Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony as a Narrative of Trauma
Abstract:
Leslie Mormon Silko’s landmark novel Ceremony was praised for representing cross-cultural sensibility and raising fundamental issues of identity, survival and the political rights of Native Americans. The fundamental difference in the world-view that characterised the cultural contact with Europe was fatal for the culture of indigenous people as it caused trauma among the survivors. The present paper attempts to read the novel in the light of trauma theory. Trauma theory argues that disastrous experiences of the past keep on haunting individuals and societies in the present. The essential nature of trauma is that the person who undergoes it has not proper memory of the event or events that caused the trauma. Silko’s novel thematizes the trauma of Native Americans as they struggle with their past and present. The novel affirms the restorative power of Indian stories to cure cultural trauma and seeks a space for Native American imagination in the American literary space. Silko narrates the cultural trauma of the protagonist Tayo, a war veteran who returns to his native land suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. He attempts to politically and socially regenerate the Indians and galvanizes his visions and confused perceptions to mediate the issues of self and society.
Key Words: Cultural Trauma, Identity, Fragmentation, Race, Colonialism, Oppression, Cultural erasure
Trauma studies, an offshoot of psychology, is chiefly concerned with memory and the role it has in forming cultural identities. These studies analyse extreme experiences as represented in literature and art. Theoretical frameworks that inform this criticism are psychoanalytic, poststructural, postcolonial and other sociocultural theories. This theory attempts to analyse how intense traumatic experiences that individuals and a society at large experienced in the past keeps on influencing the present. Trauma studies focus on the cultural significance of individual and collective trauma. Trauma theory attributes to fragmentation of self, which is a postcolonial and postmodern condition, deep psychological reasons and causes. It is analytical in approach and focuses on the complex process by which the self and society deals with traumatic experiences and how language plays a significant role in comprehending the intensely unsettling experiences of the past. Ruth Leys analyses trauma as “fundamentally a disorder of memory” (2). The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud laid the foundation for Trauma theory. Cultural critics like Judith Herman and Cathy Caruth are two significant theoreticians who inaugurated the theory as a significant tool for literary analysis in the 1990s. Relying on psychological theories these and other theoreticians developed a critical model that envisages a severely unsettling experience that interferes with the process of communication and renders meaning extremely unpredictable. Suffering turns out to be unpresentable, as every attempt to define meaning meets with failure. Critical conversations based on trauma theory thus focus on how traumatic experience operates within the domain of self and its struggle with language and representation.
The aspect of remembrance is significant in trauma theory. The event that caused extreme pain and suffering is not as traumatic as the remembrance of it through narrating the event again and again. It is in this act of repetition trauma operates. The original even is renarrated, reinterpreted, and recreated again and again in the conscious mind. Freud terms this as the talking cure or abreaction that results in the release of repressed emotions and reliving the past experience is crucial in this process of curing. Freud and Breuer explain that a latency period expires between the original event and traumatic consciousness. This temporal distance between event and the consciousness grasping the event as traumatic delay the effects of the past. (Breuer and Freud 192). The patient repeatedly relives the feelings and it results in traumatic neurosis; the attempt is to master unpleasant feelings. Freud says in his work Beyond the Pleasure Principle that the patient, through dreams, “masters the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (37). Freud points out that the patient cannot remember all of what is repressed within the mind and may miss essential aspects of the experience, that is the reason why the patient relives the experience as an event that happens in the present rather than something happened in the past (19). Traumatic memory is not normal memory. It has to be shaped into a normal memory through narration and reliving in the present. Since that does not happen the reliving of trauma goes on ad infinitum.
Trauma studies focus on how individual and collective trauma impact memory and identity. Psychoanalytical theories are employed to study emotional suffering and fragmentation of self. Individual and societies mauled by experiences of the past try to renegotiate their present by coming to terms with the past and negotiate loss and disruption of the self. Trauma theory in cultural studies links the personal world of an individual with historical events and experiences. Scholarship in the 1990 spearheaded by cultural theorist like Cathy Caruth, Soshana Felman and Geoffrey Hartman applied trauma concepts to the study of literature and society. Focusing on the inherent contradictions of language and expression these critics offered incisive analysis of how trauma was narrated in literature. Michelle Balaev writes:
In the traditional trauma model pioneered by Cathy Caruth, trauma is viewed as an event that fragments consciousness and prevents direct linguistic representation. The model draws attention to the severity of suffering by suggesting the traumatic experience irrevocably damages the psyche. Trauma is an unassimilated event that shatters identity and remains outside normal memory and narrative representation. Fragmentation or dissociation is viewed as the direct cause of trauma, a view that helps formulate the notion of transhistorical trauma, which suggests that trauma’s essential or universal effects on consciousness and narrative recall afford the opportunity to connect individual and collective traumatic experiences. (Richter, 363)
So trauma represented in literature is not direct. Trauma studies view the linguistic expression as an attempt to express the inexpressible or the unpresentable, because the event is not readily available to the memory; it evades memory and at the same time constantly make attempts to enter memory. A psyche damaged by individual or collective trauma defines the fragmented identity and subjective experience. Balaev explains:
The event is absent in normal consciousness but preserved just beyond the limits of understanding in a timeless, wordless state and continues to inflict pain on the psyche. Trauma’s strange absence yet ghost-like presence in consciousness, its lack of normal integration into memory and narration, casts a shadow that indirectly points toward trauma’s meaning and the truth of the past. (363)
Judith Herman views that: “Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptation to life. Unlike commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death”(33)
Trauma theory was essentially based on Freud’s study of individual hysteria and neurosis, reworked later to explain historical trauma of societies. Key aspect of trauma for an individual is dissociation of ego caused by the process of remembering an extreme event and this is applied to explain historical experiences of societies ravaged by colonialism, conquest and systemic oppression. Freud in his later work Moses and Monotheism (1939) developed the theory of historical trauma to explain the cultural psychology and history of Jewish people. This study is informative for trauma theory as it engages with collective trauma of people whose identities are shaped by experiences that are culturally transmitted. Caruth argues that trauma, both collective and individual, evades conscious appropriation. Past has to be performed and reenacted in contemporary terms. Historical understanding thus does not become ‘straight forwardly referential’ (Caruth, 11). Traumatic experience comes back to haunt individual later on that bears no similarity to the experience of the original event. The later encounter with the event after the lapse of a latent period has dissociated the sensibility of the individual. The fragment self tries to comes to terms with past and its role in the memory. Fixing a stable identity is possible only if the individual comes into terms with the past. The matter becomes extra-complex when trauma is culturally transmitted. Societies ravaged by conquest and systemic oppression transmit the memory of past from one generation to another. Native American, postcolonial societies, and Dalit people, all carry the culturally transmitted burden of the past with them.
The original inhabitants of American continent, the Native Americans, or Indians as they are called after the territorial misrecognition of Columbus, relegated to the margins of American society for centuries and who became the worst victims of the trauma caused by colonialism and cultural erasure, galvanized a cultural renaissance in the 1960s through empowerment movements which provided the momentum for the emergence of a powerful literary movement. Native American renaissance in literature is often associated with the Scott Momoday’s House Made of Dawn (1968). The writings of Momoday, James Welch and Leslie Mormon Silko reached a large audience and soon became topics for study in colleges and universities. Interest in Native American culture and the historical condition of these people became an academic discourse with these writings. Silko’s Ceremony received the most critical acclaim of the many books published by the Native American writers during the period. Critics found in the work a unique blend of European Narrative tradition and Native American storytelling and the narrative was able to bridge the boundaries of gender and culture. Silko was praised for her cross-cultural ability and her “dual-sensibility”. The novel raised fundamental questions about identity, culture and ironically contrasts the American myth of conquest with the Native American lot and highlights the traumatic encounter between two world views in opposition with each other. Historian Richard Slotkin in his work Regeneration through Violence: The Myth of the American Frontier, terms this opposition as “fatal opposition” (12), as it was utterly damaging to a whole world view upon which the natives organised their culture and society.
The American mythos refers to a notion of an American narrative that has shaped the concept of a nation. In Ceremony Silko critically revisits the concept from the viewpoint of a Native American. The fatal opposition between two world views that caused irreparable trauma for the indigenous people were not racial enmity between conqueror and the conquered; rather it was the conflict between two irreconcilable perspectives, what Rachel Stein terms as “a struggle between different cultural orientations toward the natural world” (Stein 1). The Native American notions of land use were incompatible with the European concept that land is something that one could own. Stein analyses “when Europeans arrived in America, two conflicting stories about the human relationship to nature were thrown into confrontation, and the European story of human dominion over nature authorized white settlers’ ruthless subjugation of the Indian peoples, who viewed themselves as kin to the spirits of the land” (23). The fundamental difference in the world view of the settlers and natives resulted in cultural alienation of the former from the American landscape. Silko’s novel thematizes this contestation between the two cultures.
Traumatic events unsettle Tayo adds more distress to his troubled identity of being a mixed race. Tayo suffers from post-traumatic stress related to his war time experiences. He tries to overcome his trauma by reconnecting with his Native American past through cultural reintegration making use of ceremonies and rituals. We find Tayo unable to look at light and he vomits a lot when he talks about his wartime experiences. He is at his auntie’s house. She raised him after his mother died. His mother had a relationship with a white man and Tayo was born out of that relationship. But he never knew anything about his father. The unknown identity of his father is a constant source of trauma in Tayo. Tayo has this feeling of not belonging to either culture and felt like an outcast in his native place. Auntie had hoped that her son would become a great success in life. She wanted Tayo to remain in her house for ever as a servant. Tayo was fully controlled by auntie and he was allowed to enlist in the army so that he would safely take home her son Rocky who had already enlisted. Rocky died in the war which becomes another traumatic event for him. In his narrative interpretation of Rocky’s death Tayo tries to overcome the trauma by blaming himself for his death, an event which was actually outside his control. Tayo is unable to claim the experiences that determine his life and struggle to fix them in his memory as normal events in the past. He has to keep on attempting to come to terms with his past, and he fails continuously. The effect of trauma is such that Tayo is not able to rationally approach his past. He blames himself for the drought in his native land because he believes that he cursed the rain while he was in the warfront. The terrible depression to which he falls, the absolute lack of rational thinking, which accounts for Tayos’ illogical assumptions about the causality of his condition, all point towards the traumatic nature of Tayo’s condition. The course of action he takes to overcome his condition is to reconnect with his Native American culture, and a critical appraisal of colonial historical experiences the Indians were subjected to for centuries. He hopes that through enacting ceremonies and rituals he would be psychologically refreshed. Tayo knows that something is wrong in his condition and he initiates a process of curing, but his lack of logical grasp of the exact sources of his suffering causes further agony and conflict. Tayo’s health is temporarily restored by a local medicine man. The old man’s methods prove ineffective in addressing Tayo’s psychological conflicts. He becomes an alcoholic and when his trauma intensifies he relies on narcotics. His war experience keeps on haunting him but later he realises the source of his suffering is much deeper than post traumatic stress disorder associated with war, a condition that he was diagnosed with by white doctors. His auntie’s husband lends a helping hand and takes him to another medicine man Betonie, which proves to be a defining moment in Tayo’s life. The Navajo curer is able to combine multicultural elements into his ceremony and cures Tayo.
Betonie initiates Tayo into a historical understanding of his past and thus reconfigures his identity. The disastrous colonial encounter and the destruction of native culture and ways become the topics of discussion. Tayo is now able to deeply see the sources of his suffering, the historical situatedness of his self, how his self is deeply embedded in social and cultural factors. Earlier he blamed himself for his suffering, now he is able to locate the socio-cultural markers that define his identity and experience. As part of the ceremony that Betonie initiates Tayo to seek atonement for what he believes as his doing, the death of his uncle Josiah. While he was in the warfront he had a hallucinatory vision of Uncle Josiah being executed by a firing squad and when he reached home he found out that Uncle Josiah was indeed killed. Josiah met with death while in search of his lost cattle. Tayo feels guilty because he was not able to help him in need; instead he was fighting the battle for the white men. Uncle Josiah had initiated him to traditional native ways and its spiritual dimension and showed him the way to cultural boundary crossing which Josiah found essential for reconfiguring native identity and culture, an act integral to the very survival of Indians. He taught him how to respect the land and the need to teach humanity Native American wisdom. Curing the land is very much at the heart of the project of correcting the civilizational errors of mankind; it is not just about finding a solution to the pathetic plight of the indigenous people. It is about the American land and every race is in it; only by addressing the problems of the collective humanity Native American condition could be improved. As part of his atonement Tayo searches for Josiah’s lost cattle. His quest is a symbolic act that would give his curing a dimension of intercultural integration, a path Josiah had shown. Successful completion of this mission is essential for completing the ceremony. Tayo searches for the cattle in the mountains. For the first time he appreciates the beauty of nature. He thinks about the innumerable natives who had wandered in the place. The journey connects Tayo with his land and for the first time in his life he feels an emotional belonging. He is able to find the cattle and frees them and narrowly escapes being caught by white men. With the help of woman named Ts’eh he meets during his journey Tayo is finally able to bring the cattle to his family ranch. But the ceremony is not complete. Tayo’s relationship with Ts’eh flourishes into a deep one; with the help of her Tayo learns to appreciate the value of nature and regains his Native American sensibility. He is now deeply connected to his land and culture.
The old and the new, the ancient stories of the pueblo people and the stories from main stream culture, are combined critically in the novel. Contact with Euro-Americans had irrevocably entered into the Native American tradition and true to its story telling mode present merges in the past and is renewed through each rendering. Mixing the old and new is a Native American tendency, one that clearly marks out the very nature of its story telling. Tayo narrates:
The fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants – all of creation suddenly had two names: and Indian name and a white name…Now the feelings were twisted, tangled roots, and all the names for the source of this grown were buried under roots, and the all the names for the source of this growth were buried under English words, out of reach. And there would be no peace and the people would have no rest until the entanglement had been unwound to the source (68-69).
Ceremony, affirms the restorative power of Indian stories to cure cultural trauma: “the only cure/ I know/ is a good ceremony/ that’s what she said” (12). The multilayered novel is interspersed with poems like the one quoted above and becomes “frame poems” surrounding a contemporary plot. These tribal story-poems contain traditional legends about threats to natural world and to the Indians. The central plot of the novel is Tayo’s quest to save his tribe and end the drought and the stories contained in the frame poems acts as comments that illuminate the central plot. Thus the poems act as an interpretive framework for the plot; the plot and the poems together form a circular narrative where ancient wisdom sheds light on the conditions of the present and conditions of the present alter the meanings of ancient wisdom. The chief discourse that blends together the narrative is ultimately an ecological one, one that goes on to assert the interconnections between the spirit of nature and human life and society.
Tayo belongs to Laguna reservation, a place plagued by insecurity and doubt, constantly pressurized by a hostile dominant culture that keeps on undermining tribal traditions and cultural identities. Tayo returns from World War II as a traumatized person. In the war Tayo was unable to kill Japanese soldiers because “they looked too familiar” (7), he saw his uncle Josiah in them. The inability is narrated thus: “Tayo could not pull the trigger. The fever made him shiver, and the sweat was stinging his eyes and he couldn't see clearly; in that instant he saw Josiah standing there; the face was dark from the sun, and the eyes were squinting as though he were about to smile at Tayo” (8). Rocky was not able to convince him. Tayo was admitted in the hospital. He suffered bouts of panic attacks accompanied by disturbing visions and feels responsible for the death of his uncle in the reservation. After reaching home he feels that his actions caused drought in the reservation. Troubled by guilt and confusion Tayo seeks redemption using the same madness that has caused such tension in his mind. The cure that Tayo seeks is precisely the cure that his community wants in order to untangle traditional Indian vision from the muddle of native wisdom and Euro-American concepts. Tayo’s identity itself is a muddle caused by the ambiguity of his half-breed status. Because he is of mixed descent his status is that of a ‘cultural nobody’, denied acceptance in both worlds. Tayo’s healing of his trauma is the central narrative prop that stitches together the other incidents in the novel. In the process of healing he uses his cultural confusion and ambiguous social position as tools for negotiating the relations between Indian and white cultures and he attempts ceremonial reconstruction of the traditional Laguna relationship to the land, a relationship got severed long ago with the fatal cultural contact with Europe. His perception of the fatal consequences of native and white cultural contact enables him enter into a mediation with the present condition of his community and address contemporary issues like drinking and lack of political space in the wider American society. The cultural renaissance discourse the Native American writers initiated after 1960s aims at addressing the political and social issues faced by the Native Americans more than the issues of self. Tayo’s attempt ultimately is about politically and socially regenerating the Indians and he galvanizes his visions and confused perceptions to mediate the issues of self and society. Following a discussion of displaced peoples and the issue of Indian drinking and war veterans, Tayo tries to vomit out everything , “all the past, all his life”(168). After this the text develops an Indian parable about the land and spiritual reconstruction. In an attempt to establish balance with the past Silko presents native myths and shift the perception of the readers to the issues of identity and shows how important it is to mythically recapture the lost sense of identity, in typical Native American way – through ceremonies – to renegotiate the political and sociological condition of the natives. The text develops an Indian parable about the land and spiritual destruction. Tayo’s realization of the extreme violence inherent in European civilization, a realization he got from his war experience, clarifies his perception with regard to the course of action needed. Tayo’s ceremonial healing curated by medicine man Betonie evokes in him visions that alter the political equation between the whites and natives and re-establish the relationship between the tribe and the land. Tayo’s creation and reevaluation of meaning is the very essence of a dynamic process of self-correction and social re-integration. Silko initiate the discourses of truth, reality and knowledge for the wider American audience for an increased appreciation of Native world view by non-native audiences. Tayo’s trauma is deeper than war trauma. It is associated with the cultural experiences of the indigenous and hybrid races in America. The trauma associated with the colonial encounter defines the present condition of these people. Their concern is political survival by negotiating the power equations of the modern state. There is correlation between individual trauma and historical trauma. Tayo’ attempt to reclaim the cattle evoke the collective desire of the community than an individual effort to reformation. He is curing the community more than himself. Symbolically his actions represent the reclaiming of native land and asserting a Native American identity.
The novel asserts the power of the past to cause suffering and that the way to overcome the past is to resort to storytelling, an act the Native Americans have been successfully using since time immemorial to cure the individuals and strengthen the society. The suffering of Tayo is a result of his inability to see clearly the context of his suffering. It is not available to his conscious memory. It is not formally registered in his mind. Traumatic incidents lie outside the memory of the individual. Only through inscribing it into the memory trauma could be cured. With the help of Betonie he succeeds in capturing the memory of his culture and the sources of his suffering. His improvisation of self while dealing with his cultural trauma by engaging both with the narrative discourses of the past and the present takes us readers to a vigorous interaction with multiple layers of meaning. The essence of the Native American storytelling tradition is caught by not assiduously following any single cultural imperative but by essentially recognizing the Intertextual nature of reality. “The ebb and flow of narrative rhythm in the novel creates an event in the process of telling about event. The entire process is ceremonial, and one learns how to experience it ceremonially by achieving various kinds of knowledge attained not through logical analysis but through narrative processes that have their own epistemological basis”(Jahner, 39). As we read diverse perspectives come together and evolve into a pattern where meaning is not fixed. The temporality of meaning suggests the ever evolving nature of human consciousness, experience, history and identity. Ceremony does not convey a fixed sense; instead it problematises fixities by weaving different narratives into a coherent yet fluid pattern.
The meditative mythic discourse in the novel that cures Tayo’s trauma sets itself against the sociological discourse that characterises the epistemological imperatives of western world view. The mythic ‘way of knowing’ that characterises the native sensibility employed by Tayo does not negate the other modes of knowing. Tayo fashions the native sensibility as one refashioned and improvised enough to cure his trauma, albeit for the time being. Survival is all about negotiating the cultural coordinates of the contemporary American society and the mythic past. Elaine Jahner writes:
Through the narrative events of the novel, protagonist and reader gradually learn to relate myth to immediate action, cause to effect; and both reader and protagonist learn more about the power of story itself. Discovering the source and location of traumatic memories by aligning them with the physical location plays a significant part in Tayo’s healing process. The reader seeks to learn not only what happens to Tayo but how and why it happens. The whole pattern of cause and effect is different from most novels written from a perspective outside the mythic mode of knowledge (44).
Rather than offering a single mode of perception Silko offers the readers to view both the European discourse with its epistemology and Native American sensibility. She does not blend them or highlight their fundamental oppositional nature, but finds a space for the latter in the larger scheme of things. In a society where the imperatives of the present renders insignificant any deep cultural rooting emotions do not find a place unless they become a fad and fetish. The perspective offers thus is outside the mythic mode of knowing. It’s all about finding a place for Native American sensibility in the American society rather than a phenomenal assertion of the essential nature of a discourse ravaged by a disastrous cultural contact.
To seek a counter-discourse of the dominant narration by fashioning selves out of the ravages of historical trauma, Ceremony problematises both tradition and contemporary realities. Both Laguna and Euro-American worldviews combine to cure the trauma. The novel demonstrates that individual trauma and cultural trauma are connected and the specific cultural landscape the individual occupies is integrally related to the whole experience. The fundamental schism that characterises Native American engagement with European epistemology acts as the central organizing principle that runs through the entire narration. Two world views, in opposition with each other, need to be negotiated in a cultural space ruled by mass media and the imperatives of the space do not allow a regaining of cultural essence even politically. To gather Native American sensibility around the emotion of culture and identity has to negotiate a cultural tendency that fashions selves around the contingencies of the present rather than around a sense of deep cultural affiliation. Native American literary renaissance owes its emergence to the necessity to mediate Native American identity within the postmodern cultural space. The imperatives shift to political and social survival along with issues of identity. Acceptance of history and reconciling with past is essential for the crafting of a new self and identity. Narrative improvisation to cure trauma thus has to enter the cultural coordinates of the present than the past. The protagonist of the novel enters into the new world and brings in elements sufficient from the past which are not his real memories, but need to be reconfigured as memories because these are the forces that determine his condition. The final storytelling to the medicine man K’oosh serves as the act of integrating key elements of his cultural past into his functional memory. Tayo addresses his trauma by locating the sources and aligning them, at least for the time being, with his functional memory. He locates his trauma in the source and reconnects with past. The mythical recapturing of the past through ceremony does not act as a fundamental shift from the cultural imperatives of the present, rather it fuses and blends and finds comparisons with cultural practices of the present. "His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything" (125-6). In the true Native American way each ceremonial story telling refreshes the present by incorporating new elements. Here Tayo incorporates to the current of tribal life history the experiences related to the troubled colonial encounter. Tayo’s trauma becomes an occasion for generating new content about the relationship between the self and the world. New perceptions and historical redefinitions can redefine the place of the Native American in the larger American society.
Works Cited