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Title: Ceremony (Contemporary American Fiction Series) by Leslie Marmon Silko ISBN: 0-14-008683-8 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: March, 1988 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.57 (100 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: It's a womderfull novel that make's you live the ceremony.
Comment: BOOK REVIEW Ceremony By: Leslie Marmon Silko (Penguin Books, 1977. 262 pp.)
Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony is a wonderful novel about how some people fight to rescue and preserve their culture. Tayo, the protagonist, is a young Native American who has come back home to Laguna Pueblo after participating in World War II. In this war the Japanese imprisoned he and his cousin Rocky but only Tayo escaped alive. Rocky was beaten until he died. Seeing his cousin die in front of him plus the traumatic experience of fighting a war that he doesn't understand affected him mentally and physically. The nightmares, the weakness, and to vomit at any time made him refuse the white people's cultural influence and begin healing process searching his cultural roots. After the war veteran Native Americans earned some kind of "respect" and equality with white people but Tayo learned this vanished when he removed the uniform. He wants to recover his religion, the relationship his people have with nature and everything that reinforces his cultural identity. For this purpose he starts a ceremonial process in which he may discover those things that are really important in life. Also he will discover that to survive cultural extinction each person must make changes and adapt to the new social environment without losing their cultural essence. This novel is a real ceremony that makes you be part of it. In some moments you can feel the suffering, anguish, and despair of the characters. Each part makes the reader live the situation from the mind and soul of Tayo, the protagonist. The themes developed in this book make me think of the way many people around the world are losing their culture and the importance of it. The great talent of Silko makes this novel a masterpiece. She uses innovative writing techniques that place this novel in high level. She also includes in this novel some Native religious elements that give a magical and mysterious atmosphere. For example, it is really interesting the way the author intercepts some poems through the novel. These poem are prayers and stories equivalent to Biblical tales. Each poem presents many situations that help to create the scenario and the mood for this narration. I consider this work as a perfect example of excellent writing. I think this book a magnificent and rewarding work, and Silko, as a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, has an excellent perception of the reality of her people. For this reason I proudly recommend this novel to every person who wanted to know other cultures and to those who wanted to find their cultural essence.
By: José Miguel Garcés Rivera/ Expository Writing (ENGL 3231)/ University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez Campus
Rating: 5
Summary: Ceremony - an insight into Native American Culture
Comment: It is difficult to write about a culture without making it sound better than it is in real life. Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American, takes the Native American culture and fairly evaluates it in her book Ceremony in a way that all can begin to understand the struggles that her culture has been experiencing for many years, from both outside and within, due to the great pressures of the surrounding white culture and society.
Tayo, a young Laguna Pueblo male, is forced to see some of the many horrors created by the whites when he is recruited to fight under the United States flag. During the war Tayo witnesses many sights and horrors that deeply affect him. He is not able to cope with the ruthless killings and wasteful behavior of the whites and his mental health quickly declines. Leslie Marmon, the author, portrays Tayo as a weak and helpless young man at the beginning of the story, but this vision soon changes due to the authors vivid descriptions and deep thinking, the reader begins to realize that there is much more to Tayo than a weak Indian. Within the first few days of fighting, Tayo's falls ill mentally and is sent to a mental hospital where he stays for the remainder of the war and some time afterward. It is here that readers begin to see that there is more to Tayo's unusual illness than just sickness. Silko begins description to the reader about how the Native American culture is influenced, for the worse, by white civilization.
Many of the difficulties faced by Native Americans people are described throughout Ceremony, including the intermixing of the White and Native American culture. Tayo is a half-breed, half Native American and half white American. His mother was a Laguna Pueblo, but his father was a white male from outside the reservation. IT was quite common at the time of Tayo's birth for the women of the reservation to be used as objects, rather than being treated as human equals with feeling and lives to live. Silko uses Tayo's mother to represent those who try to leave the ways of the Native American culture to find a better living elsewhere. She is unaware of the unwritten rules and is no longer accepted either on the reservation or by the white populations. Being a half-breed Tayo received the same treatment from both cultures. He was still an Indian as far as the whites were concerned, so he was not accepted or wanted anywhere. Silko uses many other characters throughout the story, not to just represent on individual, but to represent the struggles facing the Native American population as a whole.
Silko spends much of Ceremony, showing that everyone has a place in society, but they cannot necessarily choose their place of acceptance. She also demonstrates through the use of her characters that there is a home for everyone within the depths of a culture where the individual finds it to be comfortable.
Rating: 3
Summary: It's about death.
Comment: The point of the book is that an individual Indian sees himself not as individual like the people in white society but as a member of a people. The main character could not define himself as psychologically distinct from his culture. He was sad because of what he saw in war but he could only define this sadness in terms of how Indians saw the death of humanity. The only thing that brought the main character out of his shell shocked vomiting state of mind was a story about how it was the Indian culture itself that set the evil destroying white culture against it through witchcraft. The story came from a medicine man and it empowered the Indian. Either way everything around the Indian spelled disaster because destroying white society had defeated the Indians. His life was empty and the world is doomed. This is not romantic or uplifting, only sad.
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