August 22, 2006
Lesson Plan: “Lullaby” by Leslie Marmon Silko
Background:
“Lullaby” is a short story from Silko’s 1981 novel Storyteller. As Linda Krumholtz writes,
“Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller is a collection of stories that is also a highly self-conscious consideration of the process of storytelling, an exploration into the ways the Laguna Pueblo society creates meaning and, subsequently, the ways cultures in general create meaning. Storyteller is a distinctively ‘readerly’ text: the many stories, poems, and photographs are gathered into an apparently random ‘scrapbook’ form, and it is left to the reader to construct connections between them. Storyteller is also a multicultural or cross-cultural text in which European-style short stories and traditional Laguna stories, ‘realistic’ fictional characters, traditional characters (such as Yellow Woman, Coyote, and Spiderwoman), and Silko’s family members are all brought together…
Krupat and Hertha Wong argue that Storyteller should be read as a distinctively Native American autobiography in which Silko reconceives the autobiographical subject; she rejects the authoritative individual voice that represents Western concepts of the individual as defined by difference from all others and replaces it with a polyphony that indicates the Native American conception of the individual’s story as part of the collective stories of people… Thus Storyteller is an autobiography in which the ‘I’ has been recast as ‘the storyteller,’ one who finds her identity through her role for and in the community, which shifts the reader away from a traditional Western location of the ‘I’ (as central and clearly differentiated) for author and reader. The location of the reader and storyteller as subjects who move within and between texts allows for an openness continually shaped by the Laguna Pueblo voices that compose and are composed by Silko.” (Krumholz 64-65)
Krumholz, Linda. “Native Designs: Silko’s Storyteller and the Reader’s Initiation,” Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
On “Lullaby”:
In ‘Lullaby’ the constituents of pastoral elegy frame a painful story of exploitation, misunderstanding and loss. The progagonist is an elderly Navajo woman named Ayah who waits one evening for her husband to emerge from a bar with their bottle of wine, then goes back, looks for him in the bar, finally finds him on the street, and walks up the road with him to wait, it appears, for death. During the short time, perhaps an hour or two, during which these banal events transpire, the narration follows her reverie as she recollects how much of her life has been lost to her and, in a process of grief and peacemaking, comes to terms with it.
Ayah has much to grieve for: the death of eldest son, Jimmie, in a distant war; the deaths in infancy of other children; the forced removal and consequent alienation of her two remaining offspring; a long estrangement from her husband, Chato. Ayah’s world has been contaminated and damaged by alien elements, which have entered her life by way of a language she has grown to hate…
Within the story Ayah confronts these hostile Others as she searches the bar for her husband. She feels that the Spanish-speaking patrons are looking at her ‘like a spider crawling slowly across the room. They were afraid; she could feel the fear” (48), and as she leaves, ‘She felt satisfied that the men in the bar feared her’ (49). In the view of the non-Indian drinkers the comparison with a spider might inspire irritation or contempt for a creature denigrated as a common pest. Ayah’s view of the matter is completely different. The spider, called Grandmother Spider or Spider Old Woman, is a revered figure of wisdom for all the peoples of the Southwest. She is the creator, spinning the world from her body, and she inpires abject fear and obedience. A weaver like Ayah, Spider Woman can help her children out of dangerous situations by giving them stern warnings and good advice; she is benevolent but terribly powerful, death to her enemies and those who ignore or disobey. The episode is a moment of truth for the reader of the story as well: the informed reader will understand the importance of Ayah’s comparison to the spider, while those who remain outside of Ayah’s field of communication, like the men drinking in the bar, will think they see only a delusional old woman. (Jaskoski 95-96)
Jaskoski, Helen. “To Tell a Good Story,” Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
Discussion Points for “Lullaby”:
1. Oral vs. written traditions. In “Lullaby” Ayah does not trust the written tradition that white (non-Indian) culture has brought to her tribe. “It was like the old ones always told her about learning their language of any of their ways: it endangered you,” Silko writes (47). List the moments in “Lullaby” in which the contrast between written and oral traditions is emphasized. Why might Ayah be so mistrustful of writing? What other cultures can you think of that value the verbal over the written? How might Silko’s writing style situate her between oral and written traditions?
2. The myth of Spider Woman. “Lullaby” opens with Ayah remembering how she used to spin wool with her grandmother. Then, later in the story, when she enters the bar the men in the bar “looked at her like she was a spider crawling slowly across the floor” (48). As Helen Jakowski writes, in the Laguna culture,
the spider, called Grandmother Spider or Spider Old Woman, is a revered figure of wisdom for all the peoples of the Southwest. She is the creator, spinning the world from her body, and she inspires abject fear and obedience. A weaver like Ayah, Spider Woman can help her children out of dangerous situations by giving them stern warnings and good advice; she is benevolent but terribly powerful, death to her enemies and those who ignore or disobey. (Jakowski 96)
Why might Silko be invoking the figure of Grandmother Spider in this story? In what way might the myth of the spider be an empowering one for Ayah or for her culture? How might the spinning of a web be related here to the weaving of stories?
3. Storytelling vs. story writing. In a 1986 interview, Kim Barnes asked Silko the following question:
KB: Why are you writing these stories? Are you trying to put the oral tradition in a more stable or lasting form? Do you think anything is lost in the writing down of these stories?
LS: Well, no, I’m not trying to save them, I’m not trying to put them in a stable or lasting form. I write them down because I like seeing how I can translate this sort of feeling or flavor or sense of a story that’s told and heard onto the page. Obviously, some things will be lost because you’re going from one medium to another. And I use translate in the broadest sense. I don’t mean translate from the Laguna Pueblo language to English, I mean the feeling or sense that language is being used orally. So I play with the page and things that you could do on the page, and repetitions.
(Arnold 71-72)
Do you think anything is “lost in translation” when traditionally oral stories are translated into writing? What elements of Silko’s writing style invoke oral storytelling? Why might Silko end her story with a song?
4. “Round time” vs. linear time. In an interview with Thomas Irmer and Matthias Schmidt, the interviewer asks Silko if her novel Ceremony was a reinterpretation of old myths. She responds, saying,
Well, no, it’s not reinterpretation. I think their spirit is unbroken because of the oral tradition. If you think, five hundred years, that is how long Europeans are in the Americas, is not a very long time. Because for 18,000 years there is evidence, and perhaps longer, of the Pueblo people being in that land. So for five hundred years of Christianity and the conflict with it, how many generations are this? Not that many. The interpretation of the old stories remains the same because of the oral tradition. It goes back through time so that the immediacy is now. It is very important how time is seen. The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a linear string. If time is round, if time is an ocean, then something that happened five hundred years ago may be quite immediate and real, whereas something inconsequential that happened an hour ago could be far away. Think of time as an ocean always moving” (Arnold 148-149).
How is time represented in “Lullaby”? How might Ayah’s recollection of the children’s song at the end of the story reflect what Silko calls an “ocean of time”? How does Ayah’s concept of time affect the way in which she mourns the loss of her children and the death of Jimmy?
Works Cited:
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1981.
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