Leslie Marmon Silko Essay

The Impression of Life on her Works’ Leslie Marmon Silko for more than two decades has been enriching Native American literature through her poetry, novels, short stories, and essays. Her fertile imagination and vivid writing continues to impress both critics and readers alike. Influences in Silko's life are abundant in her work. She includes childhood memories, experiences with racism, Pueblo beliefs, family history, and traditional storytelling. Prominent in many of her works is the perspective of her mixed ethnicity. She explores ethnic identity and cultural values through her literature. Often the reader is taught about the lessons, values, and heritage of early cultures. Leslie Marmon grew up attaching herself, in memory and imagination, to the village and then to the land around it; and because this is Laguna land, many of the stories she grew up with were stories from the Keresan oral tradition, the stories of her father's people and their shared history. In her art as in her life, Silko has continued to maintain her identity with the story of the people of Kawaika, the People of the Beautiful Lake. The story of Laguna, like the biography of Silko and the fictional lives of her novels' protagonists, has always been a story of contact, departure, and recovery. “My father had wandered over all the hills and mesas around Laguna when he was a child; I started roaming those same mesas and hills when I was nine years old. At eleven I rode away on my horse, and explored places my father and uncle could not have reached on foot. I carried with me the feeling I'd acquired from listening to the old stories, that the land all around me was teeming with creatures that were related to human beings and to me.” ("Interior and Exterior Lan...

... middle of paper ...

...Lullaby’ is about a woman's struggle with her family. Silko's this piece is more of a reflection of what happened to someone in her past. It seems all too real especially when she says things like; "It’s too late now...Her children were without her...She hated Chato, not because he let the policeman and doctors put the screaming children in the government car, but because he had taught her to sign her name." (Silko 2352) Works Cited Basic theme and works excerpts accessed on 19/05/2003 from: “A Laguna Woman” retrieved from http://www.richmond.edu/~rnelson/woman.html & http://web.nmsu.edu/~tomlynch/swlit.silko.html Karenne Wood writes in her review of Garden in the Dunes accessed on 19/05/2003 from: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/SILKOlesliemarmon2.html Lullaby reference accessed on 19/05/2003 from: http://csis.pace.edu/amlit/proj1d/silko.htm