Now And Then ” A Raisin In The Sun
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Overview of Silkos “The Man to Send Rain clouds”
Leslie Marmon Silkos short story “The Man to Send Rain clouds” shows the
differences between organized religion and the beliefs of the Native American people in a
way that most would not be able. Arguing that the relationship between Native American
and Mexican American cultures has often been ignored but these practices are evident in
the fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko.
Born 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, of mixed ancestry – by her own description
Laguna, Pueblo, Mexican, and white – Leslie Marmon Silko grew up on the Laguna
Pueblo Reservation, where members of her family had lived for generations, and where
she learned traditional stories and legends from female relatives. Silkos first published
book is the collection of poems Laguna Woman (1974) which draws richly upon her
tribal ancestry (Abcarian 1568.) Silko writes, “You dont have anything if you dont have
the stories” (Mitchell 28). While still in college Silko wrote and published a short
story “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.” For this story she was awarded with the National
Endowment for the Humanities Discovery Grant (Seyersted 18.)
The strength of tribal traditions is based not on Indians rigid adherence to given
ceremonies or customs but rather on their ability to adapt traditions to ever changing
circumstances by incorporating new elements. As in this short, story the younger Indians
not only honor their ancestors beliefs but also incorporate the new beliefs being taught in the village by the Spanish priest. They blend both sets of beliefs by burying the grandfather in the way of their ancestors yet giving him a sprinkling of Holy water as he is placed in the grave. In doing these things they hope to provide him with enough water to let him help them by sending rain clouds to them as he passes from one realm to another.
Throughout the story, Silko weaves into the narrative the ancient myths of the
Navajo and Pueblo tribes, their ceremonies, and rituals. For Native Americans, these
stories concern the universe and the spiritual domain. They are didactic because they
teach the history of the people, how to live, and how to survive. According to Allen,
“myth is a story of vision;a vehicle of transmission of sharing and renewal.” It
connects the past with the present. Silkos myths “show us that it is possible to relate
ourselves to the grand and mysterious universe that surrounds and informs our
being.The mythic heals, it makes us whole” (Allen 1986, 116-17).
Ceremonies are the ritual enactment of the myths, that is, the actual telling of
the stories by the shaman or storyteller. I will tell you something about the stories,
[he said] They arent just entertainment. Dont be fooled. They are all we have, you
see, all we have to fight off illness and death. And in the belly of this story the
rituals and the ceremony are still growing (Mitchell 28.)
Location, or “place,” nearly always plays a central role in the Pueblo oral narratives.
Indeed, stories are most frequently recalled as people are passing by a specific
geographical feature or the exact place where a story takes place…. The Emergence was
an emergence into a precise cultural identity…. The eight miles, marked with boulders,
mesas, springs, and river crossings, are actually a ritual circuit or path which
marks the interior journey the Laguna people made: a journey of awareness and
imagination in which they emerged from being within the earth and from everything
included in earth to the culture and people, differentiating themselves for the first time
from all that had surrounded them, always aware that interior distances cannot be
reckoned in physical miles or calendar years…. Thus, the journey was an interior process
of the imagination, a growing awareness that being human is somehow different from all
other life–animal, plant, and inanimate. Yet we are all from the same source: the
awareness never deteriorated into Cartesian duality, cutting off the human from the
natural world (Silko 83.) Even so the sheep camp has significance to Teofio, this is the
place that he has chosen to die but also the place that he is most likely extremely familiar
with. As in many cultures, the young boys and the old men are sent off to tend the sheep
to have time to reflect on life and to learn from each other.
Though not directly spoken between the two younger men at the beginning of the story
there seems to be an understanding that their grandfather has passed on to the next realm.
To me it appears quite strange that they would wait a couple of day s to begin to search