Suicide Note Written by Janice Mirikitani - Essay Example

In the poem “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window”, Joy Harjo presents a woman, a Native American, literally using her finger to hang from a window as she contemplates committing suicide. The poem portrays how people’s predicaments play a significant role in their decision-making.

In Joy’s poem, the woman hangs from a window on the 13th floor as she makes up her mind about whether to drop or not, trying to reflect on the reasons that have pushed her toward this end. As the author reveals, the woman is tormented by her past. She feels completely shattered between her two previous husbands in Chicago, which is outside her native home in the north. She appears embittered about “lost beauty.”The woman lives in abject poverty, endures racial discrimination, suffers from mental illness, and feels abandoned. She is also depressed and lonely.

The poem ‘Suicide Note’ on the other hand is a representation of the disappointments that a girl faces in her life, the poem suggests that the suicide note is written while the girl is planning to commit suicide, she expresses her disappointments, failures, struggles, and hardships, she gives justifications for her actions that she was unable to fight with the world and she wasn’t strong enough to win and defeat others.

Both the poems thematically are the same; they describe human failures, disappointments and disapproval of everything. Every human being goes through these situations, suicide is a feeling that every human goes through on various occasions in life. In terms of representation, these poems contradict with each other, in Harjo’s poem there is a representation of the suicidal feelings of a mother and in Mirikitani’s poem, there is a representation of a daughter’s suicidal feelings.

In Harjo’s poem, the woman cries over the loss of her physical beauty, the way her physical structure is described and describing her as the mother of three suggests that she is disappointed because she has lost her physical beauty and she thinks that she has lost every reason to live, whereas in Mirikitani’s poem the girl is disappointed by the fact that she couldn’t prove her worth to her parents and that she has disappointed them by not proving herself to them. Thus, to conclude, it can be said that both poems are similar in thematic levels but are different in various other aspects. Read More