Ceremony

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko Review 

Ceremony, the ‘novel’ by Leslie Marmon Silko, acted as a welcome relief for me following the traumatic experience that was reading Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The spiritually enriching read was originally planned to be a collection of short stories, before gradually evolving into what critic Momaday terms a ‘telling’. Silko once recalled that the bildungsroman became a ‘magical vehicle’ for her as she wrote it, sending her back ‘to the Southwest land of sandstone mesas, blue sky and sun’, her native home in Arizona from which she had recently relocated from during marriage. Indeed, there is a real sense of appreciation for the landscape and Silko’s love of her homeland really shines throughout the ‘novel’, making it rather magical. The tale is one of race, war and the need for transition as a traumatised Indian American war veteran struggles to settle back into normal life, the American race issues that he was once more oblivious to now having left an ingrained impression thanks to the war. This veteran, Tayo, undergoes a ceremony, a journey of re-evaluation and self-discovery, to at last reach a state of spiritual content, accepting the state of the world around him and regaining a connection to his homeland. I found Ceremony to be a superb work, one of the few that I have read that I would say borders on perfection.  

The importance of the story in Ceremony as a tool for a whole variety of ends is not to be underestimated. Critic Larry McMurtry sums up this importance in the line ‘stories help the people to move from imbalance and disorder back to a kind of balance’. One of the key examples of the power of the story in the novel clearly has to be Tayo’s remembrance of the tale he told his peers trekking through the Japanese jungle in the midst of the conflict. He remembers how the ‘words of the story poured out of his mouth as if they had substance, pebbles and stone exceeding to hold the corporal up’, the powerful imagery here clearly pressing the argument that sometimes the spoken word can have an effect exceeding the practical objects we think we need. Stories are also used as a means to fight against evil forces (as showcased in the line ‘evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories') and to connect to ones ancestors, as conveyed by Tayo’s grandmother making the acute observation that ‘it seems like [she has] already heard these stories before… [the] only thing is, the names sound different’. In essence the same events occur throughout history, just in different contexts and with different individuals, and through this shared experience we can relate to both those who precede us along with those who will follow us. The idea that stories are constantly occurring, you, the reader, are indeed living one right now, is frequently implemented by Silko during the novel as seen in the line ‘you are at an important place in this story’, the word ‘story’ being used instead of the word ‘journey’ which,  given the context of the line, would be the expected term. Throughout Tayo’s ceremony he also develops an increasingly solid connection to his homeland and nature, noting the great ‘comfort’ he feels in ‘belonging with the land’ for example, along with the ‘peace’ felt in ‘being with [the] hills’. The land is also portrayed as a means to blot out the other political and social conflicts of the day. This is exemplified by the following line:

‘the snow-covered mountain remained, without regard to titles of ownership or the white ranchers who thought they possessed it’

The land will supersede the humans who inhabit it, it was there first and it will remain long after we have gone. Tayo undergoes a compassionate relationship with a woman (her name is mentioned one time and I can’t find it :/) who somewhat exemplifies his relationship with the land, as their relationship grows so does his connexion to his surroundings. This line of thought is perhaps best summarised in the following revealing image describing this woman:

‘the sun was bleaching her hooves into faint outlines, merging into the cliff’

Her physical connection to the land surmises Tayo’s growing spiritual relationship with it, as emphasised by the onomatapoeia of 'merging'. Furthermore the novel starts and opens with a poem describing the 'sunrise', this again reflecting how nature encompasses us in its importance. 

Tayo, being of mixed race, is ‘stuck between cultures, neither wholly in nor out of what may be [his] native society: too often [being] viewed suspiciously by both of the peoples whose blood [he] carries’ (something being mixed-race myself, I can relate to) according to McMurtry and indeed the issue of skin colour is a predominant one in the ‘telling’. He often feels as if he were an exile, further accentuated by the fact that he is being brought up by his aunt, following his mother’s ‘sinful’ actions in being coerced to bed by a white man. There is a deep sense of white colonialism and cruelty throughout the work, the white ‘invaders’ stealing the native’s land, setting up fences ‘a thousand dollars a mile to keep Indians and Mexicans out’ (tying them into the same bracket as the coyotes which are excluded by the same fence) and genuinely imposing themselves as the superior race. Their maltreatment of the natives is perhaps best summed up in the following observation by Tayo:

‘white people selling Indians junk cars and trucks reminded Tayo of the Army Captain in the 1860s who made a gift of wool blankets to the Apaches: the entire stack of blankets was infected with smallpox’

What’s even worse is that amidst all of this, the natives themselves fail to criticise the whites, looking down on themselves instead, the view of the white, ‘superior’ race almost being flawless and impenetrable to attack having been ingrained over the years in their minds. This sense of injustice sparks up the most following Tayo’s involvement in the US army because for that brief moment of time, he is treated by all Americans as an equal. Tayo however notes the sad fact that amidst all this appraisal it is ‘the uniform, not [him]’ that is the focal point. This depressing fact has deep resonances for all the Indian veterans, Tayo himself falling into a deep depression, whilst individuals such as his friend Harley turning to alcoholism, this being best noted in the line, ‘he swallowed the beer in a big mouthful like medicine’, alcohol acting as a means to numb out the pain of this worthlessness felt in the aftermath of all this false admiration, the brief high of acceptance preceding an even deeper low. Harley eventually reaches a bittersweet ending, dying and experiencing a war veteran’s funeral. He gets recognised as an American again finally, but only through death. Through the ceremony that Tayo undergoes he becomes gradually more sympathetic to this fact, blaming a wider evil for the conflict, an evil that goes beyond race, as seen in the line ‘[he’d] be fooled into blaming the whites and not the witchery’ and how ‘he had never seen a white person so clearly before’, seeing that they are not such a distant, impossible and threatening race as previously imagined. This ‘witchery’, I believe, refers to the innate sense of evil and wrongdoing that encompasses the human seed, the inevitable badness that we cannot stop or prevent and which will come with every generation, taking form in a whole variety of skin tones. 

In many ways the principle moral of Ceremony is the need to accept change, an inevitable, unpreventable force. Change is portrayed as something that unites all races in their abhorrence towards it indeed, ‘Indians or Mexicans or white – most people are afraid of change’. However change is a compulsory thing for spiritual growth and a sense of fulfilment, as seen in the line ‘transitions that had to be made in order to become whole again’. Even the priests and magicians of Tayo’s native land have to accept change, and indeed many of them do, as seen in the revealing image of one such person’s mare, a ‘skinny pinto mare with hip bones and ribs poking against the hide like springs of an old car seat’. Here the combined traditional and technological imagery reflects the sense that tradition, in order to remain celebrated and utilised, must evolve with the times. Change is not necessarily a bad or demeaning thing either, although the ceremonies of his people are always changing, Tayo notes how the new ceremonies are still ‘complete’, merely being different to those of the older times. This also suggests the argument that we need to maintain and preserve tradition, just as it needs to evolve with the times. This sense is also seen in the grand help that the works of such priests as 'Betonie' have on Tayo's development, and how the old tale of whites being created after the Natives by the work of an evil witch adds much incubus for Tayo reaching a final, balance decision on the whole race issue. Thus to finish this section, the overall moral is the necessity to accept change, whilst maintaining to celebrate the past, or else we’ll be like ‘motionless, dead stars’ (just as nature changes, so must we).

The structure of Ceremony is certainly rather exotic, describing it in her own words Silko describes how she ‘construct[ed] the novel out of many different kinds of narratives or stories to celebrate storytelling with the spoken word as well as the written word’, referring back again to the main theme being the importance of the story. Thus the novel takes the form of a whole euphony of different tales, ‘poems’ and sub-stories occurring often in all at once, in a non-linear fashion. This is also somewhat down to Silko’s own inexperience over the novel form, in her preface she admits her horror realising that she forgot to add chapters to the first manuscript (chapters were never added in the end), joking how ‘[she] should never have neglected that course titled The Novel’. However, although the structure might surprise at first, note how I used the word ‘euphony’ to describe it. The sections flow into one another and add a really organic, mystical sense to the novel, by no means making it confusing or over-complicated. There is also a frequent use of non-metrical, non-rhyming poems (to be honest the only thing that they resemble with regards to the conventional poem is their shape on the page), often used to tell traditional, native legends and fables. One such tale, of the people’s journey of atonement, returning to the Corn Lady following their turning against her follows Tayo’s own journey of self-re-evaluation and so makes it all the more powerful. It also helps to infirm the overall sense that stories are all around us, just as this myth is a famed tale, so is Tayo living out his own story of sorts and how these journeys repeat over the generations. The combination of the Western form of storytelling, the more novel like structure, and the ethnic poems also illuminates how this culture reflects a clash, a mixture of two cultures, though the overall harmonious nature adds a hopeful note, perhaps these two cultures can coexist. I was also surprised to find out that the novel had been written by a woman, the complex emotions of the male characters being portrayed to an incredibly relatable level, and found the ‘telling’ to be incredibly spiritually enriching through the various morals and teachings brought to the forefront. There have been some suggestions of the novel’s slow pace making the read somewhat difficult, this is something I openly refute. The overall feel of the organic ethereal catches ones attention from the off-set and by no means makes for any moments of ennui. Overall, I found Ceremony to be a flowing, spiritually nourishing read that I would recommend to anyone wishing to broaden their horizons.