The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window

Bliss Harjo's "The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,"with its reference point in the contemporary metropolitan climate, grieves the feeling of destruction, underestimation, and individual dejection that emerges when ladies are uprooted from their profound home. Simultaneously, the sonnet urges perusers to recognize the existences of those people living in neediness in a bigoted culture who some way or another get by notwithstanding inconceivable chances. The sonnet starts with a depiction of a lady's hands squeezed to the substantial window trim of the apartment skyscraper where she resides in Chicago with her three youngsters, Carlos, the child; Margaret; and Jimmy, the most established. Birds fly overhead like a radiance or a "tempest of glass holding back to squash her." With this frightening presentation, the sonnet urges the peruser to hear the story that has carried this lady to a staggering point in her life.

The subsequent verse, only one short line, endeavors to clarify her justification needing to bounce—"She figures she will be liberated"— and consequently deftly drives the peruser to the lady's recollections about family and home remembered in the third refrain. She considers herself initial a mother, yet in addition as a youngster, "her mom's girl and her dad's child." She has been a spouse, with two relationships previously, and, essentially, has an inseparable and solid association with every one of the ladies in the structure who watch her at this vital point in her life. Moving from a particular lady's issue to a more broad and far and wide human condition, Native American author Harjo sets up the possibility of public hopelessness and expectation as the ladies watching from the beginning see themselves swinging from the window.

In her childhood, as the fourth verse clarifies, the lady had partaken it could be said of having a place, a security and solace at her home along the shores of Lake Michigan in northern Wisconsin. She was sustained there by suppers of wild rice, supported in truly and profoundly warm rooms, shaken affectionately in the arms of family. Incidentally, the very lake whose shores calmed her as a kid currently pound constantly and violently against the substantial sea wall on the "Indian part of town" in Chicago. From her problematic spot on the window sill, she can see different apartments and ladies such as herself dangling from windows there. The accompanying verses mirror her musings about the manners in which her life has changed in Chicago's outsider and antagonistic climate, or as she mindfully depicts it, "the lost excellence of her own life."

The last verse presents two conflicting pictures, accordingly leaving the peruser to complete the story. In one situation the lady relinquishes the window sill and tumbles to her demise from the thirteenth floor; in the other she "moves back up to guarantee herself once more." With this difficult equivocalness Harjo's incredible sonnet accordingly represents every one of the ones who have endure and for the individuals who have not.

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