The Uses of Blood in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead.

In her long and controversial novel Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko portrays at least seventy characters, most at various stages of corruption, disease, and addiction. Individuals and groups of poor whites, African Americans, Indians, Mexicans, and Asian Americans are connected at least tenuously by blood or business transactions, and all of them pursue the destruction of oppressive institutions or turn the assault against their own bodies through drugs and alcohol. Simply put, these characters seek to recover histories and to reclaim land taken from them over the fivehundred-year span of European conquest. Fighting them are European Americans with money and position who have mounted various campaigns to eliminate the "swarms of brown and yellow human larvae called natives" (545), who get in the way of their own acquisition of wealth and threaten to disrupt a precious line of pureblooded white aristocracy. Obscene behaviors involving torture, murder, and the pornographic use of bodies crowd the pages. If there is a life force powerful enough to overcome such corruption, it resides in the mythic realm, where fetishes, an ancient text, dreams, and the voices of ancestors reveal a more compelling, spiritual power.

The novel undermines expectations every step of the way. For many readers who appreciated Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead takes some adjustment, as is evident in Silko's comments about people's reactions at signings when it first came out:

 
   At signing, people would come and buy three or four copies of Ceremony when 
   they bought Almanac. And they said things like, "I give these out to my 
   friends." I was so embarrassed [she laughs]. Then I've also felt real 
   protective of people, thinking, Oh no, these dear little people that love 
   Ceremony, what's going to happen to them when they get sucked into the 
   maelstrom of Almanac? In Seattle a man told me he thought Almanac was 
   affecting his sanity, and finally I just said, "I hope it won't harm you, 
   or if you think it is, then stop." 
 
   (Interview with Perry 332) 

As different a "read" as Almanac is from Ceremony, there is much that is contiguous: the importance of land to Native peoples' healing and survival; the inseparability of the mythic realm from daily life or from history; the need to beware of and to fight the "Destroyers" (who are linked regardless of "race" or "nation"); and the role of belonging--to family, tribe, and community--as it confines and liberates the human spirit. The map that opens the book can be seen as a template for the spiral or webbed construction of the novel, with its center in Tucson, Arizona--where Ceremony leaves off--and its radiating arms to the south. As Arnold Krupat has noted, the "north-south/south-north directionality" of Almanac represents cultural values: "`north' signifies the Euro-settler culture of death, `south' signifies indigenous cultural value.... Silko's insistence upon the primacy of north-south/south-north movement contests and quite literally seeks to displace the privileged east-west directionality of the hegemonic American master narrative" (175). In addition to the south-north/north-south movement of its characters, the story moves through both linear and spiraling or circular conceptions of time. The novel is divided into "books," each of which stakes out both geographical and temporal locations and refers to fragments in the ancient Mayan almanac, the text that occupies the spiritual center of the novel.

Silko has contrived a dramatic means of exposing the currents of U.S. culture that encourage self-interest over care for others--or even self-respect--and that result in greed, paranoia, suicide, murder, pornography, racism, and genocide. If there is one thing that links all the competing efforts within the novel, it is blood--bloodiness, bloodshed, bloodlust. It's as if the novel were covered with blood, and the "damned spot" is on everyone's hands. One might even imagine that blood is a specialized language not just of the body but of the soul: for Silko, blood defines the extent of corruption in a society consuming itself; blood signifies a material freed from the bounds of time, reaching back, a link to the past and future, in effect an anti-material, incorporeal but real. Blood is the central metaphor of the novel, its circulatory system. Almanac of the Dead is the Destroyers' story, though blood has special meaning for the spiritually alive as well. It is Silko's use of blood, I argue, that provides an important key to interpreting this novel, both as it stands on its own and as it follows Ceremony. Most importantly, Silko uses blood as an expression of spiritual fetishes, or as a fetish in itself; as an aesthetic element, particularly in photography and cinematography; and as the tie--both symbolic and embodied--to one's own people and to a lost or stolen history.

Blood as Fetish

Most dictionaries offer two meanings of "fetish": an inanimate object revered as having magical powers or being animated by a spirit; or a "nonsexual" part of the body that acts as a focus for sexual desire. The 1993 New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary notes that a fetish was originally an "object used by peoples of W. Africa as an amulet or means of enchantment" and adds that a fetish is "irrationally reverenced, esp. in an obsessive manner." The 1969 American Heritage Dictionary uses the word "aberrant" in its depiction of fetishism: "aberrant habitual sexual excitement associated with an inanimate object or bodily part." Other dictionaries offer more neutral definitions, but in each one I've examined, the definition suggests that people who use fetishes are outsiders, either inhabitants of other countries, frequently African, or liminal sexual miscreants. There is no mention of fetishes common in first-world countries such as the United States, despite our obsession with trinkets, religious and secular, or the way we confer spiritual power on money and sexual power on the phallus. In Almanac of the Dead, blood takes on all the dictionary meanings of fetishism as well as those associated with rampant, phallic capitalism.