Summary Application Revision

Works Cited:

Bird, Gloria. "Towards a Decolonization of the Mind and Text 1: Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony"" Wicazo Sa Review, Vol 9, No. 2 Autumn 1993. University of Minnesota Press. 04 Jan. 2009 .

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Summary:

Gloria Bird begins the essay by talking about how people are living results of their colonization.  She talks of how stories, songs, and knowledge will be gone because of people passing away but then soon realizes that this is not necessarily true.  Bird is trying to free the mind of Native American “otherness.”  To do this, she compares Silko’s way of telling the story in different pieces, or nonlinear storytelling, to actual Indian stories.  Bird says that it is not right to classify people into groups through their races or their language.  She adds examples from her life to help better understand this feeling of decolonizing the mind and “otherness.”  For example, she recalls a song that she still knows even without the existence of the people who began it.  She then feels as though she is stealing a language because her mother was multilingual and she only spoke in English.  

 Bird claims that readers must learn to 'see' the world differently if they want to understand Ceremony. This is the fundamental challenge of critical fictions. This is referencing Ceremony, a novel that pushes a person to see the world through different eyes.  She explains that the challenge is getting the reader to view reality through the perceptions of the native other.  This means that the reader would put him or herself into the story and try to experience the story through the native's eyes.  She demonstrates that Silko writing Ceremony in fragments explains how each thing belongs to something else.  This means that the fragments are connected in some way and come together at the end to have more meaning.  Perhaps Tayo never noticed little things as much as he did after going through a traumatic war experience.

 Bird says that nothing was all good or all bad either.  She says that it all depends.  Gloria Bird explains that we must be willing to see the world differently and then references Ku'oosh by talking of how he uses old language to talk to Tayo.  None of the words were his own.  

 Gloria Bird continues to give many examples of how people need to learn to see the world differently.  She explains that she now knows that Western culture has known all along of the potential for language's capacity to create.

 

Application:

After reading Ceremony, it is clear that Tayo has a feeling of “otherness” because of his mixed blood.  He feels  that he does not belong anywhere and that he is decolonized from his Indian culture.  Tayo has mixed blood and Auntie is ashamed to have someone in the family that is of a different ethnicity.  She is also ashamed of Tayo’s mother for having a mixed boy like Tayo.  It is true that Auntie takes Tayo in and takes care of him but Tayo can tell that she is ashamed of him and he cannot help but feel betrayed by his own family. Also, Tayo struggles with trusting many different people.  At one point in the novel, Tayo feels betrayed by Harley but it turns out that Harley did not mean to betray him.  Instead it was Pinkie and Emo.  “He knew then that they were not his friends but had turned against him…He was not sure why he was crying, for the betrayal or because they were lost.  (Ceremony 225)  These people acted as his friends before but Tayo finally realized that he had been betrayed and that he was alone and afraid. 

 In her essay, Gloria bird sends a message that she has betrayed her family.  Although she does not actually say the word, anyone can tell that this is how she feels.  “I must recognize that I am also the product of colonization in that I speak English though my mother is multilingual.”  Internalizing the colonizer’s terms regarding the axiom of our Otherness and obvious difference, she spoke Indian around me only when she wanted to exclude me.”  This is also showing a bit of embarrassment.  Bird’s mother was obviously a bit ashamed that her daughter did not know their language.  Bird felt betrayed when her mother excluded her this way and she felt as if she wasn’t good enough for her family.  She felt as though she was decolonized from her culture and falling into Tayo’s feeling of “otherness.”

Another thing that comes to mind about these two pieces of writing is the religion or culture in both of them.  Auntie is a Christian woman which is a lot of the reason that she is ashamed of Tayo being of mixed decent.  Bird’s essay claims that the songs and stories of her religion and culture would be gone when the older people pass.  “In what may appear to be a contradiction, I catch myself thinking in my mother’s colonized version of reality:  that once the old people are gone, the songs, the stories, the knowledge will be lost.”  She then realizes that as time goes on, these stories and song are still passed throughout her culture and that is how even today, she knows them.