Final Project Essay: Silko's Ceremony

FINAL PROJECT ESSAY
Ceremony is very much a story about stories, with Tayo’s story interspersed with Silko’s poetic re-telling of Pueblo myths, and the side by side of the two, emphasizes many of the novel’s themes. It reveals the connection between all things, the healing power of storytelling, and the circular nature in history. You cannot help but to root for Tayo throughout the story, from a little boy struggling to prove is worth to his dismissive and prejudiced Auntie, through constant obedience and love, to the traumatized army veteran of mixed ancestry who returns to the reservation of the Laguna Pueblo Indians, in the New Mexico desert. Scarred and physically sick by his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese, his only redemption is to immerse himself in the Indian traditions of his past ancestors. His journey of redemption is the driving plot that depends on Tayo’s interaction with the land, the soil, wind, weather, and the scared topography of the northern New Mexico desert, which is charged with a peculiar, bittersweet magic. Silko’s novel is a beautiful reflection on the ways in which we are interconnected as humans and all of nature.
This highly charged physical setting plays a crucial role in the book, almost as if the land is a character in the story. The land takes on

a grander dimension than any fictional character ever could: “There was a peaceful silence beneath the sound of the wind. It was the silence of hard dry clay and old juniper wood bleached white.” I see Ceremony as a book about transitions and transgressions, and it touches and transcends much of the violence of Western culture. The desert landscape possesses a strong redemptive quality, and Tayo consumes it, like dosing himself with medicine, to get through moments of extreme stress and despair: “The sand felt cool. He squeezed it in both fists until it made little rivulets between his fingers. The tea was mild, tasting like the air after a rainstorm, when all the grass and plants smell green and the earth is damp.”
Tayo’s memories of the battle in the South Pacific, often contrasts with the rotten humidity, and the consoling aspect of the desert. I really like how descriptive Silko was, I felt as though I was with the character. For example towards the beginning of the story she described rain as “Jungle rain had no beginning or end; it grew like foliage from the sky, branching and arching on the earth, sometimes in solid thickets entangling the islands, and other times, in tendrils of blue mist curling out of coastal clouds.” Ceremony had an overall sad tone to it, which helped effectively portray Tayo’s misery, and gave a deeper connection to Tayo’s feelings.
The numbing haze of the booze was the temptation that continually threatens to derail Tayo’s quest, but in the end, the force of the desert landscape proved stronger for Tayo: “He was aware of the center beneath him; it soaked into the body from the ground through the torn skin on his hands, covered with powdery black dirt. It was pulling him back, close to the earth, where the core was cool and silent as mountain stone, and even with the noise and pain in his head he knew it would be: a returning rather than a separation.” Tayo knew the desert was an active force for his redemption, a healing force, and an external one. “The dreams had been terror at loss, at something lost forever; but nothing was lost; all was retained between the sky and the earth. The snow covered mountain remained, without regard to the titles of ownership.” Humans destroy and think they possess the land, but nature outdistanced their destruction, just as love had outdistanced death. Nature calls, but not many listens.
The book is full of many beautiful descriptions and many other significant roles in which the land played a part in the book, but this is what struck me the most.

Like that in the book “Out of Africa,” when Blixen mixes an aura of magic and fairy tale quality in her storytelling about the land in /Africa: “In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects, and created a great Fata Morgana.: Blixen weaved real life stories into myths and history, just like Silko in “Ceremony,” Her slightly antiquated prose is sprinkled with enchanting dream-like

images.
Blixen’s account of those years on the coffee plantation is transformed by the magic of her prose and her supreme gift of storytelling into a vibrant re-creation of Africa, filled with her affection for and understanding of the land and its people. Such as in the beginning of the story she says: “The geographical position and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not it’s like in all the world. There was not fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa.” She learned to speak Swahili while in Africa, and she was inspired by the Bible and the book Arabian Nights, to which she acted as a teacher, doctor, judge and leader of her people on her plantation. I loved how she nonchalantly described how she went out to hunt for zebras to feed her people, or killed a lion which was attacking the farm’s livestock, as if it was all in a day’s work. She paints with a wide brush when she talked about “whites” and “coloured people,” as if we were all one within our own ethnic tribe. She had ample time to compare and contrast, but she never preferred one over the other, and were a keen observer of culture. When she described how she and Dennys Finch-Hatton went out to shoot lions, it reminded me of Hemingway and his great love of big game hunting in Africa, and her use of “native” reminded me of Kipling, another colonizer from a bygone era, who loved his native land (India) despite being a part of the colonial project. I still believe throughout the book, it became apparent she was one with the land and its people; I also believe she was happier in a tent on the African plains than in a European drawing room.
The prose of her work is what drew me in, and her mastery of language made me absorb more of the quality of the story. The land in Out of Africa, when compared with the land in Ceremony, is the same, dry, and drought ridden but still clean and redemptive, and healing and spiritual, and a peculiar, bittersweet magic, and both books were true stories about redemption, and the magic of the land’s healing.
Every aspect of Ceremony, its characters, its plot, it redemption, and its very structure was a powerful presentation of its beauty and vital theme.