Ceremonial Memories

At first glance, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony seems to be a story of warfare, sickness and tribe. However, within the first 54 pages that I read, I found that Ceremony is much more than a story of war. I found that it is a story or grief, misunderstanding, responsibility and perhaps most of all so far, a story of memories. And as we are all well aware, any good "coming of age" tale involves a look back at memories, or it involves the task of dealing with memories and coming out of them alive, coming out of them better. My favorite passage is on page 8, "He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present, tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma's wicker sewing basket when he was a child, and he had carried them outside to play and they had spilled out of his arms into the summer weeds and rolled away in all directions, and then he had hurried to pick them up before Auntie found him." The aspect of entangled memories intertwined with the present creates a battle within itself, on top of the batttle Tayo had returned from with the Japenese. The theme of loss and trying to let go are ever present in this novel, so much so that I had to read a few passages over in order to fully understand the magnitude of what Tayo is going through. I have known grief and I have known sadness to the point sickness but the style and word choice that Silko uses in order to convey the emotional wreckage that is Tayo's mind in dealing with the death of Rocky and in dealing with the missing (and wishing) of Josiah. It is a beautiful story of letting go, the road it takes to get there and the uphill struggle of knowing when enough is enough and you have to put the past where it belongs in order to move foward.