In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony the color of Tayo’s eyes comes up frequently. Tayo’s eyes are an outward representation of the deeper characteristics beneath his surface. His eyes signify that he is of a mixed ancestry, but more than that, they signify that Tayo is a mixed up person. Tayo’s whole existence is two-sided—not just because he’s half-white and half-Native American but also because what people expect him to be and do is only half of who he really is and what he does. He’s of the new generation but he respects the old way. All these things that are a part of his inner self are visible on the outside in his eyes. By coming to terms with his differences in appearance, Tayo will be able to be cured from the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder he suffers with after fighting in World War II, and in the end, discover who he truly is.
It is said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. This means that by just looking into the eyes of another person, you can learn a lot about who they are. Tayo’s eyes look physically different from those of the other Laguna Pueblo people around him, and so looking into them reveals his mixed heritage. When Tayo and Rocky meet with the Army recruiter, he doesn’t believe the two are brothers because Tayo looks obviously different: “The Army recruiter looked closely at Tayo’s light brown skin and his hazel eyes” (Silko 66). Hazel eyes are a “light greenish-grayish brown” color that in Tayo’s case came about because of his mixed parentage (“hazel”). His eyes here show his connection with two cultures, but his inability to truly exist in either alone. Being this mix of two races, two eye colors, two worlds, really disconnects Tayo from the people around him, especially Auntie.
Besides being lighter skinned, Tayo’s eyes are the only physical difference between him and say Rocky or Harley. But these physical differences cause an emotional rift separating Tayo from the rest of his group. Being half-white brings about contentions and hostilities from almost everyone around him—from Auntie who nearly neglects him as a child, and from Emo whom Tayo tries to kill, to Rocky and Harley who are just trying to understand. His eyes are a big clue that Tayo is not a “full-blood.” Tayo gets a lot of reactions because of his ancestry and people think he shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the Native American Culture.
When Old Grandma is worried about Tayo’s condition and wants him to see the medicine man, Tayo’s own Auntie, who brought him up, even thinks this is wrong: “You know what people will say if we ask for a medicine man to help him. Someone will say it’s not right. They’ll say, ‘Don’t do it. He’s not full blood anyway’” (Silko 30). It seems Auntie is worried what other people would think, but that is actually exactly how she thinks, too. Tayo doesn’t only get these feeling from his family, but from complete strangers as well, “he remembered how the white men who were building the new highway through Laguna had pointed at him. They had elbowed each other and winked” (53). Most people in the novel, white or Pueblo or Mexican, see this mixing of blood as a bad, negative, and almost nasty thing.
Tayo’s eyes, a symbol of his mixed ancestry, separate him from the Native American culture and the white American culture simultaneously, but oddly enough, his eyes, his heritage, connect him to these two different worlds. Because of who Tayo is, because he is half-white he has a connection to the white world that his immediate family and friends can never understand. He resides in neither world alone, and with his eyes observes them both as an outsider while he also has the benefits of an insider.
Tayo was raised on the reservation by his Auntie, Rocky’s mother. Since childhood he’s been taught the legends and stories and ancestries of the Laguna people from the beginning of time. He is immersed in this Native American world, but not allowed to fully be part of it by his Auntie because he is impure in her eyes: “since he could remember, he had known Auntie’s shame for what his mother had done, and Auntie’s shame for him” (53). One would expect a child having roots in white culture would not appreciate the ceremonies and legends of the Native American culture, but Tayo respects and understands these important stories probably even more than the full-blooded Pueblos— at least more than Auntie’s own son Rocky does, and probably more than Auntie herself. He loved to hear Old Grandma tell the old legends, and he believed them:
“He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school—that long long ago things had been different, and human being could understand what the animals said” (87).
Tayo can see why these stories are important. The past provides insight into the future. The past is what makes people who they are in the present and who they will be in the future.
Symbolically, as well as literally, eyes represent seeing and vision. They can represent hindsight, or foresight or how things are perceived as they are occurring. Because Tayo’s eye color, hazel, is the result of a white father and a Native American mother, he can see both of the perspectives. He participates in things of the white culture and also in things of the Native American culture. Tayo is part of neither culture, but really part of both, so he can understand the prejudices more. This view as an outsider with knowledge of the inside is how Tayo becomes aware of the Lie.
Deep down everyone knows brown-skinned people are somehow worse than white people, they do worse things, they are the only ones that steal, “only brown-skinned people were thieves; white people didn’t steal, because they always had the money to buy whatever they wanted” this is the Lie (177). And Tayo realizes that “only a few people knew that the lie was destroying white people faster than it was destroying Indian people” (190). He is one of them. He sees how prejudices doesn’t make people better than others, but just makes hatred.
Emo is a fine example of how racism and prejudice breed hatred and violence. Emo fights and murders and nothing good ever comes from him. Hatred begets hatred, violence begets violence. Tayo is normally peaceful, but when driven to hatred by Emo’s racist remarks, Tayo stabs a broken bottle into Emo’s stomach. He hates the whites, he hates the Mexicans, he hates the Japanese, and he hates those with mixed blood. Because of this negativity coming from Emo and others like him, Tayo is never part of the group.
Tayo’s light skin and eyes separate him from his immediate family and friends, but they also provide a greater connection between him and some other important characters. Tayo is not, in fact, the only character in the novel described as having these light eyes, a result of the mixing of two cultures. Night Swan, Josiah’s girlfriend, has hazel eyes too, “she was an old cantina dancer with eyes like a cat” (81). Betonie’s Mexican grandmother had green eyes while his Native American father most likely had brown eyes; because of this Betonie has hazel eyes. When Tayo first meets the old medicine man he looks him over “then Tayo looked at his eyes. They were hazel like his own” (109). Both Night Swan and Betonie help Tayo find his cure. Because they have this connection through their light eye colors, these characters are able to see the world similarly.
From what I can tell Night Swan is not actually from mixed origins, she is Mexican. Night Swan is interesting because she is not white or Native American, but Mexican, the third race of people that play an important role in this novel. Whether or not she is the product of “interracial breeding” or not, she still manages to teach Tayo a few things about it and about who he is, after they make love. Night Swan says something of great significance to Tayo and to this novel, a key quote in the entire book:
“‘They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites—most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing. . . . They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don’t have to think about what has happened inside themselves’” (92).
Tayo, Betonie, Night Swan and others like them are evidence that things are changing. Tayo has been taught to believe that this sort of change is a bad thing, but Night Swan and Betonie try to help him realize that change can be good and that just because people say you are one thing doesn’t mean that you have to be the thing they say. This helps Tayo accept himself the way he is and to find his cure.
Betonie also comes from mixed ancestry. His grandmother was a Mexican woman who also had light eyes. Betonie is a crucial part in Tayo’s journey for a cure and is a crucial part in Tayo finding out his place in this messed up world. Without Betonie’s guidance Tayo would never be able to come to terms with his illness—PTSD from serving in WWII—and cure it with the Ceremony. Then frankly we wouldn’t have a novel.
Betonie helps Tayo see how the Native American, Mexican, and white worlds coexist. Betonie sees past the lie that “all evil resides with white people” (122). He believes the stories about the creation of Indian people and the creation of white people. Betonie helps Tayo understand that he doesn’t have to be scared of the white people or their ways: “I tell you, we can deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs. We can because we invented white people; it was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place” (122). Understanding how the two worlds are just two parts of a whole is a very important concept. When Tayo begins to understand this better, he begins to understand himself better, and therein lies his cure.
In the beginning Tayo’s mixed blood makes him insecure. His peers in the rising generation don’t understand how or why Tayo believes in the stories. But the stories are what keep Tayo connected in the end. Though he looks different on the outside, he is still just a human being. His differences make him able to comprehend things that his friends and family could never hope to understand.
Works Cited
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Deluxe ed. New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2006. Print.
“Hazel” merriam-webster.com. Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 2011. Web. 3 May 2011.
This was very helpful!!
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