Reading Notes W15: Silko, Part A

Leslie Marmon Silko (1029-1036)

• Silko was born in Albuquerque but grew up in Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico
• she is a novelist, poet, memoirist, and writer of short fiction
• Silko stayed on at the university and taught courses in creative writing and oral literature
• although much of her work emphasizes the healing of conflicts - between white and Native Americans, between the human and natural worlds, between warring aspects of the self - some of her novels also reveal a more aggressive and despairing tone (1029)
• the story "Yellow Woman" is one of Silko's shortest and earliest pieces, but it occupies a still growing place in the canon of short fiction
• it became the subject of a volume of critical essays published in 1993
• Yellow Woman is either the heroine or a minor character in a wide range of tales
• Yellow Woman is named together with her three sisters, Blue Woman, Red Woman, and White Woman, thus completing the four colors of corn - but in Laguna shore she eventually became a kind of Everywoman (1030)
• a tradition Laguna prayer song, recited at the naming ceremony for a newborn daughter, begins, "Yellow Woman is born, Yellow Woman is born" (1030)
• Yellow Woman  frequently appeares in tales of abduction
• she is said to have been captured by a strange mat at a stream while she is fetching water
• her captor, who carries her off to another world, is imbued with power that proves of value for her people
• Silko draws on Native tradition to make a major contribution to contemporary American fiction
• "Little Yellow Woman... you never give up, do you? I have told you who I am. The Navajo people know me, too" (1033)
• "I decided to tell them that some Navajo had kidnapped me, but I was sorry that old Grandpa wasn't alive to hear my story because it was the Yellow Woman stories he liked to tell best" (1036)