Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes ed. by David L. Moore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes ed. by David L. Moore Ryan Lackey David L. Moore, ed. Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. 264 pp. Paper, $29.65. Published by Bloomsbury in 2016, Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes, edited by David L. Moore, stands out as a useful companion to Silko’s three novels and an example of an editor’s role in giving a collection shape. Assembling nine essays— three for each of Silko’s three novels—the collection is bound together by four short commentaries from Moore: three prefaces, one for each section, and a longer introduction to the collection itself. Read together, Moore’s essays form a narrative and critical through line, and in this way, the collection’s form reflects its subject: Silko’s novels, which tend to foreground narrative shape. Moore’s opening essay, “‘Linked to the Land’: An Introduction to Reading Leslie Marmon Silko,” sets forth not only a personal and historical context for readers newly arrived to Silko studies but also a thematic cluster of witness, testimony, and space around which the other essays revolve. By offering itself simultaneously as a primer for scholars and readers new to Silko, and an example of engaging narrative criticism, the collection ought to prove useful to a diverse readership. At the very least, it is worthwhile for being criticism that is pleasurable to read. In his brief opening for the three essays on Ceremony, Moore argues for the novel as an exercise in balance, invoking its images of equinox and solstice. Similarly, the essays that follow are interested in convergence, the arrival at intermediate points between gender identities, cultural epistemologies, and versions of the novel. Kimberly Gail Wieser’s essay “Healing the ‘Man of Monstrous Dreams’: Indian Masculinities in Silko’s Ceremony” explores the gender performances of Tayo and Rocky, reading each against a traditional Laguna masculinity, and likens colonial power to a “monstrous” masculine corruption. Next, in “‘Branched into All Directions of Time’: Pluralism, Physics, [End Page 403] and Compassion in Silko’s Ceremony,” Mascha N. Gemein unites the novel’s complex topology with quantum theory; from this unusual spatiality arises the novel’s compassionate pluralism. Finally, perhaps the most intriguing of the first three essays, Carolyn Dekker’s “The Lost Women of Silko’s Ceremony” positions an early draft of Ceremony and its protagonist, a mixed-heritage woman, as a frame for reading the evolution of the novel’s form and its gender politics. Dekker attends to the cultural and market forces present during Ceremony’s composition, and she asks us to reread both Tayo’s healing and the novel’s women (especially Helen Jean) as sites of provocative gender play. Fittingly, the second section, which discusses Silko’s panoramic Almanac of the Dead, contains the widest breadth of scholarship. First, Penelope M. Kelsey juxtaposes Almanac alongside Gaspar de Alba’s novel Desert Blood, highlighting the two novels’ writing of colonial capitalism through especially brutal spatial and social divisions. More provocatively, Kelsey defends Almanac from charges of queerphobia; nonbinary conceptions of gender in Laguna Pueblo culture, Kelsey contends, urges us to read the “toxicity” of Almanac’s queer characters as a vector of the novel’s critique of witchery-infused global capitalism. Deborah Madsen’s “Silko, Freud, and the Voicing of Disavowed Histories in Almanac of the Dead” looks formalistically at Almanac’s narrator as Silko’s attempt capture history in voice. As each of the novel’s myriad characters either recognizes or disavows history, either resists or accelerates patterns of harm, the narrator mediates and arranges these stories, placing them into a larger, longer context of time and memory. Finally, in “Seeing Double: Twins and Time in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” Beth H. Piatote sees the novel’s doubles pointing to “the most terrifying twins of all: capitalism and colonialism” (154). These doubles are bound up with time, which colonial capitalism attempts to manipulate, pause, and eventually erase; as a process of resistance, the novel inducts the reader into a phenomenology of nonlinear time through the...