Tom Kruse originally recommended "Ceremony" to me as an apt
entry point into the writing of Leslie Marmon Silko. Then I heard
somewhere, erroneously, that it was about a Vietnam vet,
so I quickly got hold of a copy.
Silko, herself a half-breed living in Albuquerque, has created
Tayo, a Navajo half-breed raised on the reservation by his
mother's people. Enlisting after Pearl Harbor, he returns both
mentally and physically ill from a Japanese POW camp, and the
story tracks his recovery through tribal myth and ritual.
There is a frequent focus on tiny or seemingly insignificant
substances, objects, qualities, on thoughts or feelings introduced
in apparent gratuitousness. Here, as in Sherman Alexie's
"Indian Killer" or, indeed, any Indian fiction I've ever read,
a point is reached where I'd be fooling myself to say that
I understood. Gorged on material processes, discreet history
and power equations, I have once again reached the gulf that
measures that world's distance from the Marxist paleface.
Closing this gap depends on sense experience first, I suspect,
and on writing only in a supplemental way.
Where the culturally familiar side of Silko speaks, the meaning
is clear, powerful, and in an important sense ideological.
Here is one such passage, verbatim: Tayo's aunt, far more than
Grandmother or anyone else in the family, has been feeding him
hints about his long-dead mother; this is part of a process
as important for her as for him.
An old sensitivity had descended in her, surviving thousands of years
from the oldest times, when the people shared a single clan name and
they told each other who they were; they recounted the actions and words
each of their clan had taken, and would take; from before they were
born and long after they died, the people shared the same consciousness.
The people had known, with the simple certainty of the world they saw,
how everything should be.
But the fifth world had become entangled with European names:
the names of the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants -
all of creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name.
Christianity separated the people from themselves; it tried to crush
the single clan name, encouraging each person to stand alone, because
Jesus Christ would save only the individual soul; Jesus Christ was not
like the Mother who loved and cared for them as her children, as her
family.
The sensitivity remained: the ability to feel what the others were
feeling in the belly and chest; words were not necessary, but the
messages the people felt were confused now. When Little Sister had
started drinking wine and riding in cars with white men and Mexicans,
the people could not define their feelings about her. The Catholic
priest shook his finger at the drunkenness and lust, but the people
felt something deeper: they were losing her, they were losing part of
themselves. The older sister had to act; she had to act for the people,
to get this young girl back.
It might have been possible if the girl had not been ashamed of
herself. Shamed by what they taught her in school about the deplorable
ways of the Indian people; holy missionary white people who wanted only
good for the Indians, white people who dedicated their lives to helping
the Indians, these people urged her to break away from her home.
She was excited to see that despite the fact she was an Indian,
the white men smiled at her from their cars as she walked from the bus
stop in Albuquerque back to the Indian School. She smiled and waved;
she looked at her own reflection in windows of houses she passed;
her dress, her lipstick, her hair - it was all done perfectly, the way
the home-ec teacher taught them, exactly like the white girls.
But after she had been with them, she could feel the truth in their
fists and in their greedy feeble love-making; but it was a truth
which she had no English words for. She hated the people at home when
white people talked about their peculiarities; but she always hated
herself more because she still thought about them, because she knew
their pain at what she was doing with her life. The feelings of shame,
at her own people and at the white people, grew inside her, side by side
like monstrous twins that would have to be left in the hills to die.
The people wanted her back. Her older sister must bring her back.
For the people, it was that simple, and when they failed,
the humiliation fell on all of them; what happened to the girl
did not happen to her alone, it happened to all of them.
They focused the anger on the girl and her family, knowing from many
years of this conflict that the anger could not be contained by a single
person or family, but that it must leak out and soak into the ground
under the entire village.
So Auntie had tried desperately to reconcile the family with the
people; the old instinct had always been to gather the feelings and
opinions that were scattered through the village, to gather them like
willow twigs and tie them into a single prayer bundle that would bring
peace to all of them. But now the feelings were twisted, tangled roots,
and all the names for the source of this growth were buried under
English words, out of reach. And there would be no peace and the people
would have no rest until the entanglement had been unwound to the
source.
Well, could it be clearer than Silko puts it here?! The cross preceded
the flag (and the coin) in a way more profound than any high school text
may dare to tell. The Marxist schema must make sense to a newly
reconstituted collectivity, not to the pathetically sundered shards
it first encounters, for these it merely sunders further. This is the
deepest reason for the maddening susceptibility to factionalism and
schism on the left: these are still broken people who need a pre-verbal
healing before the words can bring genuine unity and power. The Nazis
knew that one torch-lit parade in the darkness did more than a dozen
explanations in daylight; the "New Age" search for personal integration
that followed the debacle of the Sixties both here and in Europe stands
as an answer that has been hiding in plain sight, made invisible by
the hasty contempt of the left, which saw only a perverse substitution.
If, as Russell Means asserts, indigenous cultures see in our Euro-American
civilization no more than a Christian-capitalist-Marxist continuum,
with a mere continuation where we see an end to history, this must become
the very heart of the issue. We need them more than they need us,
and we must shift our vision of economic rationality according to
their terms, where it can be at best an addendum. This is the change
that's been cooking inside me for a year, and I toss it on the table
for everybody or for nobody; I don't give a damn which.
valis
