Revision--Language: Its Ability to Colonize and Decolonize

Bird 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 pursuit, which involves much self-examination and evaluation. Deeming language to be a significant source of identity confusion, Bird not only directly links passages to her own history with “old language,” but she also reveals that it evoked within her a sense of psychological freedom. Bird furthers her admiration of Ceremony as she demonstrates Silko’s confrontation with “existing hegemonic discourse.” She does this by addressing, but furthermore specifically identifying, the issues of colonization; she expresses the negative effects of Christianity, as illustrated by the role of Auntie, as well as conveys the obstacle faced by the mixed blood Indian.  Furthermore, Silko approaches the dynamics of language by using certain writing tactics to string an element of Indian tradition through her novel. As the novel’s events sit sporadically on a chronological timeline, Silko illustrates how every entity in existence is interconnected, even though she “collapses the element of time.”  And, as Silko intertwines narratives of the mystical and realistic sort, she further paints for the reader the concept of an “interactive web” of earth, humans, and traditional stories. Finally, Bird shares that, as an educator, her curriculum includes Ceremony, as a means for her to reverse what has been internalized in the minds of her students.  In sum, Bird believes that Ceremony provides a source of empathy, and, consequently, emotional and mental liberation, for other natives—a tool for the decolonization the mind.    

           

Application

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)

A fine example of this is 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; she 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) and 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 assembles a model 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.

Also, unmentioned in, but closely linked to, Bird’s assessment, one way in which Silko exercises literary, yet harmonic, segmentation is found in the novel’s balance of prose and poetry.   Bird did cite, though, that “Tayo’s story is set against a mythic mirror that provides a connection between the worlds that are being ongoingly constructed in the novel as well as providing for the construction of the novel itself.”(3)  Perhaps, a noticeable pattern in Ceremony is that most of the mystical material is presented in verse. By noting this, it could be said that each deposit of poetry is like a bit of “ceremony,” traditional and remedial, which parallels spiritual reality with material reality.  One of the many examples of poetry being placed to reflect on, or respond to, Tayo’s mortal narrative is prominent in the story of Pa’caya’nyi, a “medicine man” whose witchery conned people into abandoning their mother corn; this resulted in mother corn abandoning the land, taking the plants, grass, and rain clouds with her, which consequently left everyone to endure a drought.  As the course of the poem entails the people’s quest to reclaim mother corn and the rain, Tayo similarly feels culpable for the drought on his own reservation.  In a way, when viewing the poetic inserts as ceremonial episodes, each piece of “ceremony” is necessary to the cosmos, as each piece of poetry is vital to the overall stasis of the book. 

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.  And, Silko achieved this all through her manipulation of language.

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.