Poetry as Gaze Equalizer: Ekphrastic Poetry’s Liberating Power from the White Gaze in Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
“Ekphrasis: “Description” in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.” (Poetry Foundation)
While most of us Anglophiles might be more familiar with the English Romantic poetry of William Blake, John Keats and William Wordsworth, or the timeless iambic pentameters of William Shakespeare, poetry emerging from the non-White populations of the world have been largely trumped in importance by that of their White colonial masters. In this age of increased awareness of minority representation in literature and art around the world, this lack of visibility that has haunted Native America since its colonization and displacement by White America is hopefully wearing off.
Native poetry is back, y’all. And it’s back in a way that is nouvelle, unexpected, and groundbreaking — yet strangely apposite, familiar and intimate.
The use of ekphrasis in Native poetry is most famously amalgamated with traditional Native and indigenous rhythm and imagery, as seen in the poetic oeuvre of Nobel Prize Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, making indigenous poetry one of the most interesting finds of the 21st century.
Introducing…Joy Harjo
Singer, saxofonist, poet, performer, dramatist and storyteller, Harjo has undeniably caused gargantuan waves throughout the poetic landscape of the English-speaking world with her effortless incorporation of indigenous traditions of oratorical poetry into the more well-known vessels of the poetic word, which include ekphrasis. Her poetry in Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings forces you to be an active participant in the reading as it evocatively transports you to the present moment of the scene, almost creating a sense of transcendence and fissure in time and space if you will (Back to the Future Part IV?).
What struck me the most about Harjo’s poetry was that given that ekphrasis is an imaginative narration of the “action” of the scene that is amplified on its meaning, her poems seem to be imbued with a divine purpose to provoke, awaken, and galvanise the individual that represents the self, the collective identity of the Native subject and the passive outsider at the same time. We are asked to seek the deeper, collective meaning and reason behind each object of the scene and its place in the larger canvas. From there, we begin to know ourselves and what our purpose in this life is better.
Her poetry also seeks to inspire us readers, Native or non-Native, to take control over our view of the scene before us and to create a first-hand, unfiltered and unfettered narrative of the socio-historical scene that is presented.
As the poems reveal how the individualised speaker takes charge of the active documentation of the scene with plain, direct narration, they imply a subversion of the age-old imposition of the White Gaze on colonized poetry and expose the biased presentation of post-colonial subjects through the centuries since the beginning of America’s colonization.
The White Gaze
For those who aren’t familiar, bear with me as I dump a bunch of theories and definitions on ya. The White Gaze has been explored extensively across many genres and topics in English literature and critical theories such as in the essays of W.E.B Du Bois and Franz Fanon. A term famously coined by African-American author Toni Morrison, it has been described by the author to operate as a notion that “[Black] lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze.” (Morrison, The Pieces I Am).
In essence, the white gaze that looks upon the subject in the artistic work is assumed to refer to a white reader. The assumption thus presupposes that the writer of a story writes for the presumed white audience(most often also male, heterosexual and cisgender yikes!). The story would then undeniably adopt a predominantly “whitened” worldview. As if biased representation couldn’t get any worse.
The white gaze hence seemingly refers to how the white colonizer’s shapes the characterization of the colonized person. It also eerily speaks to how the white perspective has influenced how readers and audiences around the world perceive and function within the global landscape (Asare, “Understanding The White Gaze And How It Impacts Your Workplace”, Forbes).
Reclaiming Our Gaze
In response to this, Harjo’s magical poetry that details the objective action of the scene through the eyes of the minoritized reader powerfully destabilizes the white worldview through the intentional act of making us see the plain action, motion and presence of the scene and its objects in verbatim. In this process of drowning out the white perspective, Harjo’s ekphrastic poems offer an emancipating outlook for the now empowered minority subject, where we can now appreciate the poetry through a set of increasingly neutralized lenses.
Harjo brilliantly engages us with the oral tradition of storytelling and the passing of tradition through genealogy that are prevalent in her poems. They not only convey a verisimilitude to our objective reality and concretized knowledge of folk culture, patterns, and stories throughout our accumulative experiences, but they also invoke a sense of responsibility in the reader to question and interrogate our inherited past. Forced to pick apart our past and present, we as an audience are challenged to reflect and look inward into how our identities relate to and are shaped by these shifting narratives, histories and traditions.
Her accessible and eternal poetry ultimately works to animate us to take up arms. To ensure that, in this ever evolving world of bias, hegemony, and altered histories (Orwell-esque maybe?), we may never lose our personal agency in utilizing our unfettered vision and unfogged critical mind to perceive the world with its many regional histories, individual stories and collective traditions, without the need to objectify and reduce the importance of any aspect of history through that “whitened” worldview.
One of Harjo’s poems from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings precisely steers us away from assuming the white gaze and instructs us to take the responsibility of the critical, individual and objective viewer.
So get ready to sit back, relax and breathe in the poetry, my friend.
For Calling The Spirit Back
From Wandering The Earth
In Its Human Feet
Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that
bottle of pop.
Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.
Open the door, then close it behind you.
Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel
the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.
Give back with gratitude.
If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and
back.
Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were
a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.
Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time,
who will be there after time.
They sit before the fire that has been there without time.
Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.
Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people
who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought
down upon them.
Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.
The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few
years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.
Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and
leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the
thieves of time.
Do not hold regrets.
When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning
by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.
You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.
Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.
Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet.
Let go the pain of your
ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
Ask for forgiveness.
Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird,
angel, saint, stone, or
ancestor.
Call yourself back. You will find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and
human abuse.
You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return
in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be
happy to be found after being lost for so long.
Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and
given clean clothes.
Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who
loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no
place else to go.
Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.
Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.
(Harjo)
Invocation of the spirit out of enforced hegemonic mundanity
In “For Calling The Spirit Back From Wandering The Earth In Its Human Feet”, the tone and agenda of the entire free-verse poem might seem familiar to us “slaves to the capitalist world”. Reading like an instruction manual, its exhortative statements strive to jolt the audience to assume a position of control over a certain narrative.
“Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that
bottle of pop.
Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.
Open the door, then close it behind you.
Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel
the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.
Give back with gratitude.” (Harjo)
We can see a quirky inclusion of objects associated with the corporeal, mundanity, mechanicality and monotony, that is seen in hegemonic societal motifs like “potato chips”, “white bread” and “cellphone”. These are starkly juxtaposed with elements of motion, nature and essentiality in “friendly winds”, “travel the earth”, “essences” and “gratitude”. This shows a critical rejection and condemnation of the hegemonic world order of mundanity, and the poet is inviting a renewed focus on the non-corporeal and spiritual.
Even in the title of the poem, it feels like a call to arms. The poet is imploring us to invoke our own voice and authority to “call” and pave the way for a return of our “spirit”, which has tirelessly traversed the “Earth” after being cast out by the dominance of the corporeal. Harjo’s poetry is also very rhythmic and is often read aloud with traditional indigenous drumming in the background. Her beautiful invitation for us to embrace the intangible spirit and inner life emphatically bestows upon us the divine duty to prioritize the inner soul beyond the physical if we ever want to resolve the conflict within us.
As we embrace the spiritual, we simultaneously adopt an objective and individualized perspective of the world that challenges the inherited white gaze. To “give back” to Mother Earth and the personification of “friendly winds” are concepts familiar to Native and many non-White populations everywhere, and the undercutting of technologized and mundane advents with traditional imagery and symbolism successfully redirects the audience’s vision to an equalized gaze of the subject matter.
Acknowledgement of overlooked histories and cultural trauma
Another striking proposition that Harjo’s poetry offers is that in order for conflict resolution to occur, we “holy beings” have to acknowledge the collective and individual trauma caused by overlooked histories of oppression, colonization and genocide. We have to bravely face the unearthed and unfiltered histories of trauma and pain that has been afflicted upon the minoritized, Native subject. Historical and cultural references to “massacres” and military lexicon bring our attention to the overlooked trauma of the indigenous peoples of America, who have been cursed with threats of eradication and destruction since the arrival of the colonists.
“The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.”
Evoking tension and conflict, the war imagery attempts to maneuver the spirit back to consciousness of injustice and hierarchy. The daunting stature of “high-rises”, “checkpoints” and “armed soldiers” convey a consistent hindrance to the subject’s journey to the inner spirit, and they subject us to a sense of powerlessness and dehumanization in the process of finding fulfillment in the world. Our encounters with these hindrances in the poem tragically parallels the oppressed figure’s constant conflict with a white gaze and worldview that clouds their full view of their histories and self-identification.
Allowing a renewal and cleansing of one’s inherited worldview
In “calling the spirit back” to one’s consciousness, the poem calls for an active submission to a cleansing of that whitened worldview, which is expressed in the later part of the poem. The poet audaciously calls for us to be vulnerable, to allow our prior inherited knowledge from the white hegemony to take a step back and to humble ourselves to the intangible and natural.
For the natural and intangible to take dominion over the mechanized and weaponized function of the hegemony.
Power to the People!
The poet instructs us to cleanse ourselves through native practices of “cedar, sage, or other healing plant”. These indigenous traditions of cleansing undercuts the stoic, mechanized worldview of Western medicine that takes precedence over non-White practices.
“You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.
Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.
Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet.
Let go the pain of your
ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
Ask for forgiveness.
Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird,
angel, saint, stone, or
Ancestor.”
Telling us to “let go” and to “ask for forgiveness” and “call upon the help of those who love you” show the power of humility and acknowledging one’s vulnerability, mortality and incapabilities to journey to the intangible. An importance is placed upon the act of seeking aid and guidance in the process of reforming ourselves of the white perspective, making the poem incredibly self-reflexive and touching.
Imploring us to “cut the ties you have to failure and shame” showcases the negating effect of hanging on to inherited negativity and internalized oppression of ourselves, culture and history. The poem invites us to release their grasp on the inherited repression of themselves that has been inducted and amplified by the white gaze, and we are now instructed to craft our own narrative for ourselves. Tis a true liberation to be able to create our own stories, no?
Ancestor, angel, stone and sand, “For Calling the Spirit Back From Wandering the Earth In Its Human Feet” is just one of many in her groundbreaking book of powerful poems and it speaks to the natural and ancient elements of the world and their place in our world today.
Her use of evocative ekphrasis and traditional indigenous oral storytelling passionately confronts the conflicts faced by the minoritized individual in a white world. Yet, its power to liberate the subject from a worldview governed by the white gaze is self-evident, as we, as readers and holy beings, are also inspired and empowered to create our own perception of the world around us, which ultimately informs us of our own identities and histories in relation to the elements around us that have existed since time memoriam.
Works Cited
Asare, Janice Gassam. “Understanding the White Gaze and How It Impacts Your Workplace.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 21 Apr. 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2021/12/28/understanding-the-white-gaze-and-how-it-impacts-your-workplace/?sh=349c8b954cd6.
Harjo, Joy. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems. W. W. Norton, 2017.
“Toni Morrison on Writing without the ‘White Gaze.’” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 26 July 2022, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/toni-morrison-on-writing-without-the-white-gaze/14874/.
By: Wendi Lee