Mark Hayek

201000569

ENGL 240 Final Paper

Dead Definitions

“That’s the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the

story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake of what had been

said; and this demanded great patience and love.” (Silko, 32)

The pattern that emerges from both colonial and postcolonial literature that we have

covered is a cyclical one. Alienation breeds a longing to find something. That is the

first half of the cycle. To put that into question at first, alienation rises from a

disidentification with the surrounding environment, which in the case of colonial

literature, you are master of nature and your environment. There is always

hopelessness in the tone of authors when discussing the insurmountable authority of

the imperial project, which seems contradictory since the imperial project has as one

of its central themes, the domination of man over his environment. Thus the

individual feels alienated from a system because it lied to him, and told him he would

have control, but he doesn’t.

The second part of the cycle – the focus of this discussion – is where the two,

colonial and postcolonial, take different roads only to end up back where they started,

alienated. In short, and since the focus will lie primarily on postcolonial responses,

colonial literature spoke of finding something new, while postcolonial (my two

emphases will be on Najla Said’s Looking for Palestine but more importantly Leslie

Marmon Silko’s Ceremony) literature defines “finding something” as looking for

something that has been lost. Said’s incessant struggle with identity, as she shuffles

uncomfortably through her adolescence and early adulthood, is supported heavily by

the idea that identity comes with strict guidelines of social conduct through dead

definition. But what Said struggles with, Silko pushes to transcend. The word “story”

pops up ceaselessly in the book, and he uses it to try to explain this notion of dead

definition, and the grip it holds on social and private conduct.

Arab. Jew. Muslim. American. These words and many others like them

bombard us throughout Looking for Palestine. They are categories, groups of people

following a dead definition. So what is a dead definition? A dead definition is a

definition of an object that is external to the human experience. It defines usually a

man-made concept, such as the ones mentioned above, but also includes words such

as communism, capitalism, empire, democracy, and such. The danger of a dead

definition is that it is dead. What seems to be obvious holds the deeper truth of our

understanding of definition. If a definition is not subject to change, if it is absolute

and unchecked, and if it is contingent upon the active performance of an individual in

it for it to sustain itself, then it is a dead definition. It is simply describing something

that is not there, a construct of a single temporal and spatial perspective that the

observer adopts as reality. Najla’s consciousness of herself was highly influenced by

these dead definitions. Her father is from a country that is not there anymore. Yet the

house her father grew up in still stands. The scene of walking up to the house in the

now-Israel, used-to-be Palestine location on the globe, disseminates this notion of

nationalism into a dead definition. How is the country gone, but the house still there?

This is the struggle that people have, which leads to the feeling of alienation and

frustration at a merciless superstructure, towering over the heads of individuals, while

they restlessly try to find a place under this constricting umbrella of appropriateness.

Najla goes through many phases of identification, mostly national, regional, linguistic,

and cultural. These phases bring with them a rubric of conduct: if I am X, then I

should act like it. “Act like a lady”, or “act like a man”, or “aren’t you American?”

You see the pattern here. With every turn in her journey, she finds herself, for a short

time, comfortable in her milieu. But then, slowly, or by one incident or another, the

feeling of inadequacy resurges within her, and she finds that this category of

identification does not serve to ease her fear of alienation. What she ends up getting

into is a web of concepts that must be followed around a minefield of faults in their

argument, criticism by others and oneself, and the usually most cliché slap-in-the-face

realization that we are all human beings living on a planet that is relatively

insignificant to its surrounding, so we should all get along and try to figure this out

together.

To make one thing clear, I am not for anarchy, I am merely shedding light on

one aspect of how what Silko calls “the lie”(177), is failing. We have dealt with a lot

of literature that deals with the problem of the imperial project but have not found a

suitable response in which we, as human beings, could coexist in what we can call a

“good” society.

The first definition to go would be that of “ownership”. Silko expresses the

rage that Tayo feels whenever Emo, or any other character for that matter, speak of

the land that they now have is what the white people left for them, the scraps of the

land. “Look what is here for us. Look. Here’s the Indians’ mother earth! Old dried-up

thing!” Silko goes on to explain the faulty reasoning behind this, because Emo, along

with some Indians and Mexicans, believe that the land they were born in belongs to

them, and was taken from them. This echoes the futile adherence to a nation state. An

exterior, alien force invaded their environment. This alien force then proceeded to

usurp any notion of humanity from these “natives”, and promised to “civilize” them.

This is the clearest example of dead definitions that have shaped the world through

imperial practice. Ownership. Native. Civilized. Silko, through Tayo’s psychological

journey, illuminates the bedrock of human experience, interaction with the living,

existing natural world. “This is where we come from, see. This sand, this stone, these

trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. This earth keeps us going.” (Silko, 42)

Silko speaks of “dead things” when she discusses the notion of imperial and

capitalist commodity. Dead things represent dead ideas; trying to capture the essence

of living through the acquisition of dead things is the contradiction that Silko is

pointing out in the lifestyle that is practiced by white people. But what is more

destructive is the adoption of this lifestyle by the struggling Indians and Mexicans,

trying desperately to coagulate within a culture that arrived to their shores dead. There

is no difference in imperial expansion, as far as military and political injustice goes,

between British and American imperialism. The colonial literature that hails the

Americas as the new world where all is possible, ends up being an exploitation of

natural resources, and tons of dead bodies.

So it is central that the true story be told, because the story is the only thing

that remains alive without temporal constrictions. It is the story, told truthfully, with

true use of language, which holds the answer to the riddles of society’s mishaps. What

Silko means by the story is human history. Guy Debord argues that through the

construction of illusory priorities in life, what I have come to call the dead definitions

of things, we have shifted from a stage of human history – a story alive while being

told – to economic history, in which the aims of the human society exist to serve the

function of the exterior capitalist doctrine within empire. Just as Silko highlights the

dead things people follow, and Said inscribes her personal experience with the

dissolution of these dead definitions, Debord discusses how society has entered a dead

state of history, in which our true history, as human beings, has ceased to develop,

and our existence as economic producers, churners of currency, is the only route that

is appropriate for any man. Tayo is constantly teetering on the edge of social sanity,

where people are waiting for him to snap at any moment. He is constantly being

pestered about his roles, duties, and shortcomings. But it seems as though Tayo, Said,

and even Conrad’s Marlowe choose to fight this alienation from a world gone awry by

shedding the light on what truly fuels the human experience, the realization of dead

definitions and the ability to discriminate between the two.