Once he returns to the Laguna reservation, Tayo muses that his praying had dried out his people's land. Tayo, during this ordeal, had passionately prayed for the rains to stop. He and a corporal had attempted to carry Rocky, who was placed on a blanket, along the drenched path to the camp. With the memory of these rains, Tayo also remembers being captured by the Japanese and making the journey to a prison camp. Times of drought have returned to the area where Tayo lives, and this fact reminds Tayo of another dramatic turn of the weather that he had observed: the relentless jungle rains that he experienced while fighting the Japanese. Tayo gets out of bed and attends to a few light chores scarred by his wartime experience, he is now staying at an outpost, remote from his family and from the rest of his community. While Tayo found himself unable to execute harsh orders (such as shooting Japanese prisoners), Rocky saw the shedding of blood as his duty as an American soldier. He was deployed alongside his cousin Rocky, but he and Rocky had different attitudes toward their military duties. Tayo, however, also harbors anguished memories of his experiences fighting the Japanese in World War II. He remembers some figures from his life in the United States, such as his deceased Uncle Josiah and two of his living relatives, Auntie and Old Grandma.

The final, short verses call attention to the idea a ceremony can be a 'cure' (3) and invoke the sunrise.Īs the main prose narrative of Ceremony opens, Tayo, a young man who is living on the Laguna Pueblo reservation, has just passed an uneasy night. The poems that follow explain that storytelling is not mere entertainment, and in fact possesses therapeutic powers storytelling, indeed, is related to a body of rituals and ceremonies that continue to evolve and expand. In the first of these, the Thought Woman and her sisters create the universe the story that follows is apparently 'the story she is thinking' (1). The paper also investigates different kinds of journeys the protagonist, as a war veteran, takes up and the various motives behind them.Ceremony begins with a group of short, untitled poems that invoke the act of storytelling. Accordingly, the present paper explores Tayo’s journey through which he quests for healing his psychological distress and physical illness caused by the atrocities of World War II.

In her novel, Ceremony (1977), Silko introduces a man on a journey that is full of hardships and frustrations. She is distinguished for her engagement with folklore traditions, religious inspirations, and quest narratives. Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the most prodigious Native American writers of the 1970s.

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Tayo’s journey, (dis)ease, healing quest Abstract

Ceremony silko novel