Grantham University American Lit Discussion (BINGO) Write a 150-200 word response to the following discussion activity. Use specific references and direct

Grantham University American Lit Discussion (BINGO) Write a 150-200 word response to the following discussion activity. Use specific references and direct quotes from our readings this week to illustrate and support your view/s. Discussion Activity #1One way to understand “magical realism” is as a kind of pleasant joke on “realism,” suggesting as it does a new kind of fiction, one that manages to combine the “truthful” and “verifiable” aspects of realism with the “magical” effects we associate with myth, folklore, and the tall tale. But more seriously, magical realism also challenges the status quo, or dominant way of looking at things. Normal notions about time, place, identity, and even the laws of physics are challenged, suspended, lured away from certitude. Sometimes, the intersection between realism and the magical in “magical realism” depends upon a colliding of cultures or civilizations, one so-called “primitive” and hence more in touch with magic, and the other “civilized” and supposedly “realistic” by being grounded in science, and wary of illusion and superstition. Compare and contrast two of the magical realist texts this week and describe how the narrative uses elements of the “magical” to resist or challenge our basic sense of what’s real. By suspending our grasp on “reality,” how do the stories make us think differently about time (playing with an understanding of the past and present), or place (what is physically and imaginatively near and what is far), or identity (our acceptance of social or cultural norms). Comment especially on how the texts force us to consider our basic assumption that “reality” can always be explained by making rational, provable distinctions between the “real” and the so-called “magical”. 1028
v. S.
NAIPAUL
which was on the same floor. Instead, for the first time, [saw something arranged
for a television life.
I thought she might have been angry. She looked only puzzled. I was grateful
for that.
I said to her in English, “Will you marry me?”
And there, it was done.
“It is for the best, Santosh,” Priya said, giving me tea when I got back to the
restaurant. “You will be a free man. A citizen. You will have the whole world
before you.”
1 was pleased that he was pleased.
So Iam now a citizen, my presence is legal, and I live in Washington. I al_nstill
with Priya. We do not talk together as much as we did. The restaurant IS ~ne
world, the parks and green streets of Washington are ~nother, and every everung
some of these streets take me to a third. Burnt-out bnck houses, broken fences,
overgrown gardens; in a levelled Lot between the high b~ick.waUs of two houses,
a sort of artistic children’s playground which the hubsht children never use; and
then the dark house in which 1 now live.
Its smells are strange, everything in it is strange. But my strength in t~is
house is that I am a stranger. I have closed my mind and heart to the English
language, to newspapers and radio and television, to the pictures of huhshi
runners and boxers and musicians on the wall. I do not want to understand or
learn any more..
.’
.
I am a simple man who decided to act and see for himself, and It IS as though
I have had several lives. I do not wish to add to these. Some afternoons I walk
to the circle with the fountain. I see the dancers but they are separated from
me as by glass. Once, when there were rumo~rs of new burnings, someo~e
scrawled in white paint on the pavement outside my house: Soul Brother. I
understand the words; but [ feel, brother to what or to whom? 1 was once part
of the flow never thinking of myself as a presence. Then I looked in the mirror
and decided to be free. All that my freedom has brought me is the knowled~e
that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this
body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.
1971
2. An African
hllll1′
should
American
man or friend
not Ill’ illHl.llill·d.
to Afrlcun
Americnn»,
hl’tl
1t”1,, 1111111( I hnl Snlll”,h.
LESLIE MARMON
SILKO
born 1948
ovelist, poet, memoirist, and writer
of short fiction, Leslie Marmon Sitko
can comfortably alternate between prose
and poetry within the confines of a single
work, in a manner reminiscent of traditional Native American storytellers. For
all its seriousness and lyricism, Silko’s
work is marked by a touch of irreverence.
Well acquainted with the proverbial trickster Coyote, Silko has demonstrated her
own wit and versatility as a narrator of
Coyote tales. But storytelling is a game
with serious ends. “I will tell you something about stories,” warns an unnamed
voice in one of her novels: “They aren’t
just entertainment. Don’t he fooled.”
Silko was born in Albuquerque but
grew up in Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico. “I am of mixed-breed ancestry,”
she has written, “but what I know is
Laguna. This place I am from is everything I am as a writer and human
being.” A Keresan-speaking
district,
Laguna Pueblo is an old Native community that whites first joined in the
mid-nineteenth century when two government employees from Ohio, Walter
and Robert Marmon, arrived as surveyors and set down roots. The brothers
wrote a constitution for Laguna modeled after the U.S. Constitution; each
served a term as governor of the pueblo,
an office that no non-Native had held
before. They also married Laguna
women: Robert Marmon is the greatgrandfather of Leslie Marmon Silko.
Silko attended Laguna Day School
until fifth grade, when she was transferred to Mnnznno Day School, a small
private
acnd”llI}
III Albuquerque.
llorween I WI” 111111 I ‘11,1). she studied
I 1I).:lIsil ill tlu- l hlt1 I~II III’ Nt’W M(‘:>(
I’ll, 1IIlIIIII’cI \ 1111. till III IIIII,’W’,
‘1ll11
gave birth to the older of her two sons,
Cazimir Silko. During these years she
published
her first story, “Tony’s
Story,” a provocative tale of witchery.
Following graduation, Silko stayed on
at the university and taught courses in
creative writing and oral literature. She
studied for a time in the university’s
American Indian Law Program, with the
intention of working in the legal area of
Native land claims. In 1971, however, a
National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Grant changed Silko’s mind
about law school, and she quit to devote
herself to writing. Seven of her stories,
including “Yellow Woman,” were published in 1974 in a collection edited by
Kenneth Rosen-The Man to Send. Rain
Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians. The novel Ceremony, her
first large-scale work, appeared in 1977.
An enormously complex novel that
appeared just after the Vietnam War,
Ceremony follows a Second World War
veteran of mixed ancestry through his
struggle for healing. Widely hailed, the
novel propelled its author to the front of
the growing ranks of indigenous writers
in the United States. On the strength of
Ceremony, Silko was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (known as the “genius
grant”) in 1981.
Although much of SiLko’swork emphasizes the healing of conAicts-between
white and Native Americans, between the
human and natural worlds, between warring aspects of the self-some of her novels also reveal a more aggressive and
despairing tone. Such a novel.isAlmanac
of the Dead (1991), which turns a merciless eye on an America that drugs, prostitution, torture, organized crime, and
IIIIIII~ III’ “‘,,11111 ,101″111″
hll\’ (’til rllptl'”
1030
LESLI[
MARMON
SILKO
and deformed. On the map that opens
the book read the stern lines: “The Indian Wars have never ended in the
Americas. Native Americans acknowledge no borders; they seek nothing less
than the return of all tribal lands.” Formerly a professor at the University of
Arizona, Silko continues to Liveand write
in Tucson.
The story presented here, “Yellow
Woman,” is one of S.ilko’s shortest and
earliest pieces, but it occupies a stillgrowing place in the canon of short
fiction. Often reprinted, it became the
subject of a volume of critical essays
published in 1993. In traditional Laguna
lore, Yellow Woman is either the heroine
or a minor character in a wide range
of tales. In her earliest incarnations, she
might possibly have been a com spiritoccasionally, Yellow Woman is named
together with her three sisters, Blue
Woman,
Red Woman, and White
Woman, thus completing the four colors
YELLOW
of corn-but in Laguna lore she eventually became a kind of Everywornan. A
traditional Laguna prayer song, recited
at the naming ceremony for a newborn
daughter, begins, “Yellow Woman is
born, YelJow Woman is born.” In narrative lore Yellow Woman most frequently
appears in tales of abduction, where she
‘is said to have been captured by a strange
man at a stream while she is fetching
water. Her captor, who carries her off to
another world, is sometimes a kachina,
or ancestral spirit; and when at last she
returns to her home, she is imbued with
power that proves of value for her people. ln Silko’s version of the tale, traditional elements remain constantly in the
foreground. Yet whether the central figures in the story are human or supernatural remains
unclear;
the story’s
ambiguity is the source of its fascination.
Thus Silko draws on Native tradition to
make a major contribution to contemporary American fiction.
YeI10w Woman
My thigh clung to his with dampness, and ( watched the sun rising up through
the tamaracks and willows. The small brown water birds came to the river and
hopped across the mud, leaving brown scratches in the alkali-white crust. They
bathed in the river silently. Icould hear the water, almost at our feet where the
narrow fast channel bubbled and washed green ragged moss and fern leaves. I
looked at him beside me, rolled in the red blanket on the white river sand. I
cleaned the sand out of the cracks between my toes, squinting because the sun
was above the willow trees. I looked at him for the last time, sleeping on the
white river sand.
I felt hungry and followed the river south the way we had come the afternoon before, following our footprints that were already blurred by lizard tracks
and bug trails. The horses were still lying down, and the black one whinnied
when he saw me but he did not get up–maybe it was because the corral was
made out of thick cedar branches and the horses had not yet felt the sun like I
had. I tried to look beyond the pale red mesas to the pueblo. I knew it WOII
there, even if I could not see it, on the sandrock hill above Ihe river, the same
river that moved past me now and had reflected the moon 1″,1 night,
The horse felt warm underneath me. Ile shook
1″‘.111 .11111pnwed the sand
The bay whinnied and k-nncd IlAllillsf Ilw ~1I1i’ I”IIII! ‘” 1″II11w. lind f reuu-ru
111’11·(1him 1I,1″,·p III Ilw n·d hlllllkl’l IIC”I”I. 1111 ,tI’
I ~Ilcl ,,1’1′ lile’ “!It’ll’ IllId
“i..
WOMAN
1031
tied him close to the other horse, I walked north with the river again, and the
white sand broke loose in footprints over footprints.
“Wake up.”
,
He moved in the blanket and turned his face to me with his eyes still-closed.
I knelt down to touch him.
“I’m leaving.”
He smiled now, eyes stilJ closed. “You are coming with me, remember?” He
sat up now with his bare dark chest and belly in the sun.
“Where?”
“To my place.”
“And will I come back?”
He pulled his pants on. I walked away from him, feeling him behind me and
smelling the willows.
“Yellow Woman,” he said.
I turned to face him. “Who are you?” I asked.
He laughed and knelt on the low, sandy bank, washing his face in the river.
“Last night you guessed my name, and you knew why I had come.”
I stared past him at the shallow moving water and tried to remember the
night, but I could only see the moon in the water and remember his warmth
around me.
“But I only said that you were him and that I was Yellow Woman-I’m
not
really her-I have my own name and I come from the pueblo on the other side
of the mesa. Your name is Silva and you are a stranger Imet by the river yesterday afternoon.”
He laughed softly. “What happened yesterday has nothing to do with what
you will do today, YelJow Woman.”
“I know-that’s
what I’m saying-the
old stories about the ka’tsina’ spirit
and Yellow Woman can’t mean us.”
MyoId grandpa liked to tell those stories best. There is one about Badger and
Coyote who went hunting and were gone all day, and when the sun was going
down they found a house. There was a girl living there alone, and she had light
hair and eyes and she told them that they could sleep with her. Coyote wanted
to be with her all night so he sent Badger into a prairie-dog hole, telling him he
thought he saw something in it. As soon as Badger crawled in, Coyote blocked
up the entrance with rocks and hurried back to Yellow Woman.
“Come here,” he said gently.
He touched my neck and I moved close to him to feel his breathing and to
hear his heart. I was wondering if Yellow Woman had known who she was-if
she knew that she would become part of the stories. Maybe she’d had another
name that her husband and relatives called her so that only the ka’tsina from
the north and the storytellers would know her as Yellow Woman. But I didn’t
go on; I felt him all around me, pushing me down into the white river sand.
Yellow Woman went away with the spirit from the north and lived with him
and his relatives. She was gone for a long time, but then one day she came back
and she brought twin boys.
“Do yelll (.IIOW the story?”
1032
LESLIE
MARMON
SILKO
“What story?” He smiled and pulled me close to him as he said this. 1 was
afraid lying there on the red blanket. All I could know was the way he felt,
warm, damp, his body beside me. This is the way it happens in the stories, I
was thinking, with no thought beyond the moment she meets the ka’tsina spirit
and they go.
“l don’t have to go. What they tell in stories was real only then, back in time
immemorial, like they say.”
He stood up and pointed at my clothes tangled in the blanket. “Let’s go,”
he said.
Iwalked beside him, breathing hard because he walked fast, his hand around
my wrist. I had stopped trying to pull away from him, because his hand felt
cool and the sun was high, drying the river bed into alkali. I will see someone,
eventually Iwill see someone, and then [ will be certain that he is only a mansome man from nearby-and
1 will be sure that I am not Yellow Woman.
Because she is from out of time past and I live now and I’ve been to school and
there are highways and pickup trucks that Yellow Woman never saw.
It was an easy ride north on horseback. I watched the change from the cottonwood trees along the river to the junipers that brushed past us in the foothills, and finally there were only pinons, and when Ilooked up at the rim of the
mountain plateau 1 could see pine trees growing on the edge. Once I stopped
to look down, but the pale sandstone had disappeared and the river was gone
and the dark lava hills were all around. He touched my hand, not speaking, but
always singing softly a mountain song and looking into my eyes.
Ifelt hungry and wondered what they were doing at home now-my mother,
my grandmother, my husband, and the baby. Cooking breakfast, saying, “Where
did she go?-maybe kidnapped.” And A1 going to the tribal police with the
details: “She went walking along the river.”
The house was made with black lava rock and red mud. lt was high above the
spreading miles of arroyos and long mesas. Ismelled a mountain smell of pitch
and buck brush. ] stood there beside the black horse, looking down on the
small, dim country we had passed, and I shivered.
“Yellow Woman, come inside where it’s warm.”
He lit a fire in the stove. It was an old stove with a round belly and an enamel
coffeepot on top. There was only the stove, some faded Navajo blankets, and a
bedroll and cardboard box. The floor was made of smooth adobe plaster, and
there was one small window facing east. He pointed at the box.
“There’s some potatoes and the frying pan.” He sat on the floor with his arms
around his knees pulling them dose to his chest and he watched me fry the
potatoes. I didn’t mind him watching me because he was always watching
me-he had been watching me since I came upon him sitting on the river bank
trimming leaves from a willow twig with his knife. We ate from the pan and he
wiped the grease from his fingers on his Levi’s.
“Have you brought women here before?” He smiled and kept chewing, so [
said, “Do you always use the same tricks?”
“What tricks?” He looked at me like he didn’t understand.
“The story about being a ka’tsina from the mounrul …. 1114′..unv about Yellow
Woman.”
Silva WIIS silcnt ; hi .. (‘m’t’ WIIS (111111,
YeLLOW
WOMAN
1033
“I don’t believe it. Those stories couldn’t happen now,” I said.
He shook his head and said softly, “But someday they wiJl talk about us and
they will say, ‘Those two lived long ago when things like that happened.’ ,,’
He stood up and went out. I ate the rest of the potatoes and thought about
things-about
the noise the stove was making and the sound of the mountain
wind outside. I remembered yesterday and the day before, and then I went
outside.
I wal.ked past the corral to the edge where the narrow trail cut through the
bJack nrn rock. Iwas standing in the sky with nothing around me but the wind
that came down from the blue mountain peak behind me. 1could see faint
mountain images in the distance miles across the vast spread of mesas and
valleys and plains. Iwondered who was over there to feel the mountain wind
on those sheer blue edges-who
walks on the pine needles in those blue
mountains.
“Can you see the pueblo?” Silva was standing behind me.
I shook my head. “We’re too far away.”
“From here I can see the world.” He stepped out on the edge. “The Navajo
reservation begins over there.” He pointed to the east. “The Pueblo boundaries
are over here.” He looked below us to the south, where the narrow trail seemed
to come from. “The Texans have their ranches over there, starting with that
valley, the Concho Valley. The Mexicans run some cattle over there too.”
“Do you ever work for them?”
“1 steal from them,” Silva answered. The sun was dropping behind us and the
shadow~ were filling the land below. ] turned away from the edge that dropped
forever into the valleys below.
“I’m cold,” I said, “I’m going inside.” Istarted wondering about this man who
could speak the Pueblo language so well but who lived on a mountain and
rustled cattle. ] decided that this man Silva must be Navajo, because Pueblo
men didn’t do things like that.
“You must be a Navajo.”
Silva shook his head gently. “Little Yellow Woman,” he said, “you never give
up, do you? I have told you who I am. The Navajo people know me, too.” He
knelt down and unrolled the bedroll and spread the extra blankets out on a
piece of canvas. The sun was down, and the only light in the house came from
outside-the
dim orange light from sundown.
I stood there and waited for him to crawl under the blankets,
“What are you waiting for?” he said, and] lay down beside him. He undressed
me slowly like the night before beside the river-kissing my face gently and
running his hands up and down my belly and legs. He took off my pants and
then he laughed.
“Why are you laughing?”
“You are breathing so hard.”
I pulled away from him and turned my back to him.
He pulled me around and pinned me down with his arms and chest. “You
don’t understand, do you, little Yellow Woman? You will do what I want.”
And, nf.(ulli hI’ wns nil around me with his skin slippery against mine, and I
was ull’ld.l 111’111111′ I understood that his strength could hurt me. llay underluouth “” .. Iliell kill \ 111.11 11(‘ could d(·~tl'()y me. Rlillal(‘r, while he sll’pl beside
III”, I 11111.1,,11 hI 1 II. 1111.1 I h;ltI tI 1’1·1·lill~
till’ I-illd,,1 1″‘1 1I11~ rlll Idlll 111.11
1034
LESLIE MARMON
SILKO
overcame me that morning along the river. I kissed him on the forehead and he
reached out for me.
When I woke up in the morning he was gone. It gave me a strange fee~ing
because for a long time] sat there on the blankets and looked around the httle
house for some object of his-some
proof that he had been there or maybe that
he was coming back. Only the blankets and the cardboard box remained. :rhe
.30-30 that had been leaning in the corner was gone, and so was the knife I
had used the night before. He was gone, and I had my chance to go now. But
first I had to eat, because Iknew it would be a long walk home.
I found some dried apricots in the cardboard box, and Isat down on a rock at
the edge of the plateau rim. There was no wind and the sun warmed me. I.wa,s
surrounded
by silence. I drowsed with apricots in my mouth, and l didn t
believe that there were highways or railroads or cattle to steal.
When J woke up, Istared down at my feet in the black mountain dirt. Little
black ants were swarming over the pine needles around my foot. They must
have smelled the apricots. 1 thought about my family far below me. They
would be wondering about me, because this had never happened to me before.
The tribal police would file a report. But if old Grandpa weren’t dead he would
tell them what happened-he
would laugh and say, “Stolen by a ka’tsina, a
mountain spirit. She’ll come home-they
usually do.” :rher~ are enough. of
them to handle things. My mother and grandmother will raise the baby like
they raised me. AI will find someone else, and they will go on like before,
except that there will be a story about the day] disappeared w~i1e I was .walking along the river. Silva had come for me; he said h~ had. I did not d~clde to
go. I just went. Moonflowers blossom in the sand hills before dawn.’ Just as I
followed him. That’s what Iwas thinking as Iwandered along the trail through
, I
I
the pine trees.
It was noon when Igot back. When I saw the stone house Iremembered that
I had meant to go home. But th…
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