leslie marmon silko's almanac of the dead

The day a woman put on black clothes and never again wore colors. Shriveled up, he says, but Lecha is concentrating on finding a good vein for Seese to inject the early-evening Demerol. The old blood, old dried-up blood, Ferro says, looking at Lecha, the old, and the new blood.įerro is cleaning pistols and carbines with Paulie at the other end of the long table. Lecha abandoned Ferro, her son, in Zeta’s kitchen when he was a week old. Old blood, Lecha says, but Zeta has never cared what Lecha or anyone else thought. Zeta lifts the edge of a sleeve to test the saturation of the dye. Lecha calls Seese her nurse if doctors or police ask questions about the injections or drugs. Lecha leans forward in the wheelchair as Seese fills the syringe. She glances up through the rising veil of steam at the young blond woman pouring pills from brown plastic prescription vials.Īnother old woman in a wheelchair at the table stares at the pills Seese counts out. Occasionally Zeta smiles as she stares into the big blue enamel pot. Read moreĭiagram THE OLD WOMAN stands at the stove stirring the simmering brown liquid with great concentration.

As a European living in North America I can't help but feel uncomfortable with some of the generalisations about white settlers - but then I can hardly complain about that when white settlers have been happily making much more crass generalisation about people of African and Native American origin for centuries. They seem to be dispatched from the story very casually - almost as an afterthought in some cases.įor me the central message was about our connection or disconnection with the land. With the exception of Sterling and (to some extent) Seese, the characters outlined in the story are so unsympathetic that their stories are hard to read. The reliance of people on technology and electricity has only got worse in the twenty-something years since the book was published. In many ways it seems prescient - we're hearing about migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa every day now, so the book's focus on mass waves of human movement from south to north seems to be true. I couldn't read a lot of it at one sitting and ended up having to borrow it from the library three times in order to finish it! It is very long, but somehow it's also very slow. This was a really difficult book to read.

Leslie marmon silko's almanac of the dead