"The Way I Heard It": Autobiography, Tricksters, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller

Buried near the end of Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller is a statement that begins as straightforward fact and concludes with a tongue-in-cheek reference that serves both to taunt readers and to clue them in on a means of interpreting the book. In "Toe'osh: A Laguna Coyote Story," the speaker asserts:

Some white men came to Acoma and Laguna a hundred      years ago and they fought over Acoma land and Laguna women, and      even now some of their descendants are howling in the hills southeast of Laguna.

(237)

Among those descendants is, of course, Silko herself, whose great-grandfather, Robert G. Marmon, was a white man who married a woman from the village of Paguate in Old Laguna. After this woman's death, Marmon married her sister, Marie Anaya, whom Silko identifies as her great-grandmother. As a person of mixed-race ancestry, Silko metaphorizes herself in the quotation above as a coyote, the quintessential trickster. When a narrator presents herself as a trickster, especially within a text that can be classified as autobiographical (even if somewhat equivocally), readers should proceed with more than their usual caution, assuming that the autobiographical pact is being manipulated if not actually broken. For although Storyteller includes numerous stories that may be fictional and that clearly do not situate Silko as protagonist, I will be treating this book as autobiography; among my goals here will be to examine the relationships among the more obviously autobiographical sections and the passages that could also be classified as myth, legend, or fiction. I am not so much out to argue that Storyteller is autobiography but rather to examine how our reading practices shift when we treat it as life writing.¹

Since a capacity to shift shapes is among the most prominent and universal characteristics of a trickster, mixed-race identity almost inevitably provides one with a precondition for trickster ability. Within the terms of Storyteller, mixed-race identity is analogous to, if not invariably identical to, shape shifting. The "misfortune of Trickster," according to Andrew Wiget, is "to embody two or more social and ethical domains," and "that creates his dilemma and our crisis of interpretation" (92). According to which social or ethical norms ought we interpret a given text? Although Silko positions herself most firmly on the Indian side of the Laguna-white hyphen, her trickster's ability to shift shapes is mirrored in the generic indeterminacy of her text. The hyphen linking yet separating Laguna and white camouflages a lacuna of identity. Such a hyphen asserts that a person is neither absolutely Laguna nor absolutely white, yet it also functions as a fulcrum, permitting a shift from one to the other, especially when identity is perceived through cultural performance rather than physical appearance. Many members of Silko's audience will be her ethnic peers and other Native Americans educated in Native traditions. Yet because Silko is also writing to some extent across that hyphen, from a Laguna context to a white audience, an audience educated according to traditional Western conventions, her transgression of conventional Western generic boundaries will confound those readers who will not quite know how to classify this particular collection of writings—and by confounding classification will implicitly interrogate the idea of classification itself.

Like many books written by Native Americans and published during the second half of the twentieth century, Storyteller is composed in both poetry and prose, but more crucial to my purposes are the additional generic distinctions that can be drawn within it. The book contains several short stories that may or may not be grounded in fact, as well as mythology, ritual material, an excerpt from a letter, and photographs. Some pages read as much like a scrapbook as like a book. Additional passages consist of apparently straightforward autobiographical information, and although these passages comprise only a minority of the book, it is nevertheless Storyteller's place within the broad category of life writing that I wish to consider.

The characteristic of Silko as trickster superimposed on the figure of Silko as narrator...