| Joy Harjo said: "We are all linked together in this song that rejuvenates culture, that changes us as we climb to the sun." A strong sense of community influences her writing process. Over the years, Harjo's narratives have tended to become increasingly visionary, as she continues to incorporate myths, landscapes, and perspectives into her narrative field of representation. She especially values writing as a therapeutic process capable of transforming and regenerating both communities and individuals. In her narratives she piles meaning upon meaning within a narrative landscape that resonates with cyclical, tribal contexts of time and space. Harjo's increasing awareness of the community within the sacred hoop of life articulates and reconnects its individual members; and her narratives "reconcile polarities," or dissolve oppositions, within the world community, bridging gaps between languages and cultures.;In the creation of her regenerative medicine narratives, Harjo resembles Spider. She directs her medicine energy--her love, memory, and active perception--into her narratives in order to articulate current realities and to reinvest meaning into the injured postcolonial landscape. She names "things" and reveals processes of life taking place within the landscape, regenerating the element of language itself; and like Spider's weaving, Harjo's regeneration of the verbal dimension narrativizes the living elements within the landscape, regenerating the story itself. She invests good medicine into the story in order to create balance in the community within the sacred hoop. Thus, Harjo's narratives are acts of continuance.;In her narratives, the story of the sacred hoop in the physical and verbal dimensions results from conscious investments of energy on the part of animals, plants, rocks, water, stars, sky, insects, humans. Thus, her words are inseparable from the living elements they articulate. Words signify a quality of being, an essence, and a spiritual consciousness and reveal the grammar of being within the landscape. In Harjo's narratives, language is a living element defined by processes of motion. |
