Language: Its Ability to Colonize and Decolonize

In her essay, Bird discusses her strive to decolonize the mind of the native person.  And, through her dissection of Ceremony, she deems Silko’s work as a “decolonizing text.”  Certainly, in her essay and in Silko’s novel, language is a significant topic; in its many forms and contexts, it can serve as a tool of exclusion, assimilation, community, and liberation.  From talk of mixed speech to writing syntax, Bird’s essay includes an exploration of language as a multipurpose device.

                Bird shares in her essay her sense of alienation that language has personally placed on her in her past.  Raised with only an English tongue, she often felt “illiterate,” as she describes, in the presence of her people. Even more specifically, she has even felt segregated from her own multilingual mother:

 

Internalizing the colonizer's terms regarding the axiom of our Otherness and obvious difference, she spoke Indian around me only when she wanted to exclude me. (Bird 1)

 

Furthermore, she later emphasizes that the ability to converse in native tongue is valued, especially during special community events.  However, even at a time of unity, Bird has housed mixed emotions:

               

Thus, my memories of wakes, funerals, marriages, giveaways, ceremonies and name-givings are remembered as emotional moments that inscribed both my feelings of inclusion and participation and, paradoxically, of estrangement in not knowing my native language. (Bird 7)

 

She offers a fine example of this found in Ceremony, when Tayo is visited by the medicine man, Ku’oosh, and is bombarded with his older dialect, shamefully lost for words in the appropriate language. (Silko 32)  Truly, speaking English was a route to assimilation, a catering to the “hegemonic phase” that Bird explains they are living in the midst of; and, in return, that lead to an alienation from history, culture, family.  However, just like Bird, Tayo still felt that hint of “inclusion and participation” with every story that he heard, as it was the storytelling that gradually healed him.  Later on, perhaps his progress is evident:

The sickness had receded into a shadow behind him, something he saw only out of the corners of his eyes, over his shoulder. (Silko 96)      

 

                When it comes to language’s ability to decolonize, Silko could very well be the poster child for conveying this in such a way that evokes empathy. Bird identifies Silko’s authorship strategies in Ceremony, like the narrative’s nonlinear timeline, sentence structure, sentence fragments, spoken speech, etc.  Such literary tactics construct the novel’s major theme of interconnectedness; Bird even dissects a few sentences from Ceremony and concludes that:

 

The subordinate clause is dependent on the sentence in the same way that meaning is also dependent on the story that is to follow. (Bird 3)

 

She also mentions that “sentences often begin with conjunctions.” (Bird 3) Indeed, Bird stresses Silko’s demonstration of how every segment contributes to the whole.  On a small scale, Silko represents this in the grammar, the diction, the choppy storyline; when examining from the literal to the metaphorical, however, Silko’s play with such literary devices assemble a metaphor for the Indians’ dearly valued theory of life.  Just as every unit of life is carefully spun into the earth’s web, as the idea of circularity is often described, Silko strings every word of her book similarly.

 

                Lastly, Bird explains that she gains a “liberating recognition” from Ceremony: 

 

Only in the moments when we are able to name the source of our deepest pain can we truly be said to be free of the burdens they represent. (Bird 2)

 

In Ceremony, Silko identifies these burdens, which just may provide the same “liberating recognition” for other native readers.  Furthermore, because the text is in a language that both the colonized and the colonizers can read, it leaves every reader to “see the world differently.” 

 

This is not, after all, a native language text accessible to only those who speak in a particular native language, but is given novelistic form in a work that is written in the English language and is available to all, native and non-native alike, who speak in this language. (Bird 4)      

 

By publishing Ceremony, Silko published the mass sentiment of her people, thus freeing their minds, and maybe even the “white man’s,” from “hegemonic discourse,” and entering them into the process of decolonization.

Works Cited:

Bird, Gloria. “Towards a Decolonization of the Mind and Text 1: Leslie Marmon Silko's ‘Ceremony’” Wicazo Sa Review, 9, 2 (Autumn, 1993) : 1-8.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gloria Bird article summary

Noticing that her fellow natives have not just been colonized, but the minds of her people have been colonized, Gloria Bird focuses her article on her search for a method of mass mental decolonization.  She states that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony serves as the best auxiliary for this quest, which involves much self-examination and evaluation. Deeming language to be a significant source of identity confusion, she pinpoints a spot in Ceremony where Tayo struggles to piece together the old dialect of the medicine man, Ku’oosh. Due to his dominance in English, Tayo felt that this interfered with his understanding of his family’s language, and made his use of it appear “childish.”  Bird not only directly links this passage to her own history with “old language,” but she also reveals that it evoked within her some “liberating recognition;” she explains that “only in the moments when we are able to name the source of our deepest pain can we truly be said to be free of the burdens they represent.”  Bird furthers her admiration of Ceremony as she demonstrates Silko’s confrontation with “existing hegemonic discourse.”  By addressing, but furthermore specifically identifying, the issues of colonization (not only language, but Christianity, cultural assimilation and marginalization, etc.) Furthermore, as she composes the timeline of her novel sporadically, Silko conveys how every entity in existence is interconnected, even though she “collapses the element of time.”  In sum, Bird believes that Ceremony provides a source of empathy, and, consequently, emotional and mental liberation, for other natives—perhaps, a tool for the decolonization the mind.   

Ceremony: Christianity, Cattle, and a Mexican Lover

P. 62-63 covers the theme of Christianity as a coercive force of assimilation. By what means does this occur and what feelings does it evoke?

On these pages, it is expressed that one of the ways the white men began to destroy the cultural web of the Indians was with their Christianity.  Clan names were omitted, leaving identity to be personal.  This way, they would become subject to salvation, as Jesus only saves souls individually.  Jesus is then compared with the Mother, who loved and guarded them collectively as her children, her family.  It is suggested that perhaps the white man uses the spread of Christianity as more of a tool of authority, not of good or spiritual moral.  For instance, it was described that, “The Catholic priest shook his finger at the drunkenness and lust, but the people felt something deeper: they were losing her, they were losing part of themselves.”  Clearly, as the relatives mourn the loss of a member, a sense of clan unity is notable.  Whereas, with the Christians, sin is not necessarily something to grieve over, it is something to be condemned, corrected, most importantly, controlled.  Furthermore, Christians viewed their dedicated mission as “doing good” for and “helping” the Indians; however, these same people were the ones who forced the Indian’s out of their homeland, deceitfully in the name of Christ.

 

We learn of Josiah’s new cattle business and of the almost wild Mexican cattle he buys. What symbolic associations do the Mexican cattle carry? (Consider breeds and breeding, contrast with Herefords, where they go, and relation to nature, fences etc).

 Josiah invests in a herd of cattle from Mexico, contrary to acquiring the traditional Hereford type.  By breeding offspring from both the cattle varieties, Josiah hoped to"genetically engineer" his way to cattle with an abundant supply of milk and meat that maintain health during a time of drought.  As it was discovered that his new herd had headed south after breaking through a fence, the occurrence suggests that Josiah’s wish to fuse different “ethnic” and “cultural” types, as it could be analogized, was not a practical expectation.  Furthermore, the fact that the Mexican cattle moved south hints that people of different groups should not be forced to merge with one another because their only home and identity lies amongst themselves in their native land.

 

We are also introduced to Josiah’s Mexican lover, the Flamenco dancer, Night Swan. What do we find out about her? What significance attaches to her character? What’s with all the blue? How does what she tells Tayo connect with elements that come up in other parts of the novel?

Upon becoming acquainted with Night Swan on a beer run, Josiah fell in love with her.  She soon invited him upstairs and danced flamenco for him, reminiscing about how this dance would force men to fall in love with her in her younger years.  Indeed she was a grandmother when Josiah met her and explains that in her old age she only dances flamenco for her granddaughters.  As her character is conveyed as rather wise and seductive, she also shares a similarity with Tayo: mixed ethnicity.  She seduces Tayo, but at the same time stands as a teacher figure, assuring him that most people fear change, which is the main cause of their discrimination: “They are fools.  They blame us, the ones who look different.  That way they don’t have to think about what has happened inside themselves.”

Ceremony: Thoughts on the drought and the medicine man

Explain why Tayo blames himself for the six year drought.

Tayo’s guilt for the six year drought traces back to a prior drought that, after six years of duration, ceased when a heavy wave of rain had done a little more than satisfy some crops.  As “jungle rain had no beginning or end,” it induced the soldiers with sweaty fevers, flooded their lungs to the point of choking, and saturated their boots until their peeled skin harbored green wounds.  After a massive flow of floodwater, Tayo and the corporal were forced to plow through a path of sludge while bearing the weight of a seriously wounded and infected Rocky.  It was at the point when the corporal slipped and nearly dragged his grip of Rocky’s muddy blanket into muck that Tayo began “praying against,” or “damning” the rain, as Silko explains. By the sixth drenching year, the weather had turned, as he had longed for, but to the parched opposite.  “Wherever he looked, Tayo could see the consequences of his praying,” starving, dehydrating animals dying.  He deemed himself to be the culprit as he “cried for all of them and for what he had done.”

 

Carefully re-read the pages that involve the old medicine man, Ku’oosh, p. 31-34. Explain the significance of how Ku’oosh speaks, chooses words, and of his point about the fragility of the world.

Struggling to make sense of the Old Ku’oosh, Tayo was bombarded with the medicine man’s regurgitated words of wisdom and talk of unfamiliar places, verbally offered to him in an outdated dialect.  Ku’oosh explained to Tayo that “the world is fragile,” and did so in a long, thorough process.  This is because, as Silko explains, the meaning of the word “fragile” holds “the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of the web.”  Because the term’s connotation is so complex, and “no word exists alone,” Ku’oosh defends his diction by providing a story for each word’s purpose.  From this, it is clear that Ku’oosh holds his message to be highly valuable, so much that every utterance in his narration had to be fully grasped.  Furthermore, the medicine man taught that this whole procedure was the project of humanity, a system that required “great patience and love.”

In Joy Harjo's "She Had Some Horses"

Although the poem is written in the third person, it would seem that the “horses” don’t just represent the clashing feelings that belong to the “she” of the poem; perhaps the speaker is referring to herself here?  When looking at the progression of the piece, it appears that this is the speaker’s way of settling such emotional contradictions, especially with such a resolution at the end.  After all, the easiest way to dissect your emotions is to do so in the third person. 

I highly agree with Field, it doesn’t appear that these “horses” are gendered.  More so, they seem to represent the speaker’s feelings, emotions, memories, experiences, and even thoughts; thus, maybe in a more general mode, they could also be called “spirits,” as Field designates them. With this said, if these “spirits” must be assigned a gender, I suppose it would be neuter.  Furthermore, “clear truths” are notable “through the spirits,” as Field would say, that indicate contempt, regret, sorrow, discomfort, appeal, and even love. 

The speaker’s resolution is obvious in the last lines: “She had some horses she loved./She had some horses she hated./These were the same horses.”  By this, Harjo explains that even the negative experiences of her life were loved as much as the positive ones, because all served as the components to her present day character, or at least when she wrote the poem.