Leslie Marmon Silko's second novel, Almanac of the Dead, portrays a nightmarish wasteland of violence, bestiality, cruelty, and crime. Deformed by grotesque familial relationships and debauched by sexual perversion, its characters are incapable of love. Even more chillingly, they seem—except for a few enraged revolutionaries—incapableeven of hatred. Almanac reveals an utterly amoral and atomized society in which each isolated member is indifferent to everything but the gratifications of his own enervated passions. He is connected to nothing: all existence outside himself is reduced to a stock of commodities for which he must compete. There is cause to use the masculine pronoun here: Silko's focus of attack is explicitly the misogynistic, arrogantly hierarchical, and egocentric traditions of Western liberal individualism. The rejection and subsequent disintegration of communal tradition and ethical discipline have left a rutting ground for witchery. Silko's monstrous characters demonstrate that the philosophy of the primacy of the individual has in fact stripped individuals of the social and spiritual structures that define their humanity. Redemption depends upon reclamation of what seems irretrievably lost: a credible telos for ordered conduct and the essential interconnections that lend substance and coherence to such conduct.

The sink of depravity and effete self-absorption the novel records stuns both intellect and imagination: the pages are crammed with atrocities almost too heinous to imagine. Its characters induce nightmares; its plot, paranoia. And the villains (the word is too feeble) are Euro-American males. Vicious, manipulative homosexuality and injurious—even murderous—sexual perversions become relentless metaphors of the insane solipsism and phallocentric avarice that characterize the dominant culture. Gone is even a vestigial sense of those virtues which undergird community: there are no personal values because the triumph of individualism has eroded every rationale for moral discipline; there are no institutional ethics because social systems are inevitably infected by the corruption of their constituents. There is no accountability because there is no one to whom one accounts; each man is his own arbiter. Contemporary Euro-American culture is spiritually and ethically rotted by an ideology that rewards egotism. It is characterized by blind obsessions with infantile self-gratification made terrifying by the vicious, power-mad adult's capacity to seize that with which it is obsessed. Control, sex, and wealth are the prizes of unscrupulous aggression; ruthlessness becomes the fundamental pragmatic. The collation of savage white men, each with his own horrific aberrations, staggers the reader almost into numbness, as if to prove how easily, how willingly, we are desensitized to, and individually dissociated from, the horror of moral vacuity and anomie.

The unrestrained greed and brutality of these hollow men is continually emblematized in dissipated sexual perversions that provide entropic substitutes for anything remotely resembling love. Men's equation of carnal gratification with the infliction of pain and their gynophobic attraction to male partners reveal an endemic phallocentric, misogynistic, and egocentric savagery. The ability to feel even the ecstasy of orgasm is so vitiated that the men typically vacillate blandly between drug-induced stupors that deaden their inability to feel and sexual acts bizarre or sadistic or dangerous enough to titillate them into imagining that they can feel. Beaufrey, who knew even as a small child that "He had always loved himself, only himself," recognizes that his indifference to other people affords him enormous power to manipulate them. As an international broker in torture pornography and snuff films, he has amassed fortunes in proving his theory that men can be divided into "those who admitted" that they "enjoyed watching torture and killing" and "those who lied." Films and videos do not sexually arouse him, however. Because "others did not fully exist—they were only ideas that flitted across his consciousness then disappeared"—Beaufrey requires the warm corpses of young male lovers he has driven to suicide.

The violent, phallocentric self-absorption that characterizes Beaufrey informs the incapacity to love that typifies every so-called "successful" man in Silko's novel. The pseudo-intellectual Mexican General J. confirms Beaufrey's theory on men's appetite for savagery: his favorite scholarly topics with his powerful lunch buddies are bloodshed and rape. He theorizes that the sight and smell of blood is a natural aphrodisiac because "bloodshed dominated the natural world, and those inhibited by blood would in time have been greatly outnumbered by those who were excited by blood"; rape, for the General, is the happy conjunction of bloody violence and sexual subjugation. The corrupt Judge Arne, who presides over the Federal District Court in Phoenix, shares Beaufrey's indifference toward other people. But whereas for Beaufrey women figure only as temporary annoyances to be dispassionately erased, the Judge manifests his gynophobia by physically injuring women during the sex act. Although he claims that he "did not think gender really mattered; sex after all was only a bodily function, a kind of expulsion of the sex fluids into some receptacle or another," he is clearly hostile to women. He becomes aroused in a brothel only by imagining his male companion ramming himself bestially into a shuddering woman, and he maintains his erection by pinching the nipples and clitoris of the gasping, protesting woman he is with until he draws blood. Far more than with prostitutes of either gender, however, who require the exchange of a few words, the judge enjoys sex with his four mute basset hound bitches and his accommodating accomplice, the basset stud.

The gynophobic, phallocentric self-involvement implicit in loveless, degenerate individualism perhaps culminates in the character of Serlo. Disgusted by the touch of men and horrified by even the thought of contact with women, he tries to mate with himself, by himself. Arrogant of his sangre pura, he jealously saves and freezes each opalescent drop of his precious semen in stainless steel vials. Cringing at the filth and corruption of the genetically flawed human female, he invests part of his exploited wealth in his own research center to develop perfect human specimens from his own sperm in artificial uteri, and part of his wealth to develop "Alternative Earth modules … designed to be self-sufficient, closed systems," where he and his hybrid progeny might live in hermetic protection from the defilements of earthly existence.

The absolute self-absorption and consequent utter lovelessness that characterize these men lead them predictably enough to obsessions with personal power. Empty of the sentiments that define humanity, each tries to give himself a sense of substance by amassing more sex, money, and control than anyone else. The social hierarchies that form, accordingly, are determined by the degree to which each can wrest the instruments and emblems of power from the others. Max Blue, suave and despotic mastermind of an international ring of flawlessly disciplined contract killers, spends his time in apparent indolence at the Tucson Country Club, playing golf with his affluent and influential clients. His services are much in demand because Max has elevated cold-blooded murder to an art form. Each job is a custom-designed set piece suspended, isolated and inviolable, in time and space; each death becomes a tangible badge of someone else's supremacy. Max, meanwhile, protected by a network of implicated officials and entrepreneurs, maintains a significantly regal bearing, receiving or refusing to receive supplicants and treating each other with whatever graciousness his station merits.

Beaufrey and Serlo accord themselves the highest position in the social hierarchy by virtue of their aristocratic lineage. Beaufrey sees everything as already belonging to him by birthright. As a child, his "favorite book had been about the Long Island cannibal, Albert Fish … because they shared not only social rank, but complete indifference about the life or death of other human beings." As a college student, "Beaufrey had read European history" and "realized there had always been a connection between human cannibals and the aristocracy": the rest of humanity, by his calculation, is his to devour. His proprietary conviction is at one point briefly ruffled by an apprehension that he may lose total control over David, one of his sex and cocaine slaves, if David comes to love the child he has mindlessly sired on the woman Seese. He needn't have worried about being confounded by love: David's fascination with his child's features is entirely narcissistic. In his ingenuous arrogance, David has long since fallen prey to Beaufrey's "game"—one that begins with Beaufrey's encouraging "gorgeous young men such as David to misunderstand their importance in the world." David fancies himself an artist, a type Beaufrey finds "the most fascinating…. Because they participated so freely" in their own destruction. And David does participate, helping to drive their lover Eric to suicide, then shooting pornographically lurid photos of the naked mangled corpse. But in Beaufrey's theater, "one act followed another": he kidnaps the baby from its mother to watch David's egocentric absorption with his replicated image, then kidnaps the child from David when he recognizes that "David is ripe" for the "final moves of the game." After David is driven to death upon seeing the 35mm color proof sheets of his baby's dismembered cadaver, Beaufrey calmly takes commercial photos of David's broken corpse and turns, in dispassionate gladness, to his next source of cannibalistic satisfaction.

Serlo elevates the importance of his aristocratic blood even more highly. Investing his entire identity in his conviction of hereditary genetic superiority, he perhaps prefigures the end result of misogynistic, earth-gutting, Eurocentric individualism. Fearing the day when the world would be "overrun with swarms of brown and yellow human larvae called natives," he coolly plans their mass extermination and stocks the underground vaults of his huge Colombian estate with food, water, and currency. Acknowledging a certain noblesse oblige to rape underling women and so infuse their tawdry strains with sangre pura, he nevertheless recoils in horror at the thought of so basely defiling his own purity. Casting himself in a godlike image, Serlo disdains the very planet he and his kind have despoiled. He plans his own ascension within space stations that "could be loaded with the last of the earth's uncontaminated soil, water, and oxygen and would be launched in high orbits" where "the select few would continue as they always had, gliding in luxury and ease across polished decks of steel and glass islands looking down on earth … still sipping cocktails" while the rabble killed each other for a share of the dwindling resources of a dying planet.

In a hegemony where status is determined by how much one is capable of taking and keeping, everything—land, money, materials, human bodies and lives—are commodified, priced, and labeled for consumption. Max Blue's anonymous victims, Beaufrey's torture videos that "progressed conveniently into the 'autopsy' of the victim," Serlo's acres of stockpiles that he will surely never use—each characterizes the fundamental mindset of what Silko calls "vampire capitalists." Their motto: buy low, sell high. Beaufrey's raw material includes kidnapped children and street punks lured by cocaine. Trigg, broker in human organs, processes hitchhikers and the homeless. When it occurs to him that men who agree to sell their blood are men who would seldom be missed, Trigg identifies an entrepreneurial opportunity. Those he determines to be alone in Tucson are "slowly bled to death, pint by pint" while Trigg gives them blow jobs to distract them from their own murder. Even at that price, Trigg feels "they got a favor from him": after all, "They were human debris. Human refuse. Only a few had organs of sufficient quality for transplant use." In another case, a police chief capitalizes upon his own resources at hand. As his investment in a lucrative pornography ring, he allows a cameraman to film official interrogations where women are sexually tortured and mutilated. An apt businessman, he recognizes a competitive threat: when he senses that the security of his position may be compromised by the cameraman's excesses, he arranges and videotapes the castration of his potential rival.

The sadistic greed of the police chief reveals the pervasive venom of individual morality. In a commodified and atomized society where malevolence and depravity are prerequisites to power and status, the highest and noblest social institutions are inevitably as corrupt as the men who control them. The novel portrays American justice and judicial systems in which justice and law are never even remote issues. Those characters who wield power within governmental agencies regard their positions quite purely as avenues of access to unbounded power and profit. No one feels anything—except mistrust—for anybody. Senators do business with contract killers over salad at the country club. CIA directors deal with sleazy arms brokers to protect the flow of mind-deadening cocaine across national borders. Drug kingpins arrogantly demand apologies and reparation when they are inconvenienced by inept policemen. Cops are either stupid and depraved, or smart and depraved. The smart ones manipulate the stupid ones, and grow stupendously wealthy through cordial and intimate business relationships with top-level criminals. Jamie, one of the stupid ones, is sexually obsessed with and chemically dependent upon the drug-smuggling Ferro until he is assassinated by his fellow officers at a theatrically staged drug raid. His boss, one of the smart ones, wisely appreciates the prudence (and the profit) in accommodating such manipulators and swindlers as Max Blue, Judge Arne, the senator, the CIA, and the border patrol. The men charged with enforcing the law and upholding the principles of the justice are among the most viciously criminal and egomaniacal characters in a novel full of egomaniacally lawless villains.

The church, that institution which most directly assumes responsibility for teaching and modeling the virtues of human community, is revealed more as the source of moral degeneracy than as an energized force against it. Silko's Indian characters perceive the Judeo-Christian tradition as irrational, bloody, cannibalistic, and cruel. Menardo's full-blood grandfather, explaining Europeans' chronic rootless alienation, compassionately calls them "the orphan people," wounded and eternally broken "because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them … throwing them out of their birthplace, driving them away." Menardo's driver Tacho (who together with his brother El Feo emblematizes the mythically redemptive Sacred Twins) sees white people's blind violence as culturally systemic: "The European invaders had brought their Jesus hanging bloody and dead from the cross; later they ate his flesh and blood again and again" yet, "typical of sorcerers or Destroyers, the Christians had denied they were cannibals and sacrificers." The old Yaqui grandmother Yoeme notes that "even idiots can understand a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal": it does not surprise her that the spiritually lacerated whites who came to the Americas sought "to dress their wounds in the fat of slain Indians." The church's culpability in failing to stop the extermination of Indians in the Americas is noted on several occasions by various characters. In a chapter entitled "A Series of Popes Had Been Devils," the paranoid Mosca, whose clarity of thought is revealed in drug-induced visions, damns the clergy for lechery, theft, and duplicity. He sees the good deeds of the church as the work of a few "potential troublemakers" who are deviously coopted to give the Church "good publicity." There is some small ambivalence in Silko's attitude toward Christianity: its efforts—however feeble and spotty—to alleviate poverty and injustice are grudgingly acknowledged. And Menardo, who is both irritated and threatened by educated Indians, blames the priests for having "treated them like human beings." Generally, though, Silko seems to endorse the anti-Christian attitudes expressed by her Indian (and several of her white) characters, who interpret the brutal perversions of Christianity as "the betrayal of Jesus" and of "Jesus' creed of forgiveness and brotherly love." Like the justice and judicial system of the government, the Church is another example of an ideologically compassionate and communally protective institution that has been raped and butchered by the combative avarice of androcentric Euro-American individualism.

Even the civil institution of marriage, which might have served as a refuge against the isolation of individualism, is doomed to fail within a social context that values only self-gratification. Despite an enormous cast of characters, there are few marriages in this novel, and neither love nor contractual fidelity between partners. Trust, respect, and compassion again succumb to the inevitable betrayals of egocentric self-interest. Menardo, the Mexican mixed-blood, thinks he has won a valuable prize when he marries the fair-skinned Iliana with the stainless European lineage. Her prize is incredible wealth. Menardo thinks the polished and cosmopolitan Alegria is an even rarer prize and marries her immediately after Iliana's untimely death. Alegria wants Menardo's money and protection, but joylessly sleeps with the abusive and insensitive Marxist Bartolomeo and yearns after the promiscuous Sonny Blue, who so despises women that he prefers to take them in the dark. The old smuggler Calabazas is married to Sarita, but wants her sister Liria; while he's in bed with his sister-in-law, his wife is in bed with the Monsignor. When Leah Blue learns of her husband Max's death, "she had to fight an impulse to laugh … she felt relief, not loss."

The women characters, while they are typically less vicious and offensive than the men, are nevertheless incapable of love as well. Survival among misogynists has given them few choices. They can adopt the male value system of aggression, greed, and callousness; resist subjugation through a defiant and dehumanizing scorn; or fall in speechless defeat. The cruelest and the most ineffectual women are white: real estate tycoon Leah Blue takes by force what she cannot buy and gives no thought to the consequences that others must inevitably suffer. Hoping—significantly—to impress her father and brothers, she manipulates a corrupt legal system into awarding her the underground water rights to a vast area of drought-choked Arizona in order to fill the network of streams, fountains, and canals in her luxury development, Venice. Training and experience has rendered her incapable of human affection and insensitive to any conception of selfless reciprocity: Leah only takes. Indifferent to her husband and sons, she alleviates her ennui with meaningless exploitative sexual affairs. The most fully developed of her loveless dalliances is with the wheelchair-bound but eternally erect Trigg, whom she callously nicknames "steak-in-a-basket." When she hears he has been brutally murdered and interred in his own organ deep-freeze, she is only marginally interested to note that she "didn't feel anything." Instead of grieving, she immediately begins to hope she'll be questioned about his death "because that young police chief was really quite sexy."

The character Seese is ostensibly the opposite of Leah. Beaten into chronic silence by ruthless misogynists, Seese looks for protection in the invisibility of listless acquiescence and the insensibility of drug-induced torpor. Formerly a topless dancer in a sleazy nightclub where the girls are required to perform "bizarre sex acts for paying customers," she becomes David's lover, unaware that he is merely using her to make Beaufrey jealous, as Beaufrey had used Eric to make David jealous. She accedes under pressure to one abortion, but insists, uncharacteristically, upon carrying her second pregnancy to term. After the baby is kidnapped by Beaufrey's thugs, Seese vacuously dedicates herself to finding her child, putting her entire vague confidence in the psychic powers of Lecha, the mixed-blood, drug-addicted T.V. psychic who can locate only dead people.

The Indian women, likewise victimized and perverted by male aggression and oppression, are equally incapable of love. Zeta and Lecha, twin sisters and putative protagonists of Almanac, are sexually molested by their Uncle Federico throughout their childhoods; Lecha is tricked into surrendering her virginity to him with the apparent complicity of the local priest. Neither woman ever loves a man. Zeta has one sexual experience as an adult—her compensation to the fat and stinking Mr. Coco for a job promotion—then chooses a life of celibacy. Lecha, conversely, amuses herself with strings of casual and indiscriminate sexual affairs but evades even the most tenuous of emotional ties. The strident vituperation of their Yaqui grandmother, Yoeme, is the result of a lifetime of oppression at the hands of white men. Forced to marry a man she typically refers to as "that fucker Guzman"—whose name is clearly meant to recall the monstrous image of "pig-anus [Nino] de Guzman," whose infamous administration exterminated and enslaved Indians by the thousands in the sixteenth century—she spends her lifetime resisting powerful men whose greed and cruelty threaten the earth and the lives and welfare of the Indians who respect it. The revolutionary activist Angelita La Escapia, who names herself "The Meathook," has sex with men who are weaker than she, but cares only for the overthrow of the globally destructive and evilly avaricious institutions that characterize Euro-American males.

Predictably, natural physical and emotional bonds are eroded by the same obsessive self-absorption that debases individuals and institutions. Those men who engage in sex with women see them as commodities to be acquired, consumed, and discarded; those who do not see women as vile, contemptible earth-crawlers who exist beneath their antiseptic intellectual concern. Everyone except Zeta is having sex with multiple partners, but no one loves anyone, and the sex is fruitless. The only children in the novel are the mythical nomadic guardians of the Almanac and Seese's memory of her baby Monte, who is dead before the action in the novel begins.

But even maternity is incapable of engendering love. Although Seese's child is both conceived and kidnapped while Seese is in her usual cocaine-and-alcohol fog, she is the best mother in the novel: she at least feels keenly the loss of her baby. None of the other women seem to care particularly for their children, and the characters almost invariably despise their mothers. Zeta and Lecha, keepers of the sacred pages of the Almanac, are something like co-mothers to the hopelessly maladjusted Ferro. Lecha bore him "one Friday morning"—there is no mention of his father's identity—but "by Sunday noon Lecha had been on a plane to Los Angeles, leaving Zeta with her new baby." Zeta names and rears him, but makes it plain to him from the outset that she is motivated by duty, not affection.

Lecha and Zeta are taught by their Indian grandmother to reject their own mother; Yoeme sees Amalia, the twins' mother, and her other children as sickly, weak-willed, and worthless progeny of Guzman. Lecha's friend Root, understanding that his mother is ashamed of his speech impediment, hates her with a murderous fury. Trigg, who also feels that his mother rejects him out of shame, dreams of somehow making enough money to win even faint favor. Sonny and Bingo, adult sons of Max and Leah Blue, call their mother by her given name, unable to think of her as mother to anyone, much less to them; Bingo fantasizes that she is killed, just to see if he would be able to feel anything if it really happened. Beaufrey, born because his mother was more afraid of abortion than of childbirth, is the unwelcome product of his mother's final middle-aged Parisian fling. Serlo's parents abandoned him to his pederastic grandfather, and Mosca was taken from his incompetent mother and thrust into a series of foster homes. Traditionally regarded as nurturers and instinctual protectors of their children, women are portrayed as emotionally eviscerated victims of misogynistic, egocentric European traditions. Listening to another of gunrunner Greenlee's crass sexist jokes just before she blasts him with her .44 magnum, Zeta "still had to marvel at the hatred white men harbored for all women, even their own." Raped and degraded by centuries of male oppression, women's survival has come to depend upon their ability not to feel.

This malevolence against mothers in particular and women in general is figurative as well as literal: women in the novel are invariably victims of male fear and hostility, but their treatment also metaphorically reflects the culturally male contempt for the female earth. The earth is repeatedly referred to as the Mother by various characters—not all of them Indian. Throughout the novel the word "rape" is applied uniformly to land and women, and to the land as woman. Yoeme argues that the white man's "gaping emptiness" results from his having "violated the mother earth"; Korean computer wizard Awa Gee plots the destruction of the empires so that the "earth that has been seized and torn open, would be allowed to heal and rest in the darkness"; and Sterling, the banished Laguna Indian, recalls the old folks' warning of the terrible consequences of the brutal wounding and scarring of "Mother Earth."

The metaphor is underscored by the correlation between men's relationships with women and their connection to the land and, analogously, their degree of sterile, narcissistic self-absorption. Again, Serlo emblematizes the final result of misogynistic disdain for the earth. He owns and retains sole authority over vast tracts of land, yet he has no emotional or moral connection with it whatsoever, just as he is incapable of the most elemental relationship with any woman, including his mother. He speaks distastefully of raping women not because of even the vaguest sense of human affinity but because rape would necessitate the squalor of physical contact. Just as he has dissociated himself completely from the company of women, he dreams of dissociating himself from the earth, living in a sterile, androgynous womb of steel and glass within sealed orbiting space units.

The women, conversely, must protect both themselves and the earth from such male psychoses. The mission of the strong Indian women—Lecha, Zeta, Yoeme, and the warrior Angelita—is to reclaim the ravished and impoverished land and restore it to its place of respect. Yoeme at first marries the hated Guzman to prevent him and other whites from breaking their land-use agreements with the Yaquis. When that fails, she adopts guerrilla tactics to subvert the silver miners' wanton rape of the earth and barely escapes death for treason and sedition. Angelita, champion of tribal rights to the earth, laments the Euro-American failure to understand that "the earth was mother to all beings." She sees the aliens' exploitative intellectual separation from the earth as artificial and ultimately doomed, because "No human, no individuals or corporations, no cartel of nations, could 'own' the earth; it was the earth who possessed the humans and it was the earth who disposed of them."

Setting and imagery further emphasize the plaited themes of egocentric violence, loveless sterility, and dissociation from the land. The story takes place primarily in Tucson, a "city of thieves" that "had always depended on some sort of war to keep cash flowing," and the surrounding deserts of Arizona and Mexico. The relentless sun is murderous to those who will not learn the land, and the dearth of water threatens all life. Dead lawns of Tucson—tucson, as Calabazas ironically notes, means "plentiful fresh water" in Papago—can scarcely be distinguished from gray pavement, and the spindly landscaping reflects the moral and spiritual drought suffered by its inhabitants. Existing water is so polluted it stinks. "Pools" are typically of blood; "waves," of nausea or hatred. Clear ponds of water are the surfaces upon which float the severed heads of diplomats or the tiny bloated corpses of unwanted newborns. The only remaining pure water belongs to Leah, who is literally sucking the earth dry to create her model desert city for the incredibly wealthy white elite.

There is little vegetation, and when flowers are mentioned, it is almost invariably in connection with grisly death. When Beaufrey's boytoy Eric blows his head apart with a .44 revolver, the critics rave about David's glossy photographs of the suicide that evoke "a field of red shapes which might be peonies—cherry, ruby, deep purple, black—and the nude human figure nearly buried in these 'blossoms' of bright red." When Menardo sees a wall of vining purple flowers he can think only of the "twists of human intestines." The assassinated motorcyclist hanging upside down in the blossoming paloverde tree is reported as a "strange fruit" by the woman who sights the corpse as she drives to work. Water, the source of all life; flowers, the harbingers of renewed harvest; and fruit, the fulfillment of the flowers' promise; are all distorted into sinister images of detached, meaningless death, inevitable legacy of a tradition of isolate, amoral self-absorption.

And yet, the novel is by no means without hope. Rather, it addresses from another perspective the potentials of witchery and the creative value of stories so gracefully expressed in Silko's profoundly hopeful first novel, Ceremony. Almanac is an apparent miscellany of isolated stories that gradually assumes design in the reader's consciousness. This growing awareness of interconnection is, according to the author, the function of stories, which "are always bringing us together, keeping this whole together," combating people's natural tendency "to run off and hide or separate themselves from others" in times of "violent emotional experience."

The Almanac, an ancient collation of sacred story abstracts, serves as metaphor for the importance of memory—one of the central themes of Silko's first novel. As Susan Scarberry-Garcia observed in her early and seminal essay on Ceremony, memory "becomes the bedrock of our humanity" in helping us to define ourselves and to "forestall the witchery which is advanced, if not generated, through forgetfulness." Both novels evoke mythic images to instruct readers, as Paula Gunn Allen has so frequently observed, that "We are the land"; that self-respect is impossible when respect for our sources and sustenance is neglected and forgotten. Ceremony attacks specifically the threat of those who

                grow away from the earth
             then they grow away from the sun
    then they grow away from the plants and animals.
                      They see no life
                      when they look
                  they see only objects.

Almanac of the Dead garishly illustrates the realization of that threat. Yet this story, like Tayo's, becomes dynamically charged within the consciousness of the hearer, and so promises the possibility of a different course.

Bonnie TuSmith sees Ceremony "as an American writer's challenge to the cult of individualism in contemporary society"—as Silko's reminder "that we are all in this together." Almanac of the Dead states both the challenge and the reminder more brutally, but with a similar undercurrent of tenacious faith. As the novel's Euro-American power structure sinks into the morass of depravity borne of its own misguided ideologies of individualism, a resurgence of communality is occurring. Ironically (perhaps), the redeemers of social organization and spiritual values are found among those who are most disenfranchised by the dominant white male "community." Saved from total corruption by the marginalization that has been thrust upon them, various individuals and groups are rising up and converging, nourished by the very injustice that was designed to starve them. Roy, the deeply disillusioned Vietnam veteran, is organizing his Army of the Homeless to fight the "fat cats" who own the government and police. He "had seen for himself women and children hungry, and sleeping on the streets…. Police beating homeless old men," and he had concluded that "This was not democracy…. Something had to be done." Clinton, another veteran, sees the oppression of women and minorities as a carefully planned conspiracy by white men to retain power and wealth. To him, "the entire war in Southeast Asia had been fabricated as a location and occasion for the slaughter of the strongest and most promising young men of black and brown and poor-white communities"; his solution is to declare war upon the deathmongers and "to reclaim democracy from corruption at all levels." Telecommunications genius Awa Gee specializes in network break-ins and the creation of fake identities. Indifferent to personal power, "Awa Gee did not plan to create or build anything at all. Awa Gee was interested in the purity of destruction … in the perfection of complete disorder and disintegration" within a system founded on waste, oppression, and greed. Ecoterrorists are "recruiting the terminal and dying … who saw the approach of the end of nature and who wanted to do some good on their way out" by martyring themselves in kamikaze missions to blow up the restrictive economic infrastructures.

All subversive action will eventually culminate in the overthrow of the destructive Eurocentric and androcentric governments of the Americas, which will make way for a sacred reclamation of land and social solidarity. Divisive distinctions between colors and genders will be transcended as people identify their common oppressor. In Tucson, the white man Roy and the black Indian Clinton come together to lead a burgeoning army of women and men who "all said they'd rather fight. They'd rather burn down the city, take a police bullet, and die quick, because that way they died fighting, they died warriors, not slaves." Roy, Clinton, The Barefoot Hopi, Weasel Tail, and others—each invokes anxious and concerned people of all colors to come together because "this was the last chance the people had, and they would never prevail if they did not work together as a common force."

Community is being built even within the collective unconscious. Tribal healers and spirits are visiting the dreams of prisoners, preparing them to rise up fraternally against the enemies of land and humanity. People everywhere, sensing danger, are beginning to react "without being conscious of what they [are] preparing for," as yet unaware that "their plans would complement and serve one another in the chaos to come." Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Angelita La Escapia and the young twins Tacho and El Feo are organizing the masses for the march northward to reclaim the sacred earth and all the interconnections that reclamation implies. It might require generations, but the prophecies are clear: "all traces of Europeans in America would disappear and, at last, the people would retake the land."

Hope, though, rests chiefly on faith and patience: Silko extends little reason for immediate triumphant optimism. Schisms continue among those who are committed to revolution. Men versus women, the humble versus the power-hungry, black versus brown versus white, those who believe in the possibility of peaceful transitions versus those who strain toward a purgative bloodletting—the same mistrustful divisiveness they are challenging threatens the unity upon which their success depends. And so far, only a tiny minority of "scattered crazies" with "feverish plots and crazed schemes" are involved at all.

Most find passivity their best defense. The novel's most likable (and least threatening) character is Sterling, a dispossessed Laguna Indian who stands ineffectually at the peripheries, watching the violence and betrayal in mute, bewildered horror. Driven from his homeland by tribal injustice, he wanders aimlessly to Tucson where he accidentally lands a job on Lecha and Zeta's ranch. He stays because it is easier than leaving, and he finally leaves because there is no place to stay. The novel closes with Sterling's return to the reservation from which he has been banished, where he takes up solitary and unobtrusive residence in the remote sandstone hut of the family sheep camp.

Sterling's apparent passivity notwithstanding, he serves as something of a repository of the atrophied but reawakening virtues of communal heritage. Like Tayo, he had been advised by white counselors to beat his depression by forgetting his past. Devoted to white notions of "self-improvement," he tries to forget, but finds in the end that wholeness comes through acts of remembrance. In his youth he had been scolded by his elders "because he wasn't interested in what they had to say," but upon his return "home" he tries "to remember more of the stories the old people used to tell" so that he can better understand the connections they revealed. The ancient myths, whose neglect had resulted in "all the violence and death" he had witnessed, assume profound significance as he begins to piece together his shadowy recollections "of the old folks' beliefs." He sees the resurrection of the south-facing stone snake from the tailings of the Destroyers' uranium mines as a promise of eventual redemption, and looks with the mythic snake "in the direction from which the twin brothers and the people would come" to liberate individuals from alienation. But Sterling's recovery is only beginning. Even as he attempts to remember, he attempts to forget: he blocks from his consciousness an acknowledgment of what he knows exists, gently—but falsely—reassuring himself instead that "the world was not like that. Tucson had only been a bad dream."

The hope that undergirds Almanac of the Dead is more implicit, then, than evident. As Silko once said of Pueblo storytelling, "a great deal of the story is believed to be inside the listener, and the storyteller's role is to draw the story out of the listeners." The contemporary America of the novel is on the surface a wasteland of dead possibilities, a treacherous desert where the promise and refreshment implicit in love have been blasted by the rapacious brutality of white male egoism. Among the empowered, all human emotion, sentiment, and compassion have atrophied in the withering aridity of European individualism. Avarice is the only remaining motivation for action; suspicion is the only remaining human connection. Even the sexual urge, the most primal guarantee of regeneration, has turned inward upon itself to produce a mutant brood of scrofulous monstrosities. And yet, although scourged and blighted, hope remains alive. The reclamation and restoration of loving relationships among people and with the land will come, according to Silko's optimistic Indians. The healing will take time, and it will require vigilant attention to history if we are to identify and resist the present sources and manifestations of witchery. But the prophecies of the Almanac are explicit: the blood-maddened male Death-Eye Dog will die; a renewed era of active spiritual and social community in the Americas will ultimately prevail.