Learning to Be || An Interview with Joy Harjo
PRISCILLA: Can you describe your earliest theater performance?
JOY: If my earliest theater performance is a performance onstage, it was a ballet and tap recital when I was five years old, on a stage in Tulsa. As we practiced ballet in preparation, I performed without knowing why I performed. My mind was a ball of questions. I wondered why these movements? Why this style and manner? And for what purpose? I could not ask anyone these questions. They would not come out of my five-year-old mouth the way that I was thinking them in my much older mind. But tap was a different matter. It was like blues and jazz. I felt it in my bones. I loved rhythm. And I loved the red satin outfit that made me want to move. I was more familiar with the music. It was how I lived every day in my ears.
I wasn’t the kid upfront, the star, the twirler. I was quietly charismatic. I still have photographs. However, my first acting part was in kindergarten as a Pueblo girl grinding corn. I still remember the corn-grinding song. We performed for our parents. I had to kneel on the floor and pretend to grind corn.
I continued to have roles in plays all through elementary school. The most memorable was as a witch for a Halloween play. I was popular in it for my improvised witch laugh that made its way all around the school. In sixth grade, I was the understudy for the fairy godmother part, the second role after Cinderella in the operetta of the same name. I was one of the shyest in my classes always, and when I nearly failed speech class for refusing to speak, I forced myself to speak enough to get a passing grade. I usually made As and Bs, so to get a D was unacceptable. Theater, however, was a different creature. I could become someone else; inhabit a character, another place and time. And, as my teachers said, I had a voice that carried. I felt magic on the stage. It held possibility. I was lucky to even have theater in my elementary schools. (I went to three different elementary schools in Tulsa.) We children had an opportunity to experience stagecraft. Theater serves human development in many ways.
The first professional or semiprofessional performance was when I was in high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts. I signed up for theater with Rolland Meinholtz after hanging around the theater group in the fall and assisting with stagecraft for a production of Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey. In the late winter, Meinholtz began assembling a show around a play by postgraduate student Monica Charles, Moqwina, and one of his plays, Black Butterflies. I was given a female lead, and Jane Lind had the other. Though I suffered from stage fright (which became nearly debilitating when I started my band Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice), I felt more at home on the stage than I had felt anywhere else in my life. It is also the poet and musician in me who thrives in liminal back roads. It is a place of all possibility, where vision happens, where metaphor lives.
PRISCILLA: Who encouraged you to write poetry and to perform?
JOY: Poetry was in my life because my mother loved poetry in books and the poetry of song lyrics. I associated poetry with books, and song lyrics with guitars and guitar players. Music came into my early life primarily through the radio, and through the players who came over to jam and rehearse with my mother. This was before I was seven. After seven, this life broke apart. On the radio, we heard Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Nat King Cole, and lots of country including Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and Johnny Cash. I was in a tire swing when I heard “Ring of Fire” blasting from a car radio. My mother preferred slow, heartbreak ballads. She sang and wrote them. She also recited poetry she learned up through her eighth grade schooling. She quit. Wearing the same dress every day made her an object of bullying. She remembered William Blake poems, some Tennyson. She gave me books of poetry, and I began finding poetry to read on my own.
I wrote a poem in eighth grade English class because our teacher wanted submissions for an all-state anthology. We also wrote stories. My story got honorable mention. I do not remember what I wrote in either form. At Indian school I wrote a foolish limerick, and was a prodigious note passer. And then tried my hand at some lyrics for the school’s rock band. I didn’t know what I was doing and those lyrics never went anywhere, though I did go-go dance onstage with the band a few times with my friend Belinda Gonzalez. I never took a creative writing class at IAIA. I’ve always loved dance, and because we were working hard on a production, which involved dance in our performances, we were in the dance studio two or three hours a day.
It wasn’t until my first year at the University of New Mexico that I attempted poetry. My first semester, I majored in premed and minored in dance. Elizabeth Waters was a renowned modern dance figure, and I was referred to her classes by dancers. By second semester I was back in studio art, and I had met the Acoma poet Simon Ortiz and we were living together. He was the poet. I stayed up all night painting and drawing. My first poems were very derivative. They were immature and naïve constructions from some vague notions I had about how to put a poem together. When I realized that I was a witness of times that were different from previous generations, when I heard very few voices of Native women in political meetings, and I wanted to hear them, that’s when my voice showed up and I had to follow it. The summer of 1973, when my daughter Rainy was born, poetry began taking over my art practice. That was also the summer of Wounded Knee; and the Kiva Club, the UNM Native student organization, was politically active. I was a very committed member.
I began performing my poetry almost as soon as I started composing the poetry that would define me. My gift emerged around the time I was pregnant with my daughter Rainy. I wouldn’t exactly call what I did performance. It was me standing at a podium, tightly holding pages of poems so the audience couldn’t see my face, and I couldn’t see the audience. I suffered deeply from stage fright, was very insecure, and doubted my authority to speak. I believe both the audiences and I were taken by something larger than me, the voice of the poetry. I had to keep following it. I had no choice. Speaking the poems was a necessary part of the gift. I learned with every opportunity I was invited to speak my poems. I was encouraged by my two beloved teachers at the University of New Mexico. David Johnson: my first poetry workshop was with him. I found a doorway in with his inclusive and warm style of teaching. He was an active poet and took us, his students, along to readings. We also read. Gene Frumkin was my second teacher. He was more serious, but his manner was inclusive. Under his tutelage we students wrote, attended readings, and were also encouraged to take part. Due to the efforts of the creative writing faculty, we always had an exciting slate of visiting poets. They included Galway Kinnell, Anne Waldman, and Ai, to name a few.
In my last year at UNM, I gave my first professional reading. My fellow undergraduate poetry student Terry Boren and I were featured as part of the UNM English Department Reading Series. That spring I was accepted into what was considered the best writing workshop in the country, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. My first book, a chapbook The Last Song, was released by Puerto del Sol Press in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
I left late summer from a place of much support and encouragement to a high-powered writing program where I found no close mentors. I was akin to the small-town girl going to the big city. The poet William Matthews was friendly and understood lyric. Donald Justice was kind to me. I had the sense that no one really got what I was doing, or they thought that it wasn’t compelling. Or our end goals were different. Yet what united us was the need, as artists, to write the best poetry. I wouldn’t have made it through without Iva Roy, a Meskwaki Native woman who took the very few Native students (only seven in all of the University of Iowa) into her home and fed us, took care of our spirits. Nor would I have completed the program without the companionship of Sandra Cisneros and the rest of our Third World Writers group, and the fiction writer/artist Dennis Mathis. Very early on, I got the message in the workshop that performance in poetry was to be avoided. To perform poetry was to cheapen it. The word should be without emotional entanglement but stand on the two feet of craft and technique. I can see how this philosophy of disengagement morphed into deconstructionism of the late eighties and nineties … I felt lost my first semester there.
PRISCILLA: As a young person, who were your favorite artists (of any form)?
JOY: I loved art and wanted to be painter. In every house we lived in during my childhood, we were accompanied by the charcoal drawing of two horses running in a storm by my grandmother Naomi Harjo. I liked to enter into the image and feel the storm, feel the horses, the shock of the first lightning strike. In childhood when the thunderstorms would begin, I would run to the door to greet them. I was not afraid. I learned to be afraid.
I often lingered over images whose creators I did not know. I understood at a basic level how color and line translated emotional fields. I could feel the personality of the artist, their disappointments, their aspirations. In elementary, junior high, and high school, I became familiar with the art of Picasso, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, the pointillists, the impressionists, and the photography of Man Ray. One of my favorite paintings was The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau. It came close to the quality of my dream world. Gauguin’s French Polynesian paintings pulled me in. I was also very familiar with Oklahoma Indian artists like Jerome Tiger.
Television was young when I was young. My favorite shows were the variety shows that showcased dancers, like the Ed Sullivan Show, the Jack Benny Show, and Red Skelton. I loved watching the June Taylor Dancers, who were featured on the Jackie Gleason Show. I watched Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and Soul Train. I imagined being one of those dancers. Martha Graham was a revered figure for me. I was terrified of her fierce countenance, but her intelligent mining of mythological emblems and symbols fed me.
Music was everywhere: my mother’s original songs and her singing, Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the British Invasion artists, Johnny Cash (especially “Ring of Fire”), Miles Davis (before I knew he was Miles Davis), Jimi Hendrix, Motown artists, the opera—especially Carmen by Bizet—Joan Baez and other folksingers, Taos round dance songs, and later stomp dance songs. I also loved the song “Amazing Grace.”
I came up through my first elementary school in Tulsa, Burbank, with a strong arts program. I’ll never forget my first art teacher, Miss Wastier. (I’m not sure of the spelling of her name, but it was pronounced “wast” [like wasp] “tier.”) She was like a wasp. She was slim and precise, with large black glasses. She had a sting. Her rules were exact and were meant to be followed absolutely. Most of our classroom of second graders was terrified of her. I was too, but we got to make art in her class. And we did. I always walked into her classroom with a mix of excitement and terror. We also had music. I learned to read music and was one of the children often called on to sing. And there was a dramatic performance in every class every year. I was in most of them. One of the teachers told me that I was picked because I had a voice that carried. I loved performing in plays because I could become someone else, not the shy, terror-ridden child who wouldn’t speak in class. I liked the magic of being onstage. Most of the plays we performed were from a repertoire of plays written for elementary school children. In sixth grade, at my third elementary school, I was chosen as the understudy for the second lead in Cinderella. It was an operetta, so I was required to sing. I still remember the songs. I never had to step in, but I loved being part of a production, the kind of space theater makes of dramatic storytelling. I knew that I loved theater, but I did not have a thought of being an actor or singer. I wasn’t outgoing like other students. I didn’t have the constant of music lessons or a family who came to see my performances. My father was gone by the time I was eight years old, and my mother worked two or three jobs.
PRISCILLA: Who are your mentors, and how did your relationships with them form?
JOY: I have acquired some outstanding mentors along the way. They include the writer Ishmael Reed; poets Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde; fiction writer, activist, and poet Meridel LeSueur; and many others.
And my previously mentioned creative writing mentors were some of the most influential, but one of the most pivotal mentors of all was my drama teacher, Rolland Meinholtz, at the Institute of American Indian Arts. When I arrived at Indian school, I was on the verge of disappearing into the streets. And no, I wasn’t streetwise, quite the opposite. I had nearly lost the will to live. When I got accepted into the Institute of American Indian Arts, it sparked my heart. I applied with drawings and was accepted. I was alive again, and far away from a very abusive stepfather.
I remember hanging out during rehearsals for a drama production of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, a perfect selection for our student body. The British playwright was eighteen when she wrote the play. As I mentioned earlier, I assisted with stagecraft, and I loved being inside theater society.
As we prepared our schedules for second semester, one of my friends said she was signing up for drama. I remember saying this: “I will never get on a stage.” I signed up anyway. It was there I began learning under Rolland Meinholtz, our drama teacher. Being onstage and learning stagecraft engendered happiness in me even as it challenged my stage fright and raised up all those pools of self-doubt I had tended within. I felt exactly who I was and didn’t have to make excuses or run away. I was chosen as a lead in a play, and became one of the only two high school students of a show that was mainly comprised of postgraduate students. We studied every aspect of stagecraft: set up lights, made masks, honed our bodies with dance even as we learned how to fall. I really needed that one: how to fall. We learned how to get up again. We rehearsed until sometimes two and three in the morning, and were allowed later morning hours.
I knew Meinholtz absolutely believed in me. He believed in all of us, and whipped together a group of renegade Indian students from all over the country into a semiprofessional company, one of the first all-Native theater companies. I can imagine what it must have taken, in terms of time and resources, to accomplish this in a school that was essentially a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. He had a mentor in Lloyd New, a visionary Cherokee artist who headed that school through its most influential and famous years. Meinholtz treated us as professionals; and we were, though there were bumps in the road. I was informed years later by a previous dorm staffer that there was a plan at work to put me in custody of the school, because it was obvious my stepfather was abusive. When the letters went to our parents to ask permission for us to tour our show in the West, which was quite an accomplishment to be included, my stepfather overrode my mother and denied me permission. My mother stood up to him for what was probably the first time ever in their relationship, and I was allowed to go on tour. He didn’t talk to her for almost two months. Meinholtz mentored many young playwrights, like Monica Charles, who wrote some of our plays, and William Yellow Robe.
PRISCILLA: What were some of your opportunities to share your poetry with the public?
JOY: I have performed my poetry all over the world, from Amsterdam to India, to all over the Americas, Egypt, and nearly every European country. I have performed as a solo reader, with a full band, with one or two other musicians. I took up saxophone when I was nearly forty, around the time I started the band Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice. I learned to play saxophone for Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century, my first album. I began learning to sing (or should I say remembering to sing) on Native Joy for Real, my second musical album. My next album, I learned flute. I will also be playing some of the guitar and bass parts on my newest project. Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, my first full-length play, came about as I performed onstage with my band, Joy Harjo and the Arrow Dynamics Band. I would speak between songs. And as I would speak and connect songs, I thought, why not put together a show with a dramatic arc, with a full band, why not make a play?
That was how I started this play. I didn’t want to be bound by my very personal story; rather, I wanted the freedom to move, so I fictionalized the story. I began writing, and inserted some of my songs, and then I created others to go with the story. I had been working with the guitarist/producer Larry Mitchell, and asked him to be part of it. He created synth pads and helped with transitional instrumental music to get us from one dramatic movement to another. The ambiance that his music created really helped to make the show. When people would ask what he was working on, he liked to tell them it was a one-woman show.
PRISCILLA: When and where did you learn the most about writing and performing?
JOY: It is difficult to say where I learned most about writing and performing. I am always learning. I took it into my pores, as all children do, in childhood. I watched country swing artists perform at concerts and in my home. I watched and listened to my mother, to what was presented in the classroom. In fourth or fifth grade, our class was taken by bus to hear a classical music performance of Peter and the Wolf. Our music teacher prepared us for the experience in advance. We were taught the instruments, what voice each instrument represented, and we were prepped on the story to enrich our experience. It was one of the most memorable classroom experiences.
PRISCILLA: What are some of your biggest challenges as a performer?
JOY: In space there are so many possibilities. The artist, whether a poet, playwright, saxophonist, or actor, is involved in a call and response with the unseen, with the Great Potential. The biggest challenge, for me, perhaps, is vulnerability. Allowing myself to step into the known—but to do this knowledgeably, you need all your practice, your craft, your technique, and in a sense, you have to un-know your knowing. Letting go is a big one. To allow yourself to fail is another part of it. Stage fright is another. I have many stage-fright stories, most involving saxophone. When you blow saxophone, you cannot hide behind a few pages of poetry. It is a loud, even obnoxious instrument, though it can be nuanced and even tamed to be expressive in a classical European manner. I believe the saxophone prefers blues and jazz—then it can let loose.
I once wrote: The saxophone is so human. Its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy, talk too loud, bump into people, say the wrong words at the wrong time, but then, you take a breath all the way from the center of the earth and blow. All that heartache is forgiven. All that love that humans carry makes a sweet, deep sound and we fly a little.
I identify, then, with the saxophone.
Once I was tapped to open a show of women drummers in the Bay Area with a poetic opening. I asked to play sax. They gave me an eight-bar solo. During rehearsal, I did exactly what I had been rehearsing in my mind: I played badly. There’s nothing like the thudded silence after musical failure. It has a decay that will send you running for home with your tail curled between your legs. I could feel everyone wondering why I was being allowed to play. I decided to return to my hotel room and pack up my bags and skip out. I went back and began packing. Then my spirit came and talked with me. I realized that I had to reset my practice in my mind, to playing successfully. I went to the next rehearsal. I wasn’t bad, but I didn’t nail it. The night of the performance, I was out of my mind with terror. But, I watched as the singer Faye Carol sang and entertained the audience. My spirit told me, “She’s not obsessing over perfection. Watch and listen to her.” I understood that she was just listening to the music. She was absolutely present, and loving what she was doing. She was in it.
That shifted performance in me. I pulled off my little solo. I didn’t fly, but I didn’t shame myself either.
I’ve learned that when energy comes before performance, we often equate it with fear. It’s not. It’s a gift of energy coming to us to help us out. This lesson helped when I had to perform my one-woman show (with a guitarist!). I had to memorize the whole show, and then I was having problems sleeping because I was so wound up. Sleeplessness is a major cause of forgetfulness. So to use the insomnia, I imagined that the show was a story being told in the early hours of the morning, before dawn, after the people had been in ceremony all night. That helped.
PRISCILLA: How did you feel the first time that you decided to play the saxophone in public?
JOY: My first performances with saxophone were in Tucson about 1989. I collaborated with the keyboardist singer/songwriter Keith Stoutenburg. We played my original poems with music crafted around them, the precursor to my Poetic Justice stuff. I was terrified to play, but just being inside the music compelled me. One of my favorite performances was to improv on soprano sax with Keith and a bass player. We were background music for some event that Keith was asked to do. We just … played. I didn’t struggle with stage fright for that one. The next one, I did. I brought in Keith and Michael Davis, the bass player for MC5. We started performing and then I froze on my horn. I put it away and didn’t perform again with it that evening. I was so ashamed at what I deemed my most absolute failure. I hide behind stage and didn’t want to go out and meet the public after. My spirit had a talk with me. Very logical. My spirit asked me, “Do you want to play saxophone? You don’t have to, you know.” I answered, “Yes.” “Then play. Play every chance you get.” So … I did. I’ve learned, too, that it helps if I am prepared.
PRISCILLA: Who are your role models today?
Miles Davis
Toni Morrison
Lorraine Hansberry
Um Kulthum
Charlie Hill
Johnny Depp
Wilma Mankiller
Jim Pepper
Big Chief Russell Moore
Tribe Called Red
I think Pura Fe and her blues slide guitar is one of the most exciting things happening in Native performance today.
PRISCILLA: If you were starting a career as an artist today, how would you do it?
JOY: It’s different these days. There’s internet and social media. Anyone can write and produce music and put it out there. It’s affordable. Publishing is different. There are lots of online magazines. But the basics are the same. Practice. Study. Connect with mentors (in body or spirit). It is important to challenge yourself. Stretch. I would be much more savvy in my overall plan. Promotion is everything, but you must have the goods. Taking care of the quality and vision of your art is primary.
PRISCILLA: What is one thing you wish you had known much earlier in your career?
JOY: I wish I absolutely believed in myself. Too often I allowed insecurity and self-doubt to waylay me. I didn’t trust my spirit or my gifts.
PRISCILLA: What inspires you to continue to write and perform?
JOY: The same things that have always inspired me—to follow mystery, to hear and see beyond what I ever thought possible, and the stories and songs of my ancestors. I have specific goals on the horn, with my voice, performing and writing projects. I am learning how to listen, always. I want to play, write, and be that which brings forward a fresh vision for my people.
PRISCILLA: What are your next goals as a performer?
JOY: I just turned in the book of my musical, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented. I will write the music, and I want to get this play produced with all the elements fully realized onstage. I’ve gone from a one-woman show to one with over thirty characters. I want to write and produce a bluesy jazz Native album of music. I’m working on a historical memoir that may be written as poetic oratory. And I will get a band together in Knoxville, where I now live. There are lots of musicians here. And I started a young Native women writers’ group with the Cherokee writer Mary Kathryn Nagle.
PRISCILLA: If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about creativity and performance?
JOY: I would say, just be yourself. And give gratitude to those who have gone before.