Harjo, Walcott and Schwartz Reflection

 Fisk Candau

Dr Ellis

EN376

4 Oct 2023

    A through-line of all three of these poems is the theme of self-love and self-acceptance. 

    Harjo explores this theme through the narrative of forgetting one's own culture and being reborn to create a new map and continue the songs of the ancestors. The narrative voice instructs the reader to "keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep," referring to ancestral knowledge lost and forgotten from one generation to the next and how these generations are aware of the change--can even "keep track" of it--and yet do nothing to stop the loss (Harjo). However, even though things seem bleak, "they have never left us," and the knowledge and culture can be renewed and continued to passed down by learning "to navigate by your mother's voice, renew the song she is singing" (Harjo). This renewing of cultural ancestral knowledge can only be made possible by people finally accepting their own cultures and ancestral knowledge as valid, rather than allowing them to be "abandoned [...] for science," something which requires self-love and embracing of one's culture and history in defiance of the popular view of science and objectivity as the highest form of knowing (Harjo). 

    Walcott explores this theme very obviously through the meeting of the two selves. Walcott, in a similar way to Harjo, explains this meeting as a reconciliation after the self has turned away from and abandoned themself in favour of another. Walcott has this turning away and abandonment be a result of loving someone else at the expense of respecting and loving oneself, while Harjo has this turning away be an abandonment of culture and ancestral knowledge in favour of the imperialism of science. Walcott explains that the self has been "ignored for another," where after a relationship has ended there can finally be a self-searching and acknowledgement of what one needs and wants for themself separate from what anyone else wants (Walcott). And this meeting and reconciliation results in the cross-nourishment of the self by the self, where one must "eat. [...] Give bread. Give wine. Give back your heart / to itself. [...] Feast on your life" (Walcott). 

    Schwartz also explores the theme of self-love, where "the future loves you already," without having to do anything amazing or special to win what is shared by all people, the future loving them (Schwartz). Since the future loves you, you should also love and accept yourself rather than falling into the hole of self-criticism and self-hatred.

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