Open Prompt: That's What She Said

Here's my first go at analyzing Ceremony before the entire class has discussed it.

2010. Palestinian American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said has written that “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Yet Said has also said that exile can become “a potent, even enriching” experience. Select a novel, play, or epic in which a character experiences such a rift and becomes cut off from “home,” whether that home is the character’s birthplace, family, homeland, or other special place. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the character’s experience with exile is both alienating and enriching, and how this experience illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

Alienation and exile can be a frightening experience that allows for character development in both the real and literary world; a scared new student put into a new high school may be shy at first but can overcome that fear and develop a new confidence in himself.  Likewise, the character Tayo in Ceremony by Leslie Silko feels estranged from Native American culture because he is part Indian and part white. Coming home from the trauma of World War II, after losing his brother figure, Rocky, Tayo realizes the rift in himself and struggles to put those two parts of him together.

Tayo's internal strife that the novel centers around comes from his surroundings yet starts in his roots. His mother is a prostitute and his father was a drunk that disappeared before he was born and by the age of four, his mother abandons him with his uncle, Josiah and menacing aunt, simply called 'Auntie'. While Josiah does his best to incorporate him into the family, Auntie distances him from her son, Rocky, and herself, hating the fact that he is half white. This is his first conscious experience of being alienated from his culture, as he recalls the silent truth between him and Auntie as a child, an unwritten code that Rocky would be favored and he would not be noticed. The alienation grows even further as Tayo comes back from World War II, where he experiences the pleasures of being an American. Tayo comes to the epiphany that it was not him that the girls and booze was serving, but simply the uniform that he wore. Now, Tayo has no where to turn, his brother figure, Rocky has died during war and as he was away, Josiah had also died. Being half Indian, Auntie refuses to accept him and without his uniform, he is nothing to whites. 

Eventually, Tayo does find a way to heal the two parts of him; by doing a ceremony. While there are no specific instructions other than being told that the ceremony changes to accommodate with the times, Tayo finds  a way to bridge the gap in himself through a series of events. The series of events, objects and people are meant to allow him accept certain things in his life that he has not and embrace a part of himself. He falls in love with Ts'eh, also known as Montano, symbolizing his love for the wild and clues him in on the fact that the ceremony actually exists. Once he begins to believe in it, animals also begin to appear to help him, making Tayo acknowledge the fact that he also has a deep belief in the mythical teachings that whites disdain. By the end of the summer, he is able to return the missing cattle that Josiah had bought; thus letting Auntie accept him into the family. Finally, he completes the ceremony by watching the death of his friend, Harley, accepting that life completes itself in a circle and death is the end of it. By the end of the novel, Tayo is able to return home, accepted into his family and community, completed and whole.

The rift that Tayo has between himself is important to the novel because it comes to symbolize the many things that Silko is trying to say; its not just a division of Tayo but also representative of the rift between of two cultures as well as the different generations in Native American culture. Having Tayo complete the ceremony, Silko proves her point that there are problems created by the intrusion of American culture but it can be eventually cured.

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My right wrists hurts so bad because i was typing so fast.  : D