Leslie Marmon Silko

I'm going to be thinking about this novel for a long time. I don't understand its power. I'm not sure how it works. The same actions and perceptions, throughout the novel, can be taken as signs of mental illness, or signs of mental clarity. Time sequence is broken over and over again in the novel, and yet the movement of the story from beginning to end feels as propulsive and climactic as any linear story. The language feels simple and declarative at first, until I realize that it's highly show more elevated, to the extent that it resembles poetry--and then it becomes actual poetry on the page. Characters seem simultaneously real and mythological. There are no sharp edges between the characters, either--rather than having any sense of autonomous 'self' they are defined instead by their relationship to one another. What is real and not-real is likewise not sharply defined. Dream bleeds into memory into a fictive reality and back into dream. I didn't feel this novel was written to explain something to me. I felt instead that Silko wrote exactly and uniquely to her purpose. She wrote something entirely new. I've never read anything like it. show less

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

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

I like to compare reading Silko to drinking a icy cold glass of limoncello. It is not the kind of thing you gulp down in chug-a-lug like fashion. It is better to take in small sips of the scenes in order to let them slide over your subconscious and filter slowly into your brain. Think of it this way. It is as if you have to give the words time to mellow and ultimately saturate your mind.

First things first. When you get into the plot of Ceremony what you first discover is that Tayo is a show more complicated character. After being a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, alcoholism, battle fatigue (now called post traumatic stress disorder), mental illness, and guilt all plague Tayo. It's as if threads of guilt tangle in his mind, strangling his ability to comprehend reality, especially when other veterans on the Laguna Pueblo reservation turn to sex, alcohol and violence to cope. Friends are no longer friendly.
Next, what is important to pay attention to are the various timelines. There is the time before the war and the time after at the mental health facility with the timeline with Thought (Spider) Woman, Corn Woman, and Reed Woman. Each timeline dips back and forth throughout the story. Tayo struggles to reconcile what it means to be Native American, with all its traditions and beliefs, with the horrors of war and captivity. How does one as gentle as Tayo forgive himself for being a soldier? "He stepped carefully, pushing the toe of his boot into the weeds first to make sure the grasshoppers were gone before he set his foot down into the crackling leathery stalks of dead sunflowers" (p 155). He can't even inadvertently harm a bug.
Interspersed between the plot are pages of lyrical poetry.
Throughout it all, I found myself weeping for Tayo's lost soul. show less