Rebecca Tillett - Otherwise, Revolution!: Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead

I would like to thank all members of the Native Studies Research Network, UK, past and present, who have been so generous in their support, enthusiasm and intellectual stimulation over the years. Thanks are also due to my colleagues in the Department of American Studies at the University of East Anglia; and special thanks are due to Joni Adamson, who provided such invaluable feedback and advice at a very early stage in this project. Above all, my thanks and love go to Mick and Jacob, who, as always, have been so patient and supportive.

If you make it all the way through Almanac, it makes you strong. But its like one of those stronger remedies. You do have to tell some people, hey, if it starts to bother you, put it down. Rest. Take it easy. Every now and then Ill run into someone who, by god, read Almanac of the Dead in three days, just read it.

And Im like, whoa, isnt it toxic to do that?

Seven years after the publication of her controversial novel Almanac of the Dead (1991), Leslie Marmon Silko sounded a note of warning for any potential reader: while the novel was a remedy for late twentieth-century America that had the power to mak[e] you strong, too intense a dose was potentially toxic. These remain wise words: Almanac is a profoundly disturbing analysis of the workings and effects of late twentieth-century capitalism that tracks the origins of both the capitalist system and the continued high status of a range of international social and corporate elites back to the emergence of early monopoly companies, and to the imperialist European cultural worldviews that initiated and facilitated the colonization of the New World. In a strategy that exposes the moral results of supposedly amoral economic and political systems, Almanac quite specifically identifies European greed and selfishness as the primary cause of widespread policies of genocide enacted against Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, and the European slave trade as a market system inseparable from the development of national elites, national economies, transnational corporations, and capitalism itself. Moreover, Almanac traces historic injustices into the capitalist era, to link them firmly to contemporary social policies, and to the ways in which those policies not only derive from but also perpetuate ongoing social and economic injustices in the late twentieth century. It was no coincidence that Almanac was published to coincide with the quincentennial celebrations of Columbuss New World discovery: the timing, as Linda Niemann commented, was perfect (1992: 1).

Almanacs readers are openly shown the processes of capitalism: violent excesses, exploitative depravity, and a corrupt and vicious commodification of everything and everyone. In Almanacs late capitalist world, everything is for profit, and human bodies are again linked to the histories of slavery as they become commodities once more through the sale of human blood, tissue and body parts. Taking Karl Marxs notion of vampire capitalism to its limits, Silko depicts how human bodies are literally consumed, through portrayals of objectification, dismemberment and even cannibalism. In the dystopia of the text, we see writ large the European Enlightenments propensity for separation and categorization, a propensity that demands we accept the need for scientific detachment from life, from the world around us, from each other, ultimately from what makes us human. This detachment, this separation or atomization, this to employ Marxs own term alienation, is coupled not only with individualism, with a privileging of the individual at all costs, but also with an over-dependence on a corrupt market system that has no scruples and an insatiable desire to make ever-increasing profits. Disturbingly, the textual result is the transformation of love the ultimate human interaction into lust, commodified sexualities, desire-driven societies, and highly sexualized power structures. In the world of Almanac, it is unclear if love is compatible with the socio-economic system of the late twentieth century. Here, in place of the much theorized and celebrated post-human, we are simply presented with the inhuman. Most worryingly, Almanacs vision is depicted as our own potential future.

In this context, Almanac exposes the most profoundly disturbing endgame of all: what results when our scientific detachment includes a detachment imaginative, philosophical, spiritual, physical from the Earth itself. As a result, Almanacs focus is profoundly Earth-centred, the Earth is the central character of an exploration of the ways in which enlightened scientific detachment is predicated upon a separation of humanity from the natural world. Drawing directly upon the Enlightenments Christian antecedents, Silkos text examines the results in the late twentieth century of the problematic hierarchy, outlined in the Book of Genesis, that places the natural world firmly under humankinds dominion. It is no accident that dominion can be defined as supreme rule, and Silkos novel shows us the environmental and human devastation that happens when the tenets of European/Euro-American religion, science and capitalism converge to produce and promote a profoundly short-sighted, short-termist, yet virulent worldview that demands the quickest and highest profits at any cost. Almanac therefore traces the results of complexly historied European philosophical-religious-political worldviews, to show how the exploitation at the heart of dominion is subsequently translated directly into the exploitative processes and practices of empire-building and then of globalized corporate capitalism. Under such conditions, where dominion becomes supreme rule, the abusive treatment of the natural world is echoed in the abusive and inhuman treatment of the majority of the Earths human populations, and our very concepts of democracy are threatened. As the environmental writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams has so persuasively argued, not only is democracy to be described and understood in the context of the natural world as an open space, but that within the open space of democracy, the health of the environment is seen as the wealth of our communities precisely because our [human] character has been shaped by the diversity of Americas landscapes (2004: 8). In this context, the message in Almanac is clear: until and unless we treat the Earth with due respect, humankind will continue to suffer similar oppression and exploitation; the bodies of humans and the body of the Earth are quite literally related.

To illustrate the virulence of these kinds of short-termist profiteering, Silkos novel is packed full of monstrous and inhuman characters. Regardless of culture, class, ethnicity, gender, race or sexual orientation, there are few characters that are in any way sympathetic. Similarly, the excesses that Silko depicts, and the graphic nature of their depiction, are so all-encompassing that they are often overwhelming. As its title suggests, the text is saturated with both the bodies and the presence of the dead, whose And every form of unnatural death dominates the text, from suicide, to homicide, to genocide; as do a series of killers that range from military/governmental forces, powerful members of the social elites, serial killers, mafia hitmen, drug-running gangs, and a range of business entrepreneurs. Everywhere, almost everything is trafficked, sold for profit: drugs, weapons, human bodies and body parts, illegal immigrants, land and natural resources. Perhaps the greatest human emphasis is upon sexual commerce, both consensual and non-consensual, and including paedophilia and bestiality. Most overwhelming is the profiteering from the sex industry, with a market that has been imaginatively and lucratively expanded to showcase if not to be dependent upon human pain and misery. With appalling and often highly explicit detail, and drawing attention again to the potential end results of a rabid and out-of-control capitalist system,