Ceremony

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 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 show more '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 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, show more 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 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 show more 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 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, show more 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

“Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time immemorial stories...It was a world alive, always changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it, sometimes imperceptible, like the motion of the stars across the sky.”

“Every day they had to look at the land, from horizon to horizon, and every day the loss was with them; it was the dead unburied, and the mourning of the lost going on forever. So they tried to sink the loss in booze, and silence their grief with war stories about their courage, defending the land they had already lost.”

In the years, immediately after WWII, we are introduced to Tayo, a young Native American, who fought as a Marine in the Pacific and was taken prisoner show more by the Japanese. He returns to his Pueblo reservation, as a shattered man and the novel is about Tayo's long, slow climb out of his own wreckage, using witchcraft and other traditional means to reach this difficult goal.
This is not an easy read. Watching these characters wallow in their suffering and alcohol abuse, can be painful but the narrative brightens as Tayo pulls out of his tailspin and begins to live again and appreciate the loved ones, who have supported him, through his trials. The writing grows stronger as the novel progresses, rewarding the reader, for hanging in there. This will not be for all tastes, but I can appreciate it's lofty position in Native American literature. show less

Ceremony is the story of Tayo, a half white, half Navajo veteran of World War II who, after a stay in a California hospital being treated for PTSD (although that term was not in vogue when the novel was written—1977) returns to his childhood home, the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. The book is also an allegory of Tayo’s people, both the Navajo of the American Southwest in particular, and of Native Americans more generally (called “Indians” in the novel).

In the war, Tayo fought on an unnamed Pacific island where it rained constantly. His home (just west of Albuquerque) on the other hand, is in the midst of a long term severe drought. Tayo feels some guilt because he prayed for and performed ceremonies to end the rain in show more the Pacific, and he fears that his efforts may have brought the drought to his home.

Tayo’s childhood friends, who also fought in the war, spend much of their time reminiscing about how much respect they got while they were in uniform. That respect contrasts dramatically with the way they are treated now, and they find themselves devolved into an almost constant state of drunkenness. Their fate inspires Tayo think about the tremendous discrimination Native Americans face at the hands of the whites, whom they nevertheless seem to admire.

The narrative oscillates from Tayo’s pre-war youth to the war and to his current situation. Always present is Tayo’s efforts to influence events through prayers and ceremonies. The characters face a constant tension between the Christianity forced upon them by the whites and the ancient stories and beliefs of their ancestors. It Is not clear to me whether the author wants the reader to believe (for purposes of the story) in the efficacy of the ceremonies as actual causes of the events in the novel, but it is very clear that the characters believe in them. It is also clear that Ms. Silko doesn’t put much faith in the whites’ religion, either in the novel or in her own life.

The story takes some unusual turns, and the conclusion is more than a little bizarre. Tayo’s efforts to end the drought have not been successful, and so he believes he must do something extra to complete his ceremony. That something is to incorporate an element of white culture into his rite. He decides that he needs to spend a night in a local abandoned uranium mine and the ceremony will be complete.

Unfortunately, some of his “friends,” one of whom is an avowed enemy from childhood, have their own notions of ceremony that involve a ritual killing of a tribe member, presumably Tayo. The “friends” come looking for Tayo, but can’t find him in the mine. So they decide to kill Tayo’s best friend! From his hiding place, Tayo watches them torture his real friend to death, but, knowing the trouble he would incur, restrains himself from killing their leader in order to save his friend. The white authorities investigate the murder, but are unable to prove a case against the leader. However, the FBI agent investigating the crime knows enough to tell the leader to leave New Mexico and never return. The leader goes off to California, which is significant because that is where Tayo had spent his time recovering in the VA hospital.

In the end, the drought is broken. The reader is left to decide whether the correlation of Tayo’s ceremony was the cause of the end of the drought.

In this summary, the story seems more than a little kooky. However, the book is very well written, including numerous short poems that bring Indian lore to life. In addition, I can attest that its descriptions of the land is very accurate. I read this book in conjunction with Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, a collection of non-fiction essays by the same author. The two together provide a bittersweet depiction of Native American life today.

(JAB) show less

like my last reading, i'm not sure i have much to say here, even though there is so much to think about. so much of it is over my head, and i know that. but what i do understand, is beautifully wrought. she does something really special here, even though i can't speak to all of it, or maybe even most of it.

but this idea that you're sick if you don't accept the white devastation, that you're sick if you try to reconnect with your past and your history and your culture and with what made your community what it has become - it's powerful. tayo is so sick, physically and otherwise, but he's the one in this book that is doing his best to understand how to live in the present while not completely losing the past and his heritage. he's the one show more that wants to honor the old ways while making a new way - the ceremony of the title, which must adhere to old traditions but also morph and change with time or it no longer has any meaning. he is the ceremony, he is the salvation of the community. but he is seen as sick, as insane, as disposable. and until he truly reconnects with his culture, he really is sick, because he doesn't fit in the world around him.

i wish i understood more of this because it is so full of ache and beauty and i know, i just know, that it is even so much better than i see it. and i already see it as something amazing.

"Here they were, trying to bring back that old feeling, that feeling they belonged to America the way they felt during the war. 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. They never thought to blame white people for any of it; they wanted white people for their friends. They never saw that it was the white people who gave them that feeling and it was white people who took it away again when the war was over."

"He wanted to yell at the medicine man, to yell the things the white doctors had yelled at him -- that he had to think only of himself, and not about the others, that he would never get well as long as he used words like 'we' and 'us.' But he had known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn't work that way, because the world didn't work that way. His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything."

"'The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done, maybe because one slip-up or mistake and the whole ceremony has to be stopped and the sand painting destroyed. That much is true. They think that if a signer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can be done, great power unleashed....That much can be true also. But long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle's claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the chants. You see, in many ways, the ceremonies have always been changing....At one time, the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But 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.

She taught me this above all else: things which don't shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise, we won't make it. We won't survive. That's what the witchery is counting on: that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power will triumph, and the people will be no more.'"

"'Look,' Betonie said, pointing east to Mount Taylor towering dark blue with the last twilight. 'They only fool themselves when they think it is theirs. The deeds and papers don't mean anything. It is the people who belong to the mountains.'"

"Then they grow away from the earth/then they grow away from the sun/then they grow away from the plants and animals./They see no life/When they look/they see only objects./The world is a dead thing 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."

"He knew then he had learned the lie by heart -- the lie which they had wanted him to learn: only brown-skinned people were thieves; white people didn't steal, because they always had the money to buy whatever they wanted.

The lie. He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; 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....If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it in motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it."

"He wanted to scream at Indians like Harley and Helen Jean and Emo that the white things they admired and desired so much -- the bright city lights and loud music, the soft sweet food and the cars -- all these things had been stolen, torn out of Indian land: raw living materials for the ck'o'yo manipulation.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, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; 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. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead."

"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."

4.5 stars

from feb 2009:

"Here they were, trying to bring back that old feeling, that feeling they belonged to America the way they felt during the war. 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. They never thought to blame white people for any of it; they wanted white people for their friends. They never saw that it was the white people who gave them that feeling and it was white people who took it away again."

"Then they grow away from the earth/then they grow away from the sun/then they grow away from the plants and animals./They see no life/When they look/they see only objects./The world is a dead thing 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."

"Every day they had to look at the land, from horizon to horizon, and every day the loss was with them; it was the dead unburied, and the mourning of the lost going on forever. So they tried to sink the loss in booze, and silence their grief with war stories about their courage, defending the land they had already lost."

"He wanted to scream at Indians like Harley and Helen Jean and Emo that the white things they admired and desired so much - the bright city lights and loud music, the soft sweet food and the cars - all these things had been stolen, torn out of Indian land: raw living materials for their ck'o'yo manipulation. 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, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs." show less