Native American Literature: History Revisited in Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony”
Native American Literature: History Revisited in Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony”

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s (1948) – an outstanding American writer’s - novel Ceremony (1977) in an attempt to reveal the author’s innovative approach to Tradition, her treatment of the contemporary Indian identity problem. In her writing Silko breaks the stereotypes of the portrayal of Native Americans. In the novel the Indian stands out not as a “wild, brutal, uncivilized, and soulless renegade”, but as a human being who has lost his conceptual identity due to the centuries old denigration of Indian culture, their discrimination, and constant “westernization”. Silko considers the question of what it means to be Indian in contemporary America. The writer provides a critique of white colonizers who isolated themselves from the natural world turning it into a convenient object for their needs. The Indian world outlook is nonanthropocentric and devoid of dichotomies. Individual is considered an equal part of the whole. The Indians have a holistic and ecologically-oriented approach to existence. The material and the spiritual are two sides of the same reality. Silko stresses the importance of tribal languages, land, and community to the formation, or recovery, of the Indian identity, the necessity to recover Tradition which has to be revisited to fit the reality of the ever-changing world. In Silko’s understanding, individual identity is not a static, isolated phenomenon, not a given. It is rather shaped through relations, transgression, reflections, and the exploration of a human being and the world. In this respect, life is a continuous growth, change, and new insights. Silko encourages to recreate the proper order of the universe - a balance and harmony between its all elements, all forms of life, as all evil stems from the destruction of this balance.

• Details
• Contents