Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, the hero of Leslie Marmon Silko’s groundbreaking novel Ceremony, is a half-blood Laguna Indian who returns to his reservation after surviving the Bataan Death March of World War II. As he struggles to recover the peace of mind that his experience of warfare has stolen from him, Tayo finds that memory, identity, and his relations with others all resemble the colored threads of his grandmother’s sewing basket. The elements of his personality feel knotted and tangled, and his every attempt to restore them to order merely snags and twists them all the more. Tayo’s problems, however, extend far beyond the frustrations and alienation he encounters in trying to readjust to peacetime. Having risked his life for an America that fundamentally disowns him, Tayo must confront difficult and painful questions about the society he has been fighting for.
In the pages of Ceremony, a novel that combines extraordinary lyricism with a foreboding sense of personal and national tragedy, Leslie Marmon Silko follows Tayo as he pursues a sometimes lonely and always intensely personal quest for sanity in a broken world. As Tayo searches for self-knowledge and inner peace, the reader, too, embarks on a complex emotional journey. In observing Tayo’s efforts to come to terms with a society that does not fully acknowledge his humanity, one may initially feel personal sympathy with his character. However, as Silko’s narrative steadily metamorphoses into an indictment of social and historical forces that have led to Tayo’s suffering, the reader’s feelings are likely also to transform, as simple pity gives way to solemn contemplation of the atrocities that our native peoples have been forced to undergo.
As powerful as Tayo’s story is, the enduring triumph of Ceremony extends far beyond its narration of events. Interwoven into the tale of Silko’s hero, giving structure to the novel and added meaning to its insights, are the ancient stories of the Laguna people—stories that explore the nature of magic, that delve into the origins of evil, and that may also point a way toward purification and redemption. Silko’s reader discovers that she or he is, indeed, taking part in a mystic ceremony—an initiation into a new way of thinking and feeling. Both tenderly humanistic and apocalyptically prophetic, Ceremony is truly a novel capable of changing both hearts and minds.