Analysis Of Crazy Brave By Joy Harjo

Crazy Brave is a memoir written by Native American poet and artist Joy Harjo. In this memoir Harjo recollects and evaluates a number of pivotal moments, which occur during her life, that altered her identity as well as how she saw the world around her. Many of these moments occur in the first two sections of the book entitled “East” and “West”. These moments include, but are not limited to, when she is playing with bees and is stung as a young girl, when her mother forces her to put on a shirt while playing outside with her brother, when she colors a ghost green in class, when her stepdad finds her personal diary and reads it in front of the rest of her family, as well as when her stepfather does not allow her to be involved with the school …show more content…
This section starts off by telling the reader that she made the decision to color the ghost green instead of the “normal color”, white. This act created an uproar in the first grade classroom. The children demanded that she was doing it wrong and were, “hanging close to see what would happen” (Harjo, 49). She fired back at the other students and questions if they knew what a ghost looked like. She says that she was scared to tell the children, “I had seen how a green ball of energy could give people pneumonia.” The children then went to tell on her to the teacher but, the teacher let Joy leave it the way she made it. This section is vitally important because she did something that was off the beaten path, she was confronted about it, and, where it differs from the other passages she is not forced to change the way she is doing it. The simple act of her teacher allowing Joy to keep her drawing the way she wanted was crucially important in her life because it let her know that it was okay to do things the way that she wanted to do them and not have to conform to what everyone else thought was the “normal” …show more content…
This feeling of defiance of what another person wanted affected her because she no longer did things because that was what other people wanted out of her. Joy did things because she wanted to. She followed her own path from then on and it created a enormous feeling of independence from everyone else around her.
The memoir Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo is a novel riddled with pivotal moments in her life which altered her identity as well as how she saw the world around her. In this short response I have shown the moments, most prevalent to me, that occurred in the first two sections of the book entitled “East” and “West”. The moments in which I described represent Joy’s strife in trying to define herself as a human