Myths as a form of expression

Silko uses several myths in Ceremony as a way to express Laguna life.  Though not her own experience, Silko’s cultural upbringing is one in which she is part of a “people” that prosper and perish together.  Ceremony is set in the collective suffering of the Laguna people following WWII, as the young veterans return from the war.    Ceremony’s protagonist Tayo, is forced to embrace the traditions of his people, the myths that he no longer believes to be fact, because he realizes these myths are necessary for his own healing.  I will assert that Silko is also able to give a more personal projection on Tayo, though the character is not necessarily based on the author.

Silko uses the Laguna myth of the “Gambler”, “Spider Woman”, and “Sun Man” as a means to explain the drought the Laguna people were experiencing.  According to the myth, the  Gambler was holding the rain clouds hostage, causing a drought.  Spider Woman, Sun Mans grandmother, sends Sun Man up the Zuni Mountains with information to defeat the Gambler, releasing the storm clouds and bringing rain to the Laguna people.  Though Tayo knows this is not really why they are experiencing drought, Tayo feels a certain connection to these myths, believing they may have had truth in what his own grandmother refers to as time immemorial.  In any case, they connect Laguna myth with the “real world” experience of drought.

The prompt indicates that we should explain how the relationship between myth and experience negotiates the past, culture, and tradition as well as an individuals identity.  It’s very relevant to point out that Tayo’s situation was somewhat unique in that he was a part of the first generation of Laguna’s given an opportunity to do something different other than a very traditional way of life.  This means that many of his elders, the people who raised him like Auntie, Robert, and Josiah, were cut from the more traditional cloth.  I equate Tayo’s connection with his native Laguna myths as any American’s connection with Santa Clause (sort of).  It’s one of those things you grow up believing, only to find out that it is not true.  Somewhere, in the back of your head, you allow yourself to retain a bit of Santa Clause as truth.  Similarly, Tayo still embraces, to an extent, old Laguna myths because that is what he was raised to believe, and is something that has always been believed by his people.

Written in similar style to Morrison’s Jazz, Silko also writes Ceremony about a time in which she is a generation removed, giving her no direct contact with the events and trials for the Laguna war veterans immediately following WWII.  Silko uses Laguna myths as a basis for expression.  Many people criticized Silko for divulging the myths, allowing how she overstepped the boundary between good literature and relying on Laguna tradition to round out the novel.  These myths however, are really important to Ceremony in that they are the only things truly anchoring Tayo to native traditions.

Ceremony

Well, if this book is going to be about a ceremony, it is not apparent in the first 37 pages.  The narrative actually begins in the most unceremonious of circumstances, with our protagonist Tayo deep in the heart of a WWII fighting hot bead.  We can also tell that this novel is written in a non-linear style; on page 9 the author describes a shirt given to him after the end of the war.  Ceremony uses vibrant imagery and detailed explanations about what things the author has presumably drawn from “experience”.  Silko goes on at length about life and the conditions her people experienced living on a post WWII Native American reservation.  She gives a lot of detail about the drought on the reservation, and how it burdened their way of life.  Equally detailed is Silko’s narrative about the horrors Tayo has experienced fighting in the Filipino  jungles; about how Tayo feels delusional when told to kill a Japanese soldier he believes to be his Uncle Josiah.  This seemed strange to me because Silko, a woman, never fought in the war, making it not her experience at all.  Yet you know from the introduction that Silko grew up on the very reservation that the majority of the novel will take place.?