Cultural Flexibility in Ceremony and "The Man to Send Rain Clouds" PDF

ENGL 2307\ Final Paper\ Eytan Pol Cultural Flexibility in *Ceremony* and "The Man to Send Rain Clouds" In Leslie Marmon Silko's novel *Ceremony* and short story "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," ceremonies and cultural traditions are modified and adjusted. In *Ceremony*, the medicine man Betonie tell...

ENGL 2307\ Final Paper\ Eytan Pol Cultural Flexibility in *Ceremony* and "The Man to Send Rain Clouds" In Leslie Marmon Silko's novel *Ceremony* and short story "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," ceremonies and cultural traditions are modified and adjusted. In *Ceremony*, the medicine man Betonie tells Tayo that he has "made changes to the rituals" (Silko, *Ceremony* 116). Likewise, in "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," after Louise's urging, Leon relents and asks the priest to sprinkle Holy Water on Teofilo's grave. In turn, the priest gives in after initially stating he is unable to do so, since no Last Rites were given. However, this cultural flexibility in both of Silko's texts leads to different outcomes. In this paper, I argue that while the changes to the tribal culture and traditions in *Ceremony* were necessary for Tayo's healing, the same attitude is suggested to lead to the undoing of the tribe in "The Man to Send Rain Clouds."\ The necessity of cultural flexibility for Tayo's healing is quite evident in *Ceremony*'s narrative. Early in the novel, Ku'oosh, another medicine man, is ineffective in aiding Tayo, as the modern warfare was "too alien to comprehend," and his ceremony is thus useless to help (33). Betonie, on the other hand, believes that the ceremonies have always been changing, "if only in the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle's claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the chants" (116). He clearly recognizes that the details of the cultural traditions are not the same as they had been. This realization, a conviction that "things which don't shift and grow are dead things," likely stems from his grandfather Descheeny, who was also a medicine man (116). Descheeny had watched the sky and saw the constellations shifting the old stories, and subsequently changed his ceremonies (139). In *Ceremony* then, change is embraced.\ However, I believe this is not the case in "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," where I argue a few subtle moments of exposition and description betray the fate of the tribe. Essentially, in a couple of key passages at both the beginning and end of the short story, Silko suggests that the future of the tribe is rather bleak. Unlike in *Ceremony*, the changing ceremonies, cultures, and traditions do not lead to a protagonist healing nor the tribe successfully adapting to new circumstances in "The Man to Send Rain Clouds". Instead, I argue that Silko takes an opposite approach, and therefore tactfully criticizes the powers that force such cultural flexibility.\ Early in the short story, Silko foreshadows the difficult times for the tribe in a highly symbolic sentence. After Teofilo's body is found underneath a big cottonwood tree, the narrator inserts a line of exposition, describing how "the big cottonwood tree stood apart of a grove of small winter-bare cottonwoods which grew in the wide sandy arroyo" (133). The big cottonwood tree is quite symbolic in the first part of "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," as it is underneath the tree that Leon and Ken find Teofilo's body, the tree they wait under, and the tree they return to. In other words, Teofilo's body is initially hardly mentioned, and it is the tree that symbolically represents the dead old man. As the solitary and big cottonwood tree, standing apart from the grove, is a stand-in for Teofilo, the group of small trees then suggests the rest of the village.\ A few aspects of this symbolic line then spell bad news for the village. Teofilo, as the big cottonwood, represents an elderly and guiding role over the smaller trees, a role which is subsequently lost after his death. This loss is suggested further in the state of the grove of smaller trees, which are winter-bare, as though in sorrow. Moreover, the placement of the grove in an arroyo is highly symbolic. An arroyo is a wash or waterbed that often exist in a dry state. Water only flows through arroyos ephemerally, for a short period of time, and usually during a flash flood. The implication of the grove of small trees, symbolizing the surviving members of the village, in an arroyo, is that of an impending flash flood engulfing them. This flash flood, I argue, represents the priest and the Catholic culture he attempts to spread among the village.\ After Leon and Ken find Teofilo's body, they wrap him in a blanket and spread corn meal and pollen on him. As the story draws to a close, Teofilo is buried after the priest has sprinkled the holy water on his body, and "the wind pulled at the priest's brown Franciscan robe and swirled away the corn meal and pollen that had been sprinkled on the blanket" (136). The corn meal and the pollen that Leon and Ken spread on Teofilo's body were part of the tribal ceremony of preparing the dead, and this process further included the tying of a feather and the painting of the face. In contrast, the holy water represents the priest's Catholicism and this culture's funeral rites. At first, both cultural traditions appear to coexist side by side in preparing Teofilo for death and the afterlife. However, this line, in which the wind swirls away the corn meal and pollen is significant in disturbing that balanced coexistence. These important parts of the tribal tradition, symbolized in the corn meal and the pollen, are blown away and removed from Teofilo's body right after the holy water takes their place. Subtly then, the removal of one culture by the other is suggested by the narrator in another line of exposition containing highly symbolic phrasing. It is the priest's Catholicism, after all, that now appears to push away the village's tribal traditions.\ However, as I stated earlier in this paper, not only the village relents in allowing the sprinkling of the priest's holy water after Louise's urging, but also the priest himself performs this ritual even though Last Rites were not given, which he states were necessary for a Christian burial (135). The position of the two cultures here is different, however, and I believe that therefore the compromising of both sides is suggested by Silko to not be one of equal coexistence at all. After all, the priest is a stranger in the village, and though he has some sympathy for the tribe, he has no knowledge of either their culture or the land they live on. He does not initially understand how the villagers managed to dig a grave into the frozen ground, and after seeing Teofilo's small body wrapped in a blanket, he suspects a "perverse Indian trick" (136). In other words, the priest is somewhat of an intruder, who lives among the tribe with the sole reason of converting them to his religion, to Catholicism. The priest's adaptation of his religious traditions to fit the tribe's wants and wishes is then meant to serve the purpose of eventually spreading Catholicism among the villagers, and springs from offensive reasons. For the tribe, however, the adaptation of their culture by including the holy water, appears in contrast to be from defensive reasons. Leon and Ken, who found Teofilo's body, did not wish to have the priest involved initially, and only relented after Louise urged them. What appears at first as a compromise then, I believe, is rather a small surrender.\ Who then is the titular man to send the rain clouds? Silko's title of course allows for different interpretations, though I believe not Teofilo nor Leon or Ken are the men to send the rain clouds, but the priest. Nor are the rain clouds here as positive as the ones that solve the drought in *Ceremony*. Instead, the priest's holy water represents the rain clouds that wash away the pollen and corn meal, in turn symbolic for the tribe's culture. These rain clouds may not be the type that the village is hoping for, ones that bring plenty of precipitation to ensure a good harvest. Instead, it is the arroyo of the initial crucial passage that betrays what the rain clouds will bring. The rain clouds will bring the water that will rush through the arroyo, flooding and engulfing the grove of small and bare cottonwoods that remain after Teofilo's death, and which represent the tribe, in the same way as the priest's holy water washed away the corn meal and pollen.\ All in all then, the cultural flexibility in "The Man to Send Rain Clouds" results in very different cultural dynamics and balances than the same attitude does in *Ceremony*. The contrast is stark; whereas Tayo is healed through the changing of ceremonies, the village is suggested to be washed away by a flash flood -- which itself contains highly symbolic biblical meaning -- of the priest's Catholicism. Silko thus presents these same flexible attitudes leading to very different outcomes in both of her texts. Works Cited Silko, Leslie Marmon. *Ceremony*. Penguin Books, 2006.\ \-\--. "The Man to Send Rain Clouds." *New Mexico Quarterly*, vol. 38, no. 4, 1968, pp. 133-136.