Ceremony Book

"I will tell you something about stories
[he said]
They aren't just entertainment.
Don't be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.

You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories."

Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony opens with a defense of storytelling. Storytelling is a way of making the world, a way of protecting self and culture. Ceremony itself takes part in this process, telling the story of Tayo, a young Native American come home from WWII and severely traumatized by the experience. He is sick, depressed, suffering from PTSD, it seems, and unable to re-integrate into his society. Until he visits Betonie, that is, a medicine man who tells him about the witchery that is at play in the world, witchery that Tayo can help put an end to as he completes a ceremony that will also help him heal.

Silko's novel is a beautiful reflection on the ways in which we are all interconnected--all humans and all of nature--but do not see this connection. Because we do not see this connection, we continue to destroy ourselves, our fellow humans, and the world in which we must live. Tayo finally makes this connection through seeing the connections between Los Alamos and the creation of the atomic bomb and his own experiences: "From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah's voice and Rocky's voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery's final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter" (246). Upon this realization, he is relieved to find that "he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time" (246).

The book is a hopeful one, ending with healing and sunrise, with the witchery "dead for now" (261), but in it Silko acknowledges that "it has never been easy" (254), that "It isn't very easy / to fix up things again" (256). And it is easy to damage things: "It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured" (38). What happens to one happens to all. This works both ways. One person's misdeeds or losses affect everyone else (whether on a familial and community level or on a worldwide level) and so it isn't easy to maintain balance and harmony and we all live constantly in danger of being harmed by someone else; however, we each also have the power and the responsibility to begin the process of healing, to engage in ceremonies and storytelling and action to change the end of the narrative, as Tayo does.