War, death and what remains in the poetry of joy Harjo

Abstract EN

Wars spell destruction and loss for the victor and the vanquished alike.

Associations of death and dismemberment hang over war like shadows that haunt it.

This paper attempts to locate representations of war, death and ending in the poetic oeuvre of Joy Harjo.

The wars depicted in her work take place on political levels as well as on the level of the personal represented in social conflict or in conflict with the self I would like to contend, however, that in dealing with war she echoes not only destruction but discovery about the self and the things that are no more.

In war, humans live realities of desecration that testify that to their abilities there are limits that cannot be crossed.

Once their imagination is stripped bare by a reality at once ruthless and impoverishing, they are willing to accept the unacceptable.

Haijo’s poetic oeuvre focuses on both the physicality and the spirituality of loss and growth in loss.

Her attempts to problematize death as journey and to reinvent it will be considered along with the motifs of dispossession of voice, dismemberment and imprisonment.

Presenting what lies beyond death will be explored through a depiction of poems that illustrate the idea of the trace and her engagement with the past with reference to Derrida’s philosophy of the trace as “non presence.” Nature is represented as the only resource of wholesomeness in a journey of breakage and bereavement.

Moreover, the notion of the human body as a site for the articulation of colonial conflict and death will be illustrated from a selection of poems written by the author.

Volumes that will be considered for review are In Mad Love and War, A Map to the Next World and The Woman WIto Fell From the Sky.