Harjo's Kitchen Table

Perhaps the World Ends Here

BY JOY HARJO

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

I have been thinking about this poem a lot, especially how this one would speak to Shonto Begay's poem that I blogged about here. Harjo's poem makes visible a lot of things

which Begay's poem obscures-- women's labor, the conflicts that happen around the domestic space, the production and reproduction. There isn't any "I" in this poem.Instead, there is a "we." However, there is still something that makes me uncomfortable about this poem. What does it mean to say the world begins and ends at the kitchen table, when the struggle for a large section of women in this world had been to construct a world beyond the kitchen table. It doesn't really shrink a woman's world per se, as it happens in the Begay poem. But it shrinks the world itself to fit into the space of domesticity. I am trying to formulate a way in which to relate this shrinking to the kind of politics of indigeneity that Harjo ascribes to, but haven't been able to do it yet.

{été}

I am recognizing how hard often it is to assert myself in circumstances where folks don't really know how to recognize the very essential identity of women involved in intellectual or creative pursuits. Yet, those are the activities that make me me. It has been both un-nerving and comforting to be confirmed during the last one week that I will never be an ideal homemaker. I like to withdraw from the world because the kinds of work that I do need solitude. But that does not mean I am into domesticity. Staying a lot indoors or inside one's homespace does not make one a domesticated person. It becomes especially true for women who write, paint, theorize...in short, are involved in work which requires long hours away from the roles that are socially delineated for women. Emily Dickinson stayed inside the four walls of her home a lot. That does not make her domesticated or even remotely interested in domesticity.

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:Writing Updates:

--Submitted to 5 places (4 print, 1 online)

-- Have not been able to do any work with the poetry manuscript because of the overall hullabaloo in life. But in retrospect, that might be good. I believe it is allowing me a wee bit of distance from work just completed.

--Working slowly on the short story for the UCLA workshop. It's due in two weeks!

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Finished Nnedi Okorafor's novel Zahrah the Windseeker. Still under its spell, will try to write my thoughts about it once all the quasi-familial stuff recedes into background.