors” (110). It also represents learning to find one’s way in the dark.

At 16, Harjo meets a Cherokee student several years older, and they begin a relationship. At the behest of a fellow student, she signs up for an acting class. When their troupe is set to go on tour, her stepfather denies permission without explanation. The school interprets his actions as abuse and attempts to put Harjo in the custody of the school, though this does not happen. Her mother then gives permission against the wishes of her stepfather. They perform on tour across the West Coast. Once people throw rocks at them and yell “Dirty Indians,” yet together they form a “creative, coherent family” (115). After the tour, Harjo returns to her stepfather’s house, secretly pregnant by her new boyfriend, with “no idea at all as to where I was going or how I was going to get there” (115).

After her boyfriend does not send a bus ticket so she can get to his town, Tahlequah, as he promised, Harjo borrows the money from her brother and goes there herself. She has told her mother that she is getting married. He meets her at the bus station, and she stays with two of his friends. He uses Harjo to take care of his daughter, who he had two years before with another girl. She then stays with her boyfriend’s grandmother and eventually is summoned to his mother’s house. Anticipating marriage, she refers to everyone by their future relationship to her, e.g., “my mother-in-law-to-be” (119). She moves in with her boyfriend’s mother, whom she describes as beautiful but “jealous, overprotective, and mean” (119).

The day her son is born, she irons her boyfriend’s shirt before they walk together four blocks to the Indian hospital, and he leaves for work. The hospital is cold and “government green,” with cold and indifferent doctors and nurses. She is alone, with none of her family to give the moment meaning and happiness. The morning after she gives birth, when she is allowed to hold her son, “the nurse stood guard as if I would hurt him” (124). She is presumed ignorant for being young and Indian.

She continues living with her boyfriend’s mother, who resents her greatly, believing she is holding back her son from achieving success. She then moves to Tulsa with her now husband and children. Her mother-in-law moves in next door, and her mother avoids visiting, disappointed by her. Her husband moves from one low-paying job to the next. One day her mother-in-law blows cigarette smoke in her face, and her husband explains the smoke was cursed. Her mother-in-law is using witchcraft on her, though she does not die or get sick. They become cautious allies again some time later.

The family goes to the circus one day, and before the show, an Italian trapeze artist talks with Harjo, who is bewildered by the attention. They go to meet her husband at work after the show, and Harjo fails to convince her husband that they should join the circus as performers. The trapeze artist later asks Harjo to come with him to Corsica, and she asks him to leave. Weeks later, her husband loses his job, and they move to another part of town, followed by her mother-in-law.

 

Part 3 Analysis

While Part 1 represents beginnings and Part 2 represents struggle and difficult lessons, Part 3, “West,” represents endings, tests, and “learning to find the road in the darkness” (110). When Harjo finds herself pregnant and with no plans, her situation leads to the end of her artistic resurgence at IAIA and leaves her in metaphorical darkness. She is thrown out of this productive environment by her own tragic flaw of seeking out alcoholic, destructive men, and she wanders into a new environment of poverty and dead ends. She is left metaphorically lost, wandering in the darkness, searching for a way out. Her blindness in this predicament is underscored by the story of her sudden, naïve enthusiasm to join the circus. This story also strongly characterizes Harjo as a lost soul, as she is enamored with the idea of joining the circus simply because a trapeze artist was the first person to speak affably toward her since she left IAIA.

Harjo’s character arc reaches a structural low point when she once again loses both her creativity and spirituality, just as she had begun to find them again at IAIA. Harjo’s artistic renaissance ends, and she becomes a lost mother living with an unambitious husband under the shadow of a disapproving mother-in-law. Much like a Greek tragedy, this loss is caused by Harjo’s tragic flaw: her attraction to destructive men who resemble her father. This low point comes just before Part 4, in which she begins to find her artistic and spiritual side once again.

In Part 3, she refers to her boyfriend as “my husband-to-be” (118), and she calls his family members “my soon-to-be mother-in-law” and “my new sister-in-law” (119), even though they never form a happy, functional family. These terms are used ironically, foreshadowing the poverty-stricken and miserable family life to come. She neglects to even mention the marriage itself, emphasizing how unimportant this event is in her life.

Her experience giving birth at the Indian hospital embodies the themes of sexism, racism, and the oppression of women. The fact that she irons her husband’s shirt after she begins having contractions, and that her husband abandons her to give birth alone, emphasizes Harjo’s oppression in the domestic environment. She then purposefully emphasizes the cold and green environment of the hospital, painting a grim setting for her son’s birth. She notes that she is treated as ignorant for being a young Indigenous woman, to the point that she is not even allowed to hold her newborn baby without being carefully and judgmentally monitored.

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