BOOK REVIEWS: Garden in the Dunes

Rone Breines Special to The Daily Yomiuri
GARDEN IN THE DUNES
By Leslie Marmon Silko

Simon & Schuster, 479 pp 25 dollars

Novelist, poet and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko has been--since the success of her first novel "Ceremony" back in the 1970s, and then her second controversial novel, "Almanac of the Dead" in 1990--the indisputable voice of Native Americans--a group that all too often, even in these days of great American prosperity, feels marginalized and even persecuted. Yes, they have been given land, but it is land, she says, that they roamed free on for thousands of years and so in theory, was theirs to begin with. Yes, they have been given money, but it is money, she says, that always comes with a price; a price way too steep for her people to accept. And this is the perspective her stories aspire to offer.

In her novels, Silko, who was born and raised on the Laguna reservation in New Mexico, does not only condemn the white European descendants that invaded her people's country, but also openly confronts the problems of her own people. Just as she portrays the Anglos as unmerciful invaders, she also portrays Native Americans as forgotten citizens left in the dark to become cultural misfits caught in a precipitous downward spiral that has led them to severe problems such as alcoholism, crime and intransigence. They are a people who have sacrificed their spiritual awareness for spiritless worlds of poverty and moral ambiguity. But it is not their fault, she complains. It is what they have been left with.

In her newest novel, "Garden in the Dunes," Silko once again explores the consequences of forced exile. She has created a world of Sand Lizard people who live by a fictional river in Arizona during the turn of the 20th century. Grandma Fleet is the matriarch of the family from which Sister Salt and Indigo come. She teaches the girls the importance of their Indian heritage and the ways of their people.

Mama takes care to keep them all together, even though she knows an upheaval is imminent, and within the span of a short chapter, the world--for this family and so many others--is turned upside down.

The soldiers have come west, and with them comes the newly instituted legislation from the U.S. government and its agencies that says all Indians must be placed onto reservations.

Just before the inevitable day the family will be led away, Grandma Fleet peacefully dies. It is an omen that much is about to change. The soldiers appear and the family is split and members are taken to different reservations.

At this point, the novel splits into two stories. The first one is of Sister Salt, who escapes from the soldiers and ends up as a prostitute at a mining camp. Sister Salt eventually becomes pregnant with the baby of a negro cook, and calls the child Little Grandfather. She decides that she wants to return to the land of her people.

The other story follows Indigo from the Indian school that she runs away from to the house she makes her way to. Indigo is taken in by a woman named Hattie and becomes part of a very unlikely family that travels to New York, England, and Italy. Silko manages to bring us back in time and place; we can smell the gardens that Indigo and Hattie move through, and we can sense a world where for those who leave their origins and communities behind, nothing is ever quite comfortable.

What happens to the sisters, and Hattie, is representative of what happens to the country that has been forcibly created. Exile and conquest are things that work not to legitimize a nation, but to sanction all its laws and policies, its racist and discriminatory practices and its ability to undermine standards and morals for the sake of monetary and territorial gain.

Silko has a message, but it is a complex one. There are few answers, but many questions. How did America, as a nation, become so segregated? How will it turn things around for those who have been conquered and rejected? How can all peoples look at each other with trust and equanimity, and see the commonalities within them, all while dispelling the lingering prejudices and hatreds?

By portraying the indigenous people as human beings with standards, languages, and cultures of their own, the nation may begin to see that there is much more that it can learn from them, than what it has tried to imposed upon them. This is what Silko seems to be saying. Garden in the Dunes is a Dickensian story that teaches as well as entertains, and it is Silko's poetic storytelling gifts that allow her to momentarily bring her readers back to our earliest, most indigenous selves.
Copyright 2001 The Yomiuri Shimbun
 

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