She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo

First published: 1983, in She Had Some Horses

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

Joy Harjo’s “She Had Some Horses” consists of eight stanzas punctuated by a common refrain with a coda at the end of the work. The poem, written in the form of an American Indian chant, explores a woman’s struggle to shape her identity as a modern Native American living in the alien environment of Euro-American culture. The mythic image of the horse, repeated at the beginning of and between every stanza, is juxtaposed with paradoxical images and events from the speaker’s life in twentieth century America. These juxtapositions not only sharply define the psychological, spiritual, and cultural conflicts at war in the woman’s conscious and subconscious minds, but also build toward the speaker’s self-recognition. At the end of the poem, the speaker achieves psychological and spiritual unity by accepting the contradictory sides of her psyche, thereby giving birth to a new and complete being.

The speaker’s search for wholeness is rooted in the physical world of contemporary life as well as in the mystical realm of Native American myth and legend. The first line of the poem, “She had some horses,” calls upon one of the most powerful and enduring symbols in Native American culture. Every line in the succeeding stanzas begins with, “She had horses . . .,” reinforcing the speaker’s American Indian identity. The poem explores all facets of the woman’s existence, from the elements that make up her physical being to the components of her mind and spirit.

In the first stanza, the woman acknowledges her intimate connection to the created order. Her physical being is made up of fundamental components of the natural world: “bodies of sand,” “maps drawn of blood,” “skins of ocean water,” and “blue air of sky.” In the second stanza, the collection of natural elements coalesces into a flesh and blood woman who has “long, pointed breasts” and “full, brown thighs.” Violent images in the following lines—“She had some horses who threw rocks at glass houses/ She had some horses who licked razor blades”—clash with the sensual description of the woman’s body and reveal the anger and fear that lie beneath the surface of her consciousness.

By the third stanza, fear becomes a dominant force, moving the poem forward. The speaker reveals that she is “much too shy” and retreats into “stalls” of her “own making.” Her fear and anger deeply fragment the landscape of her inner life. In the next three stanzas, contradictory images reveal her confusion: “She had horses who lied./ She had horses who told the truth”; “She had horses who had no names./ She had horses who had books of names”; “She had horses who waited for destruction./ She had horses who waited for resurrection.”

In the last stanza of the poem, the speaker searches for someone to save her from the anger, fear, and oppression that entrap her. Yet by the end of the poem, she discovers that she is her own savior. Throughout her journey, she has been in the process of attaining wholeness by naming her “horses.” The naming ritual gives her power over all aspects of her spiritual and physical life. As she accepts each “horse” as a part of herself, she ceases to experience a splintering of her soul and can finally accept that “She had some horses she loved./ She had some horses she hated.// These were the same horses.”

Forms and Devices

As a Native American writer, Harjo follows a different aesthetic from her Western counterparts. The oral traditions of her Muscogee Creek heritage are central to her poetic vision and expression. Although she is acquainted with classic European forms, she chooses not to use them. Her use of the chant form in “She Had Some Horses” is an example of her commitment to her Native American heritage, as well as her defiance of the dominant Anglo culture and its traditions.

The horse was an important spiritual icon to the Plains Indians and symbolizes power, strength, and survival. The speaker views the horse in these culture-specific terms but appropriates the horse as her own personal spirit animal who breaches the boundaries between American Indian myth and tradition and mainstream Anglo society. The refrain and the rhythmic repetition of “She had some horses” and “She had horses” act as a mystical incantation invoking healing and wholeness. The syntactical linkage connects each line to the next, leading the reader through the work and providing an underlying continuity that unites the disparate images of violence, fear, and anger that permeate the poem.

The horse is especially significant as a symbol of survival. The speaker’s mind is a spiritual and psychological battleground where conflicting points of view threaten to overcome and extinguish the woman’s spirit. The various horses in the poem represent the fractured spiritual condition of the woman: Some horses are positive influences, some negative, and some neutral. In order to survive with her ego intact, the woman must tame the horses of her psyche by accepting them as they are.

It is important to remember that Native American authors often have a different perspective on animal imagery than do European writers. In the case of Harjo’s poem, the horses are kin to humans, as well as living spirits who exist regardless of the dictates of Western logic and scientific reasoning.

The Western perspective views the modern world as split between the sacred and the secular. From the Native American point of view, there is no division. In “She Had Some Horses,” the spirit animal transcends time and place, bridging the divide between the past, where American Indians lived as a free people, and the twentieth century, where minorities are oppressed by the dominant white culture. Although there is a dichotomy between American Indian and Anglo culture, there is also an underlying reality where unity is possible. This is the domain in which fear meets courage, anger meets peace, and weakness meets strength. It is a realm where contradictory views of the world can become one, and it is a place where the spirit and material universes embrace each other. The horse, a creature of both worlds, makes the meeting and resultant union possible.

Bibliography

Ballassi, William, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, eds. This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Contains an interview with Harjo that examines her treatment of diversity; her role as a teacher, a feminist, and a challenger of the literary canon; and the importance of music in her life and to her writing.

Bruchac, Joseph. “The Arms of Another Sky: Joy Harjo.” In The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, edited by Paula Gunn Allen. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. An extensive treatment of the style, structure, and subject matter of Harjo’s poetry.

Harjo, Joy. Interview by Stephanie Izarek Smith. Poets and Writers Magazine 21, no. 4 (1993): 22-27. Examines Harjo’s background, her role as a poet, her feminism, and her work.

Harjo, Joy. “A MELUS Interview with Joy Harjo.” Interview by Helen Jaskoski. MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 16, no. 1 (1989-1990): 5-13. Harjo discusses poets who have had an influence on her own work, her vision of what her poetry is meant to accomplish, and the concept of the woman warrior.

Harjo, Joy. “Ordinary Spirit.” In I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Harjo’s essay is a useful introduction to her life.

Harjo,Joy. “The Story of All Our Survival: An Interview with Joy Harjo.” Interview by Joseph Bruchac. In Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, edited by Bruchac. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987. Harjo discusses She Had Some Horses, her roots, and her role as a female American Indian writer.

Pearlman, Mickey, ed. Listen to Their Voices: Twenty Interviews with Women Who Write. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. The interview with Harjo explores her role as a teacher of creative writing, her own writing, and its sources in her life’s experience.