Silko’s Narrative Negotiation of the Rain Man’s Rites of the Passage

Abstract

Leslie Marmon Silko’s story “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” (1974) is an important work of the “the second wave” (Allen 8) of Native American writing. In the story, Silko shows an “understated celebration of death of a beloved Indian grandfather” (Rosen xi). However, the death of the Indian elder becomes a site for reassertion of Indian tradition and culture of the indigeneous people of America. Molly Andrews in her essay ‘Narrating Moments of Political Change’ observes: “As such, stories play a vital role, not only in constructing the political world as it is, but also as it might be, depicting how it once was. These stories are never consensual—it is the mark of humankind to contest the stories of other individuals and communities. But stories are one of the primary vehicles through which politics are articulated and debated.” The question arises whether the story “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” is a political narrative or whether it can be justiciably read in the frame of a text engaged with identity politics? Since narratives are a part of the community, especially narratives that consciously evoke questions of differences in culture the present story becomes an exemplary specimen of investigation into politics of identity and further offers a negotiated alternative to lived experience where ‘exclusion’ or dominance is practised. In ‘The Man to Send Rain Clouds’ the family decides to take a limited dispensation from Christianity—as much as will suit the demands of the community and align with the wishes of the departed individual. Molly Andrews notes, ‘narratives are central to the machination of politics, for in constructing the stories about what is and isn’t working, and how this compares to a notion of ‘how it should be’ we are invariably deciding what aspects of social/political/economic/cultural life are and are not relevant to the current problem and its solution—in other words, the lifeblood of politics. Thus, political narratives engage the imagination, not only in constructing stories about the past and the present, but in helping https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2005516