The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window by Joy Harjo
"The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window" is a poignant poem by Joy Harjo that explores themes of despair, displacement, and the struggle for identity among women, particularly in marginalized urban settings. The narrative centers on a woman living in a Chicago tenement, contemplating her precarious situation and the possibility of jumping from a window. As she reflects on her past, the poem reveals her deep connections to family, community, and the natural beauty of her childhood home near Lake Michigan, contrasting these memories with her current feelings of alienation and loss.
Harjo's work evokes a broader commentary on the experiences of women facing poverty and racism, emphasizing the communal suffering and resilience shared among them. The poem employs repetition and vivid imagery, allowing readers to resonate with the woman's internal conflict and her memories of belonging. Ultimately, the poem leaves readers with an ambiguous conclusion, depicting the duality of life and the choices that define it. Harjo's skillful use of rhythm and musical influences enhances the emotional depth of the piece, making it a powerful representation of many women's stories.
The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window by Joy Harjo
First published: 1983, in She had Some Horses
Type of poem: Narrative
The Poem
Joy Harjo’s “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,”with its reference point in the contemporary urban environment, mourns the sense of desolation, marginalization, and individual loneliness that arises when women are displaced from their spiritual home. At the same time, the poem encourages readers to acknowledge the lives of those individuals living in poverty in a racist culture who somehow survive despite incredible odds. The poem begins with a description of a woman’s hands pressed to the concrete window moulding of the tenement high-rise where she lives in Chicago with her three children, Carlos, the baby; Margaret; and Jimmy, the oldest. Birds fly overhead like a halo or a “storm of glass waiting to crush her.” With this startling introduction, the poem compels the reader to hear the story that has brought this woman to a devastating point in her life.
The second stanza, merely one short line, attempts to explain her reason for wanting to jump—“She thinks she will be set free”—and thus deftly leads the reader to the woman’s memories about family and home recollected in the third stanza. She thinks of herself first as a mother, but also as a child, “her mother’s daughter and her father’s son.” She has been a wife, with two marriages in the past, and, significantly, has an inextricable and strong connection to all the women in the building who watch her at this crucial juncture in her life. Moving from a specific woman’s predicament to a more general and widespread human condition, Native American writer Harjo establishes the idea of communal misery and hope as the women watching from the ground also see themselves hanging from the window.
In her youth, as the fourth stanza explains, the woman had enjoyed a sense of belonging, a security and comfort at her home along the shores of Lake Michigan in northern Wisconsin. She was nourished there by meals of wild rice, nurtured in physically and spiritually warm rooms, rocked lovingly in the arms of family. Ironically, the very lake whose shores lulled her as a child now pound relentlessly and viciously against the concrete breakwater on the “Indian side of town” in Chicago. From her precarious place on the window ledge, she can see other tenements and women like herself hanging from windows there. The following stanzas reflect her thoughts about the ways her life has changed in Chicago’s alien and hostile environment, or as she thoughtfully describes it, “the lost beauty of her own life.”
The final stanza presents two contradictory images, thereby leaving the reader to finish the story. In one scenario the woman lets go of the window ledge and falls to her death from the thirteenth floor; in the other she “climbs back up to claim herself again.” With this painful ambiguity Harjo’s powerful poem thus speaks for all the women who have survived and for those who have not.
Forms and Devices
For Muscogee Creek writer Harjo, poetry is not so much visual or descriptive as it is evocative. Her gift lies in the transformative expression of feeling and thought, and while at times she cleverly creates a series of complex and conflicting metaphors, she wants her poetry to be clear and alive, to not add to what she calls the confusion of life. Even when writing about painful subjects, Harjo carefully and consciously presents language in a beautiful way, making frequent use of repetition, like a chant, so that ideas enter the reader like a song: “She thinks of all the women she has been, of all/ the men. She thinks of the color of her skin, and/ of Chicago streets, and of waterfalls and pines.” Repetition, with its time-honored place in Native American life and literature, is used most often in storytelling as a way for listeners to enter the spiral of meaning and emerge changed. It is a way too for the narrator, the woman hanging from the thirteenth floor window, to revive the memory of herself as she was before the urban destruction of her life.
In the tenth stanza Harjo repeats the refrain “she thinks of” on six occasions, each time ending the phrase with a concrete image of important people and places: her children, Carlos, Margaret, and Jimmy; her father and mother; and “moonlight nights” and “cool spring storms.” As the woman visualizes the beloved faces and enriching landscape as she re-creates them, the reader believes she will not let go of the window ledge and life. Yet in the final stanza of the poem the refrain takes a sharp turn: “She thinks she remembers listening to her own life/ break loose.” The displacement and removal from her tribal community is achingly real: “She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded/ her up like death.” She is aware that the knowledge of her physical roots implies a recognition of a spiritual belonging. To call it forth at this time becomes a lifesaving effort.
The story of the silent and tormented woman effectively enters the reader’s heart and mind as a song. Harjo’s own musical influences, a combination of country western, Creek stomp dance songs, jazz, and blues, infuse the poem with a rhythm and cadence that appeal to its audience, whom she envisioned as women, mostly American Indian women who might be dancing the stomp dance in “worn levis” or swinging on the dance floor in “northside bars,” remembering the ballads of their youth, the old love songs, and the heartbreak of the blues. Hers, then, is not a new song. In an interview, Harjo remarked that readers may feel they know this woman. She is not one woman but many women, with a story that happens over and over like the sad chorus of a country ballad.
Bibliography
Adamson, Joni. “And the Ground Spoke: Joy Harjo and the Struggle for a Land-Based Language.” In American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001.
Bryson, J. Scott. “Finding the Way Back: Place and Space in the Ecological Poetry of Joy Harjo.” MELUS 27 (Fall, 2002): 169-196.
Keyes, Claire. “Between Ruin and Celebration: Joy Harjo’s In Mad Love and War.” Borderlines: Studies in American Culture 3, no. 4 (1996): 389-395.
Lobo, Susan, and Kurt Peters, eds. American Indians and the Urban Experience. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 2001.
Riley, Jeannette, Kathleen Torrens, and Susan Krumholz. “Contemporary Feminist Writers: Envisioning a Just World.” Contemporary Justice Review 8 (March, 2005): 91-106.
Scarry, John. “Representing Real Worlds: The Evolving Poetry of Joy Harjo.” World Literature Today 66 (Spring, 1992): 286-291.