Joy Harjo’s Perspective on Native Americans Reconciliation for Identity: A Study on Joy Harjo’s In Mad Love and War

This paper ascertains how Joy Harjo illustrates historical events from a Native American perspective by exploring the portrayal of atrocities Native Americans have experienced for centuries. Not only have Native Americans historically been marginalized ethnically by the white society, they have also suffered from traumatic experience resulting from their past history. Joy Harjo in In Mad Love and War induces prose poem with its storytelling ability as a means of empowering Native Americans through language that enables them to speak historically and culturally. In her collection of poems, Joy Harjo proposes reconciliation as the effort for Native Americans to struggle for establishing their identity amidst American society. Since all the data used in this research are written text, library research methodology is applied. This analysis employs Lucien Goldmann’s Genetic Structuralism as Joy Harjo perceives that reconciliation is considered as the attempt to free themselves from the miserable life in which Native Americans are tightly bound and to rebuild Native Americans devastated life into a brighter future. Reconciliation by fostering love and eliminating hatred brings assurance to Native Americans for hope in the future. Joy Harjo redefines American literature by calling attention to one of the marginal voices that are rapidly becoming the centre in the United States.