Leslie Marmon Silko: Snakes, Stories, Healing and Community.
I would like to thoroughly thank my friends for allowing me to vicariously experience Leslie Marmon Silko's words, and to get my copy of Almanac of the Dead signed.
I was devastated to realize that I had foolishly (without foreknowledge) scheduled my flight at the same time as Marmon Silko's speech; she was the whole reason that I attended the Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society Convention in Albuquerque last week. She is my favorite author--I presented a paper on Almanac of the Dead at the same conference last year.
Without Marmon Silko's words, the crazy-amazing growth I have experienced (both mental and spiritual), and the decolonizing of my own mind and lifeway would have been impossible. Her insights have led me to realize that the nature of storytelling, healing, and community are entwined in a web, they are all woven together.
One cannot be separated from another. She says this is Grandmother Spider's, Thought Woman's, web. In community we are not only in relationship with each other, but in relationships with the land, and the spirits, and the rocks and the animals and the Earth. When we fall out of Right Relationship in this community, we become broken, both in our relationships with community and within ourselves (because it is all connected). When we are broken, we need healing. We are healed through storytelling, because the stories remind us of who we are, and where we come from.
The stories connect us through time back to our ancestors, and through subsequent retellings they link us with the future generations that have yet to emerge. Stories connect us to the future and to the past; stories heal us. The stories are alive. To paraphrase Marmon Silko, the stories see us, even if we don't see them. The stories are living beings with the power to heal us. The stories are the stuff Grandmother Spider's web is made of.
The web binds all points together. With a web, you cannot pick up a single point and say "This is me, and mine alone" or "That is only a woman's/black/gay/whatever/ issue" or "this is my piece of land," because you cannot pick out a single point on a spider web. When you pick up a point on a spider web, everything comes up with it, because everything is attached to it. In this way we are part of a whole.
Amy asked Marmon Silko my question for me. I asked if the age of stories was over, because it seemed that in her story Yellow Woman that that was the case. However, upon further thought and closer reading, I realized it was not, and Marmon Silko's answer upheld that feeling. She said that the age of stories is still here; we are still creating these stories. We can know the spirits in the stories and our ancestors in a personal and powerful way.
When I listened to Marmon Silko speak, and answer my question, I cried. Because listening to her voice was like hearing an old friend: an old friend that I had thought was dead, but rediscovered, alive and thriving. I cried with joy. Though we have never met, I consider her one of my greatest teachers.
Though I did not see her this time, as I listened to her speak, I felt my soul spinning out a road that would lead me back to her. I will see you again, old friend. And thank you for your stories.
The Spririt Messenger snake Ma ah shra true ee emerges!!