Novelists From The United States

"I realize that I have a turn of mind that leads me to exaggerate and oversimplify things for the sake of better understanding, and I know there are dangers in that. But I think that tendency in me helps me get to the essence of things. I do believe it helped me get at the core of what was going on with these two social movements—civil rights and anti-Vietnam war—when for the first time in my life I had the opportunity and the desire to pay close attention to what was going on around me. What came out of it for me was the realization that I had to do something about the conclusions I was coming to. And that posed some real challenges to me. I liked physics and didn't want to give it up. Being in a university is a relatively easy life. There's status and long vacations, and the money is pretty good, actually. I had a young family to support—two sons—and my wife wasn't working and she was completely dependent on me. But I couldn’t stay quiet about this. - The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, 2001"

"Bill Clinton said in his Portland State University speech that anyone who doesn't want America to become darker is "un-American." Isn't that something? This jerk who used to organize anti-American demonstrations during the Vietnam war and chant, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chih Minh, the Viet Cong's gonna win," is now telling us that we're "un-American"!"

"The only reason that a rabble of feminists and queers and Jews and Blacks and mestizos and liberals and Clinton supporters are running America into the ground today is that decent people are sitting on their hands. If the decent people in America would get off their hands and accept personal responsibility for what is being done to their world, and if they would make a commitment and begin working together, we could sweep the whole Clinton coalition into the dustbin of history. It doesn't matter that the Clinton rabble outnumber us. We will whip them in a minute. We will have the media bosses jumping into the ocean all along the East Coast and swimming toward Israel as fast as they can go. But first we must be willing to accept personal responsibility. And so my message today to every decent person who is listening is this: Don't be a shirker. Don't try to be a smart guy by continuing to cheer from the sidelines but refusing to join the team and get out on the field. Stand up and become a participant in life. Make of your life a model that people will remember and talk about long after you're gone. - Thoughts on Accepting Responsibility, 1999"

"From my viewpoint it's the Clinton gang who are the outlaws, the violators of our Constitution and of all of our old-fashioned legal and moral principles, and anything that we do to oppose them is legal and is morally justified. Anyone who goes along with them is a traitor, in the strict, old-fashioned sense of the word, and anyone who sits on his hands now and refuses to oppose the Clinton gang is not much better."

"People tell me, "Oh, you must not advocate doing anything illegal." My answer to them is that I have been a law-abiding man all my life. I believe in law and order. I believe that we must have a society governed strictly by laws, not by mobs or by any tyrant's whims of the moment -- or by any clever tribe of alien manipulators who have gained control of our mass media. But does anyone really believe that we have a society governed by laws today? Let us remember that we are living now in the era of O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton. We have laws on the books, and we have police and courts which have the theoretical responsibility for enforcing those laws. And when it is Politically Correct to do so, they will."

"Other people tell me that whatever solution we seek to the problems our people are facing today must be a solution without violence. And my response to that is that I am a peaceful man. All my adult life I have been a scholar and a teacher, never a man of violence. But look at the behavior of our opponents! All they know is violence and coercion and murder. I do not want violence, and I am determined to avoid it as long as I can."

"We must reach out to our people. We must alert them. We must educate them. We must encourage them. We must inspire them. And here's a beautiful, wonderful thing: when you reach out to other people to encourage them and inspire them, you yourself will be encouraged and inspired. When you find out how many other people there are who share our concerns, our feelings, our values, our sense of responsibility, you cannot help but be encouraged. Even the hatred that you encounter from some people -- especially from people in the controlled media -- will be encouraging. For you will understand that they would not hate us so much if they did not fear us. And the reason that they fear us is that deep inside them they know that what we say is true. So let's get out there -- all of us -- and start looking for encouragement!"

"This trendy, new crowd, which likes to do everything with committees, really believes that all it takes to make anything legal and OK is a majority. I guess they call that democracy. When the majority is what it has become in the United States today, a better name is mobocracy. But really, it's much worse than mob rule. It is rule by a self-appointed elite of utterly evil and destructive people who have in their hands the tools for controlling and guiding the mob. They're pretty cocky now -- so cocky, in fact, that they're making statements of the sort I've quoted today. They're cocky because they believe that no one can take away from them their tools for controlling the mob, and that as time passes and America becomes darker and more degenerate, their grip on the mob will only become firmer. Our job is to prove them wrong. It's a big job, and we'd better get started."

"Did you ever wonder why the Jews are such great proponents of democracy? Whether in Indonesia or Pakistan or Serbia or you name it, whenever there is some threat to universal suffrage, the Jews are ready to send the U.S. armed forces in to bomb and kill until everyone is permitted to vote. Why is that? [...] Well, let's not beat around the bush: the appeal of mass democracy lies in the fact that in essentially every country in the world today, the number of persons unable to think for themselves is substantially larger than the number able to make independent decisions. Those unable to think for themselves have their thinking done for them by the people who control the mass media. Which is to say, democracy is the preferred system because it gives the political power to those who own or control the mass media and at the same time allows them to remain behind the scenes and evade responsibility for the way in which they use that power. [...] Believe me, one day soon the Jews on both sides of the great water will institute a web-TV voting system that allows the couch potatoes and the ball game fans to vote without having to getup from their couches, just by clicking their remote controls at their TV screens to select the next President or prime minister. That will be real democracy."

"If the Jews manage to get Iran involved in the war also -- and that's what they really want to do, what they really need to do -- then I think we stand a pretty good chance of seeing some major terrorist activity in the United States. I know that if I were Osama bin Laden, I'd have been spending my time getting ready for just such a development ever since Bill Clinton blew up that pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. I'd be putting my teams into place in the United States, assembling materials, choosing targets, and waiting for the Jews to provide justification for me to begin killing Americans on a significant scale. Of course, whether Osama bin Laden is as resourceful and as capable as he's said to be remains to be seen. Personally, I have very little faith in the ability of these flea-bitten Muslims to get things done. But we'll see."

"...everyone knows they're going to die, but no one really believes it."

"True" representation is representation as best as possible. (Absolutely true representation is not possible because it is always only representation.) Then we can circumvent our own stereotype and, in a sense, not indulge in stereotyping. And I think that will produce better literature, and surprising literature, too. (To the Western mind this is the main thing in society.) And I think in a sense that Leslie Silko has done that; certainly, the stereotypes are not there."

"From Leslie Silko we hear, perhaps for the first time, the voice of contemporary Indian America rising above dull anthropological reports"

"Leslie Marmon Silko's writing takes us into old worlds of consciousness inside the present, and inside ourselves."

"a brilliant novelist."

"It's simply splendid, and I can't stress too much how happy I am to have this book in the world."

"in the last five years, the works of Leslie Marmon Silko have had a great impact on me. I feel that there are connections that she is making in terms of a kind of writing that we have to do to counter the death dealings of a Euro-American monoculture. She is also a wonderful storyteller, so I find courage in that kind of writing and being able to have that kind of worldview that is based on her own indigenism. I feel that we Chicanas could be drawing from that source much more than we are. I find her very inspiring."

"Leslie Silko's Ceremony is an extraordinary novel, if indeed 'novel' is the right word. It is more precisely a telling, the celebration of a tradition and form that are older and more nearly universal than the novel as such...Her talent is real and remarkable."

"At her best, Leslie Silko is very good indeed. She has a sharp sense of the way in which the profound and the mundane often run together in our daily lives. And her sense of humor is acute…We must take such words as "storyteller" very seriously. And we must make distinctions. A camera is not a storyteller. Neither is a novelist or a poet, necessarily. In view of the title of this book, let us make a distinction here. Leslie Silko is a writer, one of high and recorded accomplishment. If she is not yet a storyteller, she promises to become one."

"A brilliant, haunting, and tragic novel of ruin and resistance in the Americas...If Karl Marx had chosen to make Das Kapital a novel set in the Americas, he might have come out with a book something like this."

"it looks like Leslie Silko and Toni Morrison are doing what I'm doing too. When we've talked about our backgrounds in myth and storytelling, it sounds like we grew up in very similar ways. Toni was trying to figure out where we belong, and she kept using that term "magical realism"; she thought we were in that tradition...we went to China together. I do feel an affinity not only because I love them as people but because we seem to write alike. There is so much human emotion and richness and story and imagery and colors and things to eat. Nobody is alienated from life; everybody is warm. I feel that we write like that because we are warm, and even though we all-I hate to say master-we are all very good with words, words aren't the only thing that's important. We care about stories about people, and also that magical real place that we are all visiting. When I compare our work to some of the mainstream work, it seems as if many of them are only playing with words. The "language" people's world seems gray and black and white. Toni's and Leslie's and my aliveness must come from our senses of a connection with people who have a community and a tribe. We are living life in a more dangerous place. We do not live in new subdivisions without ceremony and memory; and if those other writers have to draw from that non-magical imagination, then of course, their writing will be gray and black and white."

"I call Leslie Silko a storyteller, but she says she's not a storyteller either, not in the tribal sense of the term as one living within the heart of the culture weaving stories for food for the community. Yet, I see Leslie doing that, from the borders of cultures. She weaves them together. So she is a storyteller."

"There is no way you can say that realism is the only literature going. I mean, most of our best novelists are not even writing realism a writers like Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Leslie Silko. They are using realistic techniques to tell stories that are not realistic."

"I've always liked her work, and especially admire Ceremony."

"She was a discovery for me in a particular way I don't think any other writer will ever be. I'm very attached to her work."

"Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead is an extraordinary book, a work of immense creative power...a landmark in Native American literature-the Indian War and Peace."

"The work of women of color arises out of the creative void in a multitude of voices, a complex of modes, and most of these women are quite aware of their connection to the dark grandmother of human wisdom...Leslie Marmon Silko reaches into unexplored realms, the gloom of what is long forgotten but that continues to nourish our love and our terror"

"I read Almanac of the Dead, and here were these ideas, these stories, this understanding of the relationship of the people of the SW to the land, and the immateriality of the political border to traditional cultures. It was not written to flatter or beguile. She did not pull any punches. It was written to show these connections between the seen and the unseen, the past and the future. By talking about the Yaqui, who live on both sides of the border, she highlighted another culture, like the Opata, who have claims that supersede current boundaries. It was a great relief to find her work."

"Leslie Marmon Silko writes in her collection of essays, Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit, about "The Indian with a Camera." Silko grew up at Laguna Pueblo, and tourists have been pointing cameras at her all of her life, in one case, taking Leslie, who is mixed blood, out of a photo because she didn't look Indian enough. As an adult, Silko, who wrote novels such as Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead," and most recently, Gardens in the Dunes, is also a photographer. She said that this makes the tourists really uncomfortable. Why? Because she, as an artist, is turning her gaze on them. Indians are supposed to be the passive receivers of their gaze. The implications of an Indian turning her gaze, her sensibilities, on them, capturing their images, is a subversion, a reversal of the given order."

"(How do you relate to the women's movement?) S: I feel I've benefited by it just generally in the sense that anything that undermines the stereotypes perpetrated on all of us by white men is helpful. What it does is take some of the pressure off those of us who have never lived very close to the stereotypes. I've always been the way I was. Here at Laguna, a lot more is expected of women; women are expected to be strong, to manage the property. Children belong to women and to their families. Women do the plastering. It's a relief to have the stereotypes knocked down. It's just made it easier for me to do what I want to do."

"When I go to the Laguna Acoma High School to talk to Native American kids, I tell them that storytelling for Indians is like a natural resource. Some places have oil, some have a lot of water or timber or gold, but around here, it's the ear that has developed. You have it. In a sense, it's accidental just like uranium is accidental in a given region. But I want them to know that this potential exists. There's the possibility for telling stories. I think it has to do with community, with growing up in certain kinds of communities as opposed to others."

"(Do you think there are any contemporary myths emerging?) S: I don't see that there has ever been any end to the stories. They just keep going on and on. So far, I haven't seen that there are any new ones. There's a need to have a multiplicity of perspectives and tellers. I tell some stories. Simon Ortiz tells others. We need certain tellers to look after certain myths. The ones I'm looking after have always been around. It's part of a continuum. I see it more as a matter that certain people come along and work with the myths that have always been there."

"good literature has to be accessible. It's incredibly narcissistic to be otherwise. Artists can't work with a chip on their shoulders, and that's what has happened to a lot of feminists. Politics can ruin anything. It will ruin a picnic. Politics in the most crass sense - rally around the banner kind. I'm political, but I'm political in my stories. That's different. I think the work should be accessible, and that's always the challenge and task of the teller - to make accessible perceptions that the people need."

"Whatever just happened, it would be related to other things that had happened, and finally the function of the stories would be to keep you from feeling that God had just dropped a rock on your head had been singled out in some way, which is really dangerous, because the stories remind you that this isn't the first time."

"relationships. That's all there really is. There's your relationship with the dust that just blew in your face, or with the person who just kicked you end over end. ... You have to come to terms, to some kind of equilibrium, with those people around you, those people who care for you, your environment."

"It's generally double-edged. It seems with humor, there's always something beyond just the laughing that when you're laughing, you have to think beyond to greater considerations."

"(Why did you entitle the novel Ceremony?) S: That's what it is. Writing a novel was a ceremony for me to stay sane."

"I think what writers, storytellers, and poets have to say necessarily goes beyond such trivial boundaries as origin."

"with a good story there is no end to the possibilities"

"...the best thing you can have in life is to have someone tell you a story; they are physically with you, but in lieu of that, since at age five or six you get separated from all of those people who hold you and talk to you, I learned at an early age to find comfort in a book, that a book would talk to me when no one else would. Or a book would say things that would soothe in a way that no person could."

"in order to realize the wonder and power of what we share, we must understand how different we are too, how different things are. I'm really intrigued with finding out similarities in conditions, and yet divergences in responses, of human beings. I'm really interested in that. Without forgetting that first of all, before we can ever appreciate what's the same, we have really to love and respect and be able to internalize freedom of expression."

"my process is mostly, not totally, subconscious, not conscious. The reason I write is to find out what I mean. I know some of the things I mean. I couldn't tell you the best things I know. And I can't know the best things I know until I write."

"as a writer and as a person, I like to think of myself in a more old-fashioned sense, the way the old folks felt, which was, first of all you're a human being; secondly you originate from somewhere, and from a family, and a culture. But first of all, human beings."

"Certainly for me the most effective political statement I could make is in my art work. I believe in subversion rather than straight-out confrontation. I believe in the sands of time, so to speak."

"(How do you feel about the Bicentennial-do you have feelings about it?) LMS: Oh, I do, definitely, I have all kinds of things to say-I think it's one reason I'm very anxious to try to get the novel out during 1976. I just want to make sure that during this year when all of this sort of celebrating is going on, that Americans can be reminded that there are different ways to look at the past 200 years. I just want to make sure that beside all of the rhapsodizing about Paul Revere and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin that Americans are reminded that this great land, this powerful nation they are celebrating was established on stolen land. It was the resources, the metals, the minerals, it was the water, it was the coal, that enabled those people who came to America to build this nation. In this Bicentennial year we should remember, we should remember that it was on this stolen land that this country was settled and begun. In Anglo-Saxon law, in common law, when something is stolen, no matter how many times the stolen property changes hands, in common law, that piece of property still belongs to the original owner. It doesn't matter whether the people take the stolen article in good faith. The property remains stolen. As long as this fact is acknowledged, then I'll be satisfied, and they can celebrate all they have done with this stolen land and the stolen resources and they can pat themselves on the back for the achievement. (1976)"

"The attitude of the white shaman is that he knows more about Indians than the Indians know. (1976)"

"The most radical kinds of politics are not in harangues given at stupid rallies. I mean the most earth-shaking kinds of shifts occur when language is plain truth. (1987)"

"I am never far away from oral narrative, storytelling and narration, and the use of narrative to order experience. The people at home believe that there is one big story going on and made up of many little stories, and the story goes on and on. The stories are alive and they outlive us, and storytellers are only caretakers of the story. Storytellers can be anonymous. Their names don't matter because the stories live on. I think that's what people mean when they say that there are no new stories under the sun. It's true - the old stories live on, but with new caretakers. (1994)"

"all young writers should understand that even those things that we throw in the trash can are necessary to get us to where we want to be. (1994)"

"(Q: When you saw that it was going to be an almanac, what difference did that make?) A: Then I started to think about the notion of time reckoned not with numerals and numbers, but what if you just talk about time as narratives, day by day. What happened that day is the identity of the day. More in the direction of what the Mayans thought. Once we did that, the editing went differently, and it became a whole different book. (Q: Your sense of time in the book is very non-Western.) A: The way time is computed in western European cultures is completely political. Colonialists always want time and history not to go back very far...Here [among Native American people], five hundred years is nothing. This is something that the Anglo-Americans, the invaders, the colonials, never want to face-in China or India or Africa-especially when there are native people who have an incredible spiritual connection to the very earth. Time is totally political-especially when they are on that mother ground and especially when it's such a short period of time, where somebody living today could have talked to somebody who had talked to somebody who actually was at the scene of some of these events. Then you completely miscalculate how well things are going."