Ceremony

Introduction

When Leslie Marmon Silko began to publish her first stories and poems in the early 1970s, it was immediately clear to discerning judges that a literary star of unusual brilliance had appeared. Among the discerning judges were the selectors for the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, who chose Leslie Marmon Silko as one of their very first group of fellows, to receive what is now known as a “genius” award.

The MacArthur Foundation, in chosing Leslie — an old friend of mine — already had ample evidence of her blazing talent. Between 1974 and 1981 she published a wholly original book of poems (Laguna Woman), a brilliant book of short stories (Storyteller), and her early masterpiece, the haunting, heartbreaking, Ceremony, which rises near to greatness and can easily stand as one of the two or three best first novels of her generation, a book that has been startling and moving readers in their thousands for more than a quarter of a century.

Far from resting on her already considerable laurels, Leslie plunged into the long swim across time and history that became Almanac of the Dead, which the critic Sven Birkerts rightly called one of the most ambitious novels of our time. The Almanac absorbed Leslie Marmon Silko for more than ten years; it was followed by a lovely book of essays (Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, after which she returned to a theme which is woven through all her work: the theft, by the invading Europeans, of the native people’s long-accumulated and reverently guarded wisdom about the natural world. This novel was Gardens in the Dunes, and the intellectual property that is being looted is chiefly botanical lore.

Ceremony is a novel whose unsettling story has lost none of its force in the nearly three decades since it was published. It is a book so original and so richly textured that the novelist N. Scott Momaday has wondered whether it ought to be called a novel at all. Perhaps, he suggests, it should just be called a “telling.”

Leslie Marmon Silko grew up on the Laguna Reservation west of Albuquerque. She, like her hero, Tayo, is of mixed blood; most of her work could be said to explore those border-lands of identity experienced by mixed-blood people — individuals who, in a sense, find themselves stuck between cultures, neither wholly in nor wholly out of what may be their native society: too often they are viewed suspiciously by both of the peoples whose blood they carry.

Tayo is a World War II veteran who returns from the Pacific war suffering terribly from what was then called battle fatigue and would now be called — as soldiers continue to experience it — posttraumatic stress disorder. After a stint in a veterans’ hospital in Los Angeles, Tayo journeys — without much hope — back to New Mexico. He finds, as do soldiers in all wars, including the current one, that going home is terribly hard. Neither Tayo nor his home is the same. In Tayo’s homeland a mine has been dug in a sacred area, a violation of nature that disturbs him deeply. Evils have been unleashed, witches have increased in power, and the indigenous people are more vulnerable than ever to spiritual and physical defilement.

Tayo, like the wisest of his people, turns for protection to the tribe’s saving stories. The stories help the people move from imbalance and disorder back to a kind of balance, the balance that comes from the accuracy and depth and beauty of the stories. The importance of faithful storytelling is a strong theme in all of Leslie Marmon Silko’s writing. She knows that the stories won’t save everyone; but, if they are faithfully kept and honored, the people will survive and perhaps in time recover their primal strength.

All of Leslie Marmon Silko’s work is infused with reverence for the natural world. Her “tellings” never lose sight of the fact that the earth was here first, along with the sun and the moon and other permanent powers. Thus, when she has told the tale of Tayo’s difficult return, she ends with this:

Sunrise, accept this offering, Sunrise.

— LARRY MCMURTRY