Finding Ceremony on my bookshelf felt a bit magical. I didn't know it was there. When I first got the idea for this blog, I went down a list of books I was interested in and purchased several at once to have on hand - novels by authors from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds who were also on the Advanced Placement or other California approved list of readings. While I've slowly been making my way through the list, I didn't realize the gem I had among them until I had written in my previous blog on Sherman Alexie and the #metoo controversy - that I unfortunately could not name any other Native American authors. Seconds after I published that blog, I turned to find my next book and there was Ceremony sitting on my shelf with praise from Alexie on the back cover. This book was meant to find me at this time.
In Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, Tayo's Laguna community seeks to help him heal from the PTSD that he, like many of his peers, has brought back with him from World War II. A story that echoes the familiar tales of alcohol abuse and struggles with racism and belonging encountered in Alexie's work, the overlap between the returned veterans' PTSD and the multi-generational trauma of reservation life and colonialism lays the cultural foundation for a plot that drew me in and left me on edge from beginning to end. Set in a very specific time and place - New Mexico in the late 1940s - with a character dealing with very specific struggles both internal and external, Silko takes the reader on Tayo's journey towards healing that involves a vast mountain range of emotions rather than a straight path to the top.
Silko's writing has an exquisiteness that paints both internal and external landscapes with such visceral visuals that it is easy to become the character and feel what he is feeling and see what he is seeing. For example, when he was in the hospital after returning from war in the Philippines, Tayo has a sense of disembodiment,"They saw his outline, but they did not realize it was hollow inside." Silko also describes him as "smoke." He is floating around without substance, so separated from himself that it's as if he is invisible. These metaphors illuminate Tayo's experience of being medicated to the point where he not only doesn't remember the war, he no longer has a sense of attachment to himself. It's easy to imagine him gliding numbly through the hospital and understand the abruptness of being at a train station on his way home.
Throughout the book, the theme that Silko keeps coming back to is that of humanity's interdependency on one another and the natural world. "His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything," Tayo realizes. "Inclusive of EVERYTHING" - that phrase is so all-encompassing that it envelopes not just the Earth, but the planets and stars, not just the physical, but the spiritual, not just the natural world, but the supernatural as well. In this vein, the story is entwined with mythic tales in verse-like form and characters that walk the line between the natural and supernatural worlds. Like Tayo's memories "reality" and magic are, "tangled up like Grandma's wicker sewing basket when he was a child...He could feel it inside his skull - the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places they snagged and tangled even more." This mixing up of realism and mythology leave the reader often times questioning reality and the character's mental state and thus reliability as a narrator. Though he assures us at the end, "He was not crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distance and time." Which essentially encompasses the unraveling of the plot as it jumps to different periods of time and to the different stories that represent the stories of the Lakota people.
Like Alexie, Silko addresses white colonialism, but she gives the white reader something that Alexie doesn't give - hope, humanity, forgiveness, an opportunity to be a part of the fabric of the natural world. Betonie, the healer, tells Tayo, "'They want us to believe all evil resides with white people. then we will look no further to see what is really happening. they want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction...'" This feels like a betrayal of sorts, Betonie blaming Native Americans for their own oppression, yet for Tayo this suggestion gives him the power to work towards his own peace and liberation. The catch, of course, being that it's a complicated endeavor. Or as Tayo's aunt, who treats his care as her own personal martyrdom, explains "'I tell them, 'It isn't easy. It never has been easy,' I say.'"
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