60 pages • 2 hours read
Leslie Marmon SilkoYellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 17-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “As a Child I Loved to Draw and Cut Paper”
Although she was not as adept as her classmates, Silko loved craft projects as a child, a passion which followed her into adulthood. She did not possess the realism necessary for a degree in visual arts, so she stuck with writing, which came naturally. Her father was a photographer, and after dropping out of law school, Silko took a photography class and a graduate English class which looked at the interplay between visual representation and text. Silko offers that the “tension between the word and the image goes back thousands of years in Europe and the Middle East” (167) via the fear of idolatry, although text is technically visual. In Western Europe, there is little harmony between the two mediums. Silko identifies children’s books and the work of William Blake as two exceptions to this. However, in Asia, these two mediums are not conflicted. Silko adds thatalthough photographs or video do not usually lie, they do depend upon words for specification and context.
The narrator’s project Sacred Water is interested in photographs that obscure meaning instead of revealing it, “so that the words do not overpower the odd minimalism of the pictures but instead depend upon the pictures for subtle resonance” (169). For this reason, SIlko also made hand-sewn copies of the book entirely by herself, so it would be free of editorial criticism and up to her own discretion, transporting herself back to the bliss she felt as a child while crafting.
When Silko was in sixth grade, she created a dirty joke magazine, taking pictures of the Playboy bunny while focusing the joke on male anatomy. Her family was open on its views of sex, and her father did not hide the magazines. She took her two copies to school and got called to the principal’s office because another female student told on her. Her classmates admitted that they had been telling the joke before the magazine, saving her from expulsion. The narrator finds similarities between the joy she experienced during her adult project and that sixth-grade encounter. She realized that the “written word is no more and no less reliable than the spoken word” (172).
In regard to her creation process, Silko states that she edits as she goes and has received several letters from concerned professors outlining errors, which have helped her in subsequent editions and made the text bring on a communal collaborative spirit. She explains the role of listeners during Pueblo storytelling to edit mistakes they hear in a reply to one of these professors, also mentioning her love of eccentricities in Elizabethan-age spelling. She admits she has no interest in publishing anyone’s work besides her own, as all the errors are therefore her errors, which indicate Freudian slips.
Chapter 18 Summary: “The Indian with a Camera”
Silko states that petroglyphs around the San Jose River suggest that Pueblo’s paleo-Indian ancestors made images of spiritual significance 18,000 years ago, and Pueblos continue to view imagery as sacred today. Pueblos had no problems with cameras themselves; however, they did not appreciate the intrusive white men attached to these cameras. Silko’s Grandpa Hank photographed much in the Pueblo community. Silko remembers looking at photographs which accompanied stories.
Silko says that “[a]t first, white men and their cameras were not barred from the sacred kachina dances and kiva rites” (176), but after the villagers understood their voyeurism and the prosecution that could result after the US government banned Pueblo religion, the cameras too were banned. Similarly, the Pueblo people understand the power and significance of photographs, and they did not want outsiders to violate their privacy.
“The Pueblo cultures seek to include rather than exclude” (177), creating vast networks of trade and commerce. The Europeans were shocked at Native American adaptability and the ability to incorporate new ideas, although they misread this as signs of indigenous weakness and disloyalty: “Euro-Americans project their own fears and values in their perception of a conflict between Native American photographers and traditional native artists” (177). Silko contends that white Americans are frightened by indigenous photographers because they believe that indigenous cultures were destroyed and sub-human, which indigenous photography subverts. Further, indigenous photographers remind Euro-Americans that Europeans will disappear from the Americas.
Silko states that “The stories and reminisces that enliven all Pueblo social gatherings are densely encoded with expression and information” (178). Even though the US government attempted to break this narrative identity by forcibly relocating children to distant boarding schools, they failed; the children “were reunited with what continues and what has always continued” (179).
Chapter 19 Summary:“On Photography”
Silko’s father learned photography in the army, and so she has been around it her whole life. She states that “Photographs are capable of registering subtle electromagnetic changes in both the subject and the photographer” (180).For example, when Silko was photographed by a Japanese professor, she believes she appeared Japanese. The narrator believes photographs are able to capture energy that people do not understand, even in the least mysterious of places, such as the dry wash below her house.
Silko possesses one roll of film she associates with the abduction and murder of a woman. The shots feature a black sedan and a spider web resembling a shallow grave: “Fields of electromagnetic force affect light. Crowds of human beings massed together emanate actual electricity. Individual perceptions and behavior are altered” (182). Greed and violence become palpable, forever altering the energy of a location. In a photograph of Geronimo’s capture at Skeleton Canyon, one can see the will to resist in his stare, a similar defiance that is captured in photographs of Native American schoolboys.
Many scholars have delved into the interesting relationship between Native Americans and photography, such as David Seales, who believes “the spiritual integrity of the person behind the camera matters most” (183). Victor Masayevsa believes the camera honors ancient spirits by averting its gaze. The difference between the photographs of insiders and those of voyeurs is love. The diversity of the Native American experience has been captured in photographs, as well as the similarities of bravado and the control the people possess.
“Mexico City is the most populous city on earth” (185) and most of the inhabitants are Indian and mestizos, who will eventually retake the Americas back from European invaders, Silko contends. Further, the earth will help with climactic changes and dwindling water supplies in desert cities.
Silko’s father photographs the land and people of Laguna-Acoma, and sometimes people specifically ask him to take their pictures. He prefers informal pictures using available light, especially with old-time people, whose photographs he keeps after they pass on to Cliff House.
Chapter 20 Summary: “An Essay on Rocks”
Silko sees a black form against the white arroyo sand, piquing her curiosity. The arroyo was formed by a violent volcanic explosion in which “great fiery clouds sucked up pebbles and stones and melted them into strange glassy rocks with colorful swirls and patterns of stars” (188). She makes her way from the ridge where she is standing through the vegetation, trying to figure out what the black object is. She states that the“lava hills northwest of Tucson are full of secrets” (188), featuring loot buried from robberies, bootlegger breweries, bags of cash and cocaine, and the shallow graves of murder victims. She is anxious, but realizes it is only a black rock that looks like a meteorite. “The appearance of a rock may change from hour to hour” (191); she has mistaken a rock before for a giant sleeping bear.
Chapters 17-20 Analysis
These chapters demonstrate the interconnectivity between visual art and the written word, stressing the interplay between the two. The narrator appreciates both as forms of art, although she does not see them as separate from one another, but rather interacting harmoniously with each other. This view is, of course, similar to the Pueblo ideal of interconnectivity and the desire to achieve harmony with all things, living and nonliving. In this way, the narrator further abstracts the ideal of interconnectivity by rethinking it as applicable to ideas such as writing and art; however, both of these creations represent physical actions, and so there is interplay between the abstract theory and the physical construction. The narrator then conflates the abstract with the concrete, in a way which reiterates the way in which the Pueblo peoples believe that concrete symbols are inherently abstracted into theories. That is, a simple rendering of a blossom does not merely represent the flower itself, but also expands to encompass ideas such as the four cardinal directions and other symbolic references. Much like the written word, any constructed art is rife with context and nuanced meaning. In this way, it seems as though art is no different from words themselves. In Chapter Twenty, the readers actually are able to see the photographs themselves and the way in which the visual art merges with the text.
Although the narrator stresses the Pueblo interaction and interconnectivity between text and images, she also identifies the difference between this interpretation and the Anglo conceptualization thereof. In much of Anglo literature, words are seen as being in conflict with visual representations; it would appear that Anglo literature does not understand that words are themselves visual interpretations. Especially within Judeo-Christian notions, images were considered blasphemous. In Pueblo culture, however, the images are seen as sacred, as are words: there is divinity in everything. The narrator also presents other differences between Anglo and Pueblo culture, such as the Anglo view of other cultures through a gaze of voyeurism versus the Pueblo love and respect of other cultures, and the interconnectedness between all humanity.
In these chapters, the reader witnesses further understanding that historical trauma remains in a place—evident in the last section of chapters as well—reverberating into future generations. This localized historical trauma manifests in otherwise inexplicable acts of violence, such as the young man’s gruesome murder of his friends and the teenagers’ suicide pact. This violence has neither motive nor explanation that law enforcement can find. However, the narrator knows the explanation for these otherwise random acts of violence: the violence perpetuated against the land and allowed by the Pueblo tribal councils has seeped back into the people. In this way, the narrator demonstrates the harm that can occur as a result of the interconnectivity of all things: these connections mean that in attempting to desecrate the land, humans desecrate only themselves.
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By Leslie Marmon Silko
