Ceremony (thoughts)

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko left me a gushing fangirl mess. Honest to God, I squealed out loud when I read the first page:

Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman,
is sitting in her room
and whatever she thinks about
appears.

She thought of her sisters,
Nau’ts’ity’i and I’tcts’ity’i,
and together they created the Universe
this world
and the four worlds below.

Thought-Woman, the spider,
named things and
as she named them
they appeared.

She is sitting in her room
thinking of a story now

I’m telling you the story
she is thinking.

And then I turned to the next page and found this:

I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.

You don’t have anything
if you don’t have the stories.

I was entranced. So by the time the narrative began, a narrative driven by the power of stories, I had already completely surrendered to Silko and the power of her writing. And oh what power it is: the novel pulses. There is so much emotion, so much truth, in these pages; I cared so deeply about Tayo and his experiences that I’m truly at a loss as to how to go about writing about it. Ceremony manages the magic of all truly great fiction: telling a concrete, specific story about one person in one place and time while at the same time capturing the larger experience of what it means to be human.

Can I just stop there? I can’t seem to find the right words. This book ripped directly into my soul. I suppose I wouldn’t call it a comfort read, but there was something deeply right about it that gave me the sense of ‘homecoming’ I usually associate with comfort reads. But I don’t want to talk too much about it, because I want each of you to discover it for yourselves. So I’ll just turn to the great Sherman Alexie, and what he has to say:

Ceremony is the greatest novel in Native American literature. It is one of the greatest novels of any time and place. I have read this book so many times that I probably have it memorized. I teach it and I learn from it and I am continually in awe of its power, beauty, rage, vision, and violence.

It’s funny, this book wasn’t on my radar at all until Gavin mentioned it offhand a couple of weeks ago. And then I got it from the library, but I didn’t immediately pick it up…it wasn’t calling to me in any spectacular way. And then I picked it up, and found it was one of Those Books; the ones that I’ll always remember exactly how I was sitting as I began to read, and how I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and the mix of desire to turn the pages ever faster to find out what was going to happen next with the desire to slow down and reread every sentence because they were all so wonderful. One of Those Books that feel like sheer perfection, and that have me internally exulting: “This is why I read!”.

I’m so glad I found my way to Ceremony. Now I want a copy for my own shelves; Penguin’s new deluxe edition please. And you better believe I’ll be reading more of Silko. Just as soon as I catch my breath.