Craft Essay on "Ceremony" written by Leslie Marmon Silko by Claire Wilcox
New Mexico’s Continental Divide Trail (CDT) traverses the Rio Puerco drainage and the Mt. Taylor area in Central New Mexico. This is where Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony takes place, much of it in Laguna Pueblo land. I’ve hiked all of New Mexico’s CDT, in segments, usually alone, its land, flora and fauna my only company. Ceremony is rich with gorgeous nature writing, and reading this book put me back in many of my own experiences there and transformed the way I now relate to that landscape. I now feel more awe and love for that part of New Mexico than ever. Its diversity reveals itself more and more with each turn of the page.
As stated by Larry McMurtry in the introduction to Ceremony, about Silko, “her work is infused with reverence for the natural world. Her ‘tellings’ never lose sight of the fact that the earth was here first.” Silko uses the craft technique of characterizing nature—using detailed descriptions activating more than one sense, highlighting the duality of its traits, and showing its interconnectedness with humanity—to highlight the essentialness of the natural world to the human characters in her book, and, really, to humans, in general, both native and non-native.
First, I will attempt to define nature, in Silko’s terms. For Silko, nature encompasses a broad array of beings, objects, and entities. It’s wind, sun, stars, trees, crickets, flowers, skeletons and bones, clay, seeds, roots, the moon, herbs, corn, rock, cliffs, dust, bees, ants, clouds, dawn, stars and water in all of its forms. Most larger animals are part of nature too, like frogs, snakes, sheep, cows, mountain lions, mules, calves, goats, bear, horse, dogs, deer and rabbits. These larger animals live in harmony with the land and are dependent on one another and the environment they live in. No one, and no thing, in the landscape is left out of nature’s tapestry. The interdependence of the flora and fauna and elements are undeniable; none can be unraveled from the other in this magical region of the Southwest. “Cattle are like any living thing. If you separate them from the land for too long, keep them in barns and corrals, they lose something” (Silko, 68). However, nature does not include human animals, to Silko. In the following passage, animals are portrayed as being more “in sync” with other inanimate elements of nature than man: “Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted because they became part of the wind” (Silko, 24).
Silko turns nature into its own character through several mechanisms, and one is by using evocative, accurate, and striking detailed descriptions, often engaging several of the senses at once. There are scores of beautiful examples in this book. Here’s one: “The wind was getting stronger; it made a whirling sound as it came around the southwest corner of the ranch house…there was a peaceful silence beneath the sounds of the wind; it was a silence with no trace of people. It was the silence of hard dry clay and old juniper wood bleached white” (Silko, 19-20). Another example: “The canyon was the way he remembered it; the bee-weed plants made the air smell heavy and sweet like wild honey, and the bumblebees were buzzing around waxy yucca flowers. The leaves of the cottonwood trees that crowded the canyon caught reflections of the afternoon sun, hundreds of tiny mirrors flashing. He blinked his eyes and looked away to the shade below the cliffs where the rabbit brush was green and yellow daisies were blooming” (Silko, 41). These descriptions are so vivid they put me back instantly into moments during my own quiet experiences in the area, passing through similar paradises.
Another way she characterizes nature is by making nature complex, giving it both kind and evil, or beautiful and ugly qualities. In Ceremony, nature’s duality is highlighted; its elements, or traits, influence the protagonist in both positive and negative ways, like all “good” characters in literature should. One obvious example is the way that water is portrayed and seen by Tayo. In Vietnam there was too much of it, which kills his friend Rocky, in Tayo’s mind. In New Mexico, it’s a source of life and sustenance, and often there is a deficiency of it. This passage emphasizes the duality of water for Tayo: “Jungle rain lay suspended in the air, choking their lungs as they marched; it soaked into their boots until the skin on their toes peeled away dead and wounds turned green. This was not the rain he and Josiah had prayed for, this was not the green foliage they sought out in sandy canyons as a sign of spring…it was the rain which filled the tire ruts and made the mud so deep that the corporal began to slip and fall with his end of the muddy blanket that held Rocky. Tayo hated this unending rain” (Silko, 10). Water murders, and water gives life and nourishes.
A third way she characterizes nature is by showing that nature influences and affects the human characters in Ceremony, and vice versa: nature is part of their stories. For example, Tayo, the protagonist, loves animals, and being around them grounds him, opens him up. We see him at his most empathetic and loving when he is with them. In the same way, his actions impact those same animals, in one case negatively affecting their wellbeing, which elicits regret. “He had prayed the rain away, and for the sixth year it was dry; the grass turned yellow and it did not grow…the grey mule grew gaunt and…in the evenings they waited for him…and the mule stood by the gate with blind marble eyes…the mule whinnied…Tayo reached into the coffee can and held some corn under the quivering lips...he got the choking in his throat again and he cried for all of them, and for what he had done” (Silko, 13). Tayo believes that his own prayer had kept the water away, and which has caused the hunger of these animals which give him joy. As the story unfolds, reconnecting with nature is key to Tayo’s recovery from trauma—it helps him heal. Near Mount Taylor, Tayo relates, “Yet at that moment in the sunrise, it was all so beautiful, everything from all directions, evenly, perfectly balancing day with night, summer months with winter. The valley was enclosing this totality like the mind holding all thoughts together in a single moment. The strength came from here” (Silko, 220). Towards the end of the book, he, too, is focused more on giving back to nature, and is seen planting seeds and tending to his animals.
Other human characters in Ceremony—and their societies—also interact with and are connected with nature in a similar bidirectional manner. In one story, we hear about a hunter who comes upon “…a mountain-lion cub chasing butterflies; as long as the hunter sang a song to the cub, it continued to play, but when the hunter thought of the cub’s mother and was afraid, the cub was startled and ran away” (Silko, 172). For Silko, nature (and all of its elements) and the human characters are interdependent, constantly affecting each others’ trajectories.
By characterizing nature through these mechanisms, Silko creates dramatic effect. When Silko then introduces some threats to this key character, such as territorialization (ranching, logging and zoning under white rules), uranium toxicity from mining, and impending nuclear war, the reader is immediately drawn into the tension. Will this essential being survive? If she is destroyed, will the human characters we have grown to be so invested in—especially Tayo—be destroyed too? But nature pushes back, and persists, at least for now. Towards the end of the novel, in his time of healing, Tayo says, “…nothing was lost; all was retained between the sky and the earth and within himself. He had lost nothing. The snow-covered mountain remained, without regard to titles of ownership or the white ranchers who thought they possessed it. They logged the trees, they killed the bear, deer, mountain lines, they built their fences high; but the mountain was far greater than any or all of these things. The mountain outdistanced their destruction, just as love had outdistanced death” (Silko, 206).
I am so grateful that I was allowed passage through what I know see as a sacred, essential land, thanks to Silko. It saddens me that it has been taken from the Laguna people, fenced off, mined, but it persists. Like Tayo, this land has healed me too, and I revere it, and all of its beings.
Satterlee, Michelle. “Landscape Imagery and Memory in the Narrative of Trauma: A Closer Look at Leslie Marmon Silko's ‘Ceremony’.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Summer 2006, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 73-92.
Garcia, Reyes. “Senses of Place in Ceremony.” MELUS, Winter, 1983, vol. 10, no. 4, The Ethnic-Novel: Appalachian, Chicano, Chinese and Native American (Winter, 1983), pp. 37-48.
Piper, Karen. “Police Zones: Territory and Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko's ‘Ceremony’.” American Indian Quarterly, Summer, 1997, vol. 21, no. 3 (Summer, 1997), pp. 483-497.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Penguin Classics, 1977.
Claire E. Wilcox is originally from Minnesota, but the first time she saw mountains, she knew she wouldn’t stay there long. She has been living and writing in the Albuquerque area for 15 years. She’s worn many professional hats as a psychiatrist, researcher, teacher, and academic. She is currently pursuing an MFA at IAIA for fiction, and she also writes non-fiction. Her creative work has been featured in the Santa Fe Reporter, Psychology Today, Across the Margin, New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, Your Tango, El Portal, and Fiction on the Web, among others.
