Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: Healing Ethnic Hatred by Mixed-Breed Laughter

Abstract

In Ceremony, Leslie Silko brilliantly crosses racial styles of humor in order to cure foolish delusions readers may have, if we think we are superior to Indians or inferior to whites, or perhaps superior to whites or inferior to Indians. Silko plays off affectionate Pueblo humor against black humor so prominent in 20th-century white culture. This comic strategy has end-result of opening our eyes to our general foolishness, and also to possibility of combining merits of all races. Joseph Campbell wrote in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space of change in mythologies away from local and tribal toward a mythology that will arise from unified earth as of one harmonious being (16-17). Ceremony is a work that changes local mythologies in that more inclusive spirit. Silko is right person to have written this book. She herself is a mixed-blood, and her experience has evidently given her access not only to a variety of problems, but also to a variety of styles of clowning and joking. Although Elaine Jahner has mentioned presence of jokes in novel (39), I have known whites to read Ceremony as not comical at any point. Probably their power of recognition had been switched off by the picture of humorless Indian ... so common in so much of literature, in so many of film and television depictions of Native Americans (Bruchac 22). Although Ceremony is serious, offering a number of valuable propositions for our consideration, narrative also spins a web of jokes in morning sun. If readers' cultural background has not prepared them for Pueblo reverence for maternal spider, they could think of Silko's writing as resembling turning and darting of a brown-and-white bird hunting insects in air, at one moment flashing white sunlight, next nearly invisible against browns of this beautiful Earth.