par Anissa Ghedied

Un immense merci à Joy Harjo pour cette rencontre et à Baptiste Bürki pour le portrait de la poète dessiné pendant l’événement.
À l’occasion de sa tournée en France organisée à l’initiative de Cécile Brochard, Delphine Rumeau et Marthe Segrestin, Joy Harjo s’est rendue à Nantes Université le mercredi 19 novembre 2025, pour une rencontre-lecture au Plateau de la Bibliothèque de Lettres et Sciences Humaines. Dans le cadre de cet « Afternoon with Joy Harjo », nous avons eu l’honneur d’entendre la poète Muskogee lire quelques poèmes extraits de son recueil An American Sunrise, au programme de l’agrégation de lettres modernes pour les sessions 2025 et 2026 : « Break My Heart », « Granddaughters », « The Fight », « For Those Who Would Govern », « An American Sunrise », « Rabbit Is Up to Tricks ». Nous avons eu l’immense privilège d’entendre Joy Harjo chanter « Welcoming Song », un moment mémorable et émouvant de cette rencontre qui s’est poursuivie par un entretien mené par Cécile Brochard.

Cécile Brochard : In An American sunrise, you pay tribute to many artists. Can you tell us more about these voices? Why do they matter to you? For instance Emily Dickinson: what role has she played in your poetic journey?
Joy Harjo : She was one of the first female poet I read as a child. My image of poet as a child was an old white man in England reading poetry, and I didn’t hear women poets; so she was the first one. It was in my children’s book of poetry, and I liked the mystery in her poetry.
Cécile Brochard : “A Refuge in the Smallest of Places” is dedicated to Emily Dickinson. In this poem, the image of “the timeless room of lost poetry” is very interesting. Is poetry for you a refuge or a sort of prison, a cage?
Joy Harjo : I was thinking about the gathering of refugees. I had just read that something like 40% of the world’s population are refugees. Often the one thing you can carry are your poems, if you have them memorized, you can carry songs. I was thinking about when I leave this world, when any of us leave this world, what we will be taking with us. I think poetry transcends language or words, but it can also transcend time. It can live in the spiritual rounds which transcend time.
Cécile Brochard : In An American Sunrise, you write that you went back from the West to the East, backtracking the Trail of Tears to see the lands your ancestors were forced to leave behind. In this personal and poetic journey, did you work with archives? And did you see An American Sunrise as a collective archive?
Joy Harjo : I always work with the archives of memory. Most of the world’s history or literature is not in books. Details that go way, way back, at least six or seven generations. Though I am not a scholar researcher, I also dig around to find things out. It can be in libraries, it can be on Google, although I don’t trust a lot of what I find in… I suppose An American Sunrise could be called “a collective archive” because I have all kinds of stories that come from orality, stories that my relatives, tribal members and elders have told me, and things I have found in written history. There is a book of immigration stories about the soldiers paid for by Andrew Jackson in the U.S. government, who were taking our people from the Southeast.
Cécile Brochard : Can you tell us how music, jazz, stomp dances, influence your poetry?
Joy Harjo : When I perform, sometimes I have a band, or I have music, and usually I will tell stories, I will sing sometimes. I will bring in things that people have said to be remembered, so it becomes like sitting around the kitchen table. It becomes the way that performance happens in the community, which is very different. It started with my book, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky: I decided to consciously consider orality, because poetry is an oral art, and how orality works in written language, or orality involving Muskogee people in those stories, and how we are placed in those stories. And nobody has ever really pointed that out. Most of my art has got deep Muskogee elements, references and motifs in it. So every book that I have done has gone after, reinterpreted, or tried to find another way to intern orality. My music does it, and that is another way; but even in the music, I mix speaking, singing, and talking about history.
Jazz and Muskogee music have very much influenced my poetry. Sometimes it is not an exact direct reference, sometimes it is. I have a song called “Stomp All Night”, with direct references to stomp dance and the conversations that go on; there is a back and forth with singing and sax and people yelling and talking in the song. This is a particular social aspect of stomp dance, but there are other references that I would not put in a poem, because it is not where they belong: if you put something in a book of poetry, it is going to travel around. But there are references that are cultural; and cultural beings live in certain places, you can’t take them out of there. So I reference what I do but I don’t cross lines.
Cécile Brochard : In many poems, you write about songlines – I have in mind a very moving poem entitled “Songline of Dawn” from the collection A Map to the Next World – and you wrote a poem with the Australian Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann, “Story Tree“. Can you tell us about this collaboration with Ali Cobby Eckermann and your link with Australian Aboriginal poets?
Joy Harjo : That link goes way back – some of it I can’t talk about because it happened in a dream – but there has always been this connection, we have familial genealogies, spiritual genealogies. Years ago, when I was teaching at the Indian school that I went to, in the 1980s, the supervisor brought a woman over to me, Kath Walker [Oogderoo Noonuccal – note de Cécile Brochard], and I didn’t know her. The supervisor said: « she’s a poet, she’s from Australia; would you look after her? She’s gonna be here for a week ». So we hung out, and it turned out she was a major Aboriginal cultural force. She painted, she sang, she helped restore culture in a country that has a history towards its Indigenous people very much like the United States. I took her all over with me and we had a great time. Later, when my husband and I went to Australia about five or six years ago, who picked us up at the airport was her nephew, a young man who was doing performance poetry! We were talking: “oh, I know your aunt!” So there, we were back in this connection. Then we met Ali in Australia, and she came and stayed with us in the United States later. We made a family, her family, our family.
I have always liked that idea of songlines, that you can follow songlines – and you know some trees are singers, but I don’t have time to go into that. But everything has rhythm, everything has resonance, everything has vibration. I think that everybody is a song, or has a song planted in them. And I can’t explain their idea of songlines, but I think about walking a path, or being on a path, and there is a songline, like a genealogy line, that has a particular quality of sound and color to it, that each of us is part of. And there is something too, if you think about that, that has led us, every one of us, to be right here, right now, in this room. There is something that has brought us all here. And there is something else too with audiences: if you get everybody in a room, our hearts all start naturally beating together to find harmony in the space. I don’t think you get the same thing on Zoom. I have had to perform on Zoom, I don’t like it, but it is because it is harder to feel. There is some kind of nourishment that comes from being with people. It is like the internet makes a community, but it is not a full-bodied community. It might be a community of ideas, a community of quick-moving thoughts. It is very different when you have got community that is situated in place and in the natural world.

OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Collectif "Littératures autochtones", coord. Cécile Brochard (14 décembre 2025). “Everything has vibration” : rencontre avec Joy Harjo. Littératures autochtones (Amérique - Australie). Consulté le 15 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15cdp
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