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"Yellow Woman"
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"Yellow Woman"
World Lit II
Prof. Corr
"Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore..."
Mythical Realism
"But I only said that you were him and that I was Yellow Woman-I'm not really her- I have my own name and I come from the pueblo on the other side of the mesa. Your name is Silva and you are a stranger I met by the river yesterday afternoon."
He laughed softly. “What happened yesterday has nothing to do with what you will do today, Yellow Woman.” .
"I know-that's what I'm saying—the old stories about the ka'tsina spirit and Yellow Woman can't mean us.”
My old grandpa liked to tell those stories best. There is one about Badger and Coyote who went hunting and were gone all day, and when the sun was going down they found a house. There was a girl living there alone, and she had light hair and eyes and she told them that they could sleep with her. Coyote wanted to be with her all night so he sent Badger into a prairie-dog hole, telling him he thought he saw something in it. As soon as Badger crawled in, Coyote blocked up the entrance with rocks and hurried back to Yellow Woman.
"Come here,” he said gently.
He touched my neck and I moved close to him to feel his breathing and to hear his heart. I was wondering if Yellow Woman had known who she was-if she knew that she would become part of the stories. Maybe she'd had another name that her husband and relatives called her so that only the ka'tsina from the north and the storytellers would know her as Yellow Woman. But I didn't go on; I felt him all around me, pushing me down into the white river sand.
Yellow Woman went away with the spirit from the north and lived with him and his relatives. She was gone for a long time, but then one day she came back and she brought twin boys.
“Do you know the story?”
“What story?" He smiled and pulled me close to him as he said this. I was afraid lying there on the red blanket. All I could know was the way he felt, warm, damp, his body beside me. This is the way it happens in the stories, I was thinking, with no thought beyond the moment she meets the ka'tsina spirit and they go. (1299)
Questions
A dream strayed into Daylight
- Ever love a story so much you wish you could be a part of it?
- Similarly, ever think about a story so much you begin to realize that parts of the plot make no logical sense?
- Both are essentially happening here
- Note how Silva isn't helping to clarify anything for the narrator, yet what is on her mind so much? For example, why does Silva call her Yellow Woman?
- In the story the narrator recalls about Yellow Woman, anything seem ridiculous about the story (aside from the anthropomorphic animals)?
- How does this then parallel the narrator's situation? Does this seem like an abduction or a seduction?
I walked beside him, breathing hard because he walked fast, his hand around my wrist. I had stopped trying to pull away from him, because his hand felt cool and the sun was high, drying the river bed into alkali. I will see someone, eventually I will see someone, and then I will be certain that he is only a man-some man from nearby-and I will be sure that I am not Yellow Woman. Because she is from out of time past and I live now and I've been to school and there are highways and pickup trucks that Yellow Woman never saw.
It was an easy ride north on horseback. I watched the change from the cottonwood trees along the river to the junipers that brushed past us in the foothills, and finally there were only piñons, and when I looked up at the rim of the mountain plateau I could see pine trees growing on the edge. Once I stopped to look down, but the pale sandstone had disappeared and the river was gone and the dark lava hills were all around. He touched my hand, not speaking, but always singing softly a mountain song and looking into my eyes...
“Yellow Woman, come inside where it's warm."
He lit a fire in the stove. It was an old stove with a round belly and an enamel coffeepot on top. There was only the stove, some faded Navajo blankets, and a bedroll and cardboard box. The floor was made of smooth adobe plaster, and there was one small window facing east. (1300)
Connection to Tradition
Snap Back to Reality
- How will seeing someone or the fact that there are highways and pickup trucks help the narrator know she isn't Yellow Woman?
- Before Silva takes the narrator to his house, has there been anything mentioned to provide context of what time or place the story is set?
- Pixar's newest movie, Onward, has a similar idea as what the narrator is doing. Why is anything from modern-day seem so distant from the fantastic stories of the past?
- As readers (and not just of this story but any), we begin in a haze in identifying something similar, just as the narrator is.
- If we can't immediately identify or understand whats going on in our reading, does that mean we cannot connect with it?
The trail leveled out on a narrow ridge that was steep on both sides like an animal spine. On one side I could see where the trail went around the rocky gray hills and disappeared in the southeast where the pale sandrock mesas stood in the distance near my home. On the other side was a trail that went west, and as I looked far into the distance I thought I saw the little town. But Silva said no, that I was looking in the wrong place, that I just thought I saw houses. After that I quit looking off into the distance; it was hot and the wildflowers were closing up their deep-yellow petals. Only the waxy cactus flowers bloomed in the bright sun, and I saw. every color that a cactus blossom can be; the white ones and the red ones were still buds, but the purple and the yellow were blossoms, open full and the most beautiful of all. (1303)
Errors in Identifying
Knowing a Navajo
Knowing a Navajo
- The narrator's main concern throughout is identifying everything
- when she first wakes, she recognizes the terrain, but isn't certain where she is
- She asks Silva who he is
- She feels the need to identify something from modern times
- yet, her first instinct and mind goes to what she knows about Yellow Woman
- She repeatedly identifies Silva as Navajo based on assumptions of his living conditions and his height
- in this passage, Silva helps her realize the err in identifying things before you can see them well enough: the mountains look like towns because she can't see them well enough, and also because what is likely on her mind?
- instead, she stops looking in the distance and enjoys the beauty of the yellow blossoms on the cactus flower
- Might identifying something prematurely sound familiar in a story based on Native American culture?
- To help us answer that question, in comes the white man, calling Silva an Indian and immediately accusing him of stealing cattle
Conclusion
Yellow Woman Stories To tell best
I followed the path up from the river into the village. The sun was getting low, and I could smell supper cooking when I got to the screen door of my house. I could hear their voices inside -my mother was telling my grandmother how to fix the Jell-O and my husband, Al, was playing with the baby. I decided to tell them that some Navajo had kidnaped me, but I was sorry that old grandpa wasn't alive to hear my story because it was the Yellow Woman stories he liked to tell best. (1304)
- So even though we just finished reading a story, how does Silko still embrace oral storytelling?
- Is the narrator telling her story as a Yellow Woman story like her old grandpa did?
- In the end, why does the narrator still call Silva a Navajo when she tells her family the story?
- Ultimately, when we tell a story, we are conveying what it is we know at that point and time. If we tell it orally, we tell it differently each time as we come to know more and see things better. If we write it down, that information is set on the page --ever get a paper back and look back over it thinking, "why did I say that?" False information is always getting spread on social media because someone wrote it down and it was accepted as truth. For Native Americans, someone wrote down identifying them as Indians because that was what they knew at the time, yet it persisted even after knowing otherwise.
- In the Yellow Woman stories, the narrator tells her family a Navajo kidnapped her; we the reader identified him as Silva; and old grandpa identified him as ka'tsina. He is not restricted to one identity through oral storytelling