The Dichotomies of Life Ceremony - Book Report/Review Example

The Dichotomies of Life” “Ceremony” Leslie Marmon Silko Order No: 177708 No. of pages: 6 Premium – 6530 About the Leslie Marmon Silkowas born in 1948, in New Mexico in the USA. She studied in a Catholic School in Albuquerque and thereafter attended college at the University of New Mexico. She also studied law briefly and taught at many different Universities around New Mexico and Tucson. Leslie Marmon Silko has defined herself as a prolific Native American writer through her works that consisted of Novels, Poetry, Short stories, Letters and Essays. She concentrates on ethnic themes, motifs and genres and hence has become an important personality in Native American Literature. She writes for two different kinds of audiences – The group of readers who share her Indian sensibilities and identify with her ethnic background and the second group are of general readers who find her works both exciting and exotic regardless of sympathy for the problems or concerns of Indians. Literary criticism has placed Silko and many other Native American writers like her in the post colonial, in post modern literature. As a Native American writer, Silko makes use of the usual dichotomies because she is a keen observer of nature as well as human nature. The dichotomies she uses frequently in her writing are: white culture is cruel, cut off from nature, artificial, dead, based on greed; traditional Indian culture is natural, holistic and natural. (Leslie Marmon Silko by Per Seyersted, Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1980) Her novel “Ceremony” (Ceremony. New York, Viking Press, 1977) is considered as one of the two most important novels in Modern Native American literature; the other novel being N. Scott Momadays “House Made of Dawn”.(Silko, 1980) She had a great fascination for the narrative and took full advantage of it in all her works. Her novel Ceremony focuses on an American Indian youth who struggles to rearrange his life and realign himself to Indian culture after having been torn away from home, returns to New Mexico just after World War II. Tayo, the protagonist in Silko’s novel Ceremony, is half- Laguna and half Anglo. His trechererous experiences as a prisoner and the horrors of the war against the Japanese in the jungles of the Philippines made him a nervous wreck and he tottered on the brink of insanity. His captivity nearly snuffed out his will to live. The result was that he found himself in a mental ward of a veteran’s hospital. Back home at Laguna Peublo, he faces a very sad, bleak and pathetic life which enhances his estrangement and alienation and hence these feelings of regret leave him in constant danger of succumbing to his mental illness. His mother, now dead left him a legacy of shame due to her promiscuous character. He is constantly reminded of his lost heritage and feels great pangs of pain while living among a dispossessed people. His surroundings force him to associate with other fellow veterans who drink alcohol and boast and brag about their sexual escapades with white women. He is haunted and reminded of his mother when he observes the prostitutes and winos in misery and skid row squalor. While the other soldiers, who returned after the war, take refuge in alcohol, rage and violence, Tayo’s quest is to search for different kind of resolution, peace and comfort. It is this quest that leads him back to his Indian roots with all its witchcraft and evil, beliefs and traditions. The search itself takes on the form of a ritual or curative ceremony, which he believes that would wipe away all his afflictions, especially his disillusionment and despair. He understands the need for ceremonies in order to make a change and survive. He finds peace by "finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together -- the old stories, the war stories, their stories -- to become the story that was still being told." ( Silko, ”Ceremony”, Viking Press, 1997) Tayo takes refuge in Betonie, who is an old medicine man, who guides him in all his undertakings. He has an Indian Earth Goddess figure, which he uses as recourse and proceeds towards a series of mystical rituals and ceremonies which he feels would make him whole once again. In the process of doing so, he succeeds in outwitting the witchcraft of his evil antagonist Emo. Like many of the other contemporary writers, Silko, very good at narrative, experiments with the narrative line as she weaves her way through the chronological order of events as she reaches down and explores the deep consciousness of her characters. She deftly avoids the morbid extremes of self consciousness which usually arises from analyzing the narrative process by constantly using the Indian concept of reality. Her novel “Ceremony” begins with a description of Thought Woman- the spider "sitting in her room/thinking of a story now/Im telling you the story she is thinking." (Silko, Viking Press, 1997) In fact, Silko’s novel Ceremony, met with resounding success because of her ability to deal convincingly with the rituals and traditions of Indian culture and myths and at the same time recognizing the craving for psychological realism. During this process she exercised extreme control over her art of the narrative. Silko’s commitment to her referential dimension of literary language and all the communal experiences she had witnessed and associates with Native American oral tradition, has left us a rich legacy of rich knowledge and enlightenment. “Without question, Leslie Silko is the most accomplished Native American writer of her generation….A splendid achievement”, (New York Times, Book Review) Ceremony does not breed racial animosity, but on the other hand it portrays a great sense of sorrow and awarenesshow and this can be found in the following phrase –“how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten." Tayos spiritual healing is seen as a sort of offering of redemption for tribal cultures. Silko brings to the fore front, the plight of bi-cultural individuals where society can be painfully discriminating and harsh in dealing with them. Silko gives us an insightful explanation describing this discriminating behavior which is a sort of fear arising from the web of troubles present in Native American culture. People feel threatened and scared of the changes that have taken place in the Native American society that has transformed them in a vulnerable and weak culture tottering on the brink of extinction. Their belief was that if they maintained a pure lineage without merging Indian blood with other races, they would be able to preserve their culture. Therefore, characters such as Tayo are seen as symbols that dismantle culture. Tayo who is seen as a threat to culture, in fact grows into a strong force to reckon with and with a vibrant force is eager to rectify, revitalize and nourish the Native American culture by the end of the novel. Silko uses a lot of symbolic words to prove different points. For example she uses the word “cattle” to describe Mexican cattle that are wild and untamed creatures with no regard for the ranchers who look after them. They are creatures who are wild and unwilling to be tamed. The word “cattle” is used in symbolism to describe the Native American people who are in the constant quest of evading the clutches of the white man and long for their liberty and freedom. The usage of cattle is also reminiscent of the past generations of Indians strong, dependable and free from fences and restrictions before the infilteration of the white man. “He made a story for all of them, a story to give them strength. The words of the story poured out of his mouth as if they had substance, pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up, to keep his knees from buckling, to keep his hands from letting go of the blanket.”(Silko, Ceremony, Viking Press, 1997)(12) Another symbolic word she uses throughout her novel Ceremony is the word “story”. She believes that each and every member of a culture is a story teller who possesses the power through their stories to keep the culture and the way of life of their people alive. In Silko’s words from Ceremony, “This kind of shared experience grows out of a strong community base. The storytelling goes on and continues from generation to generation”. She compares the stories to the threads that sew the Native American people together. If these stories are distorted or muffled, the threads would be severed and the entire culture becomes lost along the way or becomes undone from the fabric of culture. In Ceremony, Silko experiments on the different ways of telling a story and in doing so transmit a history of a people who have been denied the right to live life on their own terms. She strongly feels that if a story for some reason is lost, forgotten or silenced by some over powering voice, then it is evident that a culture could get wiped away over time. The stories of both, the Native American as well as that of the African American, are inextricably linked together, for the fact that both parties have endured vigorous attempts at culture eradication by white culture. Silko’s masterly attempt at bringing out this fact is highly commendable for the fact that she was able to reach out and convey to her audience, the depth of pain and suffering that a person of dual culture has to undergo and the outcome of such a culture shock could be more harmful than helpful. References: VG: Artists Biography/ Silko Leslie Marmon www.voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/silko_leslie_marmon.html “Ceremony” by Leslie Marmon Silko www.amazon.com/Ceremony-Leslie-Marmon-Silko/dp/0670209864 Silko’s “Ceremony” www.georgetown.edu/bassr/218/projects/reck/alr.htm Native – L (August, 1995) Re: Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony” www.nativenet.uthscsa.edu/archive/nl/9508/0115.html Read More