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  • Silko, Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman
  • Annette Van Dyke (bio)
Brewster E. Fitz . Silko, Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2004. ISBN: 0-8061-3725-8. ix + 288 pp.

Silko, Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman is a very erudite discussion of Leslie Marmon Silko's journey to becoming a writing medicine woman who is developing the perfect language. Central to Brewster Fitz's theory is that Silko has a "conflicted desire for both orality and literacy" that "becomes a yearning for a written orality . . . different from Anglo-European literature" (x). She has, according to Fitz, "a writerly dream of grounding the oral tradition and her texts in an ontologically privileged kind of universal language in which writing and orality are organically one, life-affirming, all embracing, and motherly" (7).

To support his theory, Fitz traces Silko's development as a mixed-blood writer needing to "heal" cultural wounds that seem to stem from her knowing very little Keresan. He discusses her development from her legacy from Aunt Susie, a writing storyteller, and her experience of seeing a giant bear on the hillside on a deer hunt. For Fitz, these indicate Silko's first steps toward becoming the writing medicine woman. In chapter 1, Fitz examines bear power as figured in several of Silko's stories and Ceremony and elaborates upon her coming into her writing power.

In subsequent chapters, Fitz discusses Silko's short stories such as "Lullaby," "Storyteller," and "Tony's Story" as illustrating that "Silko vacillates between a distrust of writing that is informed by a logic of exclusion and the realization that writing can both wound and heal, a position informed by a paradoxical logic of inclusion, a messianic logic of syncretic interpretation in which writing heals a lost or unknown tongue by glossing it" (234). I quote this passage to give some idea of the challenges that await the reader of this text. It is, of course, a critical work on the concept of writing itself, so one can expect a certain amount of abstraction. However, at one point, Fitz critiques Helen Jaskoski's reading of "Lullaby," claiming that her "interpretation, though astute, becomes a figure for literary interpretation that is informed by Western literary concepts" (82). [End Page 102] He traces her use of the terms tragedy and pathos back to Aristotle and, therefore, sees them as inappropriate. As I do not have the background to do likewise with some of Fitz's concepts, I nevertheless wish he had been a bit less free with terms such as gloss; tolle, lege; glossolalia; and patristic exegesis.

Fitz also examines what he sees as Silko's "warm, matronizing, and equalizing" use of humor and irony in "Coyote Holds a Full House in His Hand" (147). He sees the coyote-like main character as being akin to Silko, as his "talents come into him like an outside force or narrative spirit" (236). He points out that Silko believes that this power or outside force(s) took over the writing of Almanac of the Dead. In chapter 6, he argues that Silko is doing a "gloss and translation" of the Mayan writings in Almanac and that the negativity in the book points to the love that is found in the next book, Gardens in the Dunes (189).

In chapter 7, Fitz claims that Silko is attempting to reclaim/create a perfect language that would balance the oral tradition with the written, the Pueblo heritage with the future, based upon a female spiritual principle particularly expressed in Gardens in the Dunes. As I have been working on the female spiritual principle in Native American literature for some time, I was particularly interested in this chapter. I was disappointed that Fitz did not seem to know about the thread of literary criticism begun by Paula Gunn Allen and compiled in her 1986 book Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Allen maintains that Silko's use of a female spiritual principle arises from its centrality to Pueblo culture, perhaps a relevant idea to Fitz's thesis. However, his explication of how Silko is using "a confusion of points of view" in Gardens to...

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