The Storyteller's Escape by Leslie Marmon Silko
"The Storyteller's Escape" by Leslie Marmon Silko is a poignant narrative poem featured in her collection *Storyteller*, which blends autobiographical elements with traditional storytelling. Set in the Laguna area of New Mexico, the poem centers on a Native American woman recognized as her community's storyteller. Through her reflections, she underscores the significance of stories as tools for survival and remembrance, articulating a deep connection between narrative and identity. As the poem unfolds, the storyteller recounts her experience during an enemy attack, revealing her vulnerability as she grapples with the fear of being forgotten.
The poem employs a unique visual format, with free-form stanzas that mirror the oral tradition of storytelling, emphasizing emotional resonance over conventional poetic structure. The themes of escape and memory are woven throughout, culminating in a powerful realization that while she may not live to tell her story, it is the next generation that will carry her legacy. By intertwining personal narrative with broader cultural elements, Silko invites readers to consider the importance of storytelling in preserving history and identity against the backdrop of adversity.
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Subject Terms
The Storyteller's Escape by Leslie Marmon Silko
First published: 1981, in Storyteller
Type of poem: Narrative
The Poem
Leslie Marmon Silko’s “The Storyteller’s Escape” is one of the story-poems included in Storyteller, Silko’s somewhat autobiographical compilation of stories, photographs, and poems. The work is set in the southwestern United States, specifically in the Laguna area near Albuquerque, New Mexico. In “The Storyteller’s Escape,” the storyteller is a Native American woman who explains why stories are important. Her statements are alternated with third-person comments and bare descriptions of episodes in the storyteller’s life. The free-form stanzas move, more or less, visually in a righthand direction across the page.
The poem begins with the storyteller’s assertion that “With these stories of ours/ we can escape almost anything/ with these stories we will survive.” This woman—acknowledged by her people to be their storyteller—knows all her people’s stories of escape and keeps them both to help the living and to remember the dead.
The people consider her best story to be the one of her own escape from an unnamed enemy. As usual during an enemy attack, the people leave their homes to hide. This time, the enemy is so close that there are no possibilities for rest stops. The old woman muses that in earlier escapes, she had been healthy and fast, leaving the slower villagers behind. However, this time, she is the one who slows under the heat of the sun and who must sit down in the shade to rest. Her main concern is not the enemy, but herself and her story: She fears that no one will know what happened to her or be able to tell her story; thus, no one will remember and grieve for her.
Making the best of her situation, she tries to think of a story to distract herself. She creates a story in which a child looks back, remembers her, and creates a story for her. The child’s story explains that the old woman plans to outfox the enemy—by dying before she can be caught. When finally the sun moves away from the old woman, she imagines it beating down on the enemy. She waits through the night until dawn and, knowing she might encounter the enemy yet, returns to the village. She believes this is truly her best escape story. Yet it is the child who must ultimately tell this story, since the old woman died that day.
Forms and Devices
The form of this poem rejects traditional Western ideas of page formatting and of poetic formats that use rhyme scheme, standardized line length, and regular stanzas of lines neatly tucked underneath one another on the page. Instead, the lines of the stanzas of this poem stretch from left to right across the page in nonsymmetrical stanzas. A stanza might—or might not—start at the left margin, indent the next line, then have the next line start on the left margin again. Some stanzas do not ever touch the left margin.
This antitextual representation represents the oral nature of the storytelling that this poem mimics. Laguna storytellers do not speak in iambic pentameter or rhyme; instead, they speak in phrases and sentences of varying length, the length chosen to represent the characters in the narrative and to create the appropriate emotion—tension, laughter, surprise—in the listeners. The offset stanzas allow space for the reader to imagine the storyteller changing voices between the third-person sections and the first-person dialogue.
The poem is unified by the simplicity of its diction (mostly one-syllable, everyday words) and repetition of words, phrases, and situations. For example, the repetition of “always before,” as the old woman remembers earlier flights from the enemy, serves to increase the nostalgia and heartbreak of the situation. She describes the ones who had faltered and been left—the sick, the pregnant, the crippled, the old—but “this time,” she is among that unfortunate group. Even her decision to stop and rest, an act of defeat, becomes a ritual, for she gives up on the afternoon of the fourth day; four, with its connection to the cardinal directions and winds, is a number often repeated in ceremonial acts.
Neither the setting nor the enemy is delineated in the poem, although both are integral to the narrative. The storyteller’s Laguna audience does not need the surroundings depicted; instead, the narrator can mention the lava rocks, hills, and Dough Mountain to evoke the Laguna region for her people. The sun becomes the narrator’s focus for description. Although the overwhelming heat of the sun is the immediate reason for the storyteller’s pause in the shade, the sun is never described in hostile terms. Instead, the sun is a “hat,” a “shawl,” and finally, as it leaves, a “butterfly.” Even when the speaker wishes the enemy to be disabled by the heat, she refers to the sun as a “blanket.” The enemy, too, need not be described, since the actual enemy—be it a hostile tribe, a colonizing culture, or government regulations—is not important: Any enemy can be eluded if people cling to their stories.
Bibliography
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Antell, J. A. “Momaday, Welch, and Silko: Expressing the Feminine Principle Through Male Alienation.” American Indian Quarterly 12 (Summer, 1988): 213-220.
Chavkin, Allan, ed. Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Danielson, Linda. “The Storytellers in Storyteller.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 5, no. 1 (1989): 21-31.
Dunsmore, Roger. “No Boundaries: On Silko’s Ceremony.” In Earth’s Mind: Essays in Native Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.
Garcia, Reyes. “Senses of Place in Ceremony.” MELUS 10 (Winter, 1983): 37-48.
Hirsh, B. A. “The Telling Which Continues: Oral Tradition and the Written Word in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller.” American Indian Quarterly 12 (Winter, 1988): 1-26.
Jahner, Elaine. “Leslie Marmon Silko.” In Handbook of Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget. New York: Garland, 1996.
Lincoln, Kenneth. “Grandmother Storyteller: Leslie Silko.” In Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Nelson, Robert M. “Rewriting Ethnography: The Embedded Texts in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony.” In Telling the Stories: Essays on American Indian Literatures and Cultures. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Sax, Richard. “One World, Many Tribes: Crosscultural Influences in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.” In Celebration of Indigenous Thought and Expression. Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.: Lake Superior State University Press, 1996.