Tayo gets up and milks his goats. He sits in his kitchen,
missing Josiah. There is a severe drought, similar to the one after
World War I, in the 1920s.
During the last drought, Tayo was a young boy and helped his uncle
to carry water for the animals. Now he has few animals and no family.
Tayo was gone for six years. He remembers the rain of the jungle
in the Philippines. He and a corporal carried Rocky, with a gangrene-infested
wound, on a sheet until anenormous flood tore the sheet from their
hands and nearly killed them. Then, Tayo prayed against the rain,
with a poem about drought. Tayo believes that the six years of drought
are the result of his prayer to stop the rain.
In the Veterans' Hospital in Los Angeles where he went
after the war, Tayo felt like white smoke: invisible, unconscious,
unable to communicate. At first, Tayo can only speak of himself
in the third person. He cries so much he makes himself vomit, but
he slowly gets well enough to be released from the hospital. At
the Los Angeles train depot, Tayo collapses. Awakening to the sounds
and sights of a Japanese family, he thinks he is back in the Philippines.
A depot man helps him up, explaining that Japanese-Americans are
no longer held in internment camps. Tayo vomits again.
On the reservation, Tayo remembers his childhood with
Rocky. He thinks about the Indian stories from his childhood which, despite
his teachers having told him they were nonsense, he still believes.
Tayo's friend Harley stops by on an old ornery burro (mule)
to visit. Harley was also a soldier, at Wake Island, and came back
with a Purple Heart. The only change Tayo notices in Harley is his increased
drinking. But then Harley alludes to an incident shortly after he
returned from the war, and Tayo wonders how unchanged Harley really
is. Harley went to help his family move their sheep to the Monta-o,
which was less affected by the drought than the surrounding areas.
Without any warning, Harley left the sheep, the dog, and his horse.
He ended up in jail and half of the animals had been killed. As
Tayo listens to Harley laugh about the incident, he realizes that
Harley feels nothing. Tayo had his own problems, including a fight
in a bar where he almost killed another old friend, Emo. Now both
Tayo and Harley have been left in the desert to watch over the deserted
ranches while their families care for the livestock in greener pastures.
Tayo is happy to be alone; not Harley. Still, Tayo is easily convinced
to join Harley on the long ride to the reservation line and the
bars. As they ride, Tayo thinks about how his grandmother and Auntie
talk about Rocky so much that Tayo feels Rocky was the one who survived
the war, while he died, only his body has yet to be buried. Tayo
starts to cry, and he feel himself back in the Philippines as he
looses consciousness to sunstroke. Harley gets Tayo into the shade
to rest.
Analysis
Ceremony is not divided into chapters;
there are fifty-three long indents at the beginnings of paragraphs
which indicate a separation into sections, but these sections are
not numbered. Poems are interspersed throughout the novel at irregular
intervals. The lack of easily identifiable section divisions in
the story is a physical, formal (in form) reflection of the themes
of interconnection between all things, repetition, and of the unclear
lines between dream, myth, memory, and reality. As Silko refuses
to conform to the standard presentation of a novel, in chapter form,
she refuses to make her story conform exactly to traditional American
standards. Similarly, as she seamlessly combines prose and poetry,
she ignores standard generic (of genre) divisions. Ceremony is
not only a story about Native Americans, it is a Native American
story.
The poetic sections of the novel tell traditional Native
American stories. The poetic form suggests that they are sung or
chanted. These are part poem, part story, and part prayer. The narrator
and speaker in these poems shifts between a first person singular
and a third person, but these are the stories of the collective.
There is not one narrator or one speaker who sings them. While they
are clearly set apart from the prose narrative by the shift in form,
the poems reflect the events of the rest of the story. In fact,
they tell the same story, with different characters, as old Grandma
remarks at the end of the novel. The poems also tell of the traditional
Native American ceremonies, while the prose narrative must create
a new ceremony. As the poems and the prose are woven together, so
are the old and new ceremonies. In addition, the entire novel is
framed by a poem, which begins with the single word, "sunrise" and
continues on the very last page. In this way, the whole story is
contained within a poem, so that the prose narrative as well as
the poems, are part of a traditional Native American prayer, poem,
or story. The poem "Ceremony" thematizes this idea. It also demonstrates
the repetitive and interlocking nature of the novel. With the same
title as the book, "Ceremony" is a poem within a story, whose subject
is stories within poems. The two opening poems also comment on the
power of stories to create and to change the world. Ceremony is
not just a story about ceremonies, it is a ceremony itself.
