Strength in Numbers
Comparing Silko’s and Morrison’s Portrayals of the Power of Community in Healing from Cultural and Personal Traumas.
“Of course Toni Morrison’s work has been important to me,” says Leslie Marmon Silko; “[she has] encouraged me to believe that I’m on the right track, and that we share something—that it’s not so lonely, for there are other women and other people writing about the same sorts of things” (Boos 1994, 143). Morrison has similarly commented on her admiration for Silko’s writing, and the two women have maintained a friendship since their travels to China with Maxine Hong Kingston in the 1980s (Ibrahim 2023; Cheney 2011). A focus of both writers has been on trauma narratives. Silko’s Ceremony and Morrison’s Beloved portray the cultural and personal traumas experienced by a Native American war veteran and a mother who escaped slavery; both texts depict the collective trauma of a community targeted by white violence, a community suffering from, to borrow Chakvin’s (2002, 6) wording, “a disease of despair.” This essay will discuss Silko’s and Morrison’s representations of trauma using the concepts of cultural trauma and collective memory, specifically, how their characters heal, and what initiates and sustains that healing. Comparing Tayo’s and Sethe’s healing journeys will reveal the authors’ similar emphasis on the power of one’s community in their healing from trauma. Both narratives portray their protagonist as isolated from their respective community, reconnecting with their community, and experiencing the healing benefits of sharing their trauma and grief; however, Silko and Morrison spend drastically different amounts of time on these three stages of their protagonist’s journeys, and thus, the weight of their intended argument differs. While Silko focuses on the positive impacts of one’s community on their healing through those who aid Tayo upon his return home, Morrison focuses primarily on the consequences that stem from one’s lack of a relationship with their community through Sethe's ostracization from her own, and the inevitable passing down of her trauma onto Denver, before finally weaving their community back into the narrative in the final part of the text. This essay will thus argue Beloved is a more effective portrayal of the writers’ shared perspective of the need for community support in healing from trauma; while Silko stresses the benefits of one’s community on their ability to heal, Morrison stresses the categorial need for it. After discussing the necessary conceptual frameworks for this comparison, this essay will turn to Silko and Ceremony, then to Morrison and Beloved, the order of which will reveal why Morrison’s approach to this shared perspective is more three-dimensional and, therefore, more deeply felt by the reader.
What ties these two texts together, and what preempts this comparison between them, are the ways Silko and Morrison similarly situate the reader within the narrative. Their writing styles allow the reader to emotionally participate in their characters’ traumas. As Freed (2011, 219) stresses, “Traumatic narrative possesses a tremendous power to collapse boundaries,” and as many critics would agree, Silko and Morrison seem to understand this power: Owens (1992), Ramírez and Baker (2005), and Freed (2011) have all spoken to this active relationship between reader and Ceremony, and Luckhurst (2008) and O’Keefe (1996) have similarly taken this stance on Beloved. Freed argues that through “formal strategies such as fragmentation and repetition,” Silko “[creates] a reading experience not unlike the experience of traumatic memory” (2011, 226). Similarly, as Bast has noted, Luckhurst maintains that Beloved readers experience “a symptom of traumatic experience” called “Nachträglichkeit or belatedness,” from the text’s “disruption of the narrative timeline and its withholding of important information” (Luckhurst 2008, 92, as cited in Bast 2011, 1070). Moreover, in either text, the central traumatic experience(s) have occurred prior to the start of the narrative, and as characters avoid, confront, and grapple with their traumas, their pasts are revealed out of sequence, in blurs of the past with the present, and in blurs of the real with the imagined; as the texts move increasingly towards healing, both narratives become gradually less fragmented, thus leaving the reader to feel they have gone on a journey alongside these characters.
This discussion will be founded on the concepts of cultural trauma and collective memory, both of which Tayo and Sethe exemplify. Horvitz defines cultural trauma as “an officially sanctioned, sadomasochistic system of oppression in which a targeted group, perceived by the dominant culture as an obstacle to the goals of the existing hegemony, are tortured, imprisoned, or killed,” listing Native American genocide and slavery as two examples (2000, 11, as quoted in Satterlee 2006, 74). Ganser’s (2004) work further reveals that cultural trauma and collective memory are necessarily intertwined: she describes “cultural traumata” as “traumatic experiences that affect the collective memory” (147). Relying on Aleida Assmann’s study of cultural memory, Erinnerungsraume, and Nietzsche’s arguments from his work, Genealogy of Morals, Ganser articulates that the body is “a medium of memory” and that “collective memory, too, is written directly and indelibly on the body” (2004, 145). Taking these definitions then, Tayo and Sethe both encapsulate an inherited cultural trauma as a Native American and a formerly enslaved person, the effects of which-- alongside their personal traumas-- manifest in ways physical, mental, and social.
As this comparison is rooted in the concept of community, Lowe’s (2021) perspective will guide this analysis, as both texts embody his definition. For Lowe, from the Centre for Public Impact, “the essence of community is a shared story.” He defines community as “a group of people who share a story that is so important to them that it defines an aspect of who they are. [... They] build the history of those communities into their own personal history; and they see the world through the lens of those shared stories.” The concept of sharing is central to his definition, which is equally central to the communities depicted in Ceremony and Beloved. As demonstrated through Tayo’s actions, Denver’s actions, and Sethe’s lack thereof, to share and receive stories is to maintain and strengthen community ties, and doing so not only prompts but is central to one’s healing.
At the start of Ceremony, Tayo grapples with multiple traumas: not only is he experiencing PTSD from the Vietnam War and grieving the loss of Rocky and Josiah, but as Satterlee writes, “his individual suffering fits within a broader cultural history of suffering caused by witchery and manifested in racial conflict” (2006, 73), which is portrayed in the text through the internalized western voice in his subconscious. Silko’s perspective on the benefits of communal healing is demonstrated through the parallels between Tayo’s healing and his expanding ties to his community: as those around him increasingly aid him, he grows stronger, his relationship with his environment strengthens, the Westernized voice in his mind weakens, and his ability to share his story increases. What allows for this overarching positive trajectory is that, as opposed to Beloved, Ceremony begins with Tayo already resituated within his community; and while both texts illustrate the isolation felt by their protagonists, the isolation Tayo feels is, crucially, not a result of active ostracization by his community. While he undoubtedly struggles with his identity and sense of belonging, it is his PTSD, and the ways in which the influence of Western knowledge separates him from the knowledge and perspectives of his Laguna Pueblo community, that trigger this state of isolation.
Silko does illustrate the consequences of a lack of community on one’s healing; however, Tayo only embodies this piece of her argument at the start of the text, and even then only in flashback, as the ‘present’ established on page one begins with Tayo already having returned home. It is during his time in the hospital and his journey home, moments when he is physically separated from his community, that the Western presence over his ability to think and heal is strongest. Silko writes, “For a long time he had been white smoke” (13), creating an image of Tayo as unbodied and unrooted.[1] She continues, “Their medicine drained memory out of his thin arms and replaced it with a twilight cloud behind his eyes” (14); this medicine detaches Tayo from himself, from his memories. He speaks of himself in the third person, answering the doctor’s questions with “he” instead of “me” or “I” (14). As the body is, as Ganser writes, “a medium of memory,” this imagery stresses that to detach from one’s traumatic memories is to detach from oneself; reflecting on his time in the hospital later on, Tayo says, “I was invisible. But I wasn’t afraid there. [...] I didn’t cry for Rocky or Josiah. There were no voices and no dreams” (113). Silko thus demonstrates the power of one’s community through the fact that Tayo’s healing can and does only commence once he has returned home. Far from recovering in the hospital, a space of Western medical knowledge, it is within and because of this space that Tayo is his most detached. However, back home, Tayo has returned to his own body, to speaking of himself in the first person, and he begins to experience the physical pains and symptoms, vomiting most of all (Todd 1995), of the traumatic memories he previously avoided. Back within the safety net of his community, he can finally admit that “he was tired of fighting off the dreams and the voices; he was tired of guarding himself against places and things which evoked the memories” (24); the need to self-protect through avoidance loosens.
Through the characters of Ku’oosh, Betonie, and Ts’eh, and the overall presence of his family, Silko stresses that it is through the aid of others that Tayo is able to heal. Through these characters and the lessons they teach Tayo, Silko embeds her perspective on healing into the broader argument for the interconnectedness of Tayo’s healing with his environment and the well-being of his entire community. Almost immediately upon his return home, the reader is introduced to Ku’oosh, who first spells out this interconnectedness for Tayo; he asks, “You understand, don’t you? It’s important to all of us. Not only for your sake, but for this fragile world” (33). Before he leaves Tayo’s bedside, he stresses again, “I’m afraid of what will happen to all of us if you and the others don’t get well” (35), trying to reconnect Tayo with a buried understanding that the well-being of one is crucial to the well-being of all.
The next healer Tayo meets is Betonie, with whom the war is discussed, as well as his vision of Josiah in the Philippines, which, unlike the white doctors, Betonie validates: “It isn’t surprising you saw them with him” (114). Betonie reconnects Tayo with Laguna perspectives, knowledge, and origin stories, which replace the Western influence over Tayo’s mind and push him towards the greater understanding that Ku’oosh introduces to him. After talking with Betonie, Tayo begins to see the larger truth of his trauma: he realizes that although “the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn’t work that way, because the world didn’t work that way. His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything” (116). And while, with Ku’oosh, “he didn’t know how to explain what had happened” (33), with each person who comes to his aid, Tayo can confront and share more and more of his story. The link between Tayo’s strength and his reconnection to Laguna knowledge is most evident after Betonie shares the story of witchery’s creation of white people: “he felt strong,” and his voice in the narrative becomes stronger, too (129). During the ceremony, Betonie first repeats “born from the mountain” and says “come home, happily / return belonging to your home,” which is followed by Tayo’s declaration, “I was born from the mountain [...] I’m walking home / I’m walking back to belonging” (133). Whereas in the hospital, Tayo had no voice at all, in this healing ceremony, his words are connected to those of his healer, and his voice is fortified.
It is through Ts’eh, another figure along Tayo’s journey, that Silko stresses the need for shared love in healing. Because of his newfound connection to Ts’eh, he finds that “The breaking and crushing were gone, and the love pushed inside his chest, and when he cried now, it was because she loved him so much” (211). After experiencing this love, and after experiencing the sharing of pain, grief, and stories, Tayo can fully reflect on his time in the hospital: “He recognized it then: the thick white skin that had enclosed him, silencing the sensations of living, the love as well as the grief” (213), demonstrating a newfound appreciation for the importance of confronting and sharing pain, as he now knows that doing so leads to deeper love and connection. Whereas at the start, he could not give voice to his experiences, by the end of the text, Tayo can share his story with Ku’oosh and the kiva elders: “It took a long time to tell them the story,” and after Tayo was finished, “the old men started crying / ‘A’moo’ooh! A’moo’ooh’' / You have seen her / We will be blessed / again” (239). Following Ganser’s writing on successful trauma therapy, Tayo has succeeded in “[reconfiguring] and de-/restructuring” his memories; “to make sense of one’s life, thus, means to make sense of one’s (hi)story, and to be able to tell it” (2004, 147). Silko not only depicts Tayo increasingly connecting with those who aid him along his journey, she ends her narrative with Tayo sharing his story with “the spiritual centre of the Laguna village” (Fattah 2022, 255)—the epicenter of his community. Though he takes a few steps backward amidst his strides forward, the trajectory of Tayo’s growth is categorically pointed upwards; returning to Lowe’s definition of community, Tayo has successfully healed through reconnecting with his own, as their collective history has become intertwined with his own and he “[sees] the world through the lens of [their] shared stories.”
When the reader meets Sethe, she is struggling to survive several traumas, including her two sons leaving home, her sexual assault, her enslavement, the birth of one daughter amidst her escape, and her decision to kill another rather than see her captured into slavery. Whereas Silko mainly writes of Tayo’s isolation in flashback, Morrison stresses and sustains Sethe’s—and by extension Denver’s—ostracization from the larger community until the text’s final pages, allowing these traumas to surface throughout the narrative. Thus, while Tayo undoubtedly encapsulates the influence community has over healing through his increasing realization that “his sickness was only part of something larger,” Beloved provides a more powerful portrayal, and a more vivid experience, of this perspective that Silko and Morrison share; by keeping the reader within the despair of Sethe’s perpetual struggle for survival against her past for so long, the reader feels, much more acutely, the relief of the entrance of community into Sethe’s previously isolated home and struggles—which only begins on page 292 of 324, with the first dish of food left “at the edge of the yard” (292).[2] As stated in the Foreword, this was Morrison’s intention: “I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population” (xii). In an interview the year Beloved was first published, Morrison spoke of the “spiritually dangerous position of being self-sufficient, having no group that you’re dependent on” (Washington 1987, 38). Indeed, the majority of the narrative narrows in on this danger. Unlike Silko, who only gives the reader a taste of Tayo’s life outside of his community, Morrison only gives the reader a taste of Sethe’s life within hers. A drastic difference in timelines and narrative arcs, Morrison uses the entire narrative to build up to her finally revealing her argument only when its effects will be felt the most, therefore giving the reader a more three-dimensional portrayal of the power of community.
Though Morrison sets most of the book within the ostracization of 124 Bluestone Lane, she illustrates the healing presence of community for the first four weeks after Sethe’s arrival, writing, “Years ago—when 124 was alive—she had women friends, men friends from all around to share grief with” (112). Those 28 days are referred to as “Days of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company” (111). Following Jesser's (1999, 326) commentary, Morrison paints the picture of 124 first as “a softened space” for those 28 days, then a “hardened” space for 20 years, and finally, through Denver’s actions, a softened space once again, directly linking softness with the presence of community and hardness without. With this brief softness, Morrison gives the reader a taste of the support Sethe needs to face her trauma and heal from her past. The return of “the four horsemen” (174)—schoolteacher, his nephew, the sheriff, and a slave catcher—abruptly cuts off this softness and ease, which is what spurs Sethe to kill her daughter, Beloved, in turn causing her renewed isolation. For twenty years, Sethe and Denver remain ostracized, and for twenty years, Sethe and Denver live with Sethe’s traumas, first taking the shape of a ghost, then inhabiting the body of Beloved.
This taste of community healing, and the dangers of not having people to “share grief with,” is heightened through Baby Suggs. Morrison writes, “124 had been a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised, and soothed. [...] Messages were left there, for whoever needed them was sure to stop in one day soon” (103). This portrayal of the lively house is then juxtaposed, two pages later, with Baby Suggs’ decline, brought on by the fact that “124 shut down” (105). Because of this loss of community, “Baby Suggs, holy, believed she had lied. There was no grace—imaginary or real—and no sunlit dance in a Clearing could change that. Her faith, her love, her imagination and her great big old heart began to collapse” (105). After being cut off from the community that she held together for so long, it becomes clear that bringing people together is what held her together, too. The ostracization of 124 allows for the growing force of the ghost, whose “spite became so personal it drove each off. Baby Suggs grew tired, went to bed and stayed there until her big old heart quit” (122). Without people to share grief, emotions, and even meals with, the presence of Sethe’s trauma replaces the presence of community, and Baby Suggs’ health and mind deteriorate.
Without the ability to share her trauma with her community, Sethe’s trauma is inherited by Denver, who suffers in many ways, at one point going deaf for two years rather than hearing Sethe’s past violence against her children. Through this avoidance, Morrison illustrates the avoidant and repressive nature of internalized and inherited traumas and, crucially, how they remain repressed without the urging of ones community to share them. Many critics have touched on this aspect of Denver’s role in the text: Rody calls Denver “the survivor and story-inheritor” (1995, 103, as cited in Bast 2011, 1081); Ramadanovic calls Denver “a protector of the troubling version of her family history” (1992, 186, as cited in Bast 2011, 1081); and Krumholz calls Denver “the teacher, the historian, and the author” (2008, 405, as cited in Bast 2011, 1081). Indeed, at the start of Part III, Denver does become the author; told through her perspective, it begins, “124 was quiet. Denver, who thought she knew all about silence, was surprised to learn hunger could do that: quiet you down and wear you out” (281). It is through Denver’s eyes that the reader sees Sethe’s isolation reach its tipping point; Sethe loses her job, her last tie to life outside of 124, and what little food they have is consumed by Beloved: the manifestation of Sethe’s trauma is literally consuming Sethe’s, and by association, Denver’s strength, growing as they shrink. It is not until “it was obvious that her mother could die” that Morrison finally begins the process of relief: “and since neither Beloved nor Sethe seemed to care what the next day might bring [...] Denver knew it was on her. She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask somebody for help” (286). As Bast contends, Denver is the only character who can achieve “the last step in the process of healing,” as she is one generation removed from the direct traumas of slavery; “Instead,” he writes, “older characters bring her into contact with it, make her deal with it, and eventually allow her to distribute it in a way that is not possible for them” (2011, 1079). Returning to Ganser, it is Denver who embodies her argument that “collective trauma also translates from generation to generation,” and that memories “lost or distorted by a trauma have to be (re)appropriated (i.e. gradually evaluated, selected, made accessible, and interpreted)” (2004, 147). Though Denver has inherited Sethe’s trauma, her generational distance from it allows her to reconnect 124 with their community, and as this trauma lives in both of them, Sethe can feel the residual benefits of Denver’s actions. Morrison strategically weaves Baby Suggs back into the narrative at this critical moment; the character who embodied community most of all, who understood its effects most of all, comes to Denver to guide her through her hesitations. She tells Denver that there is “no defense,” and instructs her to “Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on” (288).
After visiting Lady Jones, her old teacher, food made by her community begins appearing under a tree in their yard, and “she and the home become open to change and community intervention” (Jesser 1999, 326). Again, Baby Suggs plays a role in 124’s rehabilitation: “All of them knew her grandmother and some had even danced with her in the clearing” (293). And yet, even after the re-emergence of community within the narrative, Morrison still keeps Sethe from improving; in fact, “The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became” (295). It is not until Denver shares Sethe’s story that she is able to feel their support. As Denver reasons, “Nobody was going to help her unless she told it—told all of it” (298). Morrison stresses the need to “share grief” through the need for the women to understand Sethe’s traumas before they show up to rid her of them. It is not until the community returns to 124, until they cross the boundary of ostracization, that their impact on Sethe is felt. Morrison emphasizes the power of shared voice in her imagery of the women in the yard, “building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it [...] broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash” (308). Their physical presence and collective voice overpower Beloved’s, and they rid 124 of her, the physical embodiment of Sethe’s trauma.
Though Beloved is gone, Sethe is yet to use her voice, to share her pain, in this newly freed space. Unlike Ceremony’s conclusion, in which Tayo tells his story to the kiva, Sethe’s healing journey is cut off at its most critical turning point. Comparing timelines, Tayo is his closest to death in the hospital, prior to the start of the present narrative, whereas Sethe is her closest to death at the very end of Beloved. The reader is left with Sethe at her weakest, a mirror of Baby Suggs at the end of her life, as she has yet to engage with the most crucial aspect of community healing: sharing her story. Thus, while Ceremony demonstrates the benefits of community from the very start of the text, as Tayo’s lowest point has already occurred and his journey towards healing is already underway, Morrison waits until Sethe’s weakest moment the end of the text to express this final message: Paul D returns to “put his story next to hers” (322). This timing allows for a similarly hopeful ending; despite the reader leaving her in perhaps her most fragile state, Morrison provides a level of assurance that Sethe will heal beyond the text’s final pages, that the two of them might share the weight of their emotional burdens and experience the freedom to envision a shared future, together.
Though both writers take their readers on a profound journey through their protagonists’ physical, mental, cultural, and social battles, Morrison’s decision to construct her narrative primarily within Sethe’s ostracization makes Beloved a more complex portrayal of the writers’ shared argument for the power of community in healing. Ceremony and Beloved do follow similar narrative arcs; however, while the majority of Silko’s narrative is on Tayo’s gradual recovery, the majority of Morrison’s is on Sethe’s standstill with her own. By keeping the reader within the rawness of Sethe’s repressed traumas for most of the text, not only does the reader witness Sethe’s pain for a much larger window than Tayo’s, but the sense of relief at the long-awaited arrival of community support is immense, and irreplicable in Ceremony if only because Tayo was situated within the support of his community from the beginning. This is not to say that Beloved is a more powerful text overall; on the contrary, published a decade after Ceremony, Beloved is an engaging response and addition to some of the themes addressed in Ceremony, and the pair, read together, exhibits the complexities and layers behind the view that Silko and Morrison share. Albeit through different methods, Silko and Morrison ultimately come to the same conclusion: both writers, through their depictions of cultural trauma, break down the wall between individual and collective trauma, suffering, and healing, instead portraying trauma as fluid. Not only is it unfixed and non-linear in these two narratives, it travels both through and across time, place, and being, and even off the page.
Footnotes:
[1] All quotations from Ceremony are taken from Leslie Marmon Silko, 2020, Ceremony, Great Britain: Penguin Books.
[2] All quotations from Beloved are taken from Toni Morrison, 2007, Beloved, Great Britain: Vintage.
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