cting out trauma and violence in viramontes, kingston, and silko

8/12/2019 cting Out Trauma and Violence in Viramontes, Kingston, and Silko

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PHILOLOGIST JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

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ORIGINALNI NAUNI RAD

1. Introduction

Of the three authors discussed inthis paper, only Maxine HongKingston!s Þction has been identi-

Þed as openly autobiographical, but we can

argue that the Þction of the other two women writers, Helena Maria Viramontesand Leslie Marmon Silko, also contains au-tobiographical elements. The acting out,as in the title of this paper, is the centralstrategy in the works of the three authors,and is a dramatic, present tense enactment of a past event, voluntary and upon sugges-tion, not a reproduction of the traumaticevent, but its imaginative, invented per-formance. It mediates between an objec-

tive and an autobiographical narration(Leys 2000: 164"60).

Fiction by the three women writersenacts, in anthropological terms, healingrituals in an attempt to recover wholenessand meaning in times of crisis, as part of aprocess leading to resolution (or redress).The result of the ritual redress1, according

1 Redress, or redressive action, according to Turner,is the third phase of social drama (in the sequenceof breach ! crisis ! redress - reintegration ) and

the origin of performance genres (Turner 1982:126).

to the anthropologist Turner who studiedboth social and stage dramas and inventedthe terminology to describe their constitu-ent parts, is #an increase in what one mightcall social or plural re ß exivity, the ways in

which a group tries to scrutinize, portray,understand, and then act on itself ! (Turner1982: 75). Out of this reßexivity, as the wayof showing ourselves to ourselves, meaningarises in memory as a negotiation betweenpast and present, whereas out of the mean-ing some value and good may arise as anact of the will. The redressive phase, whichbelongs to the space of liminality 2 and thussignals potential transition and transfor-mation, has been scripted by theatrical

andÞ

ctional models. (Ibid.: 74)The works under discussion in this

paper, Kingston!s #No Name Woman,$Silko!s #Lullaby$ and Ceremony, and Vira-montes! #The Cariboo Café,$ all belong to

2 #Liminality is a term borrowed from Arnold vanGennep!s formulation of rites de passage, #transi-tion rites,$ " which accompany every change ofstate or social position, or certain points in age. #(Turner 1974: 231-2). The term denotes the centralstage in the transition, the #threshold crossing$(entering a new and unknown experience), and is

derived from the Latin limen for threshold (myremark).

Radmila Nasti UDK 821.111(73).09University of Kragujevac DOI 10.7251/Þl1308143n

Faculty of Philology and Arts

ACTING OUT TRAUMA AND VIOLENCE

IN VIRAMONTES, KINGSTON, AND

SILKO Abstract: The ethnic writing of Helena Maria Viramontes, Leslie Marmon Silko, and

Maxine Hong Kingston offers patterns of the so called "redressive# rituals, the termintroduced by the renowned anthropologist Victor Turner. According to this author,redress is the third stage of what he calls "social drama# or a crisis, which tends to beresolved in terms scripted by theatrical and fictional models.

Keywords: acting out, autobiography, ritual, trauma.



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the narratives of liminality, and thoughthey all reßect their authors! inner dramas,

their context is clearly communal: thethree writers imply that they are giving voices to the silenced groups in a struggleto reconcile past and present, towards atransition from one culture to another.They focus on the therapeutic e ect of sto-ry-telling in addressing conßict and vio-lence. Silko!s novel sets up a model of aritualistic acting out through a complexprocess of self-recognition and is thereforecentral to this discussion. One important

technique in the works under scrutiny isre-memory or re-vision. Much of the worksof three female artists can, thus, be alsoclassiÞed under the heading of autobio-graphical writing, which undertakes todeal with their author!s own psychic trau-mas, functioning in the Þction as events which prompt transformation. They alsofrequently share in the group traumas of aparticular community or ethnicity.

Let us be reminded, once again, of the

most widely accepted deÞ

nition of indi- vidual psychological trauma in literarytheory, that of Cathy Caruth, who wrote:

In its most general definition, trauma describesan overwhelming experience of sudden orcatastrophic events, in which the response to theevent occurs in often delayed, and uncontrolledrepetitive occurrence of hallucinations and otherintrusive phenomena (1991: 11).

In much of theoretical literature on

trauma the emphasis is on "bearing wit-ness to trauma,# the phrase introduced byKali Tal in her doctoral dissertation andthe resulting book, where she claimed thatthe various psychic journeys undertaken intrauma literature involve a move from frag-mentation to wholeness marked by a con-ßict in which survivors Þght ideologicalbattles over a struggle for meaning (Tal1996). Because trauma cannot be simplyremembered, and cannot be simply con-

fessed, it must be testiÞ

ed about, "in astruggle shared between a speaker and a

listener to recover something the speakingsubject is not $ and cannot be $ in posses-

sion of,# said another notable theoristShoshana Felman (1991: 16).

Trauma has become the subject ofsome recent narrative theories which focuson the healing property of story-telling. Ina new approach to history, New Historian!saccount of events becomes a narrative, notunlike what happens in psychotherapy. Inthe words of Hayden White:

"The sets of events in the patient!s past which arethe presumed cause of his distress, manifested inthe neurotic syndrome, have been defamiliarized,rendered strange, mysterious, and threateningand have assumed a meaning that he can neitheraccept nor effectively reject# (2001: 1717).

It is not that the patient does notknow the facts of the events. He knowsthem too well, but has, as White puts it,"overemplotted! them, that is, "has chargedthem with a meaning so intense that, whether real or merely imagined, they

continue to shape both his perceptionsand his responses to the world long afterthey should have become % past history!#(Ibid.). As in psychotherapy, the "patient#resists the intrusion into consciousness ofthe traumatized memory traces in theform that he obsessively remembers them:"The problem is to get the patient to %reem-plot! his whole life history in such a way asto change the meaning of these events forhim and their signiÞcance for the economyof the whole set of events that make up hislife# (Ibid.).

This reemplotting is a kind of actingor acting out past events which can neverbe identical to their original form. Collec-tive traumas which make up the context ofthe stories under consideration are a resultof a series of events during a protracted pe-riod of time, such as racial and ethnic con-ßicts.

In her Hystories, Elaine Showalter

discusses the question of recovering trau-matic memory manifested as hysteria (a



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Acting out Trauma and Violence in Viramontes, Kingston, and Silko

post-traumatic symptom) in abused chil-dren, raped (and otherwise abused) wom-

en, victims of incest, and soldiers su eringfrom post-traumatic stress disorder. Draw-ing on the authors who explored this prob-lem, she focuses on the need to integratetraumatic memories into rational schemesand transform them into narrative lan-guage, in order to be relived and relieved(1992: 144-5). Much of the allegedly objec-tive narrating about traumatic events isthus inherently autobiographical. In dis-cussing autobiography, Shirley Neuman

distinguishes between the humanist poet-ics of autobiography in which !the autobi-ographer is seen as discovering meaningfulpattern in the ßux of past experience in or-der to arrive at an understanding of him-self as unique and uniÞed," and the post-structuralist poetics of autobiography(1992: 214). In the latter, autobiography be-comes a new way of looking at the past, in-spired by Adrienne Rich#s statement thatfor women !rereading, or $re-vision# % !theact of looking back, of seeing with fresheyes, of entering an old text from a newcritical direction" % is an act of survival, be-cause !survival is, profoundly, a form of au-tobiography" (Rich 1993: 167). ShoshanaFelman, building on Rich#s views, furtherexpands the theory of !reading autobio-graphically" (Felman 1992: 13), which is anactivity and a performance, and a means ofrepresenting trauma, a view adopted bythe author of this text in a number of pa-pers on literature by women and drama

(Nasti 2011: 112-3).

2. Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston#s Þctional au-tobiography, The Woman Warrior is aboutthe quest for identity of a young Chinese- American, which is in one of the storiesfrom this book, !White Tigers," describedas a search for !an unusual bird" to guideher on her quest (Kingston 1977: 51). King-

ston#s narrator relies on both Chinese and American role models, but Þnally emerges

with her own idiosyncratic strategy oflearning how to $ß y,# thus completing the

metaphor of the bird as a model and inspi-ration. From a silent, almost mute girl, thenarrator becomes a story-teller like hermother, in the concluding story of thebook !A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe."The focus of this analysis is the openingstory !No Name Woman," where Kingston,through her Þrst person narrator, writesabout her growing up as a Chinese girlraised in America, a tragic story of heraunt#s life, a young woman from a village in

China in the early 1900s. The story illus-trates that traditional beliefs, taught byparents, inßuence a young person#s devel-opment, but that a creative author canboth absorb and transcend such beliefs.The story of Kingston#s aunt, is told by hermother and opens with her mother#s say-ing

!You must not tell anyone&what I amabout to tell you. In China your father hada sister who killed herself. She jumped into

the family well. We say that your father hasall brothers because it is as if she had neverbeen born." (Kingston 1975: 319)

The opening of the narration is delib-erately ambiguous as to the credibility ofthe mother#s warning, since it is exactly theelement of the forbidden that drives theauthor, the inheritrix of two traditions, togive her voice to the silenced woman of thepast and tell her story in order to makepossible her own survival in a di erent

world. !By including variant stories aboutthe lives of men and women in her family", writes Joanna Ziarkowska (2006: 123),Kingston tries to corroborate these peo-ple#s experience into that of her own. Theirpresence makes her confess that her iden-tity, her !I" originates in others# stories.Therefore, at the end of The Woman War-rior she acknowledges that ![h]ere is a sto-ry my mother told, me not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also

am a story-talker. The beginning is hers,the ending, mine" (Kingston 1977: 184)."



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The narrative technique Kingstonuses is common to many American women

writers belonging to non WASP or mixedethnicities, with the woman from the pastfeaturing as a kind of a ghost, one who hastransgressed social boundaries and hasconsequently been repressed in the mem-ory of the living, but who cannot be easilyeliminated from consciousness. Tony Mor-rison described this process of coming toterms with the !ghosts of the past" as re-memory, central to her novel about slavery,Beloved . In Morrison"s novel the ghost-girl

Beloved is a reminder of the girl who waskilled by her mother to be saved from thehumiliation of slavery, while in Kingston"sstory the nameless aunt who became preg-nant out of marriage in the absence of herhusband, drowned together with her babyto avoid violence and humiliation. In bothcases authors illustrate the impossibility oferasing the memory which has to be actedout and re-emplotted in order to becomeacceptable for the narrators. #No Name

Woman,$ write Gilbert and Gubar,#inspires the narrator to reinvent her

as the legendary maternal Þgure with whose tale Kingston concludes the book %the second century poet Ts"ai Ye, who tran-scended the trials of exile, rape, and im-pregnation by transmuting her sorrow intosongs.$ (Gilbert and Gubar 1994: 380)

The book is clearly about a rite of pas-sage of the heroine-narrator, Kingston her-self. It is not simply a realistic account noris it a straightforward memoir. While tell-ing the stories of her mother and aunts,the author is coining her own languagecharged with symbols, metaphors and al-legories to express her overwhelming crea-tivity, while singing for all of her sisters ofboth China and America, like the ancientpoetess Ts"ai Ye. The story, told in retro-spect after several decades, testiÞes to ac-culturation as survival, not so much physi-

cal as spiritual, through what Turner wouldcall a redressive ritual, leading towards a

reintegration of the protagonist into thesociety.

3. Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Silko (born 1948) is one of theleading Native American authors who, toquote The Encyclopedia of World Biogra-

phy, !has deepened her a liation to hertribe through her books, which draw onLaguna myths and story-telling traditions."3

Among her several notable works, her sto-ry !Lullaby" and the novel Ceremony de-serve our consideration as illustrations ofhow traumas can be #acted out,$ both indi- vidually and collectively. In !Lullaby," Ayah,an old Native American woman who hard-ly speaks English and cannot write, re-members tragic events of her life which isclearly nearing its end in utter materialpoverty and social humiliation: the loss ofher elder son in the white people$s war, andher two young children taken away by the

state to be given to rich (white) families.She also recollects happy memories of hermother and her grandmother who told herstories, !the myths to live by," wove them inthe way similar to weaving the wool into yarn to produce warm and protective fab-rics for the long winters of life. Ayah, wrapped in her son Jimmie$s blanket, heronly possession, is searching for her hus-band Chato who has gone into town with agovernment check to spend it on drink.

This last time they go out into the snow,homeless, he falls asleep, and she singshim a lullaby she never sang to her chil-dren. She is aware he is going to die: herlullaby is about the return to nature afterdeath % the never-ending cycle, a smallritual of uniÞcation with Earth the mother,and peaceful acceptance of death. The verse is actually a Laguna native people$screation myth:

3

(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/leslie-marmon-silko/29/09/2012)



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The earth is your mother, She holds you.The sky is your father, He protects you.SleepSleep!.. We are together always We are together always.There never was time when this was not so. (Silko 2006: 2836-7)

The story "Lullaby# takes place inpresent time, invoking the sad history ofthe native peoples of America, with aglimpse of hope in their traditional way of

life and beliefs. At the opening of Silko#s novel Cere-

mony, we are informed that the story istold by Thought-Woman (from Pueblamythology), the spider woman who spunthe world into existence. And through thepower of the word, Thought-Woman"named things and as she named themthey appeared.# Silko thus emphasizes thepower of words and of story-telling,in thePueblo people#s tradition:

I will tell you something about stories

!They aren#t just entertainment.They are all we have, you see, All we have to fight off Illness and death. (Silko 1977: 1)

The hero of the novel Ceremony, Tayo,is emotionally broken by the experienceduring WWII in Asia where he had to Þghtagainst people that were of his own raceand colour. His mother was a prostitute,

his father is unknown, and he is raised byhis aunt who is a Christian and despisesTayo as a bastard. Silko presents a healingceremony for all of us. She deals with evilin the world in a modern context, and howto cure it.

Tayo had a cousin Rocky who was afull-blooded Indian but believed in assimi-lation, while Tayo believes in following na-tive tradition. They were in the war togeth-er. Tayo promised to bring Rocky back

home safe, but Rocky died in his arms. Hecouldn#t fulÞll another promise either $ to

his uncle Josiah, his surrogate father, tokeep a special breed of cattle bought to

survive harsh weather. They are scatteredsouth to Mexico. The young protagonistcannot kill the Japanese people who re-semble his own. While in the wet jungle heprayed against rain and his request seemsto be answered at home by a draught. Thefeeling of complete disappointment andrepulsion makes Tayo sick and he is hospi-talized with post-traumatic stress disorder. When back at home he wakes up crying $his dreams are about his dead beloved. His

grandmother proposes a medicine man.The protagonist embarks on a quest for his wholeness and health, against the evil ofthe world represented by the people called%destroyers& who fear and therefore hatethe world.

In his quest he moves around thespace known as Trinity Site where they ex-ploded the Þrst atomic bomb. UltimatelySilko says that such destructive powerunites people in %the fate the destroyers

planned for all of them& (Silko 1997: 246-7). Healing comes when he realizes thatthere is %the way all stories Þt together $the old stories, war stories, their stories $to become the story that was still beingtold& (Ibid.). Tayo thus became aware thathe was not crazy, and saw the world with,%no boundaries, only transitions throughall distances and time& (Ibid.). The powerof Silko#s story is in her theory of healing, which is the ritual that helps the escape

from the evil embodied in the %destroyers.&In one of the poems in the novel Silkosays: %The only cure I know is a good cere-mony& (Silko 1977: 3). The whole novel is aceremony of cure. It diagnoses the sick-ness, and gives a cure. Part of the healingprocess is male-female dialogue. Tradi-tional healing ceremonies are not adequatefor the healing of someone who has beencontaminated by modern evil. Navajohealer Betonie informs Tayo that changes

in the ceremony have to be made. Betonieperforms the traditional ceremony but also



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teaches Tayo self-knowledge, responsibili-ty for what he is: a mixture of several cul-

tures, races, languages, times. Tayo mustlearn not to blame somebody else for hispain, not to continue the chain of hatredand violence.

During his ceremony Tayo travels tothe four quarters of the world: south (fu-ture?), to Þnd Josiah!s cattle; west, to Gal-lup where he was born and where he Þndsold Betonie (past?); east to the site ofatomic bomb testing (present?); north toÞnd the sacred woman, Water Mountain

(himself - all these). At the same time healso travels within himself to Þnd the cent-er there. The episode of the sacred womanhas a special signiÞcance. She is the wife ofa hunter. In Pueblo mythology there is a Yellow Woman, Winter!s wife, who meetssummer one day and invites him to sleep with her while her husband is out huntingdeer. In the myth both man agree that thisholy woman will spend part of the year with Winter and part with Summer, this

signifying the harmony in the world. Tayois led by the woman to a moment "in thesunrise! where everything was beautifuland harmonious (Silko 1977: 182). At thismoment Tayo was at the center.

The love heals Tayo, but the woman warns him that destroyers don!t want theirstory to continue. Tayo went to the moun-tains to escape a mental hospital. Hisformer friends, violent young man, aresent to Þnd him. While he is watching

them hidden, they perform their cruel rit-ual on one of them, expecting Tayo to comeout and stop the torture. Tayo is tempted,but Þnally realizes that they wanted him tocomplete the deadly ritual, and decides togo back to the village and report on thisevent. Thus he escaped evil (sorcery) which returned upon itself, while he ishealed (Lundquist 2004: 71-80).

What Silko performs in her majornovel is the revision of the initiation ritual

for the whole community in order to cometo terms with the past, and to be able to live

in the present. Sophie Croisy sees Silko as a#theorist of trauma$ in Ceremony.

#In her texts$ % says Croisy, #Silkobrings forth the historical value of the cul-tural metaphor of the web (a crucial sym-bol in Laguna cosmology) to assert thenon-singularity of trauma!s represent abil-ity, the interdependency of certain trau-matic stories and traumatized bodies, thebuilding or re-building of connections be-tween these traumatized bodies through acritique of dangerous systematic and sym-bolic interventions in the healing process,

and the redeÞ

nition of death as a newstarting point (though a rather morbidone) in the process of building humanconnections (with one!s own lost culturalmatrix or between enemy cultures). Inshort, Silko participates in the process ofrethinking and reshaping trauma theory$(Croisy 2006: 87).

Even closer to the genre of Þctionalautobiography is Silko!s Storyteller . #Thestructure of Silko!s autobiography lies atthe core of the Laguna Pueblo tradition,$ writes Joanna Ziarkowska (Ziarkowska2006: 7) who further says:

# Storyteller , a concise collection of short stories,poems, family reminiscences, memories and pho-tographs, is a successful attempt to render thefundamentals of the Laguna life. The unifyingthemes of the book are the Þgure of the commu-nal storyteller, the strong bond of people with theland, the cyclical nature of time, and the sacred-ness of ceremonies.$

Ziarkowska, who studied Kingston!sThe Woman Warrior and Chinaman, andSilko!s Storyteller , discovers many analo-gies between the two authors (Ziarkowska2006: 7).

Silko is praised by Marta Ramos Ol-iveira (Oliviera 2009: 156) for her devotionto oral tradition which she helps keep alive,and for showing the importance of story-telling as a way of life. In this way she sub- verts the Western myths of superiority,

conquest, and progress, dismantling thebinaries such as #oral versus written, Indi-



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an versus white, myth versus reality, au-thenticity versus change, modern versus

traditional, center versus margin, photog-raphy versus storytelling!. Ceremony andSilko"s other works are modern examplesof initiation rites in a multicultural world,linked to the redressive, healing rituals,and the symbolic rebirth of the protagonistin the psychological and the social sense.

4. Helena Maria Viramontes

In the stories of Helena Maria Vira-

montes, of special interest is her construc-tion of the concept of the American Third World, and within it, the position of wom-en. Helena Maria Viramontes has becomefamous for her short stories and their su-perb depictions of Chicano culture, in-spired by her own family and friends. In aninterview she said: #If my mother showedall that is good in being female, my fathershowed all that is bad in being male!4 Vira-montes focuses on the su ering and pain

of Chicana women within the family, theculture, and the society. In the short story#Growing,! for instance, which is includedin her collection The Moths and Other Sto-ries (1985), the young heroine learns thather father becomes estranged from her asshe grows up because she is a woman andthus something alien to him - the Other(Viramontes 1995: 36).

In her #Cariboo Café! Viramontesgives her voice to the traditionally silenced

Latin American woman represented as anembodiment of the mythical Þgure of LaLlorona, the ghost or symbol of a woman who transgressed the social norm in some way, and as a consequence was condemnedto su er, to lose her man and her children, whom she continues to mourn and searchfor. The nameless woman from El Salvador,#in a state of post-traumatic shock! (San-doval 2000: 87), has lost her son in the bru-tal civil war but cannot stop looking for

4

(http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/viramon-tesHelena.php/30/09/2012).

him in the #third world! of LA which, inher mind disturbed by pain and su ering,

she perceives as an extension of her nativecountry, while trying to escape the pain ofher former reality in a process analogues toPierre Janet"s notion of dissociation5. Sheimagines she has found him in a little im-migrant boy whom she takes home andlooks after tenderly. At the #Cariboo Café,!supposed to be a meeting point of all im-migrants, she is betrayed by the white American owner of the café who, althoughhe too had lost a son in the Vietnam war

and belongs to the working class, identiÞeshimself with the o cial state policy and#the American Way.! The story ends withthe woman confronting police and beingshot, thus becoming #a warrior woman!

(Sandoval 2000: 87) like Kingston"s hero-ine, and #a symbol of resistance! (Sandoval2000: 89).

Viramontes, together with other Chi-cana authors, struggles to articulate the voice of the silenced and oppressed wom-

en of her community and of the Third World in general: #I want to do justice totheir voices. To tell these women, in myown gentle way, that I will Þght for them,that they provide me with my own sourceof humanity.! (quoted in Sandoval 2000:79) As Anna M. Sandoval observes, Vira-montes adapted a theme from Chicana lit-erature and myth into an internationalstory and gave it a more universal charac-ter. The use of La Llorona character and its

merging with the story of the washer wom-an serve to shift the personal #I! to thecommunal #we,! which happens in the pas-sage #The women came from the depth ofsorrow to search for their children. I jointhem, frantic, desperate, and our eyes be-come scrutinizers, our bodies opiate withthe scent of their smiles.! (Viramontes

5 Psychological defense; existence of two states ofconsciousness, one of them trying to suppress thepainful memory. Pierre Janet (1859-1947), propo-

nent of the theory of dissociation was a Frenchpsychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist.



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1995: 72) One woman!s quest thus becomesevery woman!s quest. The voice of the "I#

becomes the voice of a witness, one whocan articulate violence, and in its plural,"we,# speak with a multiplicity of voices, as Vailakis puts it (Vailakis 2000: 99). We canagree with Vailakis that Viramontes is "re-reading the culture# in the way feministauthors deÞned it, in order to keep the tra-dition alive by the act of writing, the act ofstorytelling, which becomes a ritual ofhealing similar to that in Kingston!s andSilko!s prose. (Vailakis 2000: 94, 103).

5. Conclusion

Kingston, Silko, and Viramontes arechosen as the case studies among numer-ous other American ethnic authors whoare participating in the creation of a new,multiethnic culture. Ziarkowska, who callsKingston and Silko!s work "ethnic autobi-ography,# writes how the two authors havemodiÞed the traditional genre and howthey, "by introducing culture speciÞc ele-

ments, enrich and develop it# (Zairkowska2006: 9). This accurate description can beapplied to all three authors discussed inthis paper.

The three women writers have brokenthe silences to which their sex, class andethnicity have been subjected, in the wordsof Tillie Olsen, especially those who "nevercame to writing,$ the barely educated, theilliterate, the women. Their silence is thesilence of centuries as to how life was, is,

for most of the humanity. Traces of theirmaking, of course, [can be found] in folksong, lullaby, tales, language itself, jokes,maims, superstitions$# (Olsen 1978: 10)"We who write,# says Olsen, "are the survivors,# explaining in the note that for hersurvivor "contains its other meaning: onemust bear witness for those who found-ered; try to tell how and why it was thatthey, also worthy of life, did not survive. And pass on ways of surviving; and tell our

chancy luck; our special circumstances#(Olsen 1978: 39). Hopefully, this paper has

proved this to be true in the case of allthree of these major American women

writers, Kingston, Silko and Viramontes.In their Þction, Kingston, Silko and

Viramontes are positioned between a sha-manistic, social role in negotiating themodes of integration of di erent commu-nities of people who have to live togetherand survive (Chinese and white Americanin Kingston, native and white American inSilko, and Chicano and white American in Viramontes), and the artistic role of a crea-tor of new genres, new modes of represen-

tation, to express the speciÞc link betweenthe personal and the political in post-colo-nial America. They speak through theirprotagonists, mostly women, except inSilko!s Ceremony, thus building part oftheir own experience into their Þction, re-living and relieving their own traumasthrough collective rituals, in an act of thecomplex process of survival in contempo-rary America.

References

1. Caruth, C. (1996), Unclaimed Experi-ence: Trauma, Narrative and History.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

2. Croisy, S. September (2006), "Re-imag-ining Healing after Trauma: LeslieMarmon Silko and Judith Butler Writ-ing against the War of Cultures.# Nebu-la http://www.nobleworld.biz/images/N o t e o n c o n t r i b u t o r s 3 . 2 -3.pdf/29/09/2012.

3. Encyclopedia of World Biography onLeslie Silko, http://www.bookrags.com/biography/leslie-silko/

4. Felman, S (1993), What Does a WomanWant? ! Reading and Sexual Di erence.Baltimore and London: The JohnsHopkins University Press.

5. Gilbert, S. and Gubar, S. (1994), No Man"s Land , The Place of the WomanWriter in the Twentieth Century. New

Haven and London: Yale UniversityPress.



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6. Kingston, M.H. (1975). The WomanWarrior . London: Picador.

7. Leys, R. (2000), Trauma, A Genealogy.Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress.

8. Lundquist, S. (2004), An Introduction,!Leslie Marmon Silko." Native Ameri-can Literatures, New York, London:Continuum.

9. Nasti, R. (2011), !The Quest for Tradi-tion in Contemporary Canadian Fic-tion," Re i 4/2011. Belgrade: Alfa Uni- versity, pp.104-115.

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