Joy Harjo Quotes
The homeland affects you directly: it affects your body; it affects the collective mind and the collective heart and the collective spirit.
Harjo, Joy. Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo. Wesleyan University Press, 2011, p. 53.
This statement was more than a proverb but a popular political doctrine as well which had for years destabilized the Balkans. From the Serbian point of view, if a Serbian family moved to Bosnia or another country, their family land and their decedents were Serbian and under the governance of Serbia. Where there were enclaves of Serbs, they and the Serbian Government considered that land Serbian. This attitude even widely prevailed into the 21st century and led to the U. S. War with Serbia over the Serbian attempts to control parts of neighboring countries where Serbs were in the minority. The Serbs were not unique in this respect. Germany, in WWI, had seized territory from France because there were large enclaves of Ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland. The Ancient Romans likewise asserted the protection of Roman Citizens anywhere in the known world.
What is particularly interesting about this quotation is that at the time, this was a common concern by political and social thinkers of the West. Here however, we learn that there was apparently the same concern and problem ongoing in the Muslim Middle East.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She is the incumbent United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She is also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to serve three terms. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation (Este Mvskokvlke) and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
