- Leslie Marmon Silko is the author of the novels Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes. She has also written many short stories, poems and essays, and her most recent book is a memoir, The Turquoise Ledge.
- More than thirty-five years since its original publication, Ceremony remains one of the most profound and moving works of Native American literature, a novel that is itself a.
- Author Leslie Marmon Silko Submitted by: Jane Kivik Free download or read online Ceremony pdf (ePUB) book. The first edition of the novel was published in 1977, and was written by Leslie Marmon Silko. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of 262 pages and is available in Paperback format.
- Leslie Marmon Silko is often known as the first Native American woman author published in the United States. She is of Laguna, Mexican, and Anglo-American heritage, and in her work often explores multicultural themes exploring the intersection and tensions inherent in her background.
Ceremony
In Silko’s “Ceremony” the scene at the mine includes traditional songs, prayers, dances, drums, ritual movements, and
movement, that often have a hypnotic effect, especially through repetition. Participants in such ceremonies can reach an
and emotion are all one.
Ceremonies are held for many reasons, including for changes in season, for crops, and for 'purification,' especially of
disorder; he needs help to return to his tribal ways.
The mine scene, depicts the final ceremony in his purification. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen states that Tayo's
rituals to heal his personal illness, the deterioration of the physical landscape, and the disintegration of the community.
Leroy, and Pinkie torture Harley.
Drumming occurs in the scence as Pinkie slams a tire iron repeatedly on the hood of the car. There is repetition, a
This part of the ceremony climaxes with Emo laughing and Pinkie stepping on Harley's throat. The wind suddenly kicks up
also a participant in the ceremony. At this moment, Tayo speaks to himself and addresses the universe. He sees the
to reach a greater awareness of himself and his role in life.
The sacrifice of Harley is vital for Tayo to witness and to understand as part of his purification ceremony. Until that
in time to help his grandfather, Josiah, the land would have received rain and his people would not be suffering from
blessing on the people, not their destruction'. By witnessing the sacrifice, Tayo begins to understand that Harley made
and proceed with his purification rituals.
Emo and his friends leave the scene, but the ceremony continues. Tayo begins to move, even though he is exhausted.
community within the tribe. Tayo has learned through the ceremony at the mine that he is not alone. He has learned that
to take meaning from the tribal customs. Purified, he is now ready to join the tribe. He heads to the elders in the village
middle of such works of prose fiction as Ceremony.
She makes little use of simile and metaphor in her verse, with image and narration being the key elements. Her
poems. Silko herself denies that some of her poems are poems, seeing them instead as stories placed on the page with
Short Bio
The world of Silko's poetry is very much shaped by a Native American consciousness. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
Though regarded as one of the most acculturated of the pueblos, Laguna still possesses a strong sense of history and
the pueblo, Silko's 'great-grandpa Marmon' among them), it is not surprising that it has produced not only Silko but also
Rather than viewing this heritage as a curse, Silko has used European literary forms to move toward the strength of the
times the two blend. The boundary lines between the real world and the world of legends and between the modern and
changes brought by Western civilization and a lastingly strong natural environment (of which the Native American is part)
Bear Story
Changing is an important theme in Silkos work. 'Bear Story' tells of how the bears can call people to them and make which she grew up with and which she always returns to) who are changers, who make others change, and who can
Silko is also a writer who celebrates the strength of women, and the title of her first book, Laguna Woman, underscores
Anaya Marmon, the women in Silko's poems are strong, independent, even wildly indomitable.
Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer
In such poems as 'Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer' we see Silkos non-Western sense of time. Things from
I smell the wind for my ancestors
pale blue leaves
crushes wild mountain smell.
Returning
up the gray stone cliff
where I descended
a thousand years ago
Returning to faded black stone
where mountain lion lay down with deer.
The image of the mountain lion and the deer may remind one of the biblical lion and lamb, but the animals have different The old ones who remember me are gone
the old songs are all forgotten
and the story of my birth.
How I danced in snow-frost moonlight
distant stars to the end of the Earth ...
Her words are not a lament, however. They do not convey a sense of loss but rather a deep continuity which goes
for the Native American way—not a way which is gone, but one which continues beyond time, changing and unchanged.
References
Velie, A. R. Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald
Works by Silko
Storyteller (poems and short stories) 1981
Laguna Woman (poems) 1974
Ceremony (novel) 1977
Almanac of the Dead (novel) 1991
Sacred Water (nonfiction) 1993
Yellow Woman (nonfiction) 1993
There is simply no escaping our modern understanding of Tayo’s condition: he has post-traumautic stress disorder (PTSD). Silko’s construction of this illness is masterful, but extremely painful to read. We learn of Tayo’s experiences through flashback scenes – they are raw, painful, and unforgiving (this is a warning to any reader of the novel). Tayo experiences all the physical symptoms of PTSD on his return to the United States after the war: the retching and vomiting, headaches, and inability to see light. He experiences social anxiety, loneliness, anger, separation from family, and enacts physical violence upon others. He descends into alcoholism. He grieves over the loss of his best friend, Rocky, and his uncle, Josiah. Tayo’s physical and psychological torment are only two of the illnesses the book addresses, and Silko (1977/2006) masterfully crafts language and storytelling to make us as readers connect with this trauma:
He [Tayo] cried, trying to release the great pressure that was swelling inside his chest, but he got no relief from crying any more. The pain was solid and constant as the beating of his own heart. . .he crawled inside and watched the storm swirling on the outside and he was safe there; the winds of rage could not touch him. (p. 35; p. 37)
The solution to these illnesses is not found in the medical wards of the Los Angeles hospital, or the social medications of heavy drinking and sexual escapades. These do not work for Tayo. Rather, Tayo must begin a journey to understanding the ceremonies of his people, the history of colonization, communing with elders and visionary ancestors, and reconvening with nature:
His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything. (p. 116)
Tayo visits a second medicine man, Betonie, to begin this ceremonial journey, which to a great extent involves a recounting of colonization, a grappling with internalized racism and the legacies of mixed heritage, and a return to relationship with the ancestors, animals, plants, and the land.
Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko Citation
Colonization and Decolonization
Grappling with the history of colonization is central to Tayo’s ceremonial journey. Colonization is not just about the taking of land, but the enactment of lies told by the conquerors, the internalization of those lies by the colonized, and the violence these physical and psychological acts of colonization enact on the entirety of creation. Decolonization, both physical and psychological, can only come when one lays bare the lies, sutures broken relationships with self, others, and the natural world, and envisions a world where all is in relation and all is love.
Tayo’s ceremonial journey through this process of decolonization – reconnecting with his heritage, culture, history, ancestors, nature, the land, and himself – is experienced through the entirety of the novel through the same beautiful and haunting narrative structures with which we learn of his illness.
Tayo faces the truth of how white people severed their relationship to the world, leading to great destruction:
They see no life
When they look
they see only objects.
The world for them
the trees and rivers are not alive
the mountains and stones are not alive
The deer and bear are objects
They see no life.
They fear
They fear the world.
They destroy what they fear.
They fear themselves.
Colonization and its concomitant destruction result from a severing of relationship with the world. While there are certainly tremendous costs paid by the colonized, Tayo learns that there are also costs paid by the colonizers:
only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. (p. 190)
The price paid by the colonized is, of course, tremendous. Part of Tayo’s post-traumatic stress disorder comes from his participation in World War II – a war which was designed by white people “to fill their emptiness. . .to glut [their] hollowness” (p. 178). Tayo’s participation in the war arose from his best friend Rocky’s desire to belong to a white country and white people that rejected them as Native Americans. The war temporarily suspends mistreatment wrought by white racism: “I put on that uniform, and then by God I was a U.S. Marine” (p. 37). Such inclusion does not last, however. Silko (1977/2016) brilliantly captures the disappointment and anger felt by Tayo and other Native American veterans in the aftermath of World War II:
The war was over, the uniform was gone. All of a sudden the man at the store waits on you last, makes you wait until all the white people bought what they wanted. . .they blamed themselves for losing the new feeling; they never talked about it but they blamed themselves just like they blamed themselves for losing the land the white people took. (p. 39)
Tayo, who is half-Native American, half-White, struggles with his identity throughout the novel. Like his friends, much of Tayo’s illness manifests as an internalized racism:
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. (p. 189)
It is this realization that leads to Tayo’s journeying within to ward off the demons of his internalized racism, to reconnect with ancestors, Indigenous stories, nature, and the land. This journey of decolonizing the self is most vividly captured when Tayo reclaims his uncle’s brown and white cattle (the coloring of the cattle symbolic of Tayo’s own racial heritage) from a white rancher who has stolen them:
Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko Characters
He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. . .as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. (p. 177)
These shifts do not happen linearly, as I have emphasized throughout this post. However, the beauty and power of this story cannot be understated. Tayo’s ceremonial journey is one that is both deeply personal but intimately communal. It takes place among plants, animals, spirits, visions, and people that must be experienced by the reader.
On Tending to Change, Responsibly
Ceremony is a novel with deeply resonant themes beyond that shared in this post. The role of plants, animals, and insects in our journeys, and the respect we should pay to our non-human earth companions, is important and central. So too are the effects of white destruction on the natural world. Silko’s (1977/2016) weaving of the atomic bomb into this story is mastercraft, and in returning to her careful use of language – it will make one weep.
But, hidden within the novel is a nuanced message about relationship and the interconnectedness of all things. This is not a novel that rails against the white man, colonization, or destruction without nuance: “Nothing [is] all good or all bad. . .it all depended” (p. 10), we learn early in the novel. Tayo, being of mixed background, clearly wrestles with the legacies of white colonization in his own blood. Reconciling this tension is part of the illness he must overcome – he cannot internalize hatred against his entire being, and Silko’s (1977/2016) ability to weave this tension throughout the story is stunning.
I point this out not to alleviate the tension of white readers. The novel is and should be read as an indictment of colonization, cultural genocide, and environmental destruction by white people.
Yet, the novel speaks, on a larger and more vibrant plane, about the necessity of tending to change, responsibly.
For example, Betonie, one of Tayo’s medicine men in the novel, discusses the ways Indigenous people must attend to change in their ceremonies:
After the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong. (p. 116)
A central tension in the novel is whether Tayo can even participate in the traditional ceremonies, as he is only half Indigenous. Betonie himself, it turns out, is also half-white, and Silko (1977/2016) is clearly wrestling with the dynamics of changes in racial composition within the Native American community. How do we attend to biracial and bicultural realities responsibly?
It is a matter of transitions, you see; the changing, the becoming must be cared for closely. (p. 120)
For Silko (1977/2016), our responsible tending to change must come through story. We must find ways to connect our stories, to hear the stories of those whom we have hurt (including the stories of our non-human earthly companions), and to remember that story is what heals us – what brings us together. This is the greatest of Tayo’s realizations:
He cried the relief he felt at 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. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time. (p. 229)
In our own time, we are struggling greatly with the challenges of illness, death, and change. Some of us fear the “terror at loss, at something lost forever” (Silko, 1977/2016, p. 204) ushered in by the COVID19 pandemic. We must tend to this moment of great change responsibly, and as Silko so generously reminds through her beautiful novel Ceremony, remember that “things which don’t shift and grow are dead things” (p. 116). We are still in the midst of “the struggle for the end of the story” (p. 216). May it be that stories, novels, books, and poems guide us toward greater introspection, reflection, and awareness of our interconnection. May we use stories to “fight off/illness and death,” building a more relational, connected, better, and loving post-pandemic world.
References
Baldwin, J. (1956/2013). Giovanni’s room. Vintage.
Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko Audiobook
Lamb, W. (1998). I know this much is true. Regan Books.
Mims, K. (2018). All those books you’ve bought but haven’t read? There’s a word for that. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/books/review/personal-libraries.html
Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko Sparknotes
Silko, L. M. (1977/2006). Ceremony. Penguin Books.
Ceremony Leslie Marmon Silko Quotes
Smith, Z. (2005). On beauty. Penguin Books.