Ceremony

Explain why Tayo blames himself for the six year drought:

The Reason Tayo blames himself for the drought is because he believes that "he had prayed the rain away". "The corporal fell, jerking the ends of the blanket from his hands, and he felt Rocky's foot brush past his own leg. He slid to his knees, trying to find the ends of the blanket again, and he started repeating 'Goddamn, goddamn!'; [...] He damned the rain until the words were a chant, and he sang it while he crawled through the mud [...] He wanted the words to make a cloudless blue sky, pale with a summer sun pressing across wide and empty horizons. [...] and all the time he could hear his own voice praying against the rain". That is the quote, which is rather long, from the book that explains why Tayo fell to his knees to pray to rain away. The bad experience in the jungle drove him into the hatred for that rain. Another quote from the book that can further explain Tayo's hatered for the rain is when it says: "Tayo hated this unending rain as if it were the jungle green rain and not the miles of marching or the Japanese grenade that was killing Rocky. He would blame the rain". With that bad memory, it's no wonder why he wanted the rain to stop.


Carefully re-read the pages that involve the old medicine man, Ku’oosh, p. 31-34. Explain the significance of how Ku’oosh speaks, chooses words, and of his point about the fragility of the world:

There is a great significance in the way that Ku'oosh speaks and chooses words in this passage. It says in the reading that "He spoke softly, using the old dialect full of sentences that were involuted with explanations of their own orgins, as if nothing the old man said were his own but all had been said before and he was only there to repeat it". Ku'oosh also makes a point about the fragility of the world. There is a great deal of significance in the way that Ku'oosh explains this point because it says that he had to explain every word that he used, or as it says in the book: "It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said that certain way".

She Had Some Horses Response

In the poem, She Had Some Horses, Joy Harjo allows several subjects and arguments to be discussed through her interesting take on who these horses are. Are these horses representing spirits? I believe that they are. By using the past tense, the speaker talks about what all these "spirits" went through, along with their struggles or situations that they faced. Within this poem, the horses represent some contradictory feelings. Throughout the whole reading, the speaker will say something in one line and then in the next contradict it. For example, she says: "She had horses who had no names/ She had horses who had books of names". I think that by adding in all the contradiction, Harjo adds struggle and conflict to the speaker. This brings color to the poem in that sense.