988 silko, Leslie Marmon
SiLko, LESLiE marmoN Ceremony
(1977)
Ceremony is one of the earliest American Indian
novels to be widely read and praised in the United
States. Its author, Leslie Marmon Silko, who is of
mixed Pueblo, European, and Mexican heritage,
explores the sometimes destructive, sometimes cre-
ative ways in which European and indigenous cul-
tures have interacted in 20th-century America.
The story focuses on the challenges facing Tayo,
a young man of mixed heritage, and his extended
family living on a reservation in the Southwest.
Among the most developed and central characters
in the story are Auntie, Uncle Josiah, Rocky, and
Old Grandma. Auntie and Uncle Josiah are siblings
who raise Tayo in the absence of his mother and
father, with Josiah encouraging Tayo and Auntie
seeking to make him feel inferior and unwanted.
Against Auntie’s wishes, Tayo forms a close bond
with his cousin, Rocky; they enlist together and
fight in World War II. Most of the novel deals with
Tayo’s attempts to come to terms with the trauma of
this war. Old Grandma, a character who is lovingly
depicted and invested with wisdom and respect for
Indian traditions, is one in a series of powerful,
enigmatic women who assist Tayo in his journey
from illness to health and from isolation to
reintegration into the community. In keeping with
the author’s interest in complex modern identities
and cultures, the protagonist’s journey is related
to the reader in experimental ways; chronology is
not always followed, points of view and points of
reference are sometimes ambiguous, and a series of
loosely connected Indian poems and myths punctu-
ate the tale.
Ceremony explores themes such as abandon-
ment, community, education, family, identity,
illness, race, religion, responsibility, science
and technology, violence, and tradition.
James B. Kelley
abandonment in Ceremony
Abandonment is a central theme in Leslie Silko’s
novel Ceremony, with the biracial protagonist Tayo
struggling to come to terms with having lost all
contact with his parents and having found no easy
acceptance into white or Native American cultures.
On a more general level, the novel also traces the
fate of indigenous peoples who have abandoned
their cultural heritage and thus struggle blindly to
find their way in the world.
Near the novel’s start, the reader learns that Tayo
is an orphan who has been taken in by his aunt and
uncle. As the story unfolds, the reader learns more
about these familial relationships and about Tayo’s
earliest years, but many details remain elusive or
ambiguous. Tayo’s “absent white father” is barely
referenced in the novel, and the story of his mother,
who leaves him at the age of four at her sister’s
house, is told only in several fragmented episodes
and hinted at in family gossip. In the course of her
early education, the reader learns, Tayo’s mother
had been taught to be ashamed of the traditions
of her people and “urged . . . to break away from
her home.” In the white world, however, perhaps
because she finds only limited opportunities, she
resorts to prostitution as a means to provide for
her child and herself. Mother and child live on the
margins of society, and Tayo spends much of his
early childhood alone, playing with plastic straws,
cigarette butts, and chewed gum on a barroom floor
or batting about frozen excrement with a stick near
the shanty town where his mother and he have
come to live. Even after having been taken in by
his relatives, Tayo rarely experiences a strong sense
of belonging. His mother’s sister, Auntie, fears the
community’s gossip about “Little Sister” and does
not want Tayo and her son Rocky to be taken for
brothers or become close friends.
Poem-stories, presented in at least two differ-
ent versions in the novel, parallel the accounts of
Tayo’s abandonment and adoption and tell of “the
mother of the people.” The term the people is used by
a number of indigenous peoples of the southwestern
United States to refer to themselves. In these poem-
stories, the mother grows angry at an insult and
leaves her children behind, taking the water with
her and leaving behind drought and a slow death
for everything living. The offended mother has to be
contacted and then placated through an apology and
offering before she is willing to return to the surface
world and bring with her the life-giving water. Just
as in the resolution of these poem-stories, the novel
as a whole addresses not only the pain of abandon-