Fences, Borders, and Artefacts

The first and most important matter in Almanac of the Dead were the examinations of suffering in the characters through vivid images, chopped up like it was splayed out on an editor's table ready to be montaged in a movie. The grandfather and grandmother figures of Sterling's tribe, Seese's dreams of her child, the syringes and pill containers in the kitchen. It reminds me of the passage in which "The creation of these artefacts...was the spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became 'modular,' capable of being transplanted... to a great variety of social terrains" (Anderson 4). These images for the most part are not in themselves the artefacts, but the result of them. Maybe the artefacts are the Native American lands, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the Drug War that gave birth to each character and their relation to what seems like a shared national suffering.

I was especially fascinated with Silko's style as she recounts Stirling's past. The anguish expressed was such a difference from a western, national view of Indian tribes' traditions as antiquated and foolish. Suddenly the sterile museum displays become atrocities, sacrilegious, and the soul is forcefully tugged from the elder who views this. The simple act of the item becoming the artefact is forcefully transplanted from the Native American culture into "modernity".

I also took this into account when I considered the criminals in Stirling's magazines as often being of Native American descent. That these people somewhat became museum pieces themselves as a representation of the borderlessness combating the "nation-ness" of the United States was almost like a more modernized image of the Native Americans themselves. If "is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (Anderson 6), then Silko's lack or presence of boders in Almanac of the Dead presents an interesting case study. There is the stifling of Tuscan, the Ranch, but the structure of the novel itself - with it's winding narratives outside of the Ranch, many different viewpoints, and jumping from one to the other fairly quickly juxtaposes this prison-like environment with another sort of spirit. I would very much enjoy exploring the possibility that the drug inclusion in the novel also served as a point to contrast another extension of the borderless principle.