Leslie Marmon Silko

This is a challenging, disturbing read. The main character, Tayo, is an American Indian from the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Convinced by his cousin and best friend, Rocky, he enlists in the Army during WWII. Ultimately both young men are taken prisoner together by the Japanese. The horrors of that experience leave Tayo adrift in a limbo-like state, in an Army mental hospital. When he is discharged, still far from well, he finds himself wavering between a desire to return to the hospital's show more sterile cold white environment, where he felt invisible yet safe; and a tendency to slip into the false happiness of near-constant drunkenness which some of his old friends and fellow veterans have embraced. Wise women in his family have another plan, and hold hope for his redemption, however. They encourage Tayo to seek out a medicine man who can put him in touch with the old ways, and help him complete a journey...a journey which is also a ceremony of deliverance from the evil they know as "witchery"...a journey which may end with a promising sunrise and a form of peace.

I found it difficult to engage with this story at first; I would pick it up, read several pages and find myself totally lost---who is speaking, whose point of view is this, did this happen before or after Tayo went to war? I persisted, not wanting to give up on what I was sure was a significant piece of literature. There were beautiful descriptive passages, and the women intrigued me. A story poem interjected into the text a bit at a time tempted me just to find its parts and read it all at once. (I resisted doing so.) At some point, I found I was invested in Tayo's struggle, and was rooting for him to prevail. I am quite pleased to have stuck with it to the end, although I cannot say I totally grasp all there is in it. There are beautiful moments, even some small measure of hope on an individual scale. I think it is impossible to appreciate Ceremony fully without knowing something of the creation myths and other beliefs of the Pueblo people. Part of Tayo's difficulty is that he himself (in part because he has mixed heritage and has suffered the epithet "half-breed" all his life) neither understands nor accepts the cultural norms so important to his grandmother until he has undertaken his journey and acknowledged the witchery at work in the world. This story can not make sense in the context of European morality; it has to be taken on the characters' terms or left alone. I can admire it without completely understanding it, especially as I assume it was not written for me, a white woman of Anglo-Saxon and Eastern European descent. It is one of those novels that, like much of Faulkner, cannot simply be read, but must be re-read. show less

Ceremony is possibly the only book I was forced to read for high school that I still read frequently for pleasure.

Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran, struggles to overcome the events of his Pacific Front service during World War II. Today, we'd probably say he had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Back then, they just thought he was crazy. His fellow veterans have resorted to drinking ease their pain, and Tayo joins them until his family sends to a Navajo medicine man, and he realizes exactly what show more he must do to find healing: to heal himself, he will have to heal the world around him.

However, the witches who started this evil do not want to see it stopped and turned back upon them, and Tayo soon finds that some of his friends are really his enemies.

A work of Native American magical realism, I love the way Leslie Marmon Silko weaves in traditional stories and legends with the narrative. Despite the magic and witches, the book is a stark portrayal of Reservation life and Native/White relations in the 1940sand unfortunately, many of the injustices shown still remain with us today.

From my thread: here show less

First, I must admit, I knew nothing about Ceremony when I picked it up (via Bookmooch, me'thinks). I was perusing through some forums seeking recommendations for the broad generalization of "magical realism" when this title continued to pop up. See how easily I am sold when on a mission motivated by curiosity.

The cover, normally, would not have appealed to me.

It was short, so I dove right into its pages earlier this year. I'd been through a reading slump of sorts and a smallish book seemed show more to be what I was looking for. Needless to say I was NOT expecting a journey.

And Ceremony is DEFINITELY a journey.

This book reads like a dream. Even though Tayo is our young narrator, I swear there are moments when I began to believe I was a part of the Ceremony. (So yes, think of an academia Nightmare on Elm Street sorta experience or possibly The NeverEnding Story?).

So, what's Ceremony about? In a nutshell, Tayo and his best friend join the military and leave their indian village. The idea of fighting in World War II was not Tayo's idea. He would have been content working within the village. There is definitely an element of "Being an Outsider" that plays into Ceremony time and time again. In this case, Tayo was an outsider because he didn't really want more than what his village offered. His friend, however, knew that the military was his way out.

Unfortunately, Tayo is the only one to return, and much like the other Native Americans in his village back from the Great War, he is considered crazy and a drunkard. Which is only partly true. There are times when he acts crazy. And gets drunk. But only partly.

There's not a lot of time spent on the war (which pleased me because I'm not one to usually read war novels). The war scenes are all done in flashbacks and sometimes flashforwards which makes you feel sometimes lost and other times as though you are on a fast roller coaster without know which side is up. So yeah, kind of like real like, huh?

And then there's the prose....I remember reading somewhere that a whole bunch of Native Americans got their underwear in a wad because they thought Silko was exposing too many sensitive details about their spiritual world and stories. The prose is magical. And the Native American stories within Ceremony are utterly gorgeous.

I know the catch phrase with this book is: it's not only entitled Ceremony, reading it *is* a ceremony. Sounds pretty hokey, yes? I KNOW! But.... but... it's kinda true.

I mentioned earlier that there is definitely an ongoing theme of "Otherness" in Ceremony and it's true. It's everywhere. Tayo, upon his return, is the "Other" who made it back alive. He fights his own demons and then is separate from his own people. Larger than Tayo's singular experience, the idea of "Other" as Native American also presents itself.

Ceremony speaks more about the integration of a culture that was forced out of its land and then made to feel second rate because of it. It's about Tayo coming to terms with his HERITAGE as well as the KILLING of war.

Ultimately, it's a pissed off at the world kinda book that leaves the soul at peace. show less

I feel a little like my previous 5-star ratings have been a bit wasted now that I have read Ceremony. Star-inflation leaves me ill-equipped to convey how much I enjoyed this book — it gave me goosebumps. On its surface, Ceremony is a powerful story about Tayo, a soldier returning home from the Pacific Theater of WWII after spending time in a POW camp. Tayo is a destroyed man who returned to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in New Mexico to a repetitive existence of sleep, sickness, and guilt show more that he tries to keep away with drunkenness. He recognizes that in living as he does he is fulfilling one of the worst and most destructive stereotypes of Native Americans — the “drunken Indian.”

The book is also a tale of redemption and rebirth through a rediscovery and renewed appreciation of Native American myth and stories and the recognition that these are Tayo’s myths and stories even if, for some people, his mixed heritage positions him in a nowhere-space between White and Native American society. That tale on its own is poignant and well told.

… but what makes this book really special is how Silko uses the form of Native American myth and storytelling to set up layers of interpretation in the book. After finishing a first reading, I can see that she gave instructions to the readers right from the start. From the opening of the book:

Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman,
is sitting in her room
and whatever she thinks about
appears.

She goes on to say that she is about to write about the importance of stories because “You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.” The stories are defenses against the “destroyers” —

“Their evil is mighty
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy to
Because we would be defenseless then”

The stories shared in this book come through many characters’ voices, most notably the medicine-man Betonie, who represents Tayo’s last hope to recover something of himself.

Although I have only read the novel through once, I have already gone back to re-read the embedded stories multiple times. In doing that I have seen how recursive the whole novel is. The events of the novel mirror the stories … or maybe it is Tayo who fits his world to the stories once he has them as a guide. It quickly became clear that this novel can support a literal, an allegorical, and an anagogical (spiritual/mystical) reading at the same time, and the readings are mutually influential and informing. You can get one set of meanings from reading about Tayo and what he has done and then see things in quite another way when looking at the same details allegorically or analogically. This is a book that supports multiple reading.

Simply marvelous. show less