In Harjo’s “I Give You Back," the speaker is talking to fear as if it were a person. They continuously state “I release you” or “I give you up” as if they have no longer have a need for fear. It is said that “You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you/as myself.” This says that the two characters in this poem were a part of each other indefinitely. “You are not my blood anymore” shows that the fear is not allowed to be a part of the speaker any longer. They blame fear for holding “these scenes in front of me” but the speaker “was born with eyes that can never close.” There is no longer any fear of life, not of the good or the bad. But the speaker admits that they gave fear the permission to do all this damage to begin with when they say “but I gave you the leash/but I gave you the knife./but I laid myself across the fire.” No matter the past, they do not want fear to be a part of their life any longer, not “in my eyes, my ears, my voice, my belly, or in my heart”.
Harjo decides to start this poem off on a very personal level. “I release you, my beautiful and terrible/fear. I release you.” It takes a deep soul to accept fear as something beautiful when it is known to be a terrible thing. As children we see fear as a negative, and try to grow away from it. Once we start to grow up and mature we begin to realize that fear is always a part of us, whether we like it or not. “You are my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you as myself.”
“But now”, as we transition to the prosperous and fearless present, Harjo is willingly accepting the pain and agony she has lived through. She wants the reader to understand that her courage has taken her far away from her terrible past. “I give you back to the soldiers who burned down my home, beheaded my children/raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.” Harjo makes her suffering and hardships known to the reader. Th...