Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony:
An Exploration of Characters and Themes
One of the most powerful aspects of Ceremony is the manner in which Silko infuses signifcant themes and issues into the text without explicitly stating them. By weaving in just a few key words and phrases into a single passage she is able to capture the essence of an entire theme. One such passage, rich with issues and connections that span the novel, is cited below. Some themes and issues it illuminates are:
He felt the old mattress then, where all the years of Rocky's life had made contours and niches that Tayo's bones did not fit: like plump satin-covered upholstery inside a coffin, molding itself around a corpse to hold it forever. He called for help, and he drew his legs and arms stiffly to his sides and arched his back away from the mattress. His heart was pounding louder than his calls for help; he could hear old Grandma answering him, but Auntie did not come. Finally she came in from the porch. The sleeves of her dress were rolled up, her hands were damp and smelled like bleach. She pulled him from the bed, her face tight with anger. He pointed at the windows. "The light makes me vomit."She pulled down the shades, and he knew she was staring at him, almost as if she could see the outline of his lie in the dim light. But his advantage was the Army doctors who told her and Robert that the cause of the battle fatigue was a mystery, even to them. He felt better in the dark, because he could not see the beds, where the blankets followed smooth concave outlines; he could not see the photographs in the frames on the bureau. In the dark he could cry for all the dreams that Rocky had as he stared out of his graduation picture;he could cry for Josiah and the spotted cattle, all scattered now, all lost, sucked away in the dissolution that had taken everything from him. Old Grandma sat by her stove, comfortable with darkness too. He knew she listened to him cry; he knew she listened to the clang of the enamel lid of the slop jar as he removed it and leaned over to vomit.(31)
"...cry for all the dreams that Rocky had..."
Here is a prime example of Silko's skill in capturing the essence of a theme by the mere mention of a few words.
Rocky's function in Ceremony is symbolic: whereas Tayo illustrates the turmoil of one inhabiting what Gloria Anzaldua has termed "The Borderlands"--a vacuous space in between the borders of two cultures--Rocky is an individual who has made all attempts exit one culture to live in another. He is representative of the double bind that looms over the Native Americans of today. Throughout the novel, Rocky repeatedly endeavors to jettison his ties with the Native American culture by shunning ceremonies, ancient beliefs and traditions.
Rocky represents the younger generation of Native Americans whose bonds to their culture are growing less strong as they come to absorb white culture. Respect for the cultural traditions and beliefs of their ancestors has dwindled into shame and condescension.
In one scene, Silko describes Rocky's shunning of ancient customs, where he refuses to partake in a hunting ritual and must leave the room because he cannot stand to witness it. In another passage, we find Rocky dismissing his Grandmother's words as foolish: "After their first year of boarding school in Albuquerque, Tayo saw how Rocky deliberately avoided the old-time ways. Old Grandma shook her head at him, but he called it superstition, and he opened his books to show her.(51)" Here Silko underscores a tension that is negotiated throughout the text--the tension that exists between younger and older generations in the face of an increasingly technological world. Rocky is caught within a double bind, where he is seduced by the seemingly penetrable white world and encouraged by his mother to enjoy it. However, as a Native American in a selective, prejudiced white world, Rocky has little chance to achieve what he aspires for:
He was an A-student and all-state in football and track. He had to win; said he was always goign to win. So he listened to his teachers, and he listened to his coach...They told him, "Nothing can stop you now except one thing: don't let the people at home hold you back"...Auntie...wanted him to be a success. She could see what white people wanted in an Indian, and she believed this way was his only chance. (51)
Rocky illuminates how Native Americans are fooled by the illusion that they too can attain the power and success that the white culture offers. Ironically, it is Rocky's embracing of the white world, his buying into their system, that leads to his death.
Rocky Silko posits Rocky within an entirely white battle, in an entirely foreign place, to depict his death. Rocky, free from any connections to his roots and his people, cannot survive.
...contours and niches that Tayo's bones did not fit...
Part of Tayo's struggle throughout Ceremony is his lack of personal identity. As a person of mixed ancestry, he is lost, shifting in between the borders of cultures without firm ground underneath. Throughout his life he is reminded by Auntie that he does not belong, he is not entirely one of them. This message is reinforced time and time again, via his peers and family. He relays the pain and confusion it has caused him to the Mexican woman:
"Mexican eyes," he said, "the other kids used to tease me...When they look at me they remember things that happened. My mother... "
"They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening around them and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites--most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes that nothing is changing. " She laughed softly. "They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don't have to think about what has happened inside themselves." (99)
Silko illuminates the plight of bicultural individuals, where society can be harsh and discriminating to those who are perceived as 'other.' Tayo, as a Native American, is marginalized by the hegemonic white culture. As part Mexican, he is rendered an even lower status in the Native American culture.
The Mexican woman offers an insightful explanation for such discriminating behavior by describing the fear that is tangled within the web of troubles in the Native American culture. People are threatened by the change that has transformed Native American society into a weak and vulnerable culture on the brink of extinction. The people believe that if they maintain pure lineage and do not mix Indian blood with other races that they will be able to preserve the culture. Thus, individuals like Tayo are seen as symbols of the dismantling of the culture. What is significant then, is the fact that Tayo, a supposed threat, grows into a strong and vibrant force eager to nourish and revitalize the Native American culture by the close of the novel.
But the advantage was the Army doctors who told her and Robert that the cause of battle fatigue was a mystery, even to them.
Certainly Tayo suffers from some sort of crippling affliction, for the novel opens with descriptions of Tayo as an ill and dependent young man unable to sleep or eat. However, it is not "battle fatigue" that is killing him; the "medicine" the Army doctors are giving him may be the direct cause of his illness:
The smoke had been dense; visions and memories of the past did not penetrate there, and he had drifted in colors of smoke, where there was no pain, only pale, pale gray of the north wall by his bed. Their medicine drained memory out of his thin arms and replaced it with a twilight cloud behind his eyes. It was not possible to cry on the remote and foggy mountain.(15)
Tayo is dying by their hands, the hands of the white culture which repeatedly tries to silence him, to inject him with "medicine" that will make him forget, repress, deny. It is another way that the Native American Story is being erased, wiped away and replaced with lost souls like Tayo. He becomes invisible, like his people. His tongue grows "...dry and dead, the carcass of a tiny rodent...His words are formed with an invisible tongue, they have no sound."
For Tayo, survival is contigent on his ability to keep telling the story, to continue the circulation of narrations and words that make up the past, present and future of Native American culture. The Army doctors are stifling this flow, severing the links that comprise the chain of time that sustains his people. White people's medicine is poison for Tayo.
Silko likens old Grandma to the worn out gray mule Tayo rides one afternoon with Harley: "They were the same--the mule and old Grandma...she was as blind as the gray mule and just as persistent.(27)" This metaphor is a useful way to illustrate that even though old Grandma is virtually blind, her sight extends way beyond the vision of many of her children and grandchildren. She may be stubborn and persistent, but it is her strong will to not see, to not change, that helps to save Tayo in the end.
Old Grandma is still closely connected to previous generations, where the cultural traditions and beliefs were less hindered and overshadowed by white culture. It is old Grandma who summons Ku'oosh and contacts Old Betonie to help Tayo. Perhaps she recognizes the source of Tayo's sickness and understands what kind of "medicine" he is in dire need of. Old Grandma refuses to see Auntie's or the Army doctors' reasoning for Tayo's illness. Instead she believes that the ancient herbal and plant remedies of her people along with the sagacity of the medicine men can save Tayo.
In this sense, Grandma has a vision that is more perceptive and keen than any of her children or grandchildren. She indirectly saves Tayo from death by placing him in the hands of Ku'oosh and Old Betonie, the last remaining guards of sacred Native American tradition and ceremony. Like the medicine men, Grandma is from an earlier generation where the unity of the culture was stronger and more resistant to change.
Old Grandma's function is twofold: she exemplifies the wisdom of older Native American people who still embrace the ceremonies and customs integral to the Native American world. However, she also represents an older generation that refuses to see the inevitability of change in a world that continues to advance technologically. In such a realm, ancient traditions are likely to be obliterated, swept away in the flow of "progress" unless they are modified. This modification is a crucial issue for Native Americans--assimilation is both a solution and danger to their culture.
The significance of the spotted cattle is manifold, for these creatures touch on a number of themes running throughout Ceremony:
By white standards, the spotted cattle are scrawny, weak and unfit. Yet, Josiah has faith that these cattle will prove to be stronger and more durable than the soft Herefords ranchers typically bought. He decides to raise the cattle despite the fact that all the white ranchers have rejected them. Josiah follows his intuition that his cattle are special, not like the ordinary cattle who have lost touch with the land:
Cattle are like any living thing. If you separate them from the land for too long, keep them in barns and corrals, they lose something. Their stomachs get to where they can only eat rolled oats and dry alfalfa. When you turn them loose again, they go running all over. They are scared because the land is unfamiliar, and they are lost...(74)
Here Josiah describes the result of cattle ranching, an industry developed by the white man in Native American lands. Such mass farming is contrary to the Native American method of hunting, where man performs rituals after the kill to show the prey his appreciation. Josiah explains the repercussions of such ranching, where a new breed of tame, caged animals are produced solely for consumation.
Josiah believes the cattle Ulibarri sold him are better, more able creatures than those described in the books written by white men for white land: "These cattle were descendants of generations of desert cattle, born in dry sand and scrubby mesquite, where they hunted water the way desert antelope did." He is determined to raise these cattle regardless of what the "experts" claim, "We'll have to do things our own way. Maybe we'll even write our own book, Cattle Raising on Indian Land, or how to raise cattle that don't eat grass or drink water.(74)"
Silko employs the cattle as a symbolic gesture: the Mexican cattle are wild, untamed animals who have no regard for the fences ranchers try to contain them in. To the white cattle owners, these animals are useless, a joke. However, they are survivors. They are creatures of the wild, unwilling and unable to be caged by man. In this sense they symbolize the Native American people. Like the cattle, the Native Americans wish to be liberated from the white man, always in search of a way to evade his grip. The cattle are reminiscent of the previous generations of Indians before the infiltration of the white man--strong, durable, close to the land, free from fences and restrictions.
The story of the spotted cattle is the story of the Indian, a story of perserverence and persistence--a story of survival.
...The light makes me vomit.
Tayo asks Auntie to draw the curtains because the light makes him sick. Yet, it is precisely this act of avoiding and obscuring the light that is the source of Tayo's violent illness.
In the beginning of the novel we encounter a weak and fragile Tayo, unable to prevent the flood of memories that rush into his mind with every turn despite his efforts to block them out. What he comes to understand by the close of the novel is that it is his memory that will heal him--the light will save him by helping him gain access to the knowledge and understanding that resides in his memory, for within those memories is his history and the history of his people. Tayo must retain those memories. He must open them up, lay them out and examine them.
It is the act of forgetting that will render the Native American culture obsolete. Survival is contingent on the perpetuation of the stories that generate from the memory of each generation. Each member of the culture is a storyteller and possesses the power to keep the culture and people alive through his/her stories. Silko comments on this power in her essay A Pueblo Inidan Perspective:
...the storytelling always included the audience and the listeners, and , in fact, is believed to be inside the listener, and the storyteller's role is to draw the story out of the listeners. This kind of shared experience grows out of a strong community base. The storytelling goes on and continues from generation to generation.
The stories are the threads that sew the Native American people together. Muffle the stories, sever the threads, and the entire culture comes undone.
In a discussion of the power of memories, it is useful to include the texts and analyses we have done throughout this class, particularly Beloved and M.A.U.S.. In both of these texts we encounter the act of delving into one's painful past to excavate buried memories. Like Tayo, characters such as Sethe and Vladik also find the act of rethinking and retelling the past as a kind of healing process. This process is illustrated again and again in many narratives of victims who have suffered from intense racial struggles and trauma. For example, read the experiences several survivors of the Holocaust relay or narratives of slavery.
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.(12)
In the English language and Western society in general, the concept of a story is vastly different than in the Native American culture. For Native Americans, a story is an intricate part of a web that cradles all the past, present and future events, ceremonies, beliefs and traditions of their culture. Each story is part of another story which is linked yet to another one, and all these stories are connected back to the very origin of creation.
Time, in Native American terms, is not linear but circular. As Silko describes in her essay A Pueblo Indian Perspective, what is essential "...is the sense of story, and story within story, and the idea that one story is only the beginning of many stories, and the sense that stories never truly end." Time and stories, history and life are all tied together. Time is like a ring, a neverending circle
Tayo and his family can be found anywhere along this circle. He embarks on his search for the lost cattle and experiences this realization which saves him:
The ride into the mountain had branched into all directions of time. He knew then why the oldtimers could only speak of yesterday and tomorrow in terms of the present moment: the only certainty; and this present sense of being was qualified with bare hints of yesterday and tomorrow...Rocky and I are walking across the ridge in the moonlight; Josiah and Robert are waiting for us. This night is a single night; and there has never been any other.(192)
With this understanding of time he is able to establish his identity and his purpose. In his search to find the lost cattle he finds the essence of his culture. He finds himself.
The word he chose to express "fragile" was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process...It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story of why it must be said this certain way.(35)
Here Silko describes the importance of language in the Native American society. In such a culture, where the only records of history are kept via oral narration, a word has immense significance.
The concept of language for many Native American tribes is closely linked with the circular notion of time. Silko illustrates this notion when she depicts Ku'oosh attempting to communicate with Tayo: "He spoke softly, using the old dialect full of sentences that were involuted with explanations of their own origins, as if nothing the old man said were his own, but all had been said before and he was only there to repeat it."
Throughout Ceremony Silko often mentions the obstacle of the English language, where the "special meaning" of Indian words is often lost in the translation. This loss is another example of the slow eradication of the culture. However, efforts to thwart the erasure of Native American languages are strong, as evidenced by the proliferation of N.A. languages web sites attempting to shed light on this problem and mitigate it.
As with any generation
the oral tradition depends upon each person
listening and remembering a portion
and it is together--
all of us remembering what we have heard together--
that creates the whole story
the long story of the people.
--Leslie Marmon Silko
It is the long story of the people that cannot be forgotten--for if the story is lost, swept away by the black boldface type in history books or silenced by overpowering voices that wish to deny, so too is disappears the culture. To retain the traditions, values and essence of her culture, Silko urges her people to remember and retell the stories that have been passed along through the generations. Storytelling is the strongest weapon against the white culture in the struggle to avert complete cultural eradication. Both Beloved and Ceremony experiment with the ways of telling a story, of conveying a history of a people that have been routinely denied the right to existence on their own terms.
Morrison's and Silko's works both explore the function of human memory within the construction of history. Both attempt to recount the histories of individuals and cultures that have been rendered invisible by the hegemonic white culture. The stories of the African slaves and Native Americans are inextricably linked in the sense that both peoples have endured sweeping attempts of cultural eradication by white culture. Morrison and Silko not only depict the lives of two disenfranchised, lost individuals--Sethe and Tayo: within the pages of their novels they tell the story of America.
Both Jessica Vianes and Blanca Ruiz discuss the notion that America's history is one that has been constructed to tell only one side of the story. In her essay entitled American Paradoxes in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Vianes illuminates the fact that American history has been "edited" to highlight certain events while omitting others. Thus, NativeAmerican history is left untold:
American history may also be manipulated to justify questionable American actions, such as the intevention in global affairs. American legacies are passed down, but as Americans we concentrate on the best and tend to hide those shameful events. In America, Native American history is not valued as much as as other 'American' history. However, Native American history contains so much more wisdom and life lessons than the American history found in school books. American history can be readily found in classrooms across the country, but Native Americans must work hard to preserve their rich cultural tradition. It is paradoxical that the Native Americans must persevere to preserve their history which is full of culture and wisdom while editied American history is available for all to accept and embrace.
Certainly Morrison tackles this same issue of omission in Beloved and her other novels. In her critical work Playing in the Dark Morrison delineates the manner in which authors have attempted to mask the impact of slavery upon American consciousness:
...I have been thinking about the validity and vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as "knowledge." This knowledge holds that traditonal, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and the African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence--which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture--has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.
Morrison asserts that the literature is in fact influenced by and commenting on an"Africanist Presence," only it does so in heavily nuanced conflicts, underscored ommisions and startling contradictions. Works like The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and Moby Dick all invoke this Africanist Presence without explicitly discussing it: blackness, although masked, is an integral part of these canonical works. Morrison attempts to break the silence and uncover what is repeatedly obscured through the striking story of Sethe.
Morrison and Silko understand the function memory plays within history. They realize that American white culture relies on recorded annals of history--encyclopedias, textbooks, biographies--to contain and sustain what has occurred in the past. The written word has become the most significant retainer of white American history. Therefore, those individuals privileged enough to write this history (for decades--white men) are in the powerful position to construct, create and manipulate it. Morrison and Silko attempt to appropriate this power via the written narratives Beloved and Ceremony, where they record the histories of individuals and cultures often denied status in the annals of white American history.
What is so fascinating about these two novels is that they deviate from the conventional linear style of narratives to engage a descisivley non-linear, circular, web like structure. Both novels employ a form that is unique and convoluted in order to parrallel the the workings of the human memory. In her essay on Ceremony, Tomoko Yamazaki discusses the manner in which humans negotiate memory in a circular, non-linear way and how Silko is able to reflect this negotiation. Yamazaki cites the words of Thought Woman to illustrate the circularity and interweaving of time and memory:
Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman,
is sitting in her room
and whatever she thinks about
appears.
She thought of her sisters,
Nau'ts'ityi and I'tcts'ity'i,
and together they created the Universe
this world
and the four worlds below.
Thought-Woman, the spider,
named things and
as she named them
they appeared.
She is sitting in her room
thinking of a story now
I'm telling you the story
she is thinking.
This poem/story/song serves several purposes. First, it explains concept of time in Native American terms, where the past, present and future are intertwined and indistinguishable. Secondly, it exposes Silko's novel as a model of the human memory, where thoughts are not conceived and conjured in a systematic, orderly fashion but emerge from random associations and stimulation. In this sense, the interjection of this poem is much like the functioning of the mind, where tangential but relative thoughts are elicited right in the midst of another thought pattern. Silko breaks up the narrative with oral stories that do not serve to disrupt or mitigate Tayo's story but instead to enhance and illustrate it.
Similar to Silko's use of oral stories to pierce and unpack the main narrative, Morrison also employs techniques that serve to unfold and refold the novel, creating a movement that flows forward and backward through time and space. In this sense Morrison also simulates the working of human memory, where coherence is sustained not through linear progression but via associations. She digresses from the standard format of narrative wrtiting to include passages without punctuation or dialogue in order to capture the innermost thoughts and feelings of Beloved and Denver (211-217). Reminiscent of Faulkner's style of rambling, non-linear passages, Morrison jumps from one moment in time to the next and then back again, taking the reader on a spiraling journey through Sethe's memory.
This circular notion of time and memory allows both Morrison and Silko to accomplish more than telling the stories of two lost individuals: within the web of stories lay the history of two cultures whose stories have been left untold. Beloved is more than a baby back from the dead to haunt the mother who killed her. She represents the Middle Passage, the pain of memory, the atrocities of slavery, the decimation of the black population, mother and daughter relationships and more. Within the pages of Beloved is the story of black slavery told from the voice of those enslaved, beaten, raped and murdered by the institution.
Like Morrison, Silko also depicts the plight of a people who have suffered at the hands of the dominating white culture thorugh her story of a lost soul, Tayo. Ceremony describes the dismantling of a culture via the portrayal of a biracial man who is searching for his identity. Silko takes us along on Tayo's journey to find himself. We travel back and forth through time and space until we learn what Tayo learns: everything, including his identity, is found in the telling and receiving of stories. Ruiz elaborates on this notion in her essay :
After facing years of the destruction of their family, identity, group and ultimatley their self, the Native Americans, and especially Tayo, attempt to take control of their identity by claiming what is theirs through their traditional stories.
Ruiz's use of the word "claiming" is significant here, for, as Silko repeatedly asserts, the only hope for the Native American culture to avoid total erasure is to maintain and fortify their hold on these stories. Everything else has been stolen from them. Their stories are what can keep the culture alive.
Within the Act of Writing...
Both Morrison and Silko maintain the tradition of storytelling through the very act of writing Beloved and Ceremony. Although the novels deviate from the oral tradtion of narration, Morrison and Silko have managed to create a new way to sustain the tradition of narration without sacrificing its power and intensity. Trent Davol ponders the issue of oral versus written narrative in his electronic essay by questioning if Silko is rendering oral storytelling obsolete through her written novel.
I believe that in the face of a rapid progression toward an entirely technical and computerized world, the space for oral narration is severly decimated. Both Morrison and Silko have recognized the impossibility of maintaining oral traditions in an ever expanding world and still chose to tell the story, only via the written word. This written mode of storytelling may be the new and only way to sustain the cultures.
Other Native Americans and African Americans are following Morrison's and Silko's example. On the web there is a proliferation of material discussing cultural issues that keep telling the stories, so even in modern day society, the stories will not be forgotten.
Keeping the Story Alive...
People who keep telling the story: