1. Mark Hayek
201000569
ENGL 240 Final Paper
Dead Definitions
“That’s the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the
story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake of what had been
said; and this demanded great patience and love.” (Silko, 32)
The pattern that emerges from both colonial and postcolonial literature that we have
covered is a cyclical one. Alienation breeds a longing to find something. That is the
first half of the cycle. To put that into question at first, alienation rises from a
disidentification with the surrounding environment, which in the case of colonial
literature, you are master of nature and your environment. There is always
hopelessness in the tone of authors when discussing the insurmountable authority of
the imperial project, which seems contradictory since the imperial project has as one
of its central themes, the domination of man over his environment. Thus the
individual feels alienated from a system because it lied to him, and told him he would
have control, but he doesn’t.
The second part of the cycle – the focus of this discussion – is where the two,
colonial and postcolonial, take different roads only to end up back where they started,
alienated. In short, and since the focus will lie primarily on postcolonial responses,
colonial literature spoke of finding something new, while postcolonial (my two
emphases will be on Najla Said’s Looking for Palestine but more importantly Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Ceremony) literature defines “finding something” as looking for

2. something that has been lost. Said’s incessant struggle with identity, as she shuffles
uncomfortably through her adolescence and early adulthood, is supported heavily by
the idea that identity comes with strict guidelines of social conduct through dead
definition. But what Said struggles with, Silko pushes to transcend. The word “story”
pops up ceaselessly in the book, and he uses it to try to explain this notion of dead
definition, and the grip it holds on social and private conduct.
Arab. Jew. Muslim. American. These words and many others like them
bombard us throughout Looking for Palestine. They are categories, groups of people
following a dead definition. So what is a dead definition? A dead definition is a
definition of an object that is external to the human experience. It defines usually a
man-made concept, such as the ones mentioned above, but also includes words such
as communism, capitalism, empire, democracy, and such. The danger of a dead
definition is that it is dead. What seems to be obvious holds the deeper truth of our
understanding of definition. If a definition is not subject to change, if it is absolute
and unchecked, and if it is contingent upon the active performance of an individual in
it for it to sustain itself, then it is a dead definition. It is simply describing something
that is not there, a construct of a single temporal and spatial perspective that the
observer adopts as reality. Najla’s consciousness of herself was highly influenced by
these dead definitions. Her father is from a country that is not there anymore. Yet the
house her father grew up in still stands. The scene of walking up to the house in the
now-Israel, used-to-be Palestine location on the globe, disseminates this notion of
nationalism into a dead definition. How is the country gone, but the house still there?
This is the struggle that people have, which leads to the feeling of alienation and
frustration at a merciless superstructure, towering over the heads of individuals, while
they restlessly try to find a place under this constricting umbrella of appropriateness.

3. Najla goes through many phases of identification, mostly national, regional, linguistic,
and cultural. These phases bring with them a rubric of conduct: if I am X, then I
should act like it. “Act like a lady”, or “act like a man”, or “aren’t you American?”
You see the pattern here. With every turn in her journey, she finds herself, for a short
time, comfortable in her milieu. But then, slowly, or by one incident or another, the
feeling of inadequacy resurges within her, and she finds that this category of
identification does not serve to ease her fear of alienation. What she ends up getting
into is a web of concepts that must be followed around a minefield of faults in their
argument, criticism by others and oneself, and the usually most cliché slap-in-the-face
realization that we are all human beings living on a planet that is relatively
insignificant to its surrounding, so we should all get along and try to figure this out
together.
To make one thing clear, I am not for anarchy, I am merely shedding light on
one aspect of how what Silko calls “the lie”(177), is failing. We have dealt with a lot
of literature that deals with the problem of the imperial project but have not found a
suitable response in which we, as human beings, could coexist in what we can call a
“good” society.
The first definition to go would be that of “ownership”. Silko expresses the
rage that Tayo feels whenever Emo, or any other character for that matter, speak of
the land that they now have is what the white people left for them, the scraps of the
land. “Look what is here for us. Look. Here’s the Indians’ mother earth! Old dried-up
thing!” Silko goes on to explain the faulty reasoning behind this, because Emo, along
with some Indians and Mexicans, believe that the land they were born in belongs to
them, and was taken from them. This echoes the futile adherence to a nation state. An
exterior, alien force invaded their environment. This alien force then proceeded to

4. usurp any notion of humanity from these “natives”, and promised to “civilize” them.
This is the clearest example of dead definitions that have shaped the world through
imperial practice. Ownership. Native. Civilized. Silko, through Tayo’s psychological
journey, illuminates the bedrock of human experience, interaction with the living,
existing natural world. “This is where we come from, see. This sand, this stone, these
trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. This earth keeps us going.” (Silko, 42)
Silko speaks of “dead things” when she discusses the notion of imperial and
capitalist commodity. Dead things represent dead ideas; trying to capture the essence
of living through the acquisition of dead things is the contradiction that Silko is
pointing out in the lifestyle that is practiced by white people. But what is more
destructive is the adoption of this lifestyle by the struggling Indians and Mexicans,
trying desperately to coagulate within a culture that arrived to their shores dead. There
is no difference in imperial expansion, as far as military and political injustice goes,
between British and American imperialism. The colonial literature that hails the
Americas as the new world where all is possible, ends up being an exploitation of
natural resources, and tons of dead bodies.
So it is central that the true story be told, because the story is the only thing
that remains alive without temporal constrictions. It is the story, told truthfully, with
true use of language, which holds the answer to the riddles of society’s mishaps. What
Silko means by the story is human history. Guy Debord argues that through the
construction of illusory priorities in life, what I have come to call the dead definitions
of things, we have shifted from a stage of human history – a story alive while being
told – to economic history, in which the aims of the human society exist to serve the
function of the exterior capitalist doctrine within empire. Just as Silko highlights the
dead things people follow, and Said inscribes her personal experience with the

5. dissolution of these dead definitions, Debord discusses how society has entered a dead
state of history, in which our true history, as human beings, has ceased to develop,
and our existence as economic producers, churners of currency, is the only route that
is appropriate for any man. Tayo is constantly teetering on the edge of social sanity,
where people are waiting for him to snap at any moment. He is constantly being
pestered about his roles, duties, and shortcomings. But it seems as though Tayo, Said,
and even Conrad’s Marlowe choose to fight this alienation from a world gone awry by
shedding the light on what truly fuels the human experience, the realization of dead
definitions and the ability to discriminate between the two.

6. dissolution of these dead definitions, Debord discusses how society has entered a dead
state of history, in which our true history, as human beings, has ceased to develop,
and our existence as economic producers, churners of currency, is the only route that
is appropriate for any man. Tayo is constantly teetering on the edge of social sanity,
where people are waiting for him to snap at any moment. He is constantly being
pestered about his roles, duties, and shortcomings. But it seems as though Tayo, Said,
and even Conrad’s Marlowe choose to fight this alienation from a world gone awry by
shedding the light on what truly fuels the human experience, the realization of dead
definitions and the ability to discriminate between the two.