Leslie Marmon Silko

While I am still attempting to recover from an acute bronchitis and complications, and while I still have to finish posting regarding Love Medicine, I am starting with the next book to make sure I do keep up with the assignments and work my way back to the previous book.

I am reading about the author, the interview made when she visited Leipzig and a comment she made definitely caught my attention:

"Yes, when one grows up in the Pueblo community, in the Pueblo tribe the people are communal people, it is an egalitarian communal society. The education of the children is done within the community, this is in the old times before the coming of the Europeans. Each adult works with every child, children belong to everybody and the way of teaching is to tell stories. All information, scientific, technological, historical, religious, is put into narrative form. It is easier to remember that way. So when I began writing when I was at the University of New Mexico, the professor would say now you write your poetry or write a story, write what you know they always tell us. All I knew was my growing up at Laguna, recallings of some other stories that I had been told as a child."

Several things come to mind-

I was reading an excerpt from the latest book written by H.H.The Dalai Lama, who mentions the sense of deep loneliness experienced by many individuals in our society, due to the loss of the sense of community, lack of involvement in one's community, whatever community it may be. There are many reasons for the loss of belonging to a community in such a mobile and technology oriented society....

I find it very interesting that the author describes that all experience and information is related in narrative form. It also reminds me of Jewish culture, which, as far as I know has a lot of narrative and story telling in the Hassidic tradition.

The sense of raising children in a community reminds me somewhat of Herland, the utopic society evoked by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.