Lullaby

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2002

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Themes

Living Memory

“Lullaby” is a story recounted largely in retrospect, and Silko establishes the significance of memory at the start of the short story: “[Ayah] was an old woman now, and her life had become memories” (43). This is a bittersweet statement: Ayah’s life consists of “memories” both because there is relatively little of it left before her and because she has lost so much of what once gave her life meaning, including both her children and the hope of seeing her culture live on in her descendants. On the other hand, Ayah’s memories are so vivid that they constitute a kind of “life” in and of themselves, often eclipsing the reality of her actual surroundings. For example, when Ayah recalls the way in which both her mother’s weaving and her buckskin shoes protect her from the cold and damp, she finds that “Jimmie’s blanket seem[s] warmer than it had ever been” (44) as if the blanket itself has been transformed into the blankets Ayah’s mother used to make.

Memory plays a significant role in Navajo culture. For the Navajo, whose history has traditionally been preserved in oral form, memory is not a passive experience; memory engages the person doing the remembering in an act of reconstructing history and transmitting it to future generations. Similarly, weaving, like oral history, is a form of both traditional knowledge and an ongoing practice. A weaver brings the past to life whenever the weaver is engaged in work in the present moment. For example, Silko symbolically dramatizes this phenomenon in her description of the weaving process as an act that links three generations of Navajo women—Ayah, her mother, and her grandmother: “[W]hile [Ayah] combed the wool, her grandma sat beside her, spinning a silvery strand of yarn around the smooth cedar spindle. Her mother worked at the loom with yarns dyed bright yellow and red and gold” (43).

For Ayah memory is not relegated to the past; much like time itself, memory is nonlinear and encompassing. Memories experienced in this way are not always pleasant. Ayah’s grief for Jimmie, for instance, always seems to be fresh; she mourns him not just when he dies, but over and over again, whenever events like Chato’s injury remind her of the loss. Nevertheless, this experience of memory as a living presence allows Ayah to retain a sense of cultural identity in the face of her losses, and in this sense, it is preferable to the alternative embodied by her husband: a man whose current memory loss is deeply intertwined with the way in which he has compromised his Navajo identity over the years.

Motherhood

Although Ayah has in one way or another lost all her children by the time “Lullaby” begins, motherhood remains central to her existence; it is not only the focus of most of her memories, but also the context of her reconciliation with Chato as she wraps him in a blanket and eases him into “sleep” with a lullaby.

Ayah’s understanding of herself as a mother extends far beyond any familial relationships; her experience with motherhood is intertwined with her identity as a Navajo woman. Although not explicitly referred to until the closing lullaby, the figure of Mother Earth is central to Navajo cosmology, and Mother Earth serves as the equal of and complement to the male sky god; together, these two divinities embody the social roles expected of Navajo women and men. Ayah’s love of the land on which she lives is thus highly symbolic. The earth is a mother that nurtures and shelters her literally and figuratively as the Navajo hogan, constructed of stones and mud, is domed in imitation of a pregnant woman’s stomach; Ayah’s own body is a microcosm of the earth and its rhythms.

This cultural context contributes to the trauma Ayah experiences when she loses Jimmie, Ella, and Danny. Although Ayah had lost other children in their infancy, these children had died at home, and they are now buried in the surrounding hills: “She had carried them herself, up to the boulders and great pieces of the cliff that long ago crashed down from Long Mesa” (47). Silko’s use of the word “carry” is significant; it suggests that what made the loss of these children bearable to Ayah was not simply the fact that they remained physically close to her, but rather that, in consigning them to Mother Earth, Ayah was still able to experience a spiritual unity with them comparable to pregnancy. By contrast, Jimmie dies far away and of unnatural causes and the two younger children are assimilated into white society and thus cut off from Ayah and from her ability to mother them.

This construction of motherhood as a spiritual and transcendent experience allows Ayah to arrive at a place of peace and acceptance as the story concludes. Tied to what is “timeless” (the gods, the land, etc.), motherhood is not bound to linear time. In the final lines of the story, Ayah’s many experiences of motherhood across the years seem to collapse into a single, eternal experience:

She tucked the blanket around [Chato], remembering how it was when Ella had been with her; and she felt the rush so big inside her heart for the babies. And she sang the only song she knew for babies. She could not remember if she had ever sung it to her children, but she knew that her grandmother had sung it and her mother had sung it (51).

The lullaby that follows underscores this convergence of experiences, framing the relationship between mother and child as a form of unity that far exceeds the limits of any particular human lifespan.

Language as a Source of Cultural Power and Identity

Silko’s commitment to capturing the rhythms of Native American storytelling is reflected in the fact that language itself is a major concern in “Lullaby.” In fact, Silko depicts the clash between Navajo and white culture largely as a linguistic one. For example, in the scene in which Ayah confusedly signs over custody of her children to the white doctors, she feels “proud” of her ability to sign her name while frightened by the way “they waved papers at her and a black ball-point pen, trying to make her understand their English words” (45). The doctors, in other words, try to insist that Ayah “assimilate” by adopting their language, but Ayah’s knowledge of English is a liability, since it enables her to unwittingly hand over her children and, symbolically, her people's future.

The conflict between languages of English and Navajo goes deeper than the power differential between Ayah and the various representatives of white America she encounters. Rather, it speaks to fundamental differences in the two cultures’ worldviews. While describing Ayah’s encounter with the doctors, Silko draws attention to the latter’s pen and paper; these symbols of written language are alien to Ayah, whose entire culture is grounded in oral tradition. This divide between oral and written language has far-reaching implications, in that the spoken word is inherently more fluid than writing, which records language in a specific, fixed form. Writing, therefore, tends to tie language to a particular moment in time in a way incompatible with Navajo tradition; for the Navajo, stories are adapted and retold from generation to generation, mirroring the cycles of the natural world. This mirroring effect is what makes Ella and Danny’s loss of their mother tongue so devastating to Ayah; in losing the ability to speak Navajo, the children have lost a marker of their cultural identity as well as the tool through which an entire way of thinking about the world is understood and expressed.

Ayah herself retains her ability to speak Navajo just as she adheres to Navajo tradition more broadly by continuing to live in her family’s hogan. While she is unable to pass on her language and culture to her own children, she does in some sense succeed in passing it on to a new generation—namely, the story’s readers. It is ironic that Silko presents Ayah’s closing lullaby, as well as the “lullaby” of the short story itself, in the printed word and in English. As much as Silko aims to capture elements of Native American oral tradition, the mere fact that she must write in English and publish her writing to make her work widely accessible is a tacit acknowledgment of the dominance of white American culture and the loss of traditional Navajo ways of life.