Tayo, the protagonist of Ceremony, lives in more than one reality; it lives in worlds that exist once you start feeling their touch on your skin. Worlds where nightmares happen while you're awake, people and animals who say and do things that you see and hear, but no one else does. He inhabits a world where all you have left of other people's reality is a patch of sunlight: a world where it is difficult for him to decipher what is "real" and what he feels and experiences, while Others call him crazy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Throughout the ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko presents Tayo's experience that every reader will find both emotionally wrenching and authentic. Tayo, a Laguna man of white blood, is born into a world where Western society teaches him to act and be a certain way; a world where the corpses, gunshots and betrayal of war are present. When Tayo returns from World War II, he enters another world where all of his experienced physical realities, spiritual realities, and recurring traumatic realities are combined into one. We read his story through poems, legends, dreams and witchcraft. Tayo lives this reality and is seen from the outside by the characters in the novel and the readers of the novel who may call him “crazy”. Crazy, defined as: full of cracks or flaws, deranged, lacking reason, offensive, unreasonable and/or out of control. But Tayo is not crazy, he is grieving, he accepts his life and we see a reality where his experience of time, his emotions and his ceremonies do not depend on what counts as "real" or "not real", his experiences. simply are. They're not crazy, they exist and if you let them make sense and trust his stories without calling them "folklore", "myths", "magical realism" or "insanity", it can start to make sense. Meet Tayo, he's in the hospital and he's dissociating, but when: "He saw the room getting brighter then, as the square of light grew hotter and warmer, yellower with the rising sun", he starts to feel more grounded. That's where we start, with sunlight. This is a moment where Tayo sees himself as others see him. It has been asleep for a long time and when we wake up to a new life, that ray of sunshine is what keeps it present. The light serves as a reminder to bring him back to stable ground. He can understand that it's not just what he sees, but also everyone else. This square of light will bring him back into his body. When Tayo wakes up in a hospital, he is invisible, he sees and hears people telling him that he is invisible, except the doctors and people in the hospital, they see him. But they see him sick and vomiting while Tayo could see himself in a field with a deer. His memories appear before him, blurring the rest of the scene, running parallel in his mind to what he is doing. For example, while talking to a doctor or walking down the corridor, Tayo communicates with the doctor, he sees the white panels and flickering lights of a corridor but at the same time a memory floods his vision; gunshots, rainforests, death, broken limbs. His behavior in these parallel universes may appear as insensitive behavior to the people around him, a lack of understanding, or they may not notice him at all. When Tayo is in the hospital and when he returns home after being there for months, he is visibly uncomfortable, his body issick with panic and the medications he is given don't make him feel better and all of this combined makes him feel even more lost. The doctors and a large part of his family try to force him to be disconnected from his multiple realities and to adapt to a reality that requires respect for norms and rules. “The medicine drained the memory from his skinny arms and replaced it with a twilight cloud behind his eyes. It was not possible to mourn the isolated and misty mountain. If they hadn't dressed him and led him to the car, he would still be there, drifting along the north wall, invisible in the gray gloom. Sunlight, isolated mountain, hospital, fog, dusk, car; where is he? He is neither in one nor the other, he is in several places at once, he drifts between realities. Tayo was raised in the very early years of his life by his single mother. The moments he spent with her are images he sometimes returns to. He and his mother did not have a stable home, and much of his childhood is described as being regularly hungry and uncomfortable. The same kind of feelings he always experiences and describes throughout the book. Feelings that remain meaningless, feelings and traumas that he cannot put into words and when he cannot find a way to connect and translate his feelings and dissociation into the physical world, reality is displaced . Tayo lived a life where he had to resist emotion. He had to push it back to fit in or without permission. When he was four years old, his mother left him and he ended up living with his aunt, uncle, their child and other relatives. This family becomes his family. Tayo and his cousin Rocky grow up together, sharing the same table, the same bed, the same food and the same education. But they don't share the same affection as growing boys. Tayo's aunt is reluctant to identify Tayo as her immediate family and it is very clear that Rocky is her only son and the one she supports the most. Tayo is accepted and welcomed more intimately by his uncle Josiah and his aunt's husband, Robert. Tayo grows up without knowing his mother and without any mention of her being ignored by his aunt. He kept a photo of his mother, a treasure for him, and one day his aunt took it away and never returned it to him: “He cried to have it and Josiah came to comfort him; he asked Tayo why he was crying...he couldn't tell Josiah about the photo; he loved Josiah too much to admit shame...he wished aunt would give him back...but he could never bring himself to ask her. Tayo grew up trying to forget and detach himself from the loss of his mother and the rejection. But people can't so easily forget and ignore the past and how it affects the body and, as Josiah explains to Tayo, "...only humans had to endure anything because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves." This resistance causes the mind to dissociate. , to escape pain or be able to experience it in another area. This is where ceremony can come into Tayo's life to help him with less resistance and more commitment. The ceremony weaves through dreams, memories, intertwined stories and on the surface is Tayo's journey from being hospitalized to sharing his story as part of the ceremony. During this journey, we learn a list of details that explain why Tayo has so much to identify what a memory, dream, or experience is beyond his life on earth. Tayo had different influences from his Laguna culture and his Western culture. Tayo and his family were all forced to enter Indian boarding schools, attend Catholicism, and socialize with the worlddominant whites. Some members of her family were interested in practicing Laguna ceremonies and lifestyles, although her aunt was attracted to the culture of technology, English language and education, which had a great influence on him and Rocky. He ended up fighting in World War II with his cousin Rocky. These are all products of his past that lead to his loss of contact with reality. We see a timeline of Tayo growing up without his parents, going to war, losing loved ones, and the first stages of losing contact with himself. These first steps occur when Tayo returns from the war, without Rocky, who comes to him. at his uncle Josiah, who died on the battlefield or in the cattle fields. He returns to a different lifestyle, that's when he enters the lifeworlds in multiple realities. It always starts in his stomach, when his thoughts, memories and dreams begin to intertwine and get lost in each other, his body moves with them and reacts with nausea. Throughout the book we repeatedly see him hunched over and vomiting, his body convulsing as his mind moves him back and forth, in and out, of places of fear, of sorrow, of loss, of places where he is hollow and alone. But throughout his pain, he also finds moments of balance. He is shown a new way to manage his detachment and this is where he begins to try his hand at ceremonial. Betoine, a healer from Laguna, is one of the people who introduces Tayo to ceremonies and the creation of bridges between the worlds of dreams, visions and the reality of the present moment. Betoine takes Tayo through a healing ceremony in the mountains and offers him healing tools, how to stay grounded, and how to find home when he gets lost. Through the healing process, a song is born from the ceremony that Bétoine sings: Follow my footprints Walk home Follow my footprints Come home, come back happy belonging to your home return to long life and happiness return to long life and happinessE-hey-yah-ah-na! Tayo begins to use ceremony as a daily practice that can live through him and keep him in balance. The ceremony for Tayo consists of telling stories, cutting cables to cross borders, sprinkling pollen on the tracks of an animal he is tracking and finding refuge in the mountains where he stays: "near the earth , where the core was cool and silent as mountain stone... and even with the noise and pain in his head, he knew what it would be: a return rather than a separation. These ceremonial moments where the sun and earth hold him steady and secure him in sound, sight, taste and touch, he can begin to re-engage with the world from which he so often feels separated. The ceremony teaches him how to return safely from the different worlds, dreams and hallucinations he experiences, it helps him recover after leaving his body and his reality. Through the simple ritual ceremony, Tayo begins to learn that his visions and his detachment no longer concern him, that "his illness was only a part of something greater, and his healing would only be found in something something great and inclusive of everything.” discovers that he can make connections between his dissociations with his community and the land. Through ceremonies, he tries to learn how his separation from reality can be used to translate his life. “In a world of crickets and wind and poplars, he was almost alive again; he was visible. The green waves of dead faces and the cries of the dying that echoed in his head were buried. The illness had disappeared into a shadow behind him,., 2016.