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Episode 17: "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko w/ special guest Robin McLean
142 Plays11 months ago
Episode 5 of Season 2: we get to chat with Robin McLean about Ceremony by Leslie Marion Silko. And, yeah, this is probably our best episode so far, which isn’t shocking because we’re talking about talking with Robin McLean.
So, all that aside, it’s a great conversation and one that could have gone on for hours and hours yet. We could have gone deeper into nuclear weapons/testing, the residential school system, the “fragile web of the world” as Lori describes it, and so much more, but: that’s the joy of reading and of great books.
So thank you Robin.
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and do follow us on the socials, @lostinredonda across most apps (Twitter and Instagram for now; we’re coming for you eventually #booktok).
Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Lost in Redonda'
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hi, Lori. How are you doing today? I'm great, Tom. And you? I'm doing just fine. It's sunny and cold in Chicago, which is kind of what it should be this time of year.
00:00:30
Speaker
We always start with the weather and the weather feels just right with the world, at least in my neck of the woods. How's Dallas? It's the opposite here. It's cloudy and humid. But we're supposed to be getting some nice weather, like 75 and sunny this weekend, so I'm looking forward to that. That sounds good. Maybe that's a good way to bring in our guest this week.
Robin McLean's Adventures and Background
00:00:55
Speaker
Joining us from Missoula, Montana, we have Robin McLean.
00:01:00
Speaker
Robin, how's the weather in Missoula? It's a bit cloudy today, but it's been sunny and warm and beautiful fall with mushroom hunting weather. So I've been out in the mountains up at Lolo Hot Springs hunting for chanterelle mushrooms, and we just got about 35 pounds of them the other day. 35 pounds? I know. Isn't that crazy? That's wild. Yeah, that's not even a tall tale. That's true.
00:01:30
Speaker
That's a lot of mushrooms. I love mushrooms. I need to come visit you. Well, come on up this weekend and we'll cook you up some chanterelles and we can go up to Galatia National Park and go highway to the sun and cruise around, look for grizzly bears. That all sounds amazing and kind of your dream life, I feel like, Robin. That seems like what I imagine you getting up to on the weekend, I have to say.
00:01:59
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know, I like to be unpredictable sometimes, but most of the time, you know, go walking in the woods, walk with my dogs, have fun, and that's what I've been doing. Reading the rest of the time, pretty much.
00:02:14
Speaker
That's fantastic. Well, to give a bit of a quick intro to our listeners who may not know you and they should, but in case they don't.
Robin's Literary Works and Invitation to the Podcast
00:02:24
Speaker
Robin is a writer. She has three books out. Reptile House was her first collection of stories from BOA editions, right? Yep.
00:02:34
Speaker
And then Robin and I got to know each other from her next two books when I was working for End of Their Stories. And her novel, Pity the Beast, came out, followed up by her story collection, Get Him Young, Treat Him Tough, Tell Him Nothing, which is one of the great titles, I think, in recent memory. Yeah, Laurie had Robin on her other podcast Across the Pond. Twice. Twice.
00:03:02
Speaker
twice and in the store too. So yeah, I'm a big admirer of Robin's work. And that's kind of why we ask her to come on today, Tom, because we're familiar with what Robin can do. And it's always interesting to talk to a good writer and find out what work they admire. So it kind of fit right into our backlist recommendation segment. Yeah, absolutely.
00:03:32
Speaker
too many great writers that aren't also really interesting at the very least readers. I think those things kind of go together, kind of one feeds the other.
Discussion of 'Ceremony' by Leslie Marmon Silko
00:03:43
Speaker
So Robin, you suggested that we read and chat about ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. So
00:03:51
Speaker
Yeah, why don't you tell us a little bit about why why ceremony in particular jumped out at you? Maybe your first interactions with it, how you feel or how those feelings have or haven't changed over time. And then we can kind of bust into the larger conversation about this absolutely wild, truly, truly fantastic novel. Well, I came to the book
00:04:16
Speaker
slowly because it was one of those books that people had told me about. A number of people had mentioned this book and we all have these in our lives that people say, you need to read that book and kind of have it on your list or you see it in the bookstore and you say, I'll buy that next time. It was one that
00:04:39
Speaker
I knew about and didn't read for a long time, but it came to me through people who's reading I trust a lot, which is pretty much how I find books. And I read it in the desert of Southern Utah, which is very, very close to New Mexico, Arizona, not super far from the location of the book itself. And I read it at a time
00:05:10
Speaker
And my dad was really sick. I was with my dad when I read it. So it's not a light read. I always tell people that I like books that blow my mind, that pretty much I only read books that blow my mind. And this is a book that really, really blew my mind.
00:05:35
Speaker
I read it outside a lot of the time. I was sitting under a tree in the desert a lot of the time. I read it quite quickly, but moving from place to place. And it was a book that answered some questions, or at least
00:05:53
Speaker
dove deeper into some questions about life and how do you deal with pain and how do you deal with a world that's very confusing and seemingly utterly broken and not fixable, something that I think about a lot and I also I think I write about. But it was a book that I felt
00:06:14
Speaker
answers the question of why we read. We read to find some answers to our life's perplexities. And so that's how I arrived at the book. And so it's one that's sort of sat in my mind since then and has given me some edification
00:06:38
Speaker
Since then and I'm in Montana now. So when when you guys asked me this question I'm in a place that's dealing actively with Native American history and reparations and justice and the environment this is I teach one of my classes at the University right now in the Native American Center where I can hear drumming sometimes upstairs and I
00:07:03
Speaker
And I'm going up into the mountains to pick mushrooms where Lewis and Clark went through with Sacagawea and the story of the people who helped these explorers.
Robin's Personal Connection to 'Ceremony'
00:07:15
Speaker
It's just everywhere around me right now. And last night I just saw
00:07:22
Speaker
Not that it's related to how I chose the book, but last night I saw Robin Wall Kimmerer on campus and heard her speak about Brady Sweetgrass. I'm just infused with these questions. I've been up in Canada for the last six months on the Salish Sea and traveling around BC dealing with seeing how British Columbia is dealing with First Nation issues. So anyway, some of the stuff that came to me
00:07:48
Speaker
more directly through this book has also reentered my life sort of on the ground. And I just think it's an important book. I just think everyone should read this book if they can, which not everybody can. It's a hard book. Some people read for things other than answers to life. It's not a book for entertainment. But for me, it's a life changing book. It's a turning the corner book. Nothing is the same after this book.
00:08:18
Speaker
It's a book that stylistically opens many doors for writers. Leslie Morma Silico did things in this book that give you permission. And so from a writer's perspective, it's a book about liberty too. And so anyway, that's kind of how I arrived at it. Robin, had you read any or have you read any other books by her?
00:08:42
Speaker
I had not, and I still have not, although I'm ashamed to say that. And having it back in my hands again, I probably will. And I've spent quite a bit of time in New Mexico, and one of my very close friends in New Mexico knows her and went to school with her.
00:09:01
Speaker
And just that proximity is sort of, makes me vibrate a little bit. It's very exciting. Yeah. Yeah. In the edition that I have, I think, which is a anniversary edition, there's a preface by Larry McMurtry. And of course, Larry McMurtry is
00:09:24
Speaker
a great legend in Texas letters. And I think he knew her personally, if I'm not mistaken. So that instantly intrigued me, but I really knew nothing about the book. I knew that she was a Native American writer, but I understand what you're saying about the fact that it's kind of a
00:09:52
Speaker
a turning the corner book because there doesn't seem to be outside of the Native American context, which is unique in and of itself, especially given that this book was written in, I think, 1977 initially and published.
00:10:10
Speaker
And we've had, thank goodness, quite a surge in Native American authors in the United States, I feel like in the last three years or so, books published, fiction published by them. But some of the themes in this book are so very universal that it's a little hard for me to kind of pinpoint or articulate kind of what makes the magic of this book.
00:10:38
Speaker
But the feelings that she brings forth, the main character, of course, is a veteran and has PTSD. I don't know whether they knew to call it that at the time that the narrative is taking place, but today I think we would certainly call it that, and a very serious case of it at that.
Analysis of Silko's Writing Style
00:11:04
Speaker
It's so emotionally powerful. And I wonder whether you had any thoughts as to how she does that. Well, of course, I've been thinking about that a lot because I read it, reread it recently to refresh myself and speak with you guys. I'm teaching writing right now to really skilled writers. So I'm always looking for how masterful works are achieved and
00:11:32
Speaker
I feel like she does two things that I noticed right off the bat. And one of them is that she sticks to objects very closely, you know, this very, very devout attention to objects and movement, objects and movement down on the ground and very
00:11:53
Speaker
attentive observation to the natural world. So there's that and you think about Cormac McCarthy like if if he this is very much in the line of of that kind of Western writing that's very much tactile and dusty and dirty. The other thing I I'm mesmerized by this book is how she moves with those line the section breaks. She moves so freely through time with those section breaks and
00:12:23
Speaker
And it's not just through time, it's through mental space and philosophical space. She does what fiction can do that no other art form does and to the most vast degree. And I think that that's sort of saying this is how this spiritual life of,
00:12:50
Speaker
First Nations or indigenous thought works. We can make these jumps that don't depend on this linear logic and you will see the logic by jumping with me. I will show you a different type of logic through these jumps and so those are the two first things that come to mind and then of course the language is gorgeous, beautiful beautiful language and the
00:13:19
Speaker
unsparing brutality of her depiction. She just doesn't spare us at all. We must look at it and then enter into the main character's despair completely to this suffering degree and then seek the answer as much as he does. So that's more thematic. And then the free use of story and poetry and
00:13:50
Speaker
the fantastical. It's just the most liberated book that I can think of. And it creates a mind space that's bigger because of it. It's an enormous mind space. And if we read for that mind space, it's explosive. So I don't know if that answers what you're saying.
00:14:11
Speaker
I think it certainly did in a lot of ways, and I hate to use this term because it doesn't really feel applicable, but it feels like a very meta book to me in a way because
00:14:26
Speaker
The narrative talks about storytelling and the oral storytelling tradition amongst Native Americans, and particularly the people in this tribe.
00:14:43
Speaker
But then the way that she writes the story, going from prose to kind of verse, and the verse is kind of, you can imagine, every time she switched to verse, I could hear someone speaking this orally to me.
00:14:59
Speaker
much more so than if I'm just reading a poem. So there is a lot in this book, I think, just about how to tell a story and the integrity of a story. And like you said, the different ways that a story doesn't have to be linear or logical to make it a very valid and equally important story to tell. Yeah, I think that's right.
00:15:28
Speaker
She's saying I'm going to show you a different way to think about story, another different result from getting a story, thinking of story as a healing act, which is certainly how I think about stories. I just didn't necessarily think of it that way before this book. So we are in on this ceremony and that humans need
00:15:56
Speaker
ceremony and that story is medicine. And that story is also what's
00:16:04
Speaker
trapping people too. The free movement in time, there's a moment towards the end of the novel where Teo, our protagonist, he dwells on how the old men always refer to things as being in the present, whether it's in the future, a future event, or whether it's a past event, that everything is present time.
00:16:27
Speaker
And in a way that is reflecting on his, I think Laurie, they called it battle shock back in the 40s and early 50s. I don't think they would use post-traumatic stress disorder would be something that they would probably run for the hills from.
00:16:46
Speaker
Um, as a term, but I mean, his PTSD was keeping him present. He was, he was at home, um, on the ranch, but he was also in the jungle and he was also constantly hearing his cousin brother, um, have his head smashed in that, that presenting was trapping him until he was able to put it alongside the other presence he was existing within. And yeah, that, that healing act, I think is,
00:17:16
Speaker
There's that, yeah, the metatextual level of her playing with how it can be presented, but also reflecting and really, I think, making the reader feel Teo's pain and Teo's terror at all times that he would once again wake up and
00:17:32
Speaker
and find himself back in that place because he never left the place. And even by the end of the novel, he hasn't left the place. There are just other places he can exist in at the same time that he can be a part of, which is a really interesting
00:17:49
Speaker
And I think honest and true way of looking at healing, that it isn't like what came before is wiped away. It's just that it's put into a different perspective, a different scale. It's incredibly touching.
00:18:04
Speaker
As you said, Robin, it's hard. Like it's not an easy novel to, like you, I kind of raced through it. I read it very quickly. And like you, I also moved around a lot in the process because I felt like I was, I just, I couldn't stop reading it.
Narrative Techniques and Themes in 'Ceremony'
00:18:19
Speaker
I couldn't stay in one place. I had to, I had to keep it, keep going. And physically had to keep moving around.
00:18:27
Speaker
It's stunning. I just I'm still wrapping. I think this speaks to like the idea of it being a things aren't the same after novel. I'm still wrapping my head around so many of the things that that occurred to me as I was reading in so many of the.
00:18:44
Speaker
I mean, there's an entire critique of Western culture running through this that is at once incredibly steering and at the same time incredibly forgiving of everyone involved in it, which is a hell of a trick to pull off, I think. Well, I feel like in some ways that's how the ending works.
00:19:08
Speaker
is to see evil or some bad thing and to walk away, to see it, recognize it, acknowledge it, know it deeply, and then walk away from it rather than fight it. And I think that's something that this novel offers that other Westerns I've read don't necessarily offer. So an actual
00:19:39
Speaker
solution, which I was not expecting. I mean, whether you accept the solution or not, I think I appreciated it. But I think back to what you're saying about this, the present and time, the chasing of the cows, soothe that brings him into the present, and then the idea that his brother, cousin, uncle,
00:20:07
Speaker
are with him now, this sort of realization and the piece that comes with this and the idea of, I don't know, it's just sort of a tidal wave, but it accrues, it, you know, as a writer has to make, lay the ground for what's going to happen later in the novel. And you can see how she's doing it on the second or third read, but
00:20:33
Speaker
It's quite something because it sneaks up. The ground is set. It's sort of like the cattle going down into the arroyo. You have to go where she wants you to go, but you don't see the turn at the bottom. You can't see where you're going.
00:20:52
Speaker
It's such a tightly constructed novel. I mean, to the extent that it's even following some tropes, and you just referred to as a Western, and I wouldn't immediately jump to mind as a Western in terms of how you would traditionally think of a Western novel. I mean, it's obviously set in New Mexico, largely New Mexico. I don't think they ever really dip too far over the state boundary.
00:21:17
Speaker
it does follow a lot of the movement of a traditional Western, so much so that at the end of the novel, as Teo is put into a pretty perilous situation, he recognizes the way the story is supposed to end. I mean, he's told that the story is supposed to end a certain way, but it's your choice to not let it happen. And
00:21:41
Speaker
She keeps us going thinking that it's about to go in a certain direction This is the direction it should go and then pulls back at the end because that's not what needs to happen and that's not what Teo ought to be doing and yeah, just being able to control the narrative in that manner is
00:22:00
Speaker
you know, incredible. I mean, she was, I think, what, 29 when this was published. This is her first novel. She had some stories prior to this and a collection of poems about, I think, two years before this were published. But this is, I mean, this is a debut novel. I mean, Laurie
00:22:18
Speaker
At some point, we need to stop reading debut novels because I think we're spoiling ourselves for future writers. Well, we say the same thing. I mean, we sound like broken records about, I can't believe this is a debut novel. But we've had some stunners, and this is included. And or I say something along the lines of, I can't believe I haven't read this yet. And I mean,
00:22:40
Speaker
This is one that I've sold dozens of over the years. It is a perennial backlist title. It moves without you having to do anything, which is great sometimes, but it was just never one that quite popped up on my radar enough I didn't make enough time for.
00:22:58
Speaker
That's fine. Books come to you sometimes when they're supposed to. I feel like this was a good time for me to encounter this one. There's a lot thematically to dig into with this novel, but it's probably worth giving a very quick or my attempt, my usual attempt. This is a thing Robin, we do where I attempt to give a quick synopsis of the novel and then 20 minutes later we look up and realize that I haven't even wrapped it up yet.
00:23:22
Speaker
I'll try and be faster. As we said, this is following a World War II vet named Teo. He's from the Laguna Pueblo reservation tribe, and he and his cousin
00:23:38
Speaker
brother, he was raised by his aunt and he and Rocky, his cousin are the same age and pretty much grew up as brothers, enlisted at the same time, were sent to the Pacific Theater and were captured and took part or forced into what was called the Bataan Death March.
00:23:58
Speaker
And along the way, Rocky, who is badly injured when they were captured, either dies on the stretcher or he dies when a Japanese soldier bashes his head in with a rifle because they can't carry him any further. And when Teo gets back, he is very fundamentally broken. He spends time in a VA hospital and returns to the ranch, returns to the reservation and is
00:24:26
Speaker
I mean, barely there is attempting, frequently uses the term invisible to refer to what he's trying to be. He's trying to disappear. He interacts with some other young men his age that he grew up with that also went to war. All of them have massive drinking problems. All of them are very
00:24:48
Speaker
despite to the exterior seeming like they're attempting to be happy and carefree, all are badly, badly wounded by the experience. And not just the experience of going to war, but the experience of being treated in the United States as heroic while they were in uniform, while the war was going on, by being sought after by women, by specifically white women during that time. And now they're once again,
00:25:18
Speaker
you know, once again, they're Indians. Once again, they're being pushed off to the side. And so this novel is really about Teo's journey towards, I mean, uncertain levels, towards healing.
Teo's Struggles and Identity Crisis
00:25:31
Speaker
While he was in the jungle, he wished that it would stop raining, and he feels that he damaged, that there's now a drought in their area, and he feels that this is his fault, that it's connected to him, even though very early on, it's stated that droughts happen.
00:25:47
Speaker
Like this is just part of the world. It's people who have to be, who change and have to be able to adjust accordingly. And yeah, we followed Teo as he,
00:26:00
Speaker
visits a holy man who gives him directions to retrieve his uncle's cattle. And I don't know, I could keep going on into even more of the specifics. There is a really harrowing scene at the very end of the novel involving the other men from his tribe and some acts of extreme violence.
00:26:26
Speaker
But I think we can kind of, I mean, we've already touched on that a little bit. I think we can kind of otherwise talk about, you know, some of the other themes that they're emerging from and kind of maybe dip into specific scenes as warranted. How'd I do, Lori? Was that better? That was shorter than normal. Congratulations, Tom. But I think you did a really good job. Thank you.
00:26:45
Speaker
You touched on, Tom, the guilt that Teo feels because he feels as though I think as the medicine man told him, or maybe it's an older story that he heard growing up, that there's this fine web that the world is constructed in and you can't
00:27:08
Speaker
If you break the web, you know, it's it's going to be horrible for the world. It can destroy the world. So he's feeling very guilty about those prayers, for lack of a better term, when he was a prisoner of war in the Philippines, that he that he would pray for it to stop raining because it was constantly, you know, just.
00:27:33
Speaker
just so, so wet and like people's leg sores wouldn't heal and just a really horrible, horrible situation.
00:27:45
Speaker
He has a lot of guilt as well about the fact that he lets he lets he doesn't really but he feels as though he's he's let his family down because his cousin Rocky dies and and he promised before he left that he would bring Rocky back and he always feels as though his auntie and his grandmother were always expecting that it would be Teo that wouldn't
00:28:14
Speaker
come home alive or wouldn't come home you know intact and instead it's it's rocky that that dies overseas and he feels a lot of guilt about that so I guess maybe Robin this is a this is a question that maybe you can help with in terms of Teo's kind of mindset and
00:28:44
Speaker
the broken person that he is when he returns from war. I feel like some of the looks back at his past were kind of setting the
00:28:57
Speaker
setting the table for a real identity crisis with this kid. I mean, he's half native, half white and his tribe and particularly his auntie never lets him forget the fact that his mother was a slut and he's not fully native.
00:29:20
Speaker
And so he has that identity thing going. Rocky is kind of like the high school hero. He's perfect. He's an athlete. He's very good in school. And it's clear that he's got ambition and that people have ambitions for him, that he's getting off the reservation. And that's even before they're recruited by this army recruiter that doesn't really care
00:29:49
Speaker
about, I guess he's not getting paid to care, just like, give me bodies, give me numbers to send overseas. Who kind of questions, well, are you guys really brothers and you're both on the reservation and we'll sign up because you guys are real patriots and America needs you.
00:30:12
Speaker
So I'm not asking a very good question, but do you want to talk about maybe Teo's identity issues and how that kind of relates to the way he feels when he comes back from the war? Teo is, as all great main characters are, afflicted with terrible conflict inside himself. So I think the author spends a lot of time describing not only
00:30:42
Speaker
you know, the pressures in his family where his auntie and grandmother sort of have all their hopes in Rocky. But he had a very, very rough time before he got there. There's this brutal childhood living under the bridge and watching his mother who's a prostitute dragged away with other women and living in the grass and trying to find food. And he was an abandoned
00:31:12
Speaker
little person in great distress, which possibly is the reason why he survived and Rocky didn't. I mean, he's tougher. He's very tough. He doesn't view himself that way. And then, so you've got this
00:31:27
Speaker
Do I belong in this family? Shouldn't survivors guilt? I think you're sort of suggesting, which I think is absolutely true. He made this promise. But he also doesn't really want to go to war. He wants to stay and help his uncle do something that might help their people, which is to
00:31:49
Speaker
create this type of cow that is more like them, more clever on the land, knows where to find water, actively goes to seek water, helps themselves. And he says that he's going to help his uncle
00:32:08
Speaker
And he's pulled that way. And Rocky calls him his brother for the first time with that recruiter. And so he's pulled between these two loves. So this love and desire to belong and to be one of some family pulls him. But he goes with Rocky and then Rocky dies. And then if you recall, I'm sure you do,
00:32:37
Speaker
after I believe after Rocky dies, there's a firing squad of some Japanese soldiers. And during the firing squad, he sees his uncle's face. So this idea of this face that looks indigenous and the story gets to that that 20,000 years ago, they would be brothers. This idea of all humans being brothers with the animals and the plants, it's murdering each other for no good reason. Like all these things are just pulling this guy
00:33:07
Speaker
apart and in some ways these things of nuclear war which of course is touched on in this book and the Manhattan Project and the industrialized war and the horror of killing for no reason seemingly for no reason should devastate the human soul. So in some ways this character thinks of himself as weaker but
00:33:34
Speaker
The fact that he reacts to these things in this way could be just an indication that he's feeling things accurately, but he doesn't view it like that, at least at the beginning. The medicine man suggests it to him. But this tearing of the inside of this character's soul and his body, because that's what happens to the story,
00:33:59
Speaker
And seeking love, I mean, identity, love, family, home, protection of the land or the animals, all these things are balled together in this character, who we certainly hope survives and that we hold on for dear life and read from tree to tree or from room to room because we're so stressed out for this guy.
00:34:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting that you point out the fact, and it's so true, that Teo is perceiving his experience in a totally human way. In contrast to another guy from the reservation that was in the war, Imo, who is kind of braggadocious and walks around with these
00:34:51
Speaker
with this little bag of Japanese soldier's teeth of someone that he killed. He's constantly jiggling with them like dice. You feel that Imo is broken as well, but he's broken in maybe a different way insofar as he can't
00:35:11
Speaker
He can't like his humanity can't break through the bravado or the defenses that he's had to put up to kind of just exist. So that's a it's an interesting distinction with the way that both men kind of experienced the war and how they both came back damaged but damaged in different ways. The suffering is so great you could understand why
00:35:36
Speaker
Imo would have, I mean, my parents and grandparents had a lot of anger towards Germans and Japanese people. You can see why it would be, but, and he's got the buzz cut, the Marine buzz cut. So this is sort of affiliation with the US army or the white soldier or white culture.
00:36:05
Speaker
But Teo, his suffering, I think we are meant to understand that as a really strength to hold on to who he is. The suffering and his identity are tied to each other, which is a wild thing to do. I think it's also partially how Teo sees himself in relation to the land and to his surroundings.
Teo's Connection to the Land
00:36:31
Speaker
I mean, that's one of the
00:36:33
Speaker
The fascinating things about this book is the scale, and not just in terms of time, but in terms of how people interact and are put right alongside of the natural world, that they are a part of it, they are incorporated into it, except when they're not, when they're a blight on the land. When you brought up the cattle that Uncle
00:36:56
Speaker
Josiah is attempting to breed. I mean, there's some pains to explain how the primary beef cattle in this area is incredibly susceptible to drought. As you said, those cattle will not seek out water. They will not eat scrub to stay alive unless it's the last thing. And by then, they're already doomed. So Uncle Josiah wants to basically breed
00:37:23
Speaker
a Mexican cattle that is rangy, that moves, they describe it as moving like antelope with some of the standard beef cattle to kind of produce something that will survive but also be, you know, all that, which is something that Rocky actually shoots down. He thinks it makes no sense because it doesn't
00:37:43
Speaker
It doesn't match what he's learning in his science books from the white teachers, from the society that he's attempting to become a part of. So as much as Rocky is the hope of the reservation, he's also trying to run the hell away from it. Teo, as you said, wants nothing more but to be home there and to be a part of it. And I think that sense of scale
00:38:05
Speaker
It occurred to me while reading this, Robin, that that scaling, that location of humanity in the natural world, of course you recommended this book. It is absolutely a part of your project as well. It is certainly an aspect of your writing to
00:38:26
Speaker
And I think this is how I used it in publicity pitches, was you were right sizing humans. You weren't making us giants across the land. You were putting us within the landscape. And I think that's very much a part of what Teo is struggling with here, what a lot of his contemporaries have given up on. I mean, Emo wants, Emo wants,
00:38:52
Speaker
He wants, he wants, he wants, he wants to drink, he wants white women, he wants wealth, he wants, I mean, it's even suggested he wants to be white. Like that's part he does. He never liked Teo and Teo thinks it's because Teo is half white. And that's the part of himself that if you know, could be anything, it would be that to absolutely disastrous effects for a lot of the people around, you know, you know, acquires a body count among his
00:39:20
Speaker
friends and family by the end of the novel, not just Japanese soldiers. So yeah, I think, I think Teo's
00:39:30
Speaker
Teo's sense of proportionality and scale, while it is part of what's making him sick at the outset, also when he's in the hospital, the doctors are constantly trying to get him to say I and reflect on himself, but he is constantly saying we and us. He's seeing himself as part of a collective, not as an individual. And that is both what makes him sick, but also what seems to, by the end of the novel, save him to a great extent.
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean that sense of collectivity. What you just highlighted, Tom, for me was how
00:40:10
Speaker
Teo is psychologically more a part of the reservation than Rocky, even though all the hopes are on Rocky and he's a full-blooded Native American. There's that wonderful, and I just love that scene. It's early on in the book where Rocky kills the deer.
00:40:31
Speaker
And there's all of these ceremonies that they've been brought up to observe when you kill an animal and you have to thank the animal for sacrificing its life for you. And so Rocky's killing and gutting the deer and they take it back and the ceremony begins and they put, I think,
00:40:57
Speaker
They decorate the deer's antlers and they put blue corn mush down for the deer and say some prayers and things. And Rocky pretty much has total disdain for this for the ceremonial part, the ceremony, actually, which I guess, you know, so much of so much of native culture, it seems, is perhaps part of these ceremonies. And and Rocky is not into the ceremonies, but Teo certainly is.
00:41:25
Speaker
Well, it's also the case that so often ceremony like that is also, I mean, it's it's born out of perhaps some element of religious belief. Yeah, but it also frequently has like.
00:41:37
Speaker
I don't know, like ways to keep the tribe alive. I mean, like ways to keep the people, it's healthier sometimes. How much of dietary law across cultures that's tied into religious practice is also a way of making sure that the meat isn't bad, that the harvest was actually good and we can eat this stuff, or that how we treat the land allows us to have a harvest next year.
00:42:06
Speaker
And this is another reflection of Rocky's rejection of where he is coming from and where a lot of the other contemporaries that come up are Harley and Leroy and Pinky. We don't see much of Pinky, and when we do see him, he's
00:42:26
Speaker
I mean, for a character named Pinky to be as unmemorable as he is until he's not is pretty impressive, I think, as far as a craft and storytelling level. But yeah, they also are rejecting a lot of what comes with that, comes with being part of the people that they're from.
00:42:51
Speaker
But on the top, we probably should spend a little bit of time talking about ceremony and the conception of ceremony, given that it is rather the title of the novel.
Evolving Ceremonies and Modern Realities
00:43:02
Speaker
One of the, I think, interesting things that gets brought up and is put across a Teo is that ceremony is supposed to evolve, that it doesn't stay static in time, that as things change, the ceremonies must change along with it. And there seems to be, and I'm always very
00:43:25
Speaker
I'm very ambivalent or, I mean, probably a better word is nervous about ascribing too much of what characters think or put across in a novel to what a writer thinks, because sometimes it's just simply this is the mind of the character, and it really is just that. But there does seem to be a bit of a critique of, or at least in Teo's mind, it develops a critique of
00:43:54
Speaker
how ceremony, how religious practice has become a bit of a tourist attraction and how it's become stuck, that the people that are supposed to lead that and lead the people with the ceremony are just doing the same ceremonies over and over again as if
00:44:15
Speaker
the world hasn't changed around them, as if the ceremony is taking place back before land started to belong to people in a way that it never had previously for the tribes. So wondering what you guys think of how ceremony is, or rather, better question.
00:44:39
Speaker
By the end of the novel, Teo has been tasked to perform a ceremony to basically fix things, to write things. And I think it's ultimately to write himself as much as anything. And by writing himself, he's also writing the world to a certain degree, as he helps form the world as being a part of it.
00:45:01
Speaker
Does that sound right to y'all? Or what is the ceremony that Teo is tasked with performing to your mind? Lori, you want to start with that one?
00:45:13
Speaker
Well, I don't know, and maybe it's too much of a stretch, but could you almost make a generalization that all of these ceremonies are in some way a redemption? That people and cultures and societies, even with the deer ceremony that I was talking about, in a way it's almost like asking forgiveness from the deer and from the earth that you had to
00:45:39
Speaker
inflict this violence upon it, you had to end its life, but that you're very grateful for that and you try to honor the life and in honoring it kind of in other ways, preserve other living things on down the road. So I don't know, Robin, I don't want to
00:46:05
Speaker
infer that I know more about, you know, kind of Native American practices than I do or what the full meanings are. But the fact that the ceremony has to change with the times also seems to me to kind of allow a bit of flexibility in the Redemptive Act itself, right? Yeah, I think that point of, you know, you've got
00:46:34
Speaker
Auntie is a Catholic. In Catholicism and many Christian beliefs and other religions, there are rituals and ceremonies. It's not an uncommon idea. If Auntie is going to the Catholic church and confession and all the things that bring redemption, this is a familiar idea.
00:47:00
Speaker
And the idea that we've entered this time for a faith or a belief system that is interested in an animate landscape, an animate interaction with other animate beings, that it's all alive and it's all in this pool of time and spins around and it's way more engaged with
00:47:28
Speaker
the living world and the idea that the sort of catastrophic time has come in the form of World War II and atomic weapons and the people of the Laguna Pueblo and the people around Teo and the others have sort of bought in to basically capitalism or Western expansion or using the land as
00:47:56
Speaker
an object rather than a partner. The resources and beings that live on the land as objects rather than a partnership. The deer dies and you put the pollen on the nose or the mush and
00:48:15
Speaker
say thank you and then grandpa dies and at this speech last night with Robin Wall Kimmerer, she was talking about how in Pottawatomie the grandchild, great grandchild and the great grandparent have the same word and you can't talk about a hummingbird
00:48:36
Speaker
without using, you can't call it an it in that native language. It has to be inanimate. It's because it's an either animate object or inanimate object. So you've got this sort of belief system that is in direct conflict with this prevailing political system and that there has to be change in order to cope with it. That to me seems the project of the book.
00:49:04
Speaker
I don't know if I'm getting off subject here, but it just seems like that's the project of the book is that in the times that we are in, you've got Emo who's reacting to this changing times and you've got Teo and you've got Auntie and you've got Rocky. Everyone is responding in a different way and Teo is the one who finds a path through to live.
00:49:31
Speaker
I think Rocky doesn't, Emo doesn't, Pinky doesn't, not to be spoiler alert or anything, but yeah, so I don't know. I guess I'm just kind of thinking out loud, not necessarily. I don't know. Oh, we do that all the time. I think one of the joys of this podcast is that act of figuring out what we think about the book as we as we talk about it.
00:49:59
Speaker
I mean, it's sort of the question of like, why do the Catholics need ceremony? They have it too. Why do the Baptists have it? Why do the Jews have it? Why do people have it? What is the function? There's lots of atheists in the world, but maybe they have little...
00:50:19
Speaker
acts of faith in their lives also. Like, what is an act of faith? What is it for? What do we need it for? And I think this is an argument that it's necessary. What you're saying, a lot of it is meaning making, right? I mean, it's ways of understanding and positioning yourself within the world. And I think what's interesting about Aunty being Catholic and her
00:50:43
Speaker
her discomfort with medicine men being brought in to attempt to help Teo. It's partially that she already feels like her family is looked at a certain way within the community because of her sister, because of Teo. Part of why Rocky being the star he was was so important to her was their placement within their culture, among their people, their town, you could just say.
00:51:12
Speaker
I also get the feeling that her Catholicism is an uneasy fit. It doesn't go well with how they live and how they conduct their lives. Maybe it's what makes sense of the world for her, but it doesn't
00:51:31
Speaker
It doesn't really seem to have reflection in the day-to-day life beyond her reading a devotional book. The others are Uncle Josiah. Even her husband, Robert, seems to adhere to a traditional practice that
00:51:51
Speaker
allows them to live, allows them to function on the land in a way that the Catholicism doesn't. It's a religious practice, but in some ways it feels somehow divorced from the day-to-day in this setting, in this context, and maybe that's just because
00:52:11
Speaker
You know, it's not something that's going through Teo's head and that's where we spend most of our time. Maybe, you know, if we spent more, if we'd spent time inside of Auntie's head, we'd have a better sense of how that interacts. But yeah, I mean, the Catholicism feels, it feels like another indication of the disjunction, if that's even a word, I'm not sure it is, between
00:52:38
Speaker
between understanding the world and actually living in it and living within the world that they live in on the reservation. Well, that's a good point, Tom, because I feel like of the family, Auntie is in a lot of ways the least generous of the family, certainly in her
00:53:01
Speaker
emotional detachment when it comes to Teo. She doesn't want them to adopt him at the beginning. It causes a fight with her and her husband. When he's growing up, she often says nasty, unkind things to him.
00:53:19
Speaker
rubbing it in that his mom was a horrible person and she gives all the nice things to her son. And even though they grow up in the same home and for a lot of
00:53:35
Speaker
a lot of purposes, they're, they're like brothers, she always tries to emphasize that no, you know, there's, there's only one son in this home, and it's not you. So her faith is, is interesting in that light, too, I think. Yeah. And I mean, I'm not a Catholic and wasn't raised Catholic, but I do sort of think of Catholicism as a hierarchical structure, power structure. And auntie is
00:54:04
Speaker
definitely down at the bottom of that. And she's never going to get out of that, no matter what Rocky might have done as a football star. She's always going to be worried about what the Joneses are saying about her. And she's quite a sadist to him in some times. She's mean to him as soon as anyone leaves the house and puts on this performance of liking him and being fair when other people are in the house or she tells him the cruel story.
00:54:35
Speaker
of his mother naked. And the one thing I think is really interesting about what Leslie Marmosilko does in this is that she is quite even handed with, she's quite critical of many of the Laguna people in the story. She's quite
00:54:55
Speaker
critical of the white people in the story. She's quite critical. There's a lot of critique in this piece, and it's quite evenly divided, which of course adds credibility to the piece. You don't feel like you're getting spoon fed her belief systems. But Auntie is a very important
00:55:19
Speaker
She's a very, very important character, because I feel like she's got sort of simmering rage, and she's going to die like that. She's never, ever going to have a ceremony that will so will soothe her as Teo finds a ceremony that soothes him. Yeah, on the point of even-handedness, there's a passage, page 191 of my edition,
00:55:47
Speaker
where Teo is the middle of cutting a fence, and he reflects on the
Critique of Western Narratives and Decolonization
00:55:53
Speaker
lie. And he goes, the lie. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike. As long as people believed the lies, they were never able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. And this is all done against, like, as he's cutting the wire and him wiping sweat off his face, and this cutting of the wires
00:56:12
Speaker
breaking through a barrier that's dividing up the land, keeping him away from his cattle, which are actually his by any rule that the white folks have imposed upon the land. They're his, but he has to steal them back functionally.
00:56:28
Speaker
If the white people never looked beyond the lie to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery. They would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together. White thievery and injustice spoiling up the anger and hatred that finally destroyed the world.
00:56:46
Speaker
And then the last line of the SLAPARE effort is incredible. The lies devoured white hearts and for more than 200 years white people had worked to fill their emptiness. They tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they've been fooling themselves and they knew it. It's just, I think it's even handed in reflecting on the idea that it's not just because there are, you know,
00:57:13
Speaker
No one here is terrible just because of who they are. It's about how they function within this larger system and how this system is in itself designed in many ways to destroy, to rip apart, to do something unnatural to people and to the world they inhabit. And to divide people who shouldn't be divided because I feel like the underlying idea is that
00:57:43
Speaker
all people are brothers, all beings are brothers. And this the witchery that then the white people coming a westward expansion and stealing land is presented as a spell, basically a spell by these powers. But I think in that way, this book sits in
00:58:09
Speaker
the sort of part of the library that deals with the psychology of colonialism, and the psychology of guilt or the oppressor or imperialism, how does that mind work? And how does it then function day to day? So and I think that that's something that people are talking about way more now in the larger culture than they were when
00:58:38
Speaker
when she wrote the book. So it's a book that really, really has got a place in the conversation right now. It's also, it's just like that passage you read is a brutal passage, but it's also kind of a hopeful passage. Wake up and see yourself, or as in this lecture last night, they went to decolonize, has your mind been colonized? Like decolonize your mind.
00:59:07
Speaker
I think that's what she's saying in this book, but way before people use that term that I know of anyway. And it's also, I mean, it's fascinating that this book comes out in 77, like on the heels of Vietnam. I mean, when we do have a term like PTSD probably by then, we are more aware of, I mean,
00:59:25
Speaker
World War II, even today, is still presented as the good war. That's still some of the ways it's talked about. People came back from the war and they built the Great Society and they went to work and it was 50s America.
00:59:42
Speaker
Which completely ignores why did motorcycle culture develop in the US in the late 40s, early 50s? How did the beatniks really... There were a lot of people that came back from that war incredibly messed up and damaged in so many ways, but it didn't fit the narrative. And after Vietnam, the narrative had shifted enough to make room for
Themes of Healing and Relevance Today
01:00:05
Speaker
it. And as you're saying, Robin, now people are
01:00:09
Speaker
more aware and better able to discuss and to take on this idea that there might be other ways, that there are other ways and that there are some very broken things about how this world functions. But even with that, you still see a lot of the same fights and a lot of the same resistance to that very idea.
01:00:35
Speaker
The book feels very relevant. In some ways, I would say timeless, but with its focus on the fragile web of the world, it almost feels, I don't know, I wasn't that old in 77, but it almost feels more relevant now than ever.
01:00:58
Speaker
I think ever timely, maybe, might be a good way of putting it, forever timely. I mean, this book is addressing, and Silko is addressing an aspect of the human condition, an aspect of who we are. Even if this society changes, the draw will probably always be there. And so this is something that,
01:01:25
Speaker
something that's going to be with us. So bringing it to light, addressing it, and presenting options, presenting alternatives, presenting other ways, which is where Teo winds up. Teo chooses other ways. And that's incredibly hopeful.
Conclusion and Admiration for 'Ceremony'
01:01:50
Speaker
Yeah. This is not me wrapping it up. I'm just saying, holy crap, this is an incredible novel. Yeah. I'm glad you guys think so too. And I think the change in that ceremony that you brought up, Tom,
01:02:14
Speaker
I mean, one thinks, what is the... He thinks about it as going on, that as he's going along, well, this is a bit different. I'm chasing these cattle around. And then he meets this woman and finds this deep love, and the love is stronger than the suffering.
01:02:36
Speaker
I just think that that's, and then you have the story going through of all the little beings having to go, you know, the hummingbird goes and the caterpillar goes and gets the object to clean the town and this long effort and a lot of beings are required to heal the town in the story that we return to over and over again.
01:03:06
Speaker
And yet for him, there's this love that is central to the ceremony. And I just think, especially now, how startling to me that is, is that that's the most potent part of the ceremony, is the love. And physical love, but also love for a person who is wise and can bring knowledge and a new way of looking at things.
01:03:37
Speaker
It's just a startling beauty to that, especially how starkly violent and ugly so much of the book has to deal with that really, really hard material. So it's just like this ray of sunshine that I wasn't expecting the first time I encountered it.
01:03:57
Speaker
Thank you for, I'm going to say making us read this, but it was a real pleasure to read it because it feels like one of those books that needs to be in the world and more people need to read it. I think it's eye-opening.
01:04:21
Speaker
Yeah. Well, thanks for having me and thanks for doing this podcast and for you guys are both incredible literary citizens and we need that. That's part of our ceremony, I think. Doing what we love to the nth degree and sending it out to the world and that's what you guys are doing. So thanks. Thank you, Robin. Thank you, Robin.
01:04:50
Speaker
you