|
Silko's The Ceremony Silko Leslie Silko's Ceremony deals with similar themes. Like Abel in House Made of Dawn, Tayo is an outsider because he is illegitimate. His mother was a prostitute who raised Tayo in a shelter of rusted tin in an arroyo in Little Africa, a ghetto in Gallup, New Mexico, where poor blacks, Mexicans, and Indians lived in terrible squalor. When his mother died, Tayo went to live with his aunt and grandmother. Like Abel, Tayo serves in World War II and has a hard time adjusting afterward. Both characters are reminiscent of Ira Hayes, the Pima Indian who happened to be among those U. S. Marines who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima. Hayes died of alcohol-related problems when he returned to New Mexico after the war. Tony Curtis's film The Outsider made Hayes into a literary stereotype: the Indian who can die for his country but not live in it. Tayo suffers severe mental problems from the trauma of having seen the Japanese kill his cousin while on the Bataan Death March in the Philippines. Tayo's problems are compounded by the guilt he feels because he believes that his prayers to stop the rain on the march have caused the drought on his tribe's lands in New Mexico. When military and civilian psychiatrists are unable to help him, Tayo enlists the aid of the Navajo healer Betonie. Betonie knows that the proximate cause of Tayo's problems is his experience with the Japanese, but that the ultimate cause is the witchery, the supernatural evil set loose centuries ago by Indian witches. Betonie sets Tayo on a quest; when Tayo completes it, he not only cures himself but also ends the drought that has plagued the tribe. Tayo is the modern avatar of Sun Man, the trickster hero of Laguna myth who defeats the Evil Gambler who had caused a drought by imprisoning the rain clouds.
Erdrich's The Love Machine Erdrich Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine may seem at first reading to be more a set of related stories than a novel with a coherent structure, but there is a framework to the book: Lipsha Morrissey emerges as the central character, the protagonist whose adventures and discoveries give the novel its shape. The narrative begins with the death of Lipsha's mother June, climaxes with Lipsha's discovery that his father is Gerry Nanapush, the trickster escape artist (Nanapush is the Chippewa name for Trickster), and ends with Lipsha's helping Gerry escape to Canada. Lipsha is an unprepossessing figure, a man who says of himself, "I never really done much with my life, I suppose. I never had a television." He inadvertently kills his adoptive grandfather Nector while trying to work a love-medicine spell that will make the old man fall in love with the wife he has cheated on for years. Lipsha is a figure of fun, a man given to hilarious malapropisms (he confuses the Philippines with the Philistines, for instance). He does not gain a great deal of stature even at the end, but when he helps his fugitive/trickster father escape, the novel concludes on an upbeat note. All these novels close on a note of hope, the protagonists having increased their sense of self-respect by discovering who they are and how they belong to the tribal community. Still, although their degradation seems to be behind them, and they are personally better adjusted, they end socially as they began, marginally above the poverty line, uneducated, without much chance--or desire, for that matter--to be successful in middle-class white American terms. The novels of the last decade have begun to write about a different type of protagonist: the Indian professional who has gained success and great prestige in the world of the whites. While reading the more recent books of Momaday, Welch, and Erdrich it is clear that they have turned away from depicting the life within a tribe, to an issue with more meaning to them personally: the cultural identity quandary experienced by a tribal member who leaves the tribe and lives in the midst of whites and when he becomes successful he feels he cannot return to the tribe.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
