New Trends in Asian and African Literature

Shaik Shaheen Taj
Assistant Professor
Nimra Institute of Science and Technology
Nimra Nagar, Vijayawada

The Dialectic of Historical Struggle in Silko’s
Almanac of the Dead

History, in other words, is not a calculating machine.
it unfolds in the mind and the imagination, and it takes body
in the multifarious responses of a people’s culture, itself the
infinitely subtle mediation of material realities, of under-
pinning economic fact, of gritty objectivities.
(Quoted in, Edward W.Said’s, Culture and Imperialism, 1993: I).

People from Indian ancestry who are citizens of the United States are known as Indian Americans. Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 merged them with the American mainstream giving them United States Citizenship. This was because of the heroic service of many American Indian veterans in World War I. throughout the period of Indian displacement and Indian wars, Americans pondered Indian origins. Benjamin Smith Barton, in New Views of the Origins of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797) asserted that the Indians had originated in Persia and other parts of Asia. American Indian literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics of Indian cultures. Among the richest set of Native American stories that survive are creation myths, descriptions of the beginnings of the universe and the world and of the origin of humankind. The earliest works of Indian literature are traditional oral tales, songs, and myths. They are found transcribed into English in anthologies such as American Indian Myths and Legends but are best understood in the specific cultural contexts where they were sung or enacted dramatically. A second early form of Indian literature is the captivity narrative, the best of which reveal much about Indian cultures before extensive contact with whites. In such narrative we have traditional Indian cultures before extensive contact with whites. In such narrative we have traditional Indian cultures and their relationships to the land. Autobiography has continued to be important in Indian literature, though the novel is currently the dominant literary form. Contemporary Native American authors and critics are retelling, reorganizing, and re-evaluating traditional tribal stories in order to assert a communally ascribed identity that accurately portrays today’s Indian. These new stories seek to breakdown the signs and artifacts of the white man’s Indian and replace them with signs of a vibrant and thriving culture. Contemporary, Native American texts rewrite Native American histories in order to reenter or empower their culture.

Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the foremost authors to emerge from the Native American literary renaissance of the 1970s. She blends Western Laguna Pueblo heritage to communicate Native American concepts concerning time, nature, and spirituality and their relevance in the contemporary world. Silko, born is 1948 in Albuquerque; New Mexico belongs to Laguna Indian, Mexican and Anglo American heritage. Her first novel Ceremony tells the story of a group of Indian World War II veterans in a way that both describes them and also expresses their own views of their situations. Her second novel of 763 pages, Almanac of the Dead, explores and critiques interlocking histories of oppression that inscribe the land, labor, and bodies of indigenous peoples. It recovers and recreates the submerged knowledge of oppressed peoples while affirming and strengthening vital, social, ecological and spiritual relationships. It depicts a detailed description of Native American traditional history. It includes the themes like Colonialism, Disease and Health, Human Worth, Institutionalization, Medical Ethics, Natural Experience, Native-American Medicine, Nature, Power Relations, Racism, Society, Survival, and War and Medicine. Silko portrays some 70 characters, most at various stages of corruption, disease and additionally a wide array of events spanning 500 years. The novel is peopled with addicts, alcoholics, politicians, unscrupulous and greedy land speculators, and a host of other unsavory characters. These characters tell the story of resistance to Euro-American oppression and a growing effort of indigene allies to retake the land and ultimately to become agents of it’s healing.

The title of the novel refers to a set of notebooks of Yoeme, a Yaqui Indian. She is the care taker of the “Almanac”. She later passes it on to her grandchildren, Zeta and Lecha. The novel begins with these elderly Native American twin sisters in Tucson. A section of the “Almanac” is accidentally lost. Yoeme wants Zeta to write down a replacement section. She warns Zeta to be very careful while replacing because nothing is supposed to be added newly to the novel. Zeta and Lecha are compiling the almanac, the pages of which are made from horse stomachs. Almanac tells the history of the Indians in their movement north from Mexico. Yoeme believes that she is the caretaker of the “Almanac”. Lecha says that the old almanacs tell not just when to plant or harvest, but also they tell about the days yet to come such as drought or flood, plague, Civil War or invasion. Yoeme and others believed that the power of the “Almanac” will bring all the tribal people of the America together to retain the land. The almanac is a document full of prophesies that foretell the European conquests of the indigenous peoples of Mexico and the American Southwest. Through it, Silko indicts the Europeans for their hundreds of years of crimes. The prophesy also tells a future in which the domination ends. Silko makes clear and undeniable links between past activities and present socio-political problems in the United States. By populating her text with ‘the dead’, Silko exposes the moral and political significance of memory, and the narrativity of history (Silko, 1991:424).

Almanac of the Dead takes place against the backdrop of the American Southwest and Central America. It follows the stories of dozens of major characters in somewhat non-linear narrative format. Much of the story takes place in the present day although lengthy flashbacks and occasional mythological story telling are also woven into the plot. The novel’s numerous characters are often separated by both time and place, and many seemingly have little to do with one another at first. A majority of these characters are involved in criminal or revolutionary organizations. We find arms dealers, drug kingpins, an elite assassin, communist revolutionaries, corrupt politicians and a black market organ dealer. Driving many of these individual storylines we have a general theme of total reclamation of Native American lands. This novel depicts the exploitation of both dead and living. It is concerned with the repercussions on modern America of the continuing and conscious repression of the voices of the past. It depicts violence, destruction and dehumanization. Apart from these themes, a relentless critique of the corruption in Anglo-European culture revolving around money, power, sexuality, and a phallocentric order are presented.

Many of Silko’s powerful and wealthy characters ill-treat their own people as lazy and destructive thieves. By doing so, they reject their own indigenous roots. They consider monitoring and controlling inferior people as their personal responsibility. For example, General J, part of a powerful Mexican cadre, is a powerful character who proposes to his friends that illegal refugees be “gunned down from the air like coyotes or wolves”
(Silko, Almanac of the Dead.1991:495). We find many such villainous characters in Almanac. The rejection from lovers, strangers, and everyday events, the extreme, even criminal, reactions that almost inevitably follow on the part of the disabled character are rightly attributed to deviate psychology. Trigs is one such character who embodies this psychology by being so obsessed with recording his own history that he becomes unable to substantively relate to the people around him. His journals focus single mindedly upon sexual exploits and failures. Actually he attributes all of these things to his disability. Silko has created this character as half a man. He is not the only disabled stereotype portrayed by Silko. Like Triggs we find two more characters Serlo and Beaufry. Beaufrey treats ordinary people as disposable pawns in his personal game of chess. Thriving on power and profit, Beaufrey produces and sells movies featuring real-life murders, fetal dissections, surgical fantasies, and ritual circumcision. For his amusement, he uses money, drugs, and social influence to entice and manipulate the people around him.

We have an important character Bartolomeo, a communist working with Indians in the mountains. He is trying to educate the Indians masses on communism. Angelita is ths best student. She knows that communism does not hold the secrets for Indians. The communists rewrite history and do not want the Indians to remember their own uprisings their own resistance. We have an African American character, Clinton whose messages would be a call to war. Clinton and his family are direct descendants of wealthy, slave owing Cherokee Indians. He believes that the spirits of their ancestors were still with them in the United States. He feels that when there was a Civil War the old spirits drank up the rivers of white man’s blood while the slaves ran free. Max Blue is one more murderous and powerful character created by Silko.

Silko’s characters remember the past, physically piecing together individual recollections to produce a more rounded and complete history that recognizes all those who have been denied and excluded. Silko suggests that the policies of remembering relate not merely to a re-visioning of the past but also to contemporary activism: to the desire and ability of the minority group to take control of, and to actively change, the future. Silko in addition to all these also exposes the influential economic, political and social roles traditionally played by women in Native American societies. Seen by Europeans as a threat to the tribal negotiations necessary for successful settlement, these powerful traditional female roles were undermined as quickly as possible as Euro-Americans established and imposed a tribal system that only recognized and , more strategically, only negotiated with male authority figures.

Silko also exposes the influential economic, political and social roles traditionally played by women in many Native American societies. Silko, in the opening lines of the text describes a seemingly innocuous domestic scene: a kitchen where an 'old woman stands at the stove stirring…simmering brown liquid' (Silko, 1991:19). This instantly recognizable and comfortable image of nurturing and nourishment is immediately exploded as the subsequent lines reveal that the old woman, Zeta, is in fact dyeing clothing to 'the color of old blood' for use in her business of gun and drug running, while her nephew Ferro is cleaning his arsenal of weapons at the kitchen table and her equally elderly twin Lecha is being helped by her 'nurse' to inject illegal drugs. The kitchen itself, we find is situated within a fortified ranch, protected by vicious guard dogs and isolated from community of any kind in the middle of the Tucson desert (Silko, 1991:19).
Male characters such as Beaufrey, Serlo, Max Blue, Batolomeo, and a whole variety of authoritative figures from the Mexican and US armies, Police, and judiciaries are highlighted in the text. At the same time great emphasis is nonetheless placed upon some very powerful female figures: for instance, the Euro Americans Leah Blue, who ruthlessly seduces influential men to further her own business ambitions, and Seese, who has the strength to survive drug abuse and the abduction and murder of her infant son; and the indigenous women Angelita La Escapia, and the Yaqui twins Lecha and Zeta, who prove themselves to be powerful forces for political and social change. All three indigenous histories, and Lecha and Zeta inherit their roles as keepers of the almanac through a long line of female guardians from their grandmother Yoeme. All three thus emphasize the links between memory, history, identity and education, and cultural roles traditionally undertaken by women in indigenous societies.

Mexican revolutionary, Angelita locates the dead within an active and present history. We simply wait for the earth’s natural forces already set losse, the exploding fierce energy of all the dead slaves and dead ancestors haunting the Americans…we wait for the tidal wave of history to sweep as along (Silko, 1991:518). Silko’s likening of the force of history to ‘the earth’s natural forces’. The comparison of history and nature is particularly evident in the highly visible and immediate interaction between past and present that the Yaqui smuggler Calabazas perceives in the very geography, or physical landscape, of the Americas: Right Now. Today I have seen it. Where the arroyo curves sharp, caught, washed up against the big boulders with broken branches and weeds. Human bones piled high. Skulls piled and stacked like melons (Silko, 1991: 216). Here history is clearly inscribed upon the land itself, and upon the bodies of the dead. In discussing the indigenous ‘People’s Army’ led by the Mayan revolutionary Angelita La Escapia, Silko emphasizes the Mayan belief in the living nature of remembrance, and of history, regardless of the passing of time: Generation after generation, individuals were born, then after eighty years, disappeared into dust, but in the stories, the people lived on in the imaginations and hearts of their descendants’. Whenever their stories were told, the spirits of the ancestors were presented their power was alive (Silko, 1991:520). Thus we see that memory transforms itself into history, which in turn ensures a perception of the continued and continual nature of the living dead. Angelita clearly recognizes the political of history: ‘History was the Sacred text. The most complete history was the most powerful force’ (Silko, 1991:316).
Menardo’s desperate need to distance himself from his indigenous origins, despite his childhood love of his grandfather’s histories is clearly depicted. Menardo claims his characteristically tribal ‘flat nose’ to be the result of a courageous boxing career, his marriage to Iliana is influenced by her family’s social status as direct descendants of the conquistador Gutierrez (Silko, 1991:260). The figure of Menardo illustrates his increasing distance-physical, social, political, emotional, and spiritual from his origins.
The more Menardo mixes with the oppressive cultures that are traced in the Euro-American worlds of the text, the more he becomes involved with, and thus implicated in state programs of abduction, torture, and murder. It is significant that Menardo becomes fixated with the power of the gift that will eventually destroy him: the bullet-proof vest presented to him by his Mafia associates from the US. In his fixed belief in the power of the vest, which is based entirely upon its technological merits, Menardo ironically emulates Euro-American beliefs-what Wilson Weasel Tail would interpret as cultural mistranslations-regarding the spirit shirts of the Ghost Dance. Persuading his Indian chauffeur Tach to shoot him to prove the vest’s power, Menardo invited his own death. Menardo dies not just because he denies his origins and identity, but because he embraces and emulates the ‘death culture’ of Euro-Americ that considers itself ‘invincible with the magic of high technology (Silko, 1991:503). Menardo quite literally dies because he rejects the power, and thus the protection, of the ancestral spirits at the heart or the idea of the spirit shirt/bulletproof vest; technology alone is not enough.
Roof is also a complex character created by Silko. He is born into a ‘white’ American family whose wealth derives from Indian wars of the Southwest and whose social status depends upon concealment of their mixed race. Irreparably brain damaged in a near fatal motorcycle accident, Root is both rejected by-and himself rejects- his comfortable history. Instead, Root chooses to embrace his mixed heritage by living and working with the Yaqui smuggler Calabazas. It is significant that Root decides to reject Euro-American values after he has been deemed disabled-‘damaged’- by Euro-American medicine. Inspite of his financial and social success, in choosing to forget, Menardo dies; inspite of his irreparable disability, in choosing to remember Root lives. Root’s survival underlines the significance of his name: embracing his genealogical and familial origins, Root lives because he chooses not to erase his identity, in her complicated analysis of the characters of Root and Menardo, Silko, illustrates the danger of willful forgetfulness, and the political power of remembrance. In actively remembering the past and those who have died, and that justice continues to be demanded for those who have died unjustly.
Thus we see the longest of Silko’s works, Almanac of the Dead represents the culmination of years of research, thought, and other efforts connected to the issue of justice for indigenous people. Throughout a long seires of characters that show moral and spiritual salvation social redemption. As she makes clear the horrors of society, she forces the reader to pass moral judgment, even if this means passing judgment of the self. Often bluntly, the novel defines and presents a choice, on the social and spiritual levels, between creation and destruction. Most significant of all, Silko – along with many other contemporary Native writers – actively demands not just a future, but also the control of that future. In the context of the development of the literary canon in the US, it is a clear challenge to exclusion and marginalization. In this sense, Silko concurs with Carlos Fuentes’ succinct comment on the active and activist nature of history. The knowledge of the ‘past is thus …the possibility of shaping an imperfect but reasonable future. If we understand that we made the past, we will not permit the future to be made without us or against us (Fuentes, 1986:346).

Works Cited

1. Coltelli, L. (1992–3) 'Almanac of the Dead: an Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko' Native American Literature, Pisa, Italy, 65–80.
2. Fuentes, C. (Fall 1985 Winter 1986) 'Remember the Future' Salmagundi, Vol. 68–9: 333–352.
3. Silko, L.M. (1991) Almanac of the Dead, New York: Penguin.
4. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
5. -----. Orientalism. New York: Penguin, 1995.
6. Feminist Review (2007) 85, 1–7.http://www.palgrav journals.com/fr/journal/v85/n1/full/9400315a.html
7. Michelle, Jarman. “Exploring the world of the different in Leslie Silkos Almanac of the Dead.” Melus, 2006.
8. Coltelli, Laura. "Almanac of the Dead: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko." Arnold 119-34.
9. Krupat, Arnold. Etnocriticism:Etnography, history, History, Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.
10. Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
11. Olmsted, Jane. “The Uses of Blood in Leslie Marmons Silko’s Almanac of the Dead”. CL.vol 40:3, Fall 1999, 464-489.