CEREMONY BY LESLIE SILKO
Authored by Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American, Ceremony was published first by Penguin in 1977. The novel’s title is based on the spoken traditions as well as the ceremonial activities of the Pueblo and Navajo people. The book shares the tribulations of Tayo, who is born of white and Laguna parents and is, therefore, half of either. The story revolves around Tayo’s challenges while coping with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following his survival as a World War II survivor. This is worsened by the fact that witnessing the demise of Rocky his cousin in 1942 in the Bataan Death March. Tayo returns home in Laguna Pueblo following an extended period of treatment and recovery from the injuries he had sustained while in captivity. These events cause accelerated mental illness which causes Tayo to revert to alcohol in a bid to run away from his internal turmoil. Finally, Tayo seeks the traditional Pueblo ceremony and spirituality as his basis of healing. The novel is a story of violation, violence, and boundaries as well as the area between those boundaries. Likewise, the story articulates the process of healing and recovery. Further, it brings down some of the existing cultural norms and forms allowing the reader to view things from a different perspective. As opposed to the clearly plotted and scripted books of fiction that have been popularized in America, Ceremony is meandering, slow, experiential and offers a ceremonial dimension to its reading. The book moves and exists in the Indian period but offers more. It articulates transgressions and transitions, while at the same time touching and transcending a lot of violence in the Western culture. Ceremony is useful and profound and is both a movement and an act geared towards sharing a deeper understanding of the condition of humans in a highly fragmented and hybridized world. The articulation of this is not easy, yet the novel goes beyond articulating to suggest and show people how they can return and heal. The book, therefore, tells what spirituality is by relating it to healing, purpose and the actual meaning of life. Likewise, it brings forth aspects of morals and the full understanding of relations, areas that have eluded the Western culture through history.
In Ceremony , Silko calls upon people to recognize that in light of the changing times, ceremonies are vital in their lives. This is because besides affirming, they also create an identity. The book presents ideals that ought to be carried through centuries. Its thematic and structural compositions are based on Navajo beliefs. However, although Tayo is Laguna-Pueblo by birth, he learns how to heal by paying attention to a Navajo night chant. The Navajo idea of harmony and balance in the natural world either as an individual or entire community is a broad tactic to healing the imbalances created by the modern life. Presently, these ailments, which increase in magnitude from the individual to the society are dealt with using a narrow approach which entails the use of surgery and other western developments. Conversely, Ceremony proposes a webbed and multi-layered perception of healing and illness where the spiritual is acknowledged directly. First, doctors should view patients as their partners throughout the healing process. Secondly, they ought to visualize a ‘sacred’ component whereby the patients’ mental-spiritual health requires as much emphasis as their body. If the two areas as achieved, then the skilled Western physicians will be more likely to attain success in going into the sacred areas of their patients’ bodies. In Ceremony, the major healing moment happens when a Navajo healer starts working to restore Tayo’s spirit back into balance with his environment. On the other hand, the physical and emotional cure begin when Tayo initiates individual actions in response to his ailment. Up until this point, he has wholly accepted to be victimized by his psychiatrist and other Pueblo veterans. Moreover, his aunt is on the brink of rejecting him due to her resentment of him. This resentment is two-fold. First, she dislikes the fact that Tayo is the son of her alcoholic and disgraced sister and an anonymous white man. Secondly, she resents that he survived the war while his cousin did not.
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Tayo is also broken on realizing that his Pueblo relatives are like the Japanese enemies, and more so like Josiah, his favorite uncle. His self-esteem is therefore destroyed since he has powers to kill them while they killed Rocky his cousin. In comparison to his cousin, Tayo does not embrace the Western culture wholeheartedly. For instance, Rocky clearly knows what it takes for a young Indian man to succeed under a white man’s terms. He, therefore, voids his traditional ways and urges Tayo to do the same. Tayo, on the other hand, is deeply rooted in the ways of the people. It’s ironic therefore that Rocky ends up dying in the Bataan Death March despite his belief in the white man. Tayo’s guilt of surviving and his post-war fatigue are due to emotions bigger than the anguish he feels for failing to protect his cousin and letting him die on the battlefield. These issues form the base for Silko’s portrayal of the fact that once a person’s understanding of being human is destroyed by violence, his best move is to journey to remake and rediscover the self. Tayo’s physical illness and disorientation can be linked to his disengagement psychologically and his “white smoke” feeling. Likewise, the interpretation and understanding of this healing can be looked at from different perspectives. First, It can be attributed to his mixed breed background as well as the Pueblo mysteries and mythology. Though all these arguments are informative and highly relevant to the narrative, they may skip a paramount fact. This is the narrative that Tayo’s path to wholeness is achieved chiefly after a Navajo cure him. Subsequently, on receiving blessings from his enemies he begins performing his individual healing actions. By borrowing from a Pueblo framework and others, he comes up with a ceremony. This personal approach to resolving his problem is seen as being white and the orthodox Pueblo view as deviant.
At the beginning of Ceremony , Tayo is an outcast, loner and a mixed-breed with little initiative who has to find his way amongst Christianity, Navajo, Western psychiatry Laguna Pueblo and his personal spiritual paradigms. Likewise, he lacks a sacred realm. At this point, if he fails to understand his healing powers his unstable state is seen as capable of causing complete destruction of his personality, and at worst lead to death. By being able to understand his healing powers at the end, the author explicitly affirms the undeniable ability of mixed-blood individuals to introduce fresh energy to ensure Pueblo’s physical and spiritual survival. This is brought later in the novel when jungle rain makes it difficult for Tayo and their corporal to ferry Rocky, who is injured to safety. Tayo came up with a story for everyone to give them strength. By giving the story, he hopes that it will hold them metamorphically in the right path. However, this doesn’t work, and it results in the death of Tayo. He also goes ahead to pray against the rain by singing a traditional chant about Corn Woman and Reed Woman. The song works and ends up causing a prolonged drought back home as opposed to the Southeast Asia. Tayo recognizes that he was the genesis of the curse that afflicts his people but is not sure about how to deal with it. At this point, it is clear that Tayo does not comprehend that chanting and making stories is a crucial part of this life journey, even during the times when they did not work. This supports the argument that for one to become a shaman and a healer, he or she must first shed off the old version of self.
The disjunction that Tayo suffers from can only be solved by re-patterning the realm of the sacred. The initial step towards this direction takes place when a healer whose background is the white side of his inheritance. The psychiatrist believes in Tayo’s psychical invisibility and insists that he must cry, after which he will be in a position to go home. In the novel, Silko completes Tayo’s transformation by cleverly incorporating bits of Laguna traditional myth with a clear narrative on Tayo’s experience as well as strands of her poetry. Furthermore, Tayo’s recovery begins when this grandmother encourages him to talk to the completely unconventional healer, a suggestion that is highly influenced by Ku’oosh. In the Ceremony , people can derive a paradigm for the establishment of an inclusive self, who is the creation of an individual who can stand for many people. Further, if scholars study how Tayo was capable of creating ceremonies to overcome despair, then individuals might be in a position to carve out something similar for themselves, putting the community above self and taking responsibility for their actions. However, to achieve this, people must learn to embrace the stories from their communities. This will require that the current informational community embraces the traditional, but at the same time, incorporate worldwide, multicultural ways of understanding and knowing. In conclusion, based on Tayo’s story as articulated above, and using various tactics, Ceremony clearly tells what spirituality means.
