so instead of writing a synopsis to get you all excited about this book...I thought I would post the analysis I turned in for class...if anyone gets a chance to read this novel I would highly recommend, here is my paper:
Literary Analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead is a novel that incorporates numerous characters and cultures that are connected by a USA border town called Tucson, Arizona. The novel surrounds a collection of ancient notebooks passed down to a psychic Mexican Indian called Lecha. The novel embodies a world of sex, drugs and violence that is threatened by Indigenous traditions and prophecies. Twins from Mexico are leading an army that is marching to the North to reclaim their land, the world seems to be shifting its consciousness, and the drug and political world is ridden with scandalous perversion and blood.
On the cover of the book Maxine Hong Kingston is quoted saying, “[t]o read this book is to hear the voices of the ancestors and spirits telling us where we came from, who we are, and where we must go.” Almanac of the Dead read like fiction but spoke to me as an elder would about the reality of the world. I have never been exposed to the perverse, blood-hungry “destroyers” as Silko illustrates in the novel, but I do recognize them within society. From the Zapatista uprising and women disappearing in Juarez from the US owned Maquiladores to my own studies of Toltec, Mayan, Mexica, Chichimeca and other Mesoamerican Indigenous nations, I saw my history, my present and my future in the collection of stories within the novel. The images were so crisp and unapologetic that I, like Sterling, had been tainted.
Silko had no reservations when it came to the experience of the novel. I do not want to sound like I am unappreciative of her ability to characterize and “show” the insanity of some of her characters, but while I was reading I could not help but feel like hiding in a corner for two reasons. One was my own reaction after reading the display of some of the vulgarity and being indifferent to it. The other was the reality that in fact this vulgarity exists in society’s present.
In a love pentagon that involved five characters David, Eric, Seese, Beaufrey, and Serlo I felt set up to feel indifferent to them. Serlo and Beaufrey, were “blue-blood” drug and weapons lords and completely indifferent to human emotion. David himself possessed some of the qualities that Beaufrey and Serlo displayed, however he himself was also part of the sadistic game of collecting “vulnerable” deaths. I felt as if I were being set up for tragedy from the beginning. I seemed to be reacting with the same dull and unmoving manner as the characters had to the death of David’s lover Eric, and later David himself. I found it most emphasized when David died. I moved onto the next chapter with only a minor damp of the heart and an overall feeling of “what else should I have expected?” David turned Eric’s suicide into an art gallery of photos he had taken when he discovered the body of his former lover. His goal was making profits off Eric’s corpse, which only later would be his same fate. I was indifferent to both their fates and in a way found that disturbing within myself.
Not all the vulgarity went without emotional upheaval, and some vulgarity disturbingly brought to light some present issues of the blood that has been spilled. I mentioned earlier how I could see my history, present and future in the stories, and there were some very personal present issues that were aroused. While reading about the police officers in Tuxtla who became perversely carried away with their torture tactics during interrogations, I could not help but remember learning about the perverse actions going on in Juarez.
During a Latina History class I took at Santa Ana College we watched Lourdes Portillo’s documentary called Señorita Extraviada, Missing Young Woman, which courageously documented as much of the atrocities occurring to the women in Juarez as possible without getting arrested.
Although the documentary was able to pin point the origins of the missing women and dead female corpses to the US owned factories that were “pimping out” their workers to drug dealers to get more production, the problem had accumulated to such a degree that the perpetrators were more than just predators around the factories. Even police officers were connected with a great number of the victims that were missing and dead. Their crimes were being buried and hidden by officials who did not want their officer’s lack of control to go public.
In the documentary a young woman takes us through an experience when her and her husband had been arrested. They had been defending themselves from a well-off family that was attacking them because they would not sell their land. The husband and wife were charged with disrupting the public and the family that attacked them were not cited or charged with anything. When they arrived they were frisked. The woman was frisked by a woman cop, however during the episode the woman cop started to “frisk” in such a way that made the woman feel very uneasy. When the cop took notice to the woman’s reactions, the cop shouted at the woman that she was a whore and began laughing at her and yanking her hair.
The couple had no money for the bail so they had to spend the night in jail. When evening came the officers handed out little “drinks” and the woman was forced to swallow the “drink.” After words she remembers feeling like she was dreaming awake, and was not able to move her arms or legs. She says she remembers being taken to this room where there were piles of women’s clothing. One of the tactics used in Juarez was undressing their victim and replacing their clothes on another victim that had been deceased for a long time. The purpose was to throw off the investigations and confuse the victims’ families. One of the officers made the woman look at this photo album filled with pictures of dead girls and women being tortured and raped. One woman in particular was in the middle of a circle of officers who were pointing and laughing at the scared naked girl who had bruises all over her. There were pictures of officers who wore necklaces of nipples like badges to show how many victims they had murdered. The woman was then raped by an officer while her husband was held in a nearby cell and could hear his wife’s cries for help. I will never forget the intensity of my emotions during that film. The woman later was urged to press charges, and she reluctantly pressed charges for rape and the story of the photo album came out in the courtroom. The officers were found guilty, charged a $1 fine and were suspended with paid vacation.
The purpose of illustrating this true story was to signify how these acts of brutality exist, and to me spoke to the reality of the book itself. The perversity of the officers in the novel re-awoke that intensity of emotion for me that I had experienced from the documentary. This was just one example of many that the novel made of real present situations across the world, but specifically in Mexico right now. For me the novel was real and heart-breaking, at the same time I have developed a yearning to remember more of the stories that I came across through my studies of Mesoamerican Indigenous culture and traditions. The book spoke to me as if I were a child being taught something very important. I feel this will book was an excellent choice to help guide my idea for a novel into something that will change my life as well.
Almanac of the Dead
Linear Mode
