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Ceremony: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Paperback – Deckle Edge, December 26, 2006
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length243 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateDecember 26, 2006
- Dimensions8.35 x 5.63 x 0.65 inches
- ISBN-100143104918
- ISBN-13978-0143104919
- Lexile measure890L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
--The Washington Post Book World
Ceremony is the greatest novel in Native American literature. It is one of the greatest novels of any time and place. I have read this book so many times that I probably have it memorized. I teach it and I learn from it and I am continually in awe of its power, beauty, rage, vision, and violence.
--Sherman Alexie
Her assurance, her gravity, her flexibility are all wonderful gifts.
--The New York Review of Books
The novel is very deliberately a ceremony in itself—demanding but confident and beautifully written.
--The Boston Globe
Without question Leslie Marmon Silko is the most accomplished Native American writer of her generation.
--The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-eight novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received the Academy Award.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
Ceremony
Sunrise.
About the Author
LESLIE MARMON SILKO was born in Albuquerque in 1948 of mixed ancestry—Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white. She grew up in the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, where she lives with her husband and two children. She is the author of the novel Almanac of the Dead, and her stories have appeared in many magazines and collections (including Writers of the Purple Sage). She is the recipient of a five-year MacArthur Foundation grant.
LARRY McMURTRY is the author of twenty-eight novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. He lives in Archer City, Texas.
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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1977
Published by New American Library 1978
Published in Penguin Books 1986
This edition with a preface by the author and an introduction by Larry McMurtry published 2006
Introduction copyright © Larry McMurtry, 2006
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Silko, Leslie, 1943-
Ceremony / Leslie Marmon Silko ; introduction by Larry McMurtry.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics deluxe edition)
Originally published: New York : The Viking Press, 1977. With new preface by author.
ISBN: 9781440621826
1. World War, 1939-1945—Veterans—Fiction. 2. Laguna Indians—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.I44C4 2007
813'.54—dc22 2006050705
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This book
is dedicated
to my grandmothers,
Jessie Goddard Leslie
and
Lillie Stagner Marmon,
and to my sons,
Robert William Chapman
and
Cazimir Silko
Thanks to the Rosewater Foundation-on-Ketchikan Creek,
Alaska, for the artist’s residence they generously provided.
Thanks also to the National Endowment for the Arts
and the 1974 Writing Fellowship.
John and Mei-Mei:
My love and my thanks to you
for keeping me going all the time.
Preface
We moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, from Chinle, Arizona, in the late spring of 1973. My elder son, Robert Chapman, was seven years old, and Cazimir was eighteen months. Ketchikan was John Silko’s hometown, and he’d taken a supervisory position in the legal services office in Ketchikan. I had a book contract with Viking Press because Richard Seaver, who was a Viking editor, saw my short stories in Ken Rosen’s anthology, The Man to Send Rain Clouds. At the time I thought it was odd that my book contract specified either a collection of short stories or a novel. I didn’t have a literary agent then to explain that publishers preferred novels. I had no intention of writing anything but short stories for Viking Press; I felt confident about the short story as a genre, but aside from being a voracious reader of novels from age ten, I neglected to take that course the English Department offered on The Novel. No way I was going to mess with success. Short stories, that’s what I’d write. I used my writer’s grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to pay for day care for Caz while Robert was in school.
Located on Revillagigedo Island, 750 miles north of Seattle, Ketchikan had a mild climate by Alaskan standards due in large part to a warm ocean current named the Japanese Current. The average year-round temperature was forty-eight degrees, and the average rainfall was 180 inches. In Chinle the annual rainfall was twelve inches in a good year. I was accustomed to the bright sunlight of the Southwest, where the weather permitted activity outdoors all year around. In southeastern Alaska the tall spruce trees, the heavy clouds, fogs and mist and the steep mountains enclosed the town. In the Southwest I was accustomed to gazing into distances of forty or fifty miles. I was accustomed to seeing the sky and the stars and moon.
The change in climate had a profound effect on me; I spent all of June, July, and August fighting off the terrible lethargy of a depression caused in large part by the absence of sunlight. I managed to write one short story during that time, about a woman who drowned herself; it wasn’t a good short story but a message to myself. In September after the boys were in day care and school, I tried to write at home but I found it difficult to concentrate: the dirty dishes and dirty laundry seemed to cry out for attention.
About this time Richard Whittaker came to my aid. Dick and his family lived across the street from my Silko in-laws. He practiced Indian law mostly for the local tribes, and he was a strong supporter of the Alaska Legal Services program, which employed my husband. Dick was a reader of novels and especially admired Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. I talked about needing a place to write, and Dick Whittaker invited me to use the table and chair in his closet-sized law library. His law office was located on the second floor of the building that housed the offices of the legal services program. The building is still there overlooking Ketchikan Creek, next to the great Chief Johnson totem pole with Raven and Fog Woman at the corner of Mission Street and Stedman Street.
I worked on the library table with my Hermes portable typewriter and a fountain pen. Once I saw what I’d typed, I immediately edited with a fountain pen. Every day I read the previous day’s writing to get myself started again. Luckily I was in the early stages when I didn’t have much manuscript or many notes, because of course I could not leave my work spread out over the law library table: Dick Whittaker and his staff did need to use the law books from time to time. I wrote the short story “Lullaby” in the law library. I’d already started to write what would become Ceremony, but after I heard Nash and Ada Chakee were killed, I allowed myself to stray from the novel long enough to write the short story in their memory.
After about six months, the legal services offices were moved to larger offices downtown, and I followed. There was a tiny office space there, but without a door. Some of the early draft of Ceremony is written on the back side of discarded legal services letterhead. I managed there for a couple of months until Dick Whittaker told me he couldn’t find a renter for the office space vacated by legal services. Rent free, he gave me the exclusive use of the space complete with heat and lights and, best of all, no telephone.
There was an outer room that had been for reception, and the inner office that had windows that looked out on Raven and Fog Woman above Ketchikan Creek. The inner office had a chair and a wide, long built-in plywood work area shaped like a wing. The first thing I did was buy a can of Chinese red enamel and paint the plywood desk top. I brought an old percolator down to make hot water for instant coffee. Some days when I got to my office I didn’t feel like working on the novel so I wrote letters to the new friends I’d met at a writers conference in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in June of 1973. Other days I’d scoot the Hermes and manuscript over and I’d stretch out on top of the work area for a nap.
My rule for myself was this: I had to stay in that room whether I wrote or not, and, finally, after I’d written letters to Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge or Lawson Inada, the poets who provided me with moral support, or taken a nap, I’d walk over to the window to look up at the big black raven carved above me on the top of the pole. A long way down the pole came Raven’s two raven helpers, Gitsanuk and Gitsaqeq, their raven beaks oddly hooked, melted from the fire’s heat the time they carried Raven’s gift of fire to human beings. Then came the figures of Raven and his wife, Fog Woman, who held two salmon by the tails. The beauty of the carved figures lifted my spirits and I’d finally break down my resistance, and start work on the novel.
At the time I didn’t know much about the Chief Johnson pole or the story of Raven and Fog Woman, but later I learned what an auspicious location my writing office had. The Chief Johnson pole was set in 1901 to celebrate the potlatch given by Chief Johnson for the Kadjuk Tlingits. The carved figures recalled Raven’s beloved wife, Fog Woman, who used Raven’s spruce root hat to create the first salmon. Soon the rivers and ocean were jammed with salmon, and suddenly Raven was rich. Once he was rich, he began to neglect Fog Woman, and one day he spoke abusively to her until she ran toward the beach where she turned into fog. Raven told himself it didn’t matter, but when he got home he found all the dried salmon he’d stored came to life again and swam out to sea and Raven was as poor as before. The figure of Fog Woman on the pole faces the ocean at the place the salmon enter the creek to spawn; Fog Woman’s gift of the salmon made the people of Ketchikan rich.
Lunchtime was easy. Mrs. Hirabayashi’s café was only a half block away, on the street across from the docks and the fishing fleet. Mrs. Hirabayashi and her mother ran the place. It had a long white marble counter with stools where the fishermen liked to sit. They grew aged poinsettias plants in the café front window. It might have been a soda fountain at one time. The Hirabayashis, like other Japanese Americans, were imprisoned in internment camps during the war, and it was Gordon Hirabayashi, Mrs. Hirabayashi’s son, who with others worked tirelessly to secure redress for the crime from the U.S. Congress.
Mrs. Hirabayashi welcomed all her customers with a joyous greeting, and her elderly mother working behind the stove smiled shyly and nodded. I always ordered the same thing: green tea and a bowl of pork noodles. Except for me and a few old Tlingit and Haida people, the Hirabayshis’ customers were fishermen in rubber boots and gray wool halibut jackets. Usually it was raining. My first October, in 1973, Ketchikan got 42.5 inches of rain in thirty-one days. So after my noodles and tea, I usually went straight back to my writing and worked until three, when it was time to fetch Caz from day care to be home when Robert returned from school.
If it wasn’t raining too hard, sometimes I wandered around downtown Ketchikan just looking at the fishing boats or giant cruise ships and the vast flotillas of spruce logs towed by tug-boats to the pulp mill. Big ravens cavorted on the docks in search of tidbits from the fishing boats, but most amazing to my eyes were the great bald eagles, a dozen or more, that lounged or played in the tops of tall spruce while they waited to dive into the water for salmon. After a while I realized that Raven and Eagle still owned the town; the old-time tribal people belonged to the clans of Killer Whale, Grizzly Bear, and Wolf. Humans belonged to Halibut and King Salmon and Steel Head Trout clans too; surrounded by ocean, rivers, creeks, and rainwater, the watery clans seemed a safer bet. The totern poles often had small wan faces of “drowned men” carved between the major figures—I couldn’t swim and boats made me seasick—the small wan face might be me.
Once I started writing the novel, the depression lifted, but then came the terrible migraine headaches, worse than any I’d had since the tenth grade. I stayed in a darkened bedroom for eight hours at a time while the vertigo spun the bed. Fortunately, as the main character, Tayo, began to recover from his illness, I too began to feel better, and had fewer headaches. By this time, the novel was my refuge, my magic vehicle back to the Southwest land of sandstone mesas, blue sky, and sun. As I described the sandstone spring, the spiders, water bugs, swallows, and rattlesnakes, I remade the place in words; I was no longer on a dark rainy island thousands of miles away. I was home, from time immemorial, as the old ones liked to say to us children long ago.
I wasn’t just homesick for the sandstone cliffs and the sun; I missed the people and the storytelling, so I incorporated into the novel the old-time story about Hummingbird and Green Fly, who help the people purify their town to bring back the Corn Mother. The title of the novel, Ceremony, refers to the healing ceremonies based on the ancient stories of the Diné and Pueblo people. The two years I lived and taught for Diné College were important to my understanding of the healing ceremony’s relationship to storytelling. I was conscious of constructing the novel out of many different kinds of narratives or stories to celebrate storytelling with the spoken as well as the written word. I indulged myself with the old-time stories because they evoked a feeling of comfort I remembered from my childhood at Laguna.
During this time the wet climate did not agree with my younger son, Cazimir, who was twice hospitalized for acute asthma. Grandma Lillie, on a visit to Ketchikan, suffered a heart attack. At crisis times I completely forgot the novel, but afterward the need to return to the work became overwhelming. The novel was my escape, and I remember how I fretted on weekends because I was so anxious to keep working. I wasn’t sure what I was writing qualified as a “novel.”
It was supposed to be a funny story about Harley, the World War II veteran whose family tried but could not keep him away from liquor. But as I wrote about Harley’s desperate thirst for alcohol, it didn’t seem so funny after all, and I realized I wanted to better understand what happened to the war veterans, many of whom were survivors of the Battan Death March, cousins and relatives of mine who returned from the war and stayed drunk the rest of their lives. The war veterans weren’t always drunk, and they were home and available to us children when the other adults were busy at work. These men were kind to us children; they helped me train with my first horse. Even as a child I knew they were not bad people, yet something had happened to them. What was it?
As I wrote what I thought would be a comical short story about Harley and his drunken exploits, suddenly a friend of Harley’s—a character I never planned to have—Tayo, entered the story. I was perturbed because Tayo’s condition didn’t promise much comedy. Before I began the funny story about Harley, I twice tried to develop a young female protagonist to be the main character of a novel; but I found I was too self-conscious and failed to allow my fictional woman to behave independently of my image of myself. The notes and false starts and the short story beginnings that developed into Ceremony are in the collection of the Yale University library.
In February 1974, I interrupted work on the novel to go to Bethel, Alaska, for three weeks to be a visiting writer in the middle school. Eighty miles from the Bering Sea and with temperatures of fifty below zero, I still found Bethel preferable to Ketchikan because at least the frozen tundra had blue sky and miles of visibility in all directions. I remember the day I had lunch with my friend Rose Prince in Bethel and told her and her friend about my idea to have all things European invented by a tribal witch. I made notes then, but didn’t actually write the creation of the witchery section until June 1974 while I was at the Grand State College Writers Conference. I wrote it a few hours before my reading that night. That was the night I first met the poet James A. Wright. I was in a group of ten or twelve young poets that included Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Lawson Inada when we were introduced. Wright’s poetry had a profound effect on the work of all of us at the conference. He wrote to me after Ceremony was published, and we engaged in a wonderful correspondence that I cherish with the friendship we shared.
After I returned to Ketchikan from Bethel I stopped work on the novel long enough to write the short story “Storyteller.” Although I was only in Bethel for a month, the stories I heard while I was there, stories about the tundra and the Yupik people, left a powerful impression on me, and the stories I heard there refused to let me get back to work on Ceremony until I wrote a short story about the place and people of the Bethel area.
As I neared the end of the novel, I knew what I had to write; all that remained was to do it. I remember typing that last word, “Sunrise,” and feeling great relief and happiness that the novel and “the ceremony” were finished. I fussed around with the ending a bit more, but the manuscript was completed during the first week of July 1975, eight weeks before we left Ketchikan to move back to New Mexico.
I sent off two copies of the manuscript: one to Richard Seaver at Viking Press, and the other to Mei-Mei Berssenbruge, the poet. I still wasn’t quite sure if it was a novel, so I waited anxiously to hear from them. Mei-Mei called right away and was very excited. She said she especially liked the way I did not break the novel into chapters. “Oh no!” I thought while she was talking, “I knew I forgot something!” (I never should have neglected that course titled The Novel.) “Don’t worry,” I told myself, “you can call Seaver and tell him you’ll send a revised copy with the chapters, and you can do it in a day or two, easily.” But later, as I worked to break the novel into chapters, I realized it was not meant to be in chapters, so I left it as it was.
Richard Seaver called a few days later and expressed his satisfaction with the novel. He wanted to make only one editorial change. Instead of the more proper “as if,” I’d used the colloquial “like”—e.g., “He ran like a dog” vs. “He ran as if he were a dog.” I checked a dictionary and found that Norman Mailer was allowed to use “like” in his novels, so I initially refused to make the changes. I didn’t have an agent then, so when Dick Seaver hinted that if I didn’t take the editorial advice on this point, he and Jeanette Seaver “could not get behind the book,” I decided to agree to the change, in part because there were only about six instances where I used “like” instead of “as if.”
Jeanette Seaver was my editor during the production phase, and she managed to get the art department to use my father’s photograph of Mt. Taylor and old Acoma pueblo for the cover of the book jacket. Mt. Taylor, or Tśepina, is a sacred mountain central to much of the novel.
Ceremony was published in March 1977. The Seavers gave me a wonderful cocktail party at their Central Park West home. I was staying downtown on Water Street near Wall Street, and when it was time for me to find a cab to take me uptown, no one had warned me there were hundreds of cabs but none for hire because the Wall Street people had all the cabs under contract. So I had to walk in my party dress and high heel shoes to find a subway, and then I took the wrong line and had to walk a distance to Central Park West. When I arrived I was late and I was sweaty and my hair was messy; fortunately, the others had consumed enough wine by then and didn’t care.
Gus Blaisdel gave me a publication party at his bookstore, The Living Batch, in Albuquerque, where I was teaching at the University of New Mexico. No book tour for a first novel, but Geraldo Rivera and Good Morning America did a short piece on the novel at Marlon Brando’s suggestion. Brando read Ceremony , and later when I worked on a film project for him, he sometimes brought up obscure details from Ceremony that I hardly remembered; he had a photographic memory for anything he saw or read.
After Ceremony was published, some readers remarked on my male protagonist and many male characters, something of a novelty for female novelists in the English language. My childhood was spent in the Pueblo matriarchy, where women owned property, and children belonged to the mother’s clan. The story of the returning World War II veterans could only be told from a male point of view, so I did it without hesitation. Besides, I thought, male novelists write about female protagonists all the time, so I will write about men.
In this and in all things related to the writing of Ceremony, I feel I was blessed, watched over, and protected by my beloved ancestors, and the old ones who told me the stories—Grandma A’mooh, Aunt Susie, and Grandpa Hank. May the readers and listeners of this novel be likewise blessed, watched over, and protected by their beloved ancestors.
—LESLIE MARMON SILKO
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Anniversary edition (December 26, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 243 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143104918
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143104919
- Lexile measure : 890L
- Item Weight : 8.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.35 x 5.63 x 0.65 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #22,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #62 in Native American Literature (Books)
- #233 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #2,118 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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They fear the world.
They destroy what they fear.
Tayo, having been released from a Japanese prison camp and then a hospital in the United States, is “tired of fighting off the dreams and the voices; he was tired of guarding himself against places and things which evoked the memories.” Suffering from “battle fatigue” (what would be referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder today), Tayo determines his only chance at renewal is in the return to his home, the Laguna Reservation in the New Mexico. There he hopes the people he long has known, their customs and traditions, and the familiar environment will cure his ills which also include the death of his cousin during the war and his uncle’s death while Tayo was away. But it is not to a paradise that the approximately twenty-three-year-old, half white/half Native American young man returns. Poverty reigns. The land is arid and of little use, and the abuse and the unabated exploitation of Native American people continues as it has for years. Such is the world the reader enters with Tayo in Leslie Marmo Silko’s first novel, CEREMONY [(1977; 243 pp. in the Penguin Books Anniversary edition (2006) with a New Preface by the author and an Introduction by esteemed western author Larry McMurtry)].
Silko’s novel has been described as a masterpiece of Native American literature. The narrative she creates is rich and complex, demanding the reader’s attention. As her protagonist, Tayo’s story is told in a stream of consciousness style with frequent, sudden flashbacks between WWII, confinement in the prison camp, in hospital after the war, and life on the Laguna Reservation. Adding to the richness of her text are flashbacks to earlier battles Native Americans waged with sorcery and the Whites. Further intricacy is added to the chronicle as Tayo is besieged by voices of the War and from his deceased friends and family. Altogether, it makes for a fascinating portrait of a suffering individual looking for healing and regeneration.
Silko’s descriptions of life on and near the reservation are vivid. She vibrantly brings to the pages of the novel the paradoxical harshness of the environment and its unique beauty. Likewise, the beauty and nobility of the Laguna people is contrasted with the severity of their lives which can lead to helplessness, emptiness, and capitulation. Never does she romanticize Native American life or culture nor does she write seeking sympathy. Hers is a very objective and honest approach to her realistic characters and their existence.
Interspersed throughout the narrative of CEREMONY is beautiful verse often conveying stories or images which enhance the tale.
As CEREMONY progresses, Tayo realizes “his sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything.” He becomes obsessed with a mission: bringing to life his dead uncle’s determination to breed cattle which are hardier and “could survive drought and hard years” in the challenging, infertile conditions of the American Southwest. This also means finding and resecuring cattle stolen by white ranchers—a perilous undertaking. It is at this point in the chronicle in which Silko’s story-telling becomes somewhat more conventional and readers, having come to know Tayo quite fully, become even more involved with his fate and well-being.
As Silko brings the worlds of the mystical, the past, and the present of the story, where the “balances and harmonies [are] always shifting,” amazingly CEREMONY speaks to our “fragile” world of today “inside the belly of the wind” and the precipice upon which it teeters between healing and destruction in so many ways.
The concluding pages of CEREMONY taking place in “a restless, dry wind that felt as if it blew out of dusty years of the past; [and] …smelled of emptiness and loss” are filled with history, irony, betrayal, death, the discovery of new truths, strength, and fragile hope. Tayo’s journey is a fascinating one—one which the reader will be glad and feel enriched having traveled it with Leslie Marmo Silko.
In Tayo's search for, and finding the obstinate cattle, and bringing them back to their rightful home, he, like Hummingbird and Fly, bring the difficult to obtain tobacco so that the town can be purified in all four cardinal directions. Silko's telling is also a restoration of the earth, for when Tayo returns to his tribal land he finds it dry, barren, abused by mining, and atomic testing. The ceremony is both story and action; it is the weaving together that heals the land for there can be no action to find balance if the story does not work the magic to trap us in its web and move us to act.
A web is strong, yet extremely delicate and fragile. A web is a trap, a nest, and a home. The weaving of a web is also like fate, and like the weaving of our stories. We are woven into a life of connections of multiple directions and depths. Like the light of the sun, we are entangled in roots, branches, and enmeshed in the filaments of the web. We can honor the stories, and the voices; we can walk, write, and dream ourselves back into the land.
Like a web, a story is fragile. It must be held in reverence; its delicate thin silk, a quivering voice hanging for those who might appreciate its workmanship, its effort, and not break through unawares. The web is its own story. One connected to the spider, the earth, and the viewer who stops, with care, with patience and love to hear what is to be told. Silko's Ceremony, at times a difficult wandering story, like the wayward cattle, and Tayo himself, is also a web of good medicine, and well worth the ceremonial hogan story time. As old Ku'oosh said, "the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love."
Review by Carla M Paton
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„Ceremony“ ist der Erstlingsroman der Laguna Pueblo Autorin Leslie Marmon Silko. Ich habe ihn mehrmals gelesen, anfangs in der Originalsprache Englisch, dann in der deutschen Übersetzung (Titel: „Gestohlenes Land wird ihre Herzen fressen“) - sie ist hilfreich, wenn auch durch Druckfehler irritierend. Schließlich habe ich immer mal hinüber, herüber, durcheinander gelesen. Anfangs konnte ich eine Oberfläche wahrnehmen: die Handlung, so wie man als weißer Leser eben liest. Die Handlung ist einfach und scheint nicht einmal spannend: Tayo ist ein Halbblut-Indianer (unbekannter weißer Vater, indianische Mutter, die als Prostituierte zur Schande ihrer Familie wird, das vierjährige Kind zurücklässt und früh stirbt). Als mental schwer angeschlagener Veteran kommt Tayo aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Japan) zurück und nach Klinikaufenthalt in Los Angeles wieder zu seiner Familie in New Mexico, auf dem Land in der Gegend zwischen Gallup, Laguna, dem Puerco River und der Route 66, einer Gegend, aus der auch die Autorin stammt. Das Buch schildert Tayos langsame Heilung mithilfe des Medizinmannes Old Betonie. Außer dieser leidlich interessanten Oberfläche habe ich anfangs nichts wirklich verstanden. Als weißer Leser bin ich einer solchen Literatur noch nie begegnet, und es ist nicht so, dass man das Buch liest, sondern das Buch liest vielmehr den Leser. Indem Tayo Heilung findet und man lernt, in den Text einzudringen, scheint einem der Text allmählich kulturelle Verkrustungen aufzubrechen und wie eine unnütze Hautschicht abzustreifen: Noch immer hat das Buch mich nicht ganz zu meinem eigenen Kern gebracht, man darf es nicht zu früh weglegen. Auch Tayo, desorientiert bis in ein tiefes somatisches Durcheinander, muss sich durch zahllose „Übergänge“ kämpfen, bis er wieder er selbst ist.
Old Betonie, der Tayos Heilung voraus-, ja: zeichnet, indem er mit Gebetshölzern und einem Sandbild die Muster des Sternenhimmels, die Solstizien, die Bewegungen von Mond, Sonne und Menschen notiert, Old Betonie benutzt als Erklärung für die lange Dauer das Bild eines Jungen, der bei Bären aufwächst und von Menschen behutsam zu seiner eigenen Natur zurückgebracht wird. Die vielen lyrik-artigen Einschübe, mit denen die Autorin den Text aufbricht, empfindet man zunächst nur als fremdartig mythisch. Was ist das? Gebete? Ritualtexte? Gesänge? Beschwörende Gedichte? Mythische Berichte, in denen die Erzählhandlung auf anderer Ebene gespiegelt wird? Was der Autorin gelingt, ist ein Brückenschlag zwischen Magie und Gegenwart, indem sie weiße Mentalität definiert: „…seit mehr als zweihundert Jahren arbeiteten weiße Menschen daran, ihre innere Leere zu füllen; sie versuchten, die Hohlheit mit patriotischen Kriegen und mit überragender Technologie auszustopfen.“ Das geht bis hin zum Uranabbau in Tayos Gegend und zu nuklearen Versuchsreihen auf dem White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, die Tayos Großmutter in nächtlichen Schrecken versetzen. Silko definiert die von Weißen geschaffene atomare Bedrohung als „Schnittpunkt aller Lebewesen und der Erde“ – alles auf diesem Planeten und der Planet selbst sind vereint durch den Todeskreis potentieller atomarer Vernichtung. Auch dieses Muster hatte der alte Betonie in der Zeremonie gezeichnet.
Silko bleibt ohne Vorwurf, sie weiß um die Resilienz indianischer Mentalität, die sich heute allmählich wieder zeigt: „Only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people…. The plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clayfigure.“ Ja, was sind wir Weißen unter dem ganzen Überbau der Technisierung? Tayo nimmt schließlich die Kraft aus der Landschaft, seiner Verwurzelung: „The mountain remains, the love remains“, und Old Betonie weiß um Dauer wie um Veränderungen: „There are balances and harmonies always shifting, always necessary to maintain.“ Das Merkwürdigste ist, dass diese mythische Grundverhaftung nichts Schweres, Dunkles hat, sondern irritierend leicht, stellenweise fast bindungslos auftritt, als huschten einem Lichtreflexe durch den Kopf. Tayo hat zwei wortlos warme sexuelle Erfahrungen mit Frauen – die eine ist die Geliebte seines Onkels, die er später sucht und nicht mehr findet. Die andere ist mit einem indianischen Jäger verheiratet und verlässt Tayo, schmerzhaft für beide, um zu ihrer Familie zurückzukehren. Auch die Textstruktur hat dieses rätselhafte Schweben, was das Lesen nicht erleichtert. Bei aller Detailfreude von Naturerscheinungen, von Tayos physischen Zuständen – da ist so viel Duft von Pflanzen, Erde und Tieren, da klopft ihm das Herz, scheuert er sich die Knie auf, friert oder schwitzt er - bei aller Detailfreude bricht ein Handlungsstrang, ein Ort plötzlich ab und wird anders fortgesetzt. So heißt es einmal in einem einzigen Satz: „Die Veränderungen strebten in ihm in die verschiedensten Richtungen; das Maultier war blind und alt gewesen.“ Die Veränderungen beziehen sich dabei auf Tayo, nicht auf das Maultier. Ts’eh, die Frau des Jägers, steht irgendwann da wie aus dem Nichts, es heißt einfach „sie“ – erst viel später bekommt sie einen Namen.
Auf die Reflexhaftigkeit ebenso wie auf die Detailgenauigkeit des Textes muss man sich einlassen lernen – auf den Tiefenzusammenhang, das Wurzelwerk des Textes ebenso. Als Leser ist man mit diesem Buch einer wiederholten Selbsterforschung und Selbstvergewisserung ausgesetzt. Mir ist in der weißen Literatur kein Buch mit diesen speziellen Qualitäten bekannt, es ist eine Erfahrung, die durch nichts zu ersetzen ist.