CEREMONY (1977/2006)
By Leslie Marmon Silko
Penguin Classics, 242 pages.
It would be insulting to “rate” this pathbreaking book. Leslie Marmon Silko is of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo nation and one of the guiding lights of literature’s Native American Renaissance.
Ceremony is often viewed as Silko’s masterwork novel, though N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) more accurately called it a “telling,” as it violates numerous rules whites associate with fiction. My recent review of The bone people may be a measure of how much Native history has been buried; I actually know more about Maori than I do Pueblo peoples.
On the surface Ceremony is about the post-World War II travails of Tayo, a “mixed blood” individual who is half Laguna and half white. That alone places him in cultural limbo, but he’s also a survivor of the infamous Bataan Death March and could not save his cousin Rocky from being callously slain by their Japanese captors. Tayo carries guilt for Rocky’s death in ways we’d today associate with severe PTSD, though no such diagnosis existed in the 1940s. He spent time in the psych ward of a Los Angeles hospital after the war, where he came to believe he was encased in a white shell. Doctors sent him home thinking it would help him heal.
That was both correct and wrong. Tayo is listless, adrift, and spends a lot of time drinking with war survivors Harley, Leroy, Emo, and Pinkie–unaware that Emo hates him and that Pinkie follows Emo’s lead. What Tayo mainly does is ponder power and identity amidst the poverty and drought of the reservation. He’s a mess and even comes to blame himself for the drought. The book’s “ceremony” is a healing intervention, first by a medicine man named Ku’osh who is out of touch with Indian soldiers, and then by Betonie, who mixes the old ways with the new. Tayo comes to understand that, “The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen … and could never be theirs.”
That’s a good insight, but it doesn’t help Tayo cope in the here and now. To put it in Christian terms–and Rocky’s mother is a Roman Catholic convert–you have to understand how lost you are before you can be found. Don’t expect any sort of come-to-Jesus moment. Betonie leads Tayo to see that “witchery” is at work in mystical realms that are not part of white belief systems. Tayo’s spiritual journey is filled with wonders and perils, not to mention physical threats that unfold within the shadow of the Trinity atomic test site.
Ceremony delves into many things, some of which I grasp in their rudiments and many of which I do not. Racism is at play, both from whites but also from Mexicans and pure blood Pueblos. Matters are further stratified into Natives who admire whites, those who wish to recover traditionalism, and those like Betonie and Tayo who mix and match. Yet, it’s more complicated still. All live in a world in which the barriers between the natural and supernatural are thin. Why, for instance, place a deer carcass on the ground so that others can sprinkle corn meal on its nuzzle? Answer: So it can die again in the future to feed its slayers. Nor is a healing ceremony a psychological tune-up. It involves travels to the 4th World.
Silko overlays her conventional story with the myth of Hummingbird and Green Fly. She parallels it with Tayo’s plight in ways that often make us consider if some characters are actually avatar/teachers from the 4th World; we also wonder if we are in a worldly or an alt.New Mexico. Metaphor and reality blend so seamlessly that it’s hard for a white guy like me to sort them. For instance, is Tayo really being pursued by government agents who want to re-hospitalize him, or are they manifestations of internal demons he’s trying to vanquish?
I was often bewildered when reading Ceremony, but I can’t stop musing upon it. As you read this, I will be in New Mexico. I will be carrying Silko’s timeless “telling” with me.
Rob Weir
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