“Ceremony” Leslie Marmon Silko

Of the books I have read for English 236, Ceremony is by far the most difficult for me. The problems did not lie in the vocabulary or sentence structure of the text, nor the historical events and geography. The problem was that I found it difficult to connect with the text, because I initially found the style of the narrative difficult, and I never developed an emotional attachment to the main character. I know the reading is meant to be thought provoking, but the story left me with questions that were difficult for me to address, and the story lacked the closure that I needed. During the reading, I tried many times to make associations between “Ceremony” and other readings or movies to help me connect with the book more, but I don’t think my literary knowledge is sufficiently diverse to make the connections I needed.

I am interested in the history of WWII, and I was initially excited to see that the main character had been a part of the Bataan Death March. Not only was I disappointed that there was not as much about Bataan as I would have liked, but I also felt that I never really understood the complexity of feelings that the death of Rocky must have caused in Tayo. There is a story about the Scalp Society and a ceremony for “warriors who killed or touched dead enemies.” We know that Emo either killed Japanese, or at least touched them, because he keeps teeth as a trophy, but I do not remember if the author told us whether Tayo had killed any Japanese or not. So, one of the loose ends of the book for me was why Tayo felt as he did if he wasn’t responsible for any deaths in the Philippines. Another plot hole for me was why Tayo was ambivalent about his feelings for the Japanese. My feeling is that he should have hated the Japanese, who were responsible for the death of 20,000 men during the death march, one of which was Rocky. The emotional conflict within Tayo concerning the events in the Philippines seemed important at the beginning of the novel but was dropped and not developed or used in the rest of the novel. I felt that the Bataan Death March was simply a conveniently horrible event during WWII that Silko chose for the character development of Tayo, and she could have chosen a different yet equally horrible episode of WWII as long as Rocky dies as a result.

At the beginning of “Ceremony,” I was interested in Tayo’s situation. I had hopes that “Ceremony” would be similar in nature to “Regeneration,” a book by Pat Barker about a man also suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and who was an outsider, specifically a homosexual, during WWI in England. “Regeneration” also left me with many questions, but the book gave many more clues into the internal conflict suffered by the main characters than “Ceremony.” I also suspect that my common ancestry with the characters of “Regeneration” helped me understand, or at least believe that I understood, their internal turmoil, and I never felt that I understand the conflict for Tayo. Is it simply that my lack of understanding of Tayo’s culture makes it impossible for me to understand? Or is the fault in the writing?

While I appreciate the non-linear structure of the beginning of “Ceremony,” I found the circular nature of the story difficult to follow at first. I had to reread several passages to help me understand later passages. I didn’t see the structure of the book as random, though, and appreciate the way the author was developing the characters and introducing the back stories, and after awhile I was comfortable with the rhythm of the book. I was then disappointed when the author abandoned the circular structure of the book for a more linear, chronological structure. After a while, the narrative was simply following in time the journey of Tayo through the ceremony and the subsequent events. The narrative would skip from one event or location to the next but no longer skipped from one time to another. I felt the author had introduced a device, the circular narrative structure, and then abandoned it. I was looking forward to more of the circular structure, because it helped me understand Tayo’s feelings by connecting his experiences during and after the ceremony to past events.


In ‘"What Do You Do When You Love Everyone on Every Side of the War?": Teaching the Complexities of American Indian Literature’, Van Dyke tells of her students in Minnesota who live near the largest urban reservation in the U.S., and yet these students found Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” more important as literature than “Ceremony.” Van Dyke says that black culture is an integral part of white culture, even in places such as Minnesota where the black population is low. I understand what she is saying. I, too, feel more affinity for Hurston’s work than for Silko’s. I know very little of Native American culture, despite having access in the same way as the students in Minnesota. I agree with Van Dyke that even if our understanding of African American culture is flawed, it is more complete than our understanding of Native American culture. That lack of understanding of Native American culture, however, is one of the reasons why I had difficulty identifying with or empathizing with Tayo. I wanted Silko’s book to teach me more, to help me understand, but I believe an understanding of the culture is necessary first in order to understand “Ceremony.”

I don’t want to imply that reading “Ceremony” was a chore, because it wasn’t. However, I don’t think I was able to read “Ceremony” as I should have. Throughout this minority literature course I keep coming back to the fact that, no matter how much reading I do, I will never be able to put myself in the place of the characters in these books. I will never be anything other than a woman of European descent who grew up in the agricultural South in meager circumstances. Even with my myriad of experiences, I can never know what it means to live in the Laguna Pueblo, what it is like to be homosexual or lesbian, or what it is like to be black and living in early 20th Century Chicago. While I can never fully understand any of these lives, I’d like to give it a good try by continuing to read and think about what I read.

Written on 14 January 2009.