The Last Farewell (Lullaby)

2021 May 10

In a society of unrighteous exploitations, the notion of progression is loss within society’s vulnerable language that enables the fall of culture and close relations. The loss of these structures institutes a generation that have no personal form of identity only what their environment expects them to be. It becomes an internal struggle of which tradition is needed and what needs to be discarded making people who are on the outside abandon their origins in order to fit in. It is important that a society recognizes the differences between people’s language and the perception built upon the internal and external conflicts involving them. The ability for people to retrace their steps are a miracle of its own, if people continue to spread the erasure of culture, then people will lose sight of themselves and the world, they live in. In a sense, society is putting them on the battlefield to face a hell storm of bullets without a team to run back to. People would only recognize others for their worth and not their character if their identities become lost in a foreign surrounding. “Lullaby” by Leslie Marmon Silko teaches its audience that modern change can transgress to immediate tension between oral traditions and vernacular culture through fortitude of enduring loss, internal and external conflicts affecting personal identity, and how grief can obstruct livelihoods.

Ayah juxtapose the past and present as a way of coping with her grief of loss because she still has something of her culture that has not be changed by society’s modernity. The story takes place in the present while she is reminiscing about the past to help her not lose sight of what she holds dear. In fact, the very opening of the story opens with her demise illustrating death at its poignant moment, “She felt peaceful remembering” (Silko). This illustrates that after what everything Ayah has been through, she found solace that it was all over and felt happy that she could look to the past of a time where she was in control instead of a future where she was not. For people that have suffered a tragedy, death may be their ultimate means of escaping as reasoning and logic can go seemingly out the window in favor of popular opinion. People act as an active force to inhibit each other’s perception because they do not want to be categorized and feed their desire to be on top of society’s hierarchy. Another example of loss and grief within the story is when Ayah was thinking about her deceased son, Jimmie, “It wasn’t like Jimmie died. He just never came back” (Silko). Ayah never saw his corpse when Chato explained it to her she was withing her right to be hopeful for him to turn up sooner or later. Yet, this disillusionment makes her cling on to her spiritual and emotional point of view which removes her even further from modern society. Usually when people hear like this news, they accept the worse and give in to it. Here Ayah, allows her traditional culture and values to shine since the Navajo way gives her upliftment and hope for a better future. If people are trying to assimilate her ways all she is left is despair and lingering desperado to hinge from a progressive society that is working against her.

Ayah experiences the effects of internal and external conflicts since her attachments to her culture and traditions are fleeing in the face of American society. The internal factors being her language barrier and the fear of foreign culture and the external Chato, her kids, the doctor, and white prejudice. A good example that dictates where her mind is when Chato taught her English to only give Doctor’s permission to take their children, “She hated Chato, not because he let the policeman and doctors put the screaming children in the government car, but because he had taught her to sign her name” (Silko). Chato’s act infringes on Ayah’s trust when it came to bringing her closer to American society since it ultimately distanced her. Ayah is left to believe that adaption and assimilation of their culture leaves no rewards but misfortune to continue down the road. The worst part in this situation is that their language barrier was the deciding factor of what would happen to their kids. When her kids were taken away from her, not only did her resolve for trying to live the American life went down, but the loss of culture and her own language. Her emotional turmoil digs deeper when she meets her now estranged children where they feel alienated from her due to being separated for so long. She started to judge her appearance and vanity when the white woman brought them to meet and her though process was even more harrowing, “She knew they were already being weaned from these lava hills and from this sky” (Silko). From that moment she could see that they were not her children anymore but products of American society. Her dictation and earthy language made the encounter more personal as it felt like a part of Native American culture was ripped away. It is scenarios like this that causes rifts in between relationships and starts a cognitive dissonance between personal identity and modernity.

Despite struggling to become peaceful in the present, Ayah does not allow grief to control her life and goes out by remembering what is left of her culture and traditions. Mostly due to coming to terms with what she has encountered her newfound strength allows her to see both sides of her conflicts. Presumably, how her situation might affect others than herself and how they will react to it. This notion rings true when Ayah finds Chato in a deteriorating state after his rancher fired him, “He would not feel it” (Silko). Ayah knew death was coming for him despite his efforts of labor and his relationship with Ayah. When she saw him at his weakest, she felt a connection to him that she previously had not before giving them something to bond over instead of their conflicts with each other. Although, they have been strangers to each other since their kids were taken there was no need to tell the other how they felt, they already knew from first glance. Ayah knew this and hoped his death was quick since he was too a product of assimilation and had no idea that things would get this bad down the road. To ease the pain of grief, she sings a lullaby for both of them so that he can move on peacefully, “We are together always/ There never was a time/ when this / was not so” (Silko). Her lullaby is showcasing the power of language as something the only two of them could understand since it contained their culture and spirit. This is comforting for Ayah since she will be completely alone in her endeavor, leaving her nothing but memories of the past to keep going. She has become literate within American society by experiencing the ugliness and learning to manipulate it in her own way. Her devout to her culture is strengthened since it was the only thing that kept their family together at the time as it was expected of the Navajo people.

In sum, Lullaby represents the cycle of life and how indefinite things like culture and tradition can become finite if they are the constant target of forced assimilation. American culture had enough power to rip apart Ayah’s family and her customs and ultimately left her all alone in the end because she held on to her beliefs for so long. Society should never get to the point where connections and bonds are severed at the expense of conforming to social norms. When people become adaptable, they obtain certain limits that may have not been possible for people who grew up in that environment. It leads to a lack of direction, in which, people will be less likely to revise ideals and current tradition in favor of societal structure. Yet, that adds more fuel to the problem of people trying to mitigate change in society since it blocks their view of the world. Leading to a world where people are used to viewing a forced perspective instead of their own. As the poem implies, hope resides in the natural state of our world, if people do not respect it then there would no longer be considered natural. Only products of our own artificiality and choices.