Burns 1 Andrew Burns TRAD 104H Dr. Hogle November 10, 2009 Curative Memory: The Woman Warrior and Ceremony Good remembrance is active remembrance, where the rememberer controls the recollection and interpretation of each memory—passive remembrance diminishes a person's control of reality and self. In Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, the main characters are trapped in passive remembrance: Kingston agonizes over the memory of her childhood—she feels disconnected with her Chinese heritage and sheltered from the American experience; Tayo's memories drive him to self-destructive behavior. Only by accepting their heritage, and examining previous assumptions, do Kingston and Tayo work to gain control over their memories and find strength within themselves. Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid, lives in a world filled with ghosts—she clings to the old Chinese ways. Fearful that Kingston will “becom[e] a foreign ghost, a non-human thing” Brave Orchid endeavors to “raise a China up around her verbally” through talk-stories (Homsher 94).
Brave Orchid, who initially intends for her and Kingston to return to China, never
distinguishes between actual ghosts, like the Sitting Ghost, and the foreign American “ghosts,” believing that by doing so, she will smooth Kingston's transition into Chinese life. Moreover, she believes the products and ideas of ghosts to be inferior, and invites Kingston to view them with skepticism, even when they provide a more cohesive explanation of her experiences. When Kingston objects to slamming pots and pans during the eclipse to keep the “frog from
Burns 2 swallowing the moon,” Brave Orchid scolds her: “You are always believing what the Ghost Teachers tell you” (Kingston 169). Straddling the two cultures, Kingston has trouble distinguishing real from myth, and her mother doesn't help by using “talk-story” to test “[her] strength to establish realities.” Writing The Woman Warrior is medicinal for the author. She exorcises her demons on paper by exploring her memories, examining different perspectives, and rebuilding the world with its contradictory pieces. She “constructs her memories into patterns that will educate her to go on […] rel[ying] on artfulness and felt comparisons” to reconcile her Chinese reality, represented by her enigmatic mother, Brave Orchid, with the American reality she experiences growing up in Stockton, among the ghosts (Homsher 98). At first she is bothered by the various contradictory elements of the world, herself, and her memory, but by actively exploring her childhood memories, she “learn[s] to make her mind large, as the universe is large, so there is room for paradoxes” (Kingston 29). Tayo returns from World War II a broken man. Memories of Rocky's death and his failure to recover the Josiah's Mexican cattle haunt him—drive him to seek relief in a bottle. He blames himself for the drought and experiences troublesome passive memories—unwanted “flashbacks, dream imagery, and entanglement imagery” which he copes with by drowning himself in booze and barroom stories (Scarberry 20). Even at an early age, Tayo respects the Laguna ways, even as others, like Rocky and his Army pals, reject them as old-fashioned and irrelevant. After Josiah explains to Tayo his plan for raising Mexican cattle, criticizing the writers for not “think[ing] about drought or winter blizzards or dry thistles,” Tayo nods, but Rocky quickly shoots him down: “Those books are
Burns 3 written by scientists...the trouble with the way the people around here have always done things— they never knew what they were doing” (Silko 70). Betonie, the medicine man, attributes this push to discard the old ways to witchery—an evil force that “seeks to destroy the natural continuity of life relationships...[and] is advanced [...] through forgetfulness” (Scarberry 19). Emo, Harley, and Pinky exemplify witchery, driven by greed, violence, and a thirst for vengeance. The same forces that ate away at them threaten to eat away at Tayo, and, but for his early respect for and memory of the Laguna ways, they probably would have. Memory is the key to Tayo's recovery. As a child, he suffers, but after he returns from the war, cheap booze arrests his suffering and inhibits his growth (Scarberry 21). In order to escape the witchery, Grandma, Ku'oosh, and Betonie prod Tayo to remember—to suffer—and remember, both the loss of Rocky, and the old rituals. Laguna culture, rich in story-telling, holds “memory, as realized in language,” as the bedrock of our humanity (Scarberry 20). Only by recovering the Laguna stories does Tayo defeat the witchery and restore the delicate “balance between elemental forces” (Scarberry 26).
Burns 4 Works Cited Homsher, Deborah. ""The Woman Warrior," by Maxine Hong Kingston: A Bridging of Autobiography and Fiction." The Iowa Review 10.4 (1979): 93-98. Print. Kingston, Maxine H. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Print. Scarberry, Susan J. "Memory as Medicine: The Power of Recollection in "Ceremony"" American Indian Quaterly 5.1 (1979): 19-26. Print. Silko, Leslie M. Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.