Here are the questions we collected and the answers replied by the presenter: Q1: Narrative Structure: How does the narrative structure of the work organize the story to reflect the protagonist's spiritual journey and the history of the Indigenous community? A1: Narrative structure is central to Tayo's journey and indigenous history in general. The story is told as a passage through illness that is really the result not only of the war but also of Tayo's experience of the long history of genocide and indigenous dispossession in the Americas. The spiritual journey begins with the military hospital's anestization and the "fog" Tayo's leaves with after his "recovery." Numerous indigenous medicines fail as well and the first half of the novel is told in an experimental style through multiple flashbacks and time warps where Tayo (and the reader) share experiences of dislocation in time. The second half of the novel is more chronological in the sense that we follow Tayo first to Betonie's healing ritual which is his passage to political consciouness. The illness begins to recede when he realizes that his personal fatigue does not belong to his but the affective networks of historical violence that native people share. Thus, the reason for the splitting of the novel by the poetry in the ceremony of witches that invent white people. Mountain woman is also a key part of this healing process as connecting to a wider history helps build Tayo's resistance and his key recognition that European and American settler colonialism is a process of being cordoned off in reservations on "undesirable" land. Silko analyzes this process as having to be reversed as there is no part of the land that cannot serve as a source of sustainability for native peoples and to dismiss this is to accept a Euro-American myth of value that the novel questions throughout. Q2: How does it convey the themes of resistance and revitalization? Class and Social Issues: Does the work address class, social inequality, or political issues? How are these issues related to the themes of Indigenous resistance and revitalization? A2: Revitalization is an ongoing process of resisting the temptation to overharvest, mass slaughter non-human animals, and refusing to direct historical wounding inward toward oneself and other members of the native community. One key way to recognize class in the novel is to recognize Silko's attendance to the rampant poverty to which native people have been consigned. When Betonie looks out from his mountaintop over Gallop he can gain an overview of the systemic impoverishment of brown people and the gap that separates them from white settler communities. This gaining of an overview is critical to Jameson's theorization of cognitive aesthetic mapping that is a key framework for interpretation in the paper. Also, Barbara Harlow's important book Resistance Literature attends to the critical role of storytelling as a counter-hegemonic discourse to expose the fantasies of white nationalism. Q3: Critical Perspectives: What critical perspectives or theories can be used to analyze the themes and elements in "Ceremony"? For example, how do post-colonialism, nationalism, feminism, and other viewpoints apply to this work? A3: This question would take an entire class to answer. Let it stand that the presentatiion in its abbreviated form draws on Harlow's work accompanied by Jameson. Postcolonialism is key to understanding the nature of how settler colonialism operates as a seemingly benign dispossession when compared to the military massacres that are highlighted in works such as William T. Vollmanns The Dying Grass which discusses archival reading strategies that need to be undertaken for recognizing native sources buried within colonialist imperialist histories.
Here are the questions we collected and the answers replied by the presenter:
Q1: Narrative Structure: How does the narrative structure of the work organize the story to reflect the protagonist's spiritual journey and the history of the Indigenous community?
A1: Narrative structure is central to Tayo's journey and indigenous history in general. The story is told as a passage through illness that is really the result not only of the war but also of Tayo's experience of the long history of genocide and indigenous dispossession in the Americas. The spiritual journey begins with the military hospital's anestization and the "fog" Tayo's leaves with after his "recovery." Numerous indigenous medicines fail as well and the first half of the novel is told in an experimental style through multiple flashbacks and time warps where Tayo (and the reader) share experiences of dislocation in time. The second half of the novel is more chronological in the sense that we follow Tayo first to Betonie's healing ritual which is his passage to political consciouness. The illness begins to recede when he realizes that his personal fatigue does not belong to his but the affective networks of historical violence that native people share. Thus, the reason for the splitting of the novel by the poetry in the ceremony of witches that invent white people. Mountain woman is also a key part of this healing process as connecting to a wider history helps build Tayo's resistance and his key recognition that European and American settler colonialism is a process of being cordoned off in reservations on "undesirable" land. Silko analyzes this process as having to be reversed as there is no part of the land that cannot serve as a source of sustainability for native peoples and to dismiss this is to accept a Euro-American myth of value that the novel questions throughout.
Q2: How does it convey the themes of resistance and revitalization? Class and Social Issues: Does the work address class, social inequality, or political issues? How are these issues related to the themes of Indigenous resistance and revitalization?
A2: Revitalization is an ongoing process of resisting the temptation to overharvest, mass slaughter non-human animals, and refusing to direct historical wounding inward toward oneself and other members of the native community. One key way to recognize class in the novel is to recognize Silko's attendance to the rampant poverty to which native people have been consigned. When Betonie looks out from his mountaintop over Gallop he can gain an overview of the systemic impoverishment of brown people and the gap that separates them from white settler communities. This gaining of an overview is critical to Jameson's theorization of cognitive aesthetic mapping that is a key framework for interpretation in the paper. Also, Barbara Harlow's important book Resistance Literature attends to the critical role of storytelling as a counter-hegemonic discourse to expose the fantasies of white nationalism.
Q3: Critical Perspectives: What critical perspectives or theories can be used to analyze the themes and elements in "Ceremony"? For example, how do post-colonialism, nationalism, feminism, and other viewpoints apply to this work?
A3: This question would take an entire class to answer. Let it stand that the presentatiion in its abbreviated form draws on Harlow's work accompanied by Jameson. Postcolonialism is key to understanding the nature of how settler colonialism operates as a seemingly benign dispossession when compared to the military massacres that are highlighted in works such as William T. Vollmanns The Dying Grass which discusses archival reading strategies that need to be undertaken for recognizing native sources buried within colonialist imperialist histories.