Beginning of Ceremony

     Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, is a book about a Native American, Tayo, who is apart of the Lagunna Pueblo group.  Tayo is raised by his aunt Thelma, who treats him like a burden that was forced upon her. Tayo looks to his Uncle Josiah and his cousin Rocky for support growing up.  Tayo loves both rocky and Josiah, but he loses both of them when he returns home from World War II in the Philippians.  Silko describes Tayo’s journey of enduring through war, post-tramatic stress, drugs, and alcoholism.  When Tayo is posted in the Philippians, he sees mass amounts of dead bodies for the first time.  “That was the first time Tayo had realized that the man’s skin was not much different than his own…there was no difference when they were swollen and covered with flies.” (Silko 7)  Tayo discovers that death and war is the great equalizer of the human race; it does not matter what skin color or what religion one is.  Tayo cannot tell any difference between the dead and sees Josiah’s face on one of the dead Japanese bodies.  Rocky told Tayo, “…this is a Jap! This is a Jap uniform!” (Silko 7) but Tayo only saw Josiah’s “eyes sinking back into the skull.” (Silko 7)  Tayo is transported to a medic and is told to sleep.  The medic diagnosed Tayo with battle fatigue, and hallucinations caused by malarial fever.  This shows that not many people know what post-traumatic stress is, and the toll it can take on a person.  Post-traumatic stress can be triggered by anything: a feeling, memories, smell, sight, etc.  “He shivered…he could not feel anything except a swelling in his belly, a great swollen grief the was pushing into his throat.” (Silko 8) This “fever” of Tayo’s is a trigger and a cover-up for his post-traumatic stress.  The further one try’s to hide from PTS, the worse it comes back to haunt that person.  Tayo is constantly battling PTS and tries to forget about war by taking drugs or drinking.

            Tayo stays at the hospital for a while and is given Morphine to help the pain.  The author calls this western medicine white smoke and describes it as having, “no consciousness of itself. It fades into the white world of their bed sheets and walls; it is sucked away by the words of doctors who try to talk to the invisible scattered smoke.” (Silko 13)  The white smoke can help with PTS temporarily by relaxing one’s mind, but PTS will be with that person forever until that person can confront it.  When Tayo leaves the hospital, he soon wants to go back to the white smoke and get away from his PTS.  He looks to alcohol next, just like many other veterans.  Harley, a good friend of Tayo’s, is now an alcoholic due to the PTS from World War II.  “…Harley didn’t use to like beer at all, and maybe this was something that was different about him now, after the war.  He drank a lot of beer now.” (Silko 18)  Alcohol is used in the same way as morphine, to alleviate mental pain temporarily to escape PTS.  Harley thinks beer tastes awful, like poison, but he will still drink it only to get drunk.  Sometimes alcohol and drugs can’t let one escape PTS, so one has to purge their body by vomiting.  Tayo has memories and nightmares of the Philippians that are so severe that he has to vomit.  The doctor would trigger these war memories and Tayo, “wanted to scream at the doctor then, but the words choked him and he coughed up his own tears and tasted their salt in his mouth.  He smelled the disinfectant then, the urine and the vomit, and he gagged.” (Silko 14)  Vomiting is a way for Tayo to “get rid” of his bad memories temporarily.  In the beginning of the book Ceremony, Silko displays Tayo as a Native American man that fights through war, post-traumatic stress, drugs, and alcoholism.