Spatial Time and Hidden Histories

All throughout the Leslie Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, we are warned of the great dangers that come from ignoring the past and history. One of it’s great criticisms of the Euro-centric Western Culture is that it tries much to quickly to discard of the past for the linear present and future, when according to American Indian conceptions of spatial time the past is very much interwoven with what happens in the present and the future. Understanding the past fully is necessary; the old adage we must understand history or we are doomed to repeat it comes to mind.

Caren Irr describes time in the Almanac as “something endlessly available, something spatial; it is something through which one can travel forward and back like a god.” Indeed with the sheer size of the Almanac and the way Silko jumps from the past to present through a dizzying array of characters truly proves this point.

Throughout the book, it is this “spatial” time that is triumphed as the correct way of looking at history and not the “partial, photographic” history practiced by Europeans. Throughout the book we are shown an array of Europeans who constantly ignore the past, contributing to “the collapsing universe”. Clinton makes it his personal mission to uncover the true history of African Americans, and says, “To read the white man’s version, Africans were responsible for the plantation slavery in the New World. But African slaves only replaced Native American slaves.” (406). Also, La Escapia, puts the white Cuban Bartolomeo on trial “for crimes against the people’s history.” The young communist ignored all that happened before Castro in the Americas, in his trial disgustingly saying to the Mexican Indians, “Jungle monkeys and savages have no history!” (525). However, La Escapia proves him wrong to a rioting crowd by rattling off a list of revolutions that had occurred in the Americas without white communist help or aide.

These histories which are swept under the rug in the narrative of American History further show the Western tendency towards the “partial” and photographic. There is no need to look at how all people were effected by the events of history, because the only history that mattered was in the context of Europe and it’s descendants. It is a linear view, linked with the imagery of the genealogy tables of pure blood that had obsessed Serlo so much. The Almanac argues for an expansion of this linear genealogy to include people of color that have shaped the landscape as much or more then Europeans.

Michael Randolph