Ceremony 989ing or being abandoned by one’s own culture but
also the possibility of restoring the broken familial
and cultural ties and reconciling past grievances.
Tayo is not reunited with his parents in the end, but
in the novel’s final pages—where he sits with the old
men of the tribe in the sacred space of the kiva, tell-
ing his full account of what he has experienced—he
has become more fully a member of his community
than he ever was before.
James B. Kelley
ILLneSS in Ceremony
The plot of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony
boils down to the journey of Tayo, the novel’s pro-
tagonist, from illness to health. The particulars of
that journey are strongly influenced by the Native
American (Laguna Pueblo) culture in which the
character grew up and again finds himself as a young
man at the beginning of the novel.
Two long, complex sentences found in Cer-
emony’s opening paragraph reflect Tayo’s chaotic
state of mind, particularly when he tries to sleep at
night. Filling half a page, these sentences adhere to
conventions of grammar and punctuation and yet
present a disorientating alternation between very
different times and places. These sentences also
give the reader an early indication that Tayo’s ill-
ness stems from his military service in the Pacific
theater of World War II. Part of the second sen-
tence reads:
. . . the fever voices would drift and whirl and
emerge again—Japanese soldiers shouting
orders to him, suffocating damp voices that
drifted out in the jungle steam, and he heard
the women’s voices then; they faded in and
out until he was frantic because he thought
the Laguna words were his mother’s, but
when he was about to make out the meaning
of the words, the voice suddenly broke into a
language he could not understand.
Further illustration of Tayo’s mental anguish in this
opening section can be seen in a cluster of related
images—such as colts linked by rope or colored
threads in the grandmother’s sewing basket—and
in metaphors of spinning, unwinding, and entangle-
ment: “Tayo had to sweat through those nights
when his thoughts become entangled; he had to
sweat to think of something that wasn’t unraveled or
tied in knots to the past.” Although he exhibits some
physical symptoms, particularly sleeplessness and
nausea, Tayo’s problems seem primarily psychologi-
cal in nature and might be diagnosed in contempo-
rary Western terms as post-traumatic stress disorder.
In any case, the attempts to treat Tayo’s illness
through Western medicine remain unsuccessful.
After returning from combat, he spends an unde-
fined “long time” in at least one hospital, medicated
and detached from his environment and even from
his own body, which he calls “white smoke” and
sees as “only an outline” with nothing inside. Tayo’s
real healing begins with his return to his childhood
home in the southwestern United States. Here,
Tayo’s grandmother insists that the medicine man
Ku’oosh be called, despite the objections of Auntie,
who has mostly abandoned traditional views in
favor of a rigid Christian faith and an obsession
with maintaining appearances and achieving upward
mobility for her own son. Unable to treat the illness
and fearing the worst, Ku’oosh refers Tayo to a sec-
ond, less conventional medicine man, Old Betonie,
who is himself of mixed blood and who seeks to
integrate Western knowledge and imagery into his
traditional practice. Tayo’s treatments take various
forms, including ingesting herbs; singing songs;
sitting in the center of a sand painting; and pursu-
ing an individual quest to recover his uncle’s stolen
cattle, a pursuit that in the novel is told parallel to
a myth about freeing the rainclouds from a trickster
who has captured them. The novel ends with Tayo
undergoing the final cure: He sits in the sacred
structure of the kiva and tells of his experiences to
the old men on the reservation.
Ceremony thus presents details of particular heal-
ing rituals and related imagery of Native Americans
of the American Southwest, such as the significance
of the number 4 and the importance of a particular
set of myths. At least as significantly, however, the
novel also serves as a developed example of how our
understanding of a particular illness and, by exten-
sion, our treatment of that illness are always bound
up in cultural definitions and practices.
James B. Kelley