Miguelángel Meza is a Guaraní poet and cultural promoter born in Caacupé in 1955. He has contributed to numerous anthropological and linguistic research studies, as well as translations. He also worked for the National Ministry of Culture of Paraguay. He has published the books Ita ha’eñoso (1985), Perurima rapykuere (1985 and 2001), Purahéi (2001 and 2011), Chipi Gonzales guahẽrã (2006), Maleõ (2007), Perurima pypore (2010), and Arami mburukujaguýre (2012). He is the founder of the cartonera press Mburukujarami Kartonéra, with which he has published numerous titles authored by him and others.
Ita ha’eñoso is a bilingual, Mbya Guaraní and Spanish, collection of poems by Miguelángel Meza. Mbya Guaraní is distinct from Jopara, a variant of Spanish-inflected Guaraní spoken widely in Paraguay, a bilingual country, Spanish and Jopara. This, his first book, published thirty-five years prior, is a twin collection to Ayvu Rapyta, the Mbya Guaraní sacred myths of origin transcribed and collected by Paraguayan ethnologist León Cadogan. He writes a self-reflexive response, not retelling, of the myths; therefore, while his images, symbols, and metaphors refer to an ancestral culture, they are also very much his own. Meza’s words are signifiers without hierarchy that mean literally within the lyric structure, the first words by a new author, and connote literally Mbya Guaraní cosmological narratives. In essence both are the same as the word “ñe’ë,” which literally translates “word-soul.” The origin of the world is not announced by the materialization of the hummingbird, but by a voice that mournfully asserts, “I appear.”
Since Ita ha’eñoso (1985) Meza has published six collections of poetry and short fiction. However, Ita ha’eñoso remains a seminal work in Guaraní poetry because it marks the transition from oral and communal to chirographic and authorial literature. He makes an attunement to both an authorial style and a millenary culture possible, while they jointly point to another way of conceiving the world. The counterintuitive way that this poet renders the individual from the communal is reminiscent of the Paraguayan embroidery technique, ñandutí. Ñandutí means spider’s web in Guaraní. Threads extracted from, rather than woven into, a fabric trace a geometric pattern. Meza imitates this practice by claiming authorship through his lyric synthesis of a communal narrative. Meza seems to say through those that came before him: identity lies in erasure, not mark-making.
Elisa Taber is an Argentine writer and anthropologist. She explores the ontological poetics of Amerindian literature. Her stories and translations are troubled into being, even when that trouble is a kind of joy. Her writing appears in specialized media, such as 3AM Magazine, Colleex Open Formats, and Minor Literature(s). She is the recipient of two Library of Congress Hispanic Division Huntington Fellowship and a Janey Program for Latin American Studies Fellowship; and holds an MA in anthropology from The New School for Social Research. She is co-editor of Slug, a journal that bridges the gap between literature and ethnography, and editor of a Guaraní poetry issue for Words without Borders. Her books include 300 and 28 (Oakland: Gauss PDF, 2019) and An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country [Minneapolis:11:11 Press, (forthcoming) 2020]. Elisa was born in Asunción, and lives between Buenos Aires and New York.
Kimberly L. Becker is author of the poetry collections Words Facing East; The Dividings (WordTech), and Flight (forthcoming, MadHat Press). Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies, including IDK Magazine, Panoply, and Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits. She has held grants from MD, NC, and NJ and residencies at Hambidge, Weymouth, and Wildacres. Kimberly has read at venues such as The National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC and Wordfest and served as mentor for PEN America’s Prison Writing and AWP’s Writer to Writer programs. www.kimberlylbecker.com
To introduce these poems, Kimberley sent to Siwar Mayu this statement about her art, a powerful invitation for the younger generations:
“As a mixed race poet identifying Cherokee, I neither presume to speak for any sovereign nation nor identify with the dominant culture. I am undocumented and describe this experience in an essay for the upcoming anthology Unpapered co-edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez.
My work is influenced by my attempts to honor my heritage through the study of language, culture, and history. I look to my literary elders and betters, such as the brilliant Allison Hedge Coke, who taught me to “hold the door open” for others and so I seek to give back where I can.
If, as Tillie Olsen wrote, “every woman who writes is a survivor” and if, as Audre Lorde wrote, “so we speak, knowing we were never meant to survive,” then every writer of Native descent, documented or undocumented, is not only a survivor, but also a witness against the institutionalized racism still pervasive in this country. The Holocaust happened here, as well; Andrew Jackson’s visage is on our currency and his portrait hangs in the Oval Office of our current corrupt president.
Thankfully we have Joy Harjo as Poet Laureate, the first Native American poet in that role, an important cultural corrective. Read the work of her and so many Native writers who are of the land and speak wisdom from ancestors who were here first. Raise up young writers. Hold the door open. Make your writing an offering. Pray. Praise what you can. Call out injustice when you see it. Call on the strength of generations of people who were never meant to survive, but have. “
“Morning Song”: Facing East, a song of praise is offered in the morning. Nogwo sunale nigalsda (now morning has come). Yona (bear) Gvyalielitse Yihowa (I am thankful to you, God) iyugwu (Bring it)
John Henry Gloyne, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian (EBCI), grew up in the Yellowhill community of the Qualla Boundary in Cherokee, NC. Born to a Cherokee father and a Pawnee/Osage mother from Tulsa, Oklahoma he is a prolific artist using several mediums to blend traditional indigenous images within modern contexts. Tattooing, painting, drawing, and sculpting are his main outlets of expression. John Henry’s most well-known works include his own take on traditional Cherokee masks and Mississipian inspired gorgets.
His work has been most recently featured in the Renewal of the Ancient art exhibit of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and the Appalachia Now! exhibit at the Asheville Art Museum.
You can check out more of his work HERE, and on instagram.
John Henry and I met on a sunny, brisk morning at a small coffee shop in the River Arts District of Tokiyasdi “The place where they race” known by its more popular colonizer name of Asheville, NC. Former industrial buildings turned art galleries, coffee shops and micro-breweries sprawl out along the French Broad River that runs northeast through the city. We both live and work within or near urban spaces associated with Tokiyasdi. I am an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma who directs the American Indian & Indigenous Studies program at the local university while John Henry is the owner of Serpent & the Rainbowtattoo shop located in the western part of the city.
I heard about John Henry for years from friends who he played basketball with and from students who raved about his work, both painting and tattooing. We finally met-in-person when he and his partner were taking Cherokee language classes at the local university and I came to sit-in on the class from time to time. I was immediately taken by his work, his love of basketball and his family’s passion for Cherokee history and culture. For my 40th birthday I got my left forearm with my Tsalagi ‘Cherokee’ name in syllabary at his shop. The Cherokee writing system known as syllabary was invented by Sequoyah in the 1820’s and eventually led to the first bilingual Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in the United States.
Adasdelisgo’i “One who continuously helps”
During our morning together we talked art, politics, language, and another of our shared interests…basketball. The following is a brief excerpt of our conversation which highlights his work, his inspirations, and how fatherhood has shaped his craft.
Trey: Do you feel that there’s a Pawnee-Osage influence in your art or do you feel like its mainly Cherokee?
John Henry: Now, I think there’s a big Mississippi influence. That’s the umbrella of all of us in the southeast. Even beyond the southeast too. I think all tribes can relate to the iconography. I would definitely say at the moment, more Cherokee leaning. I even tried a little bit to get out of the Mississippian thing… just cuz I was using it all the time.
Anikituwaghi, 2018, acrylic Man on Mound, 2018, acrylic
Trey: When you were growing up when was the first time when you considered yourself an artist? Were you always drawing and stuff?
John: Always, yes. Always, as I had a very encouraging mother. Honestly, I can’t remember a time when I was not being creative like that. Seriously don’t remember. Mom kept all my drawings since I was like five, six.
John Henry Gloyne, Age 5, 1988.
One of the big things that I ever did was I was just always drawing. My mom was always encouraging me to draw. I drew at school when I shouldn’t have been drawing.
Spud Webb, 1995, pencil and ink.
Trey: Do you have other family members that are artists?
John: Yes, my sister was a big influence on me. She went to the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and that’s why I went there because she turned me on to it. As she got older– I would imagine with a lot of people that are creative when they’re younger and then adulthood slows it. Just because you’ve got bills to pay and that kind of shit. I think I was a little bit more reckless with it like, “I don’t care about bills. I’m still doing this.”
I threw caution to the wind and just dove into doing art and fucking got lucky and it worked out for me. She painted, but she also did a lot of collage stuff. Just a mix- mixed media, collage, paint, she did a lot of that kind of stuff. She was a big influence on me though. She’s still creative in her own way. She was always funky.
Cherokee and Creek: Indian War. 2016. watercolor.
Trey: How did she influence you?
John: She was a grind metalhead. I never got into that, but it was like, the aesthetic was always around. She loved [the band] Jane’s Addiction. All that was a big influence on me. Their album covers and stuff. That Nothing Shocking record that has two paper mache women and they’re like Siamese and their heads are on fire. Anyways, that was kind of the stuff my sister was into. She would show me all that stuff and she would be like, “Check out the art on this.” It’s cool, it’s awesome or whatever and then I’d trip on it. I was nine. That was a big influence, for sure.
Trey: How’d you get into tattooing?
John: I started learning to tattoo in 2001, I was still in high school, man. I remember I was working at Peter’s Pancakes in Cherokee, bussing tables with my sister. The owner of a local tattoo shop came to one of the high school art shows in Cherokee, He’d seen some of my stuff, asked me if I wanted an apprenticeship. I just immediately quit the bussing tables job and I just got real heavy into tattooing for almost 10 years. Not that I didn’t paint, but it was just strict, like real folks doing tattooing. Looking back, it was like, all I wanted to do was wake up and be creative. That’s all you had to do.
Trey: Do you have a particular style of tattooing?
John: I’m extremely versatile tattooer. I can do a lot of different styles. Maybe that is my style.
Trey: You tattooed in Minneapolis for a bit right?
John: Yeah, well, I got a job, but I picked up and moved almost immediately. I tattooed in South Minneapolis and East Lake Street and just a native would come in and it was just like a trip cuz I didn’t realize how huge the native community was there until I moved there. I tattooed Clyde Bellecourt that helped started AIM [the American Indian Movement organization]. Yes, I got to know his son Crow. He had a powwow group called The Midnight Express. Crow knows a lot of powwow heads from Cherokee.
Anyways, but it was awesome and on top of the native community, just the arts in Minneapolis are huge. It’s a very art hungry town. It was awesome. They call it, “Concrete Rez”, which is just right there in the middle of downtown Minneapolis. I think it’s called Red Earth. Anyway, it’s just like a little rez. It’s right in the middle of the city, it’s all just like concrete housing and stuff.
Seven Clans, 2018.
Trey: Why did you leave?
John: It was too far from home. I’m close to my family. I didn’t want to be a stranger to my nephews and nieces, because I got 12 nephews and nieces. We’re all close. I love Minneapolis, though. Too far from home, though.
Trey: You’re painting more now?
John: All the time. I actually paint more than I tattoo and I tattoo a lot. I’m just constantly doing something.
The process of weeding out, 2018, acrylic
Trey: How do you describe your painting style?
John: Yes. Like most oppressed people, their anger and oppression makes them hilarious. I joke around a lot. I’m a real fun person, but it’s you’re just hiding your fucking anger. [laughs] I feel like– It’s like the more angry you are, the funnier you are. The more darkness there is, the funnier you are. It’s getting to the point where that has a lot to do with my artwork.
Bernini’s son, 2016, acrylic and gouache.
Trey: Does it?
John: Yes. Which is funny, because the past few years I’ve just been painting things to me that are just tame. It’s almost like, I just want to show people, I can do that. But there’s still a bleakness to it, I think. Just a little bit of darkness to it.
Dogdick, 2019, acrylic.
Trey: Do you as an artist, do you feel this pressure that some people talk about, doing so called, “native art”?
John: See, I was so against that when I was younger. Yeah. I was like,” Fuck you, I’m not going to paint a horse or painting” or like, “I’m not painting a fucking Indian doing some shit.”
Tattoo Flash, 2019, acrylic and ink.
Trey: You were resisting.
John: I was resistant as fuck. I’m a genetic dissenter, it’s like– It’s in my blood to just be like, “No man, I’m not doing what you want me to do.”…but really, me doing more Native American type stuff, everything changed when I had the kids. I was probably was thinking about it before I had kids, but then when I actually had them, I was just wanting them to be more aware of who they are, but also be really proud of it. For Cherokee people too, especially Eastern Band, we’re the end of the line here…
Judith Santopietro was born in Córdoba (Veracruz, México) in 1983, though she was also raised between Ixhuatlán del Café and Boca del Monte, native communities in the Altas Montañas to which her family belongs. There she first heard stories about nahuales, chaneques, flying women, and other extraordinary beings from the Mesoamerican world. Her mother tongue is Spanish; neverthe- less, she has learned Nahuatl for political reasons and to honor her foremothers who dreamed and lived in that language. Judith holds a Master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and has carried out research residencies in the Sierra de Zongolica and Tecomate (Veracruz), the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (Texas), and the University of Leiden (The Nether- lands), as well as in New York and Bolivia.
She has published the books Palabras de Agua (Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura-Praxis, 2010) and Tiawanaku. Poemas de la Madre Coqa (Hanan Harawi Editores, 2017) —the first version in Spanish—, as well as the essay “Migran- tes nahuas celebran a Santiago Apóstol: un ejercicio de comunalidad en Nue- va York” (Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, 2017/ Leiden University Press, 2016). She was awarded the Lázara Meldiú National Poetry Prize in 2014 and was a finalist for the International Literary Prize “Aura Estrada” in 2017. She has published in the Anuario de Poesía Mexicana 2006 (Fondo de Cultura Eco- nómica), Rio Grande Review, La Jornada and The Brooklyn Rail, and has also par- ticipated in numerous festivals, including PEN America’s World Voices Festival in Nueva York, 2018.
Her passions are the project Iguanazul: Literature in Indigenous Languages, photography, participating in traditional rituals and dance, birdwatching, and leafing through her rice paper book of poetry from the Tang Dynasty in Chinese ideograms. Currently, she is writing narratives of migration about indigenous communities in the US.
Ilana Luna is a nomad at heart, and has lived on both coasts of the U.S. (Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, California); Miramar, Bs. As. Argentina; Mexico City and currently calls Phoenix, Arizona home, where she is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at Arizona State University. She has been a mother, a lover, a poet, singer, novelist, educator, activist, cooking enthusiast, and translator for the last two decades. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and came into her unrepentant and intersectional feminism at an early age, culminating in an undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, where she was born. She is also a life-long cinephile, and writes about women filmmakers in Latin America (and the world). She is the Programming Director of Femme Revolution Film Fest in Mexico City, and has written Adapting Gender: Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film (SUNY Press, 2018). Among many loose publications of poets and essayists, she has also translated several books of poetry, including Juan José Rodinás’ Koan Underwater (Cardboard House Press, 2018) and Giancarlo Huapaya’s sub verse workshop (Lavender Ink, 2019).
Brus Rubio Churay is a Murui-Bora artist from the Amazon region. He was born in 1984 in the community of Pucaurquillo, located in the basin of the River Ampiyacu, in Loreto, Peru. In his work, natural dyes and acrylic come together on canvas and ‘llanchama,’ the fibrous bark of the ojé tree. In “Our grandfather guiding the children”, the ancient territory / jungle carries the children, keepers of water and dance. Trickstery and joy emanate from the earth in a maze of barks and branches.
Whether in Miami, Havana, or Paris, the jungle reveals its boa eyes. Rubio’s sight captures the invisible. The world of men fills only a bare snippet of the canvas. Though the waterfront and the beach unfurl all of their human strength, the beings that sustain the image are, and are not, women and men, but the beings who inhabit the canvas alongside tourists, and songs and dances that accompany Salsa.
Between the city and the jungle, the Murui-Bora gods of this universe are not mere mythical episodes from a book. They are the curious gaze of Buinaima himself before the indelible structures of a contemporary city. What in the world have men done with the Tree of Abundance? Could it be true that they divide the platters of macambo and petroleum as if there were no consequences? The skeletons of the devourers devour themselves.
“My creation reflects a great cosmic happiness because it is inspired by gods and important mythic people, by festivals and rituals, by the tasks of farming and cooperative work (minga), by the magic and beauty of fish and animals, by the song, vision, and sacred work of my ancestors. All of this is part of my existence, of my way of thinking, feeling, and looking at the world.”
Brus Rubio Churay
“(…) My paintings also address social, historical, and political themes that affect my people and Amazonia in general, such as environmental contamination, the crimes of the rubber barons against my ancestors, corruption, and the outside agencies that impose development programs without understanding the local reality.”
Considered as a whole, the work of Brus Rubio allows long silences for daydreaming (but not for romanticism or exoticism.) The viewer goes from the known (let’s say a leaf) to the orange skin of a jaguar made of falling leaves. Suddenly, colorful butterflies alight upon the Milky Way while the Mother bathes beneath the stars. Eroticism and love linger, buzzing above the waters.
He’s projecting thoughts to a screen for me to read.
I’m at his private film of captivity.
He’s watching us. We’re hunched over heaving the sorrow vomit.
Father stands before me
time without fear suspended and apart
unafraid of anything one way or another.
“When did they cut it?” he wants to know
pushing the thought into space between my eyes.
Raising his pant leg where the mortician
smoothed and stretched the salvage skin Father used for padding
his below-knee amputation
hovering inches above the ground glints in his eyes.
He doesn’t remember the amputation
in the bending.
Father shows me his whole leg. Scars
mended and smooth.
He is an uncut body again. Like before the bending place.
Only the graft scars on his thighs remain.
He projects: “I feel my leg here Margo my foot still itches here” Father
points: “in this empty space” he twirls his fingers a slow spiral.
I nod to him: “I see. I’ll remember this for you.”
Artist Statement
At a very young age, I suffered a severe hearing impairment brought on by a runaway fever, poverty, and the intergenerational effects of colonization. At the time, there wasn’t the capacity to know if there was mass interest in the effects of the industrial chemical colonization of the air, land, water, and food systems in which I was raised in southern Texas and in the Texas-Mexico bordered region.
Early on, I made linkages between the settler society’s broad disrespect for and war against the Earth and the aggression we experienced as the local, non-recognized, Indigenous peoples. I didn’t have the language for this then; though, I was gaining intuitive knowing about how the oil-cattle-cotton and extraction economies trickled down toxicity to my body and how illness resulted.
Being Indigenous, poor, from non-recognized Ndé Dene peoples of Kónitsąąíígokíyaa, (aka: Southern Plains Lipan Apaches from the Big Water Country; unceded Aboriginal Title lands in current-day Texas), this also meant that my experiences, understandings, and critique of these interconnections were also linked to difficult histories spoken, or expressed nonverbally, amongst adult family members. Poetics of repressed memory, knowledge, and anxiety about our subjugated and invisible class (non)identity and (non)recognized political personhood raged into the 20th century:
through new Indigenous battle-grounds
waged inside cramped rental houses,
low-wage neighborhoods, school yards,
job sites, compulsory CCD catechism
classes, athletic indoctrinations, Sunday
mass, and public schools with White teachers
and rulers, and rule-line paper, and ruling glares.
through compulsory Brownie and Girl Scout
regimentation, yellow school bus rides, armed check points,
after school detention, signed yellow slips from home,
parents feeling contained in the rule-lined signature line
for their compulsory signing without consenting, that I
am a bad person for telling our people’s version of history,
compulsory silence in classrooms, compulsory seating order
at the back, with another Native and a Black girl,
curfews, canned corn, old tortillas stuck in
frozen wax paper, Halloween stereotypes, hard leather shoe
blisters, jumped by a gaggle of white boys managing
the settler racial architecture of space and place.
First grade in the occupied territory of unceded Lipan Apache homelands,
South Texas.
My work relates my life-long interest in language, history, archives, memory, and Ndé Dene peoples’ resistances and refusals to disappear and go away. My work also engages where and how Ndé Dene peoples have become conditioned into submission to settler supremacy, and where the colonizer’s methods embedded into the colonized. My work, as a truthing instrument, leans toward healing and revitalizing, by way of uncovering the hidden in order for truth to emerge; in order to purpose that which has been hidden and negated to be a vehicle for recovering Ndé Dene peoples’ spirits, well-being, and futurity beyond the non-persons we are imagined to be by colonizers which includes Indigenous peoples. Difficult knowledge and peace building have been core to my art, thinking, and process.
“Difficult knowledge and peace building have been core to my art, thinking, and process.”
By recognizing that genocide—for Ndé Dene peoples—has intricately involved diverse actors and polities, Indigenous genocide in southern Texas has demanded that poetry ascend to different places and strongly opposes genocide being used as a metaphor, or a generic, abstract descriptor. Genocide is an area of research, developed amongst contemporary Ndé Dene scholars, specific and located within groups of my family and kinship society, my immediate ancestors (embodied in the last four generations, between 1872-2019), as well as specific to sites/places of terror, crisis, violence, atrocity, brutality, indignity to the human body, and organized erasure in Kónitsąąíígokíyaa.
In my work, I engage different ways of knowing (epistemology), historicizing, ethics, and valuing to inform my methodology and creative methods to imagine and construct poetry which gives form and voice to non-recognized Indigenous nations. I reference my research on the state, state actors, bystanders, and specific Indigenous polities, organizations and institutions which have contributed to the process of obstructing Ndé Dene peoples’ access to justice. Poetry is a vital form to address histories and voices relegated as disposable and abject.
The cultural, physical, social, and political personhood of peoples of Kónitsąąíígokíyaa is persistently denied in US society into the present. Being deeply involved in three legal cases, between 2007 to 2013, which firmly rejected the state’s normative myth-making regarding US and bystander complicity in perpetuating genocide acts in Ndé Dene peoples’ unceded and Aboriginal Title lands (Texas) during the violent border wall conflict (2007-2009), I find poetry a useful and dynamic tool for stimulating imagery, animating truth-telling, making space for non-western language and knowledge systems, and igniting fire underneath the sedated and numbed consciousness of US-American society.
As a researcher and scholar, I am an archive builder, curator, and papers manager for two branches of Ndé Dene peoples’ historical documents and culturally related objects. In my current projects am making crucial links between Ndé Dene peoples’ difficult knowledge and state power as warehoused within officially sanctioned archives as an important subject for, (currently updated figures), 400 non-federally recognized Indigenous nations whose political personhood and land claims cases are subjected to multiple forms of human rights violations committed in the US today with the sanction of the federal government, state actors, as well as numerous federally recognized political actors today. This is untenable and is a major motivation in my production in and across poetry, visual arts, language activism, theory, and Indigenous rights advocacies.
The subject in these poems shared with the Siwar Mayu online publication is persistent genocide denial, negation, and obfuscation. As well, I’m interested in exploring the roles and memory of bystanders, beneficiaries, and obstructers to the Ndé Dene peoples’ experiences. I’m exploring Ndé Dene historical memory of complicated emotions connected to being forced by the state and its legal institutions, to helplessly witness the US and other tribal polities take control over unceded Ndé Dene peoples’ homelands. My engagement in Ndé Dene language recovery is a crucial act of honoring my ancestors—the genocide survivors and the non-survivors—and a loving act of reclaiming Ndé Dene peoples’ political, cultural, spiritual, and physical belonging with Kónitsąąíígokíyaa, our customary and traditional homeland. By doing so, the poems re-energize the Ndé Dene peoples’ self-determination and larger belonging amongst the Dene Nation. In poetry, the Ndé Dene peoples ascend to identity beyond the legal subjugated status of ‘Apache’, which is the legal synonym for the settler state’s normalizing genocide as an act of settler state sovereign impunity and immunity from accountability, redress, or recognizing responsibility. These things are hinged and interlocking; not separate.
“The memories of Ndé Dene peoples remain within me through my deep familial bonds and connections with a significant and large kinship society which spans Niguusdzán (North America).”
The memories of Ndé Dene peoples remain within me through my deep familial bonds and connections with a significant and large kinship society which spans Niguusdzán (North America). By recovering and decolonizing the legal archives, and re-purposing Ndé Dene language revitalization, I (re)visit intimate familial places in Lipan Apache (Ndé) homelands, in South Texas, eastern New Mexico, and northeastern Mexico. My ancestors’ spatial time-bending emplaces a pictorial language, helping me decipher historical violence felt by Ndé Dene of Texas.
My poetry acknowledges and draws attention to the lingering impacts of historical trauma which saturate Ndé Dene storied landscapes still obscured by aggressive settler colonial erasure. Spirit memory as sentience, landguage, place, despair—the collective internalization of Indigenous spatial exile—influence my understanding of my peoples’ refusal to settle for the abjection we’re experiencing still today as a result of the genocide politics of perpetrators and bystanders. These poems, echoing post-memory of Ndé intergenerational genocide survivors, explores how historical memory of violence disturbs linear settler literary, history, and narrative structures which have denied Ndé Dene peoples our lived experiences, knowledge, and homelands—even after death. My poetry, inter-ribboned with Ndé Dene peoples’ perspectives of herstory and law, emphatically position different realities, existences, and outcomes which the Ndé Dene peoples will into being.—Margo Tamez
César Aguilar Peña, popularly known as Chillico, is one of the most important graphic humorists in Peru. He is the director of the Magazine of Humor, Art and Cartoons Ch’illico, the only graphic humor magazine that has been in force, confronting dictatorships and abuse of power at the national level, for more than 25 years. Chillico burst forth from his native Abancay with his own style: his superior technical mastery of drawing, where color and written text complement one another, render his work bright and sharp.
Laughter is an essential quality in human beings, or in the words of Henri Bergson: “Man is the only animal that laughs.” Without a sense of humor, life would have a mournful atmosphere; we would live in a world of automatons, without emotion, without blood, without the bugs that sting and tickle us. Chillico, through graphic humor posed seriously (the most difficult mixed form to achieve) frees us from our country’s social and political chaos; he drags us out of our sadness, out of tension, fear, apathy and bitterness with a loud unexpected guffaw. Colliding with the common view, against the status quo, social fears, and the “what would they say?” mentality, he demystifies the devotion to snobbery, to mediocrity, and social-climbing. He manages to reveal the hidden, the malevolent, the perverse, and the cynical that disguises itself as deceitful morality. His caricatures help us to see reality, to seek coherence within the chaos. Nothing escapes his paintbrush, not even the Divine; spirit is made flesh, even the sublime reveals the ideological background of power, represented by his wolf-shepherd and his herd of alienated lambs. We ask, what motivates the shepherd to feed and care for his herd? The response reveals to us the false love of the shepherd who keeps, controls, and guides the herd, only to eat them.
Chillico’s artistic sense captures the essential in life, universalizing local and national themes. He caricatures power, bringing irony to the incoherent and daily nonsense of politics. He does this in the cartoon “Tolero,” in which an indignant and disgusted llama hawks a gob of spit at the ex-president—who, during his election campaign, had identified as “cholo” or “authentic indian”, but when he was elected president he supported corruption and alienated himself to foreign tastes and interests. Similarly, Chillico caricatures the current presidents of Brazil and the United States through “Bolsonerón” and “Tramp”, with characters depicted beneath a swastika, “worried” about the state of democracy in Latin America.
His vast production builds a court of humor in which the readers become the judges who will proclaim the final sentence. His is a humor that is neither trivial nor vulgar, it is grown-up humor, humor for serious laughter; it is the humor of the liberator, the emancipator, who helps us to find our own identity and a worthy life. Not only does he liberate us from tensions and emotional disturbance; he also helps us to build a more humane and just world where we can laugh fully at no price and be happy with the permission of no one.
Despite the western biomedical knowledge imposed over the Mayan
culture, Kaqchikel women have learned to keep one foot in modernity and the
other in their historical-cultural roots in order to maintain and legitimize
cultural practices and beliefs that allow them to replicate a principle of
care over their bodies. It is important to remember that the perception of
the construction of bodies and sexuality is not the same in every culture.
LANGUAGE AND BODY
Through language and their mother tongue, Kaqchikel [1] women reflected on perceptions, experiences and feelings that gravitate around the construction of heterosexual sexuality. The vehicle that allowed them to speak openly was trust. Based on trust, a dialogue was achieved, and good personal relationships were established.
[1] It is important to undertake an analysis that goes beyond gender in order to show other identities and realities present not just in Comalapa (the municipality where the research was conducted), but in Guatemalan
society at large.
The colloquial language captured in this text, made up of feminine
words, trickles in in the form of stories; it responds to forms of expression,
metaphors and jokes through which the experience of feelings such as love,
pain, suffering or desire is transmitted.
This language portrays diverse ideas and different ways of looking at life and expressing sexuality. The Kaqchikel language imposes other categories and, most of the time, another way of looking at the world. It also involves a model of appropriation through words that denote an understanding of sexuality and human corporeality linked to nature and culture. Kaqchikel language prioritizes collectivity. It only communicates knowledge if it is associated with the possibility of experience. For example, children and young teenagers should not know about sex, because if they learn about this subject, they will surely practice it. For this same reason, it is feared that talking about sexuality with young people will put information at their disposal that will need to be tested. On the other hand, currently the Comalapenses [2] usually express their ideas in two languages: Kaqchikel and Spanish. In both languages, the networks of power that are embedded in words and that correspond to the dominant ideology are evident, and uphold the discourses, stereotypes and normalization of heterosexuality. The latter is identified as a political system that can be questioned in order to decolonize the bodies and sexuality of indigenous women precisely because a patriarchal domination system depends upon the subjection of women through forced heterosexuality.
[2] San Juan Comalapa is a Kaqchikel town located in the
municipality of Chimaltenango, a province located in the center of Guatemala.
The Kaqchikel language has specific signs, symbols and feelings to
communicate its idea of human corporeality, but first and foremost it conceives the body as a
whole, whose parts are interconnected. A trilogy that interrelates body, mind
and spirit is one of the ways to understand the human being. These three
elements form a unity, and if they are fragmented, it causes an imbalance in
the person’s life. This indigenous worldview perceives the body as a living
being, with energies, feelings and needs; basically, those related to nutrition
and physical and mental health; however very little is said about the body’s
desires. For some Mayan women (who have completed higher education), the
meaning of the body is linked to self-esteem, because taking care of their body
“is a way of regaining self-esteem, because they feel the need to love and take
care of themselves,” which also consists of “giving up pain and suffering and
learning to love each other.” (Chirix García, 2003: 184)
In reflecting on the Kaqchikel language and the body in Comalapa,
I have found that there is still an abundant terminology to speak about
sexuality and the body. When one says jari ruch’akul, it means
“her/his/their body”, and jarirutiyojil refers to “fat”. In identifying
the intimate parts of the body indirect terms related to nature are used: the
male genital organ (penis) is identified as tzik’in (bird) or rab’aj
achin (man’s organ). The female genital organ (vulva) is called in several
ways: rab’aj ixoq, meske’l (cat) or ru tutz’. There are
also double entendre expressions about some parts of the body; for example,
jokingly or metaphorically, the vagina is related to the mouth; it is possible
to say ri jun ixok’ k’o ka’i’ ruchi’, which means “the woman has two
mouths.”
The heart is privileged as one of the important centers of the
human body: it represents the person and is named ranima. The heart is
identified as the main seat of reason and feelings, so it is common to hear
expressions such as kan k’i nuna’ri wanima (my heart is happy), chke’
nubij awanima (what is your heart saying?) or noqa’ pa awanma chke xin
bij apochawe (remember in your heart what I told you that time). Heart pain
is not physically located in the location of this organ, but in the pit of the
stomach, since the understanding of anatomy and physiology used is not western.
In this way of knowing, things or plants also have their soul or their heart: ruk’u’x
kem is translated as “heart of the textile, the essence, el
nawal”, and ruk’u’x che’ refers to “heart of the tree, the essence,
the tree’s core.”
Generally speaking, talking about sexuality between women, between men, or in mixed spaces – women and men – causes laughter and nervousness, both indicating there is pleasure involved when dealing with the topic. [3] What has been observable is that some women feel pleasure in talking about this taboo. In groups where there is enough trust, this topic is explored in casual chat and in jokes and jests. In this way, between jokes, Kaqchikel people express their feelings, emotions and experiences. The joke is based on what looks like a phallus or a vulva. Some women and young people joked, expressing freedom and delight, giving free rein to their imagination and the feeling of joy.
[3] The expression of laughter can be observed in informal
conversations between people and, especially, in the q’ejelonik (collective and festive meeting).
Analogies are used to talk jokingly about sex: mes (cat), saq’ul
(banana), ki’ (delicious), ik (chile). Throughout my fieldwork I
recorded many two-way expressions or jokes with sexual connotation. For
example, when women cooked chiles, some said: “Ay kan chix wa’ an, tzawi ri
ik kan poralgo kan kiäq’ jajaja” (Oh how ugly it is, oh, this chile is
so big and red! hehehe). This expression invited everyone to laugh. Faced with
the joke, women with conservative thinking reacted with disapproving gestures
and scolding. Two of them expressed themselves like this: “Oh so disgusting, they
are already adults and look what they are teaching!” Another elderly woman
added: “We come to work, not to laugh! There must be respect here!”, but a lady
from the non-conservative group replied calmly: “We’re just joking.”
Women laugh and, after a moment, one takes up the subject again
and adds another funny expression. They laugh again and continue the
conversation with new jokes, until someone changes the subject. The most
liberal women, with more experience and with a sense of humor, are those who make
funny comments and guide the conversation in the group, during which a process
of feedback of the joke occurs.
The kaqchikel language is rich in meanings regarding sexuality
when speaking about the body which proves the interest that this topic arouses.
These expressions, which are communicated in everyday contexts, are samples of
the collective and cultural expressions that language adopts to approach
sexuality in an informal and festive tone. To delve into what has been said, I
present here more expressions of this nature recorded in the fieldwork:
While speaking about bananas, a woman invites: “Qa ch’olo’ ri saq’ ulk’a” (let’s peel the banana), and another one replies: “who knows if this banana will endure” while she shows a soft or overly ripe banana. A third woman suggests: “It would be good if you pass a little bit of copal smoke on it, it will straighten out”, and they all laugh.
While speaking about tamales, a woman asks: “Tiba’na’ utzil nib’anta nim rak’än ri suba’n, kan rak’än tzik’in nib’anche’ haha” (can you please make the tamale long as the size of a penis? ha ha), and with the movement of the hand when doing the tamale she says: “Kan na sirisape” (how you round it!); the other women give in laughing and someone adds: “Ay rat la’ utz nana’ what nib’an chawe” (ah! you like what they do to you), and they continue laughing.
Drawn from colloquial language, the examples above express
personal tastes and a relationship with sexual pleasure and the body.
There are different expressions to speak directly about sexual
intercourse such as nab’än achk na’ (you are doing something) and nak’än
apo ruwäch jun achin (you are hanging out with a man; this is said by a
mother to a daughter, or one woman to another woman). The expression xa
yiq’ojoman (I’m playing music) was said by a man during the
interviews.
Among the expressions that invite sexual intercourse are yatin
roqij pa ch’at (I throw you in bed) and yatin chop (I will grab
you). These expressions are generally said by men. According to different
women, when they are invited to have a sexual relationship they are told jo’
pa awän (let’s go to the cornfield) or jo’ chuwa xan (let’s go to
the wall). This last expression is used by youth. One way of expressing it
respectfully is tasipaj jub’a chuwä (give me some). Women also
talk about the bold offerings of some men; expressions such as ninb’än jub’a
chawä (someone will give you a little). When they refer to the attitude of
women they say xb’an kan chre ixoq’ (or she got some?). When a woman has
desires, nrajo’ jub’a ri ixoq cha’ (that woman wants something) or tasipaj
jub’a chwä (give me some).
CHANGES IN THE BODY AND HOW TO TAKE CARE OF IT
In the case of teenage girls, the body changes, different feelings
are born, and the connection with sensuality begins. One of the interviewees
refers to how two strong events in her life – the earthquake and the civil war
– turned off her memory and feelings about the changes in her body. Victoria
told us her situation:
“Oh, I don’t remember because of the stress we had, the earthquake, the violence, I only remember when my period came and I was very scared because I had nothing to wear, there was no underwear, I seldom wore any. I didn’t realize when my breasts grew, I felt no shame because almost nobody told me anything, they never prepared us for that.”
Marta, on the contrary, was aware of her changes and this allowed
her to make comparisons: “Ah, anyway one says xinok wa läq ixöq re, xeki’iy
pe nutz’um, that’s how it is, my breasts grew, I am no longer a girl.”
The growth of a part of her body marked the transition from girl to adult.
In the teenage years, mothers are the ones who verbalize
prohibition, fear and denial. What is behind fear and the prohibited? What are
the institutions that create and reproduce this fear and the forbidden? When no
argument can be made, the NO is chosen, and denial is interpreted as rejection,
exclusion, dismissal, a barrier, which produces more gaps and boundaries, and
separates what is united. In power relations, denial is important because it
does not support the foundation of freedom to know about the theme of sexuality
and to acquire knowledge about its practice.
In the teenage years, recommendations based on danger are
reinforced by the mother:
“You have to take care of your body, nobody should touch you, it is dangerous if someone touches you once, and even worse if it’s after your period. Quickly you’ll get pregnant.” She told me that if it’s that time of the month for a woman, she gets pregnant right away. Just as one has experience now, with three or four, one learns.”
Both the mother and some cultural practices have been responsible
for the normalization of women’s behavior, but sometimes in the messages they
convey, contradictory perspectives can be identified. For example, it is common
to hear expressions such as “No fucker will take advantage of my daughter ” and
at the same time expressions such as “A woman has to obey her husband, she must
not raise her voice to him, he is the one with authority.” These contradictory
statements illustrate the possibilities for social behavior to be followed by
indigenous women: either they become the eternal servants of their husbands or
they lead the journey for rebelling against the patriarchal
control.
Mothers, culture and the church provide patterns of behavior that
lead to prohibition. It is common to hear expressions such as “you
shouldn’t see”, “you must not touch yourself there”, “you
must not drink”, “you must not feel ticklish”, “you
shouldn’t be alone with a man or with male family members, even less with
strangers”, “you must not pay attention to the ladino (mix-race
person) because he will never marry you”, “be careful with drunks [in
the street], they make you believe that they are inebriated to fondle
you.”
Power also applies the Law of Prohibition. Law and the church
reinforce the validity of prohibitions to maintain the status quo since those
institutions require relationships based on domination. In the framework of morality,
the forbidden becomes a synonym of fear, danger, and is associated with sin.
Therefore, the principle of care, which drives people’s health and life,
becomes a mechanism to control and to freeze freedom, pleasure and love.
Estela, the youngest of the women interviewed, shares her
experience: when she began to feel the changes in her body, she began to give
importance to the care of her hair, feet and nails because she “likes they
look good”. She is one of the interviewees who has high self-esteem and
demonstrates it in the assessment towards her own body:
“I like to take care of myself and sometimes I joke to my friends: ‘I am very pretty’, then I say:’I have self-esteem.’ I like how I am, because most women say: ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like the other’, but I feel good, I love myself as I am. I accept my body as it is. I saw that my body was beautiful [laughs], but when you are a girl it is normal for the body to be straight and then I began to notice curves, widened hips, that’s all I can remember.”
One motivation to be positive in life is the ability to appreciate
the body and accept it as it is. Another factor that helped her in satisfying
her curiosity was that her family did not hide the theme of sexuality from her.
Censorship on this issue motivates people, especially children and adolescents,
to resort to other means that do not inform but misinform. Generally, women who
belong to poor families and who perform multiple activities to survive do not
realize the changes their daughters experience, while other mothers forbid them
from dressing nicely in order to avoid the eyes of men. Stories and experiences
of indigenous women are diverse, and it is necessary to make them visible to
understand their reality.
BODY CARING WOMEN
Midwives or female body specialists are still recognized. In many
families, their word is still heard; they are recognized as the ancestral
authority that gives specialized attention to female bodies.
All midwives pray before starting their work in the tuj (temascal) [4]. They invoke the spirit-keeper of the tuj and of the fire also, so they both will give health to the woman’s body and avoid complications, such as fainting. For the women’s bath, the “tusa” (made of corn cob husks) is still used, and it must be large in order to call forth steam.
[4] On the temascal or steam bath in Guatemala see Virkki, 1962.
The tol [5] is also used to cover women’s faces and to protect them from the heat. Midwives also continue using tallow soap or black soap, with which they not only clean the body, but also, thanks to the effect of circular motion, stimulate blood circulation in places of the body that are cold or tense.
[5] A container made of jícara that has several uses in the kitchen and in the temascal. It is used by women.
Victoria tells of her experience:
“I have used the tuj, I have bathed with several midwives, because I remember that they told me that my uterus had descended, and when that happens, it hurts, and they recommended the temascal to me since it relieves the pain a little. Then I tried it with six or seven different midwives. They all bathe differently. I had the opportunity to meet them, out of need.”
Midwives identify uterus prolapse through the following symptoms:
pain in the belly, sometimes back pain and, in addition to difficulties in
walking, feet that are almost numb when walking. In kaqchikal, the uterus
prolapse is called xq’a apam, or xuya’ vuelta a pam or rob’olqotin
ri’ ruk’u’x apam (your belly descended, your uterus turned over.)
It is customary to place long benches inside the temascal [6] where one can sit or lie down. The woman who takes the bath will receive her treatment lying down, an adequate position for the midwife to give her massages. The woman, at the end of the bath, can approve or disapprove of the work of the midwife, but generally this is the expression she says: “This lady does know how to bathe.”
[6] In recent years the temascal has undergone a process of extinction due to spatial, economic and cultural factors. Families do not have enough space to build a temascal nor resources to invest in its construction. Furthermore, health personnel with their “modernizing” ideas have discredited the use of the temascal.
The encounter between women’s bodies, care of the female body by
another woman is one of the expressions of the principle of care: “We bathed
together with the midwife, for me it was not so strange, to see ourselves as
women, maybe because we are already mature”, “there is no shame, no, nothing,
and she knew how to bathe me well, that first temascal warmed me up, I liked
her.”
Throughout the interviews I was able to identify knowledge and
techniques that midwives still apply today:
Entrance: the midwife prays to the tuj’s grandmother or its nawal and the fire.
When the midwife throws water to the stones, steam rises; at that precise moment the midwife puts a wet cloth or a tol on the face of the woman who receives the care.
The moment of the massage: the midwife gives massage using a tallow soap. She starts with breasts, then stomach, belly and legs. She raises the woman’s legs and hit the soles of her feet with her fist or soap. She also hits the woman’s hands. She blows in some parts of the woman’s body in order to get cold air out and hot air in.
Exit: it is recommended to lie down, “it is important to rest, lie down and sleep for a while”. In the process of relaxing hot drinks or beer are shared.
Sensation: “I feel like a new woman.”
Midwives recommend drinking beverages and tea from medicinal
plants. If the disease is diagnosed as cold, it is advisable to drink some hot
tea. For girls and boys who urinate at night, due to something other than a
psychological problem, such as if they are cold in the stomach, are advised to
use the tuj. It is well known that another benefit of the tuj is that it
stimulates the production of breast milk. Chest massage has this goal. The
oldest of the interviewees said that she had plenty of milk, it would spill;
sometimes she tried to take it out to prevent the formation of bodoques (hard
balls around her breasts) and prevent mastitis or breast infection. She
wonders:
“Why do women no longer have enough milk and why the use of pachas (bottles)? Before women had a lot of milk, but now who knows why they don’t have it anymore, what did these women do I wonder [that] they are using the bottle. Before going to the mountain, I gave milk to my son and when I returned, my breasts hurt, a whole day of work in the mountains, I helped the man to work, I had plenty of milk.”
Women who were already mothers used to give milk to a child who
needed it. Sometimes the mother had to be absent and the other women in
solidarity breastfed the girl or the boy who cried out of hunger. In the last
three decades, indigenous women who have opted for wage labor are forced to
bottle feed their babies.
The elements that correspond to the subjective part of the
benefits of the tuj and the relationship it maintains with the bodies are also
relevant. The meeting between a midwife and a woman who receives special care
is an encounter between the healer and the woman who is the subject of healing,
and is a congregation of two female bodies. Naked bodies express a type of
communication. Women value the experience of female healers, and they hide or
bury shame, allowing themselves to be sheltered by the trust and security that
the midwife inspires. Women who receive this care gain a sense of well-being
and freedom. Midwives have the ability to identify the geography of pain or
well-being in the body. They clean any negative energies and reinforce positive
energies. Therefore, the temascal is considered as the place that contributes
to the spiritual, mental and physical cleansing of people.
Girls and boys who have had the opportunity to experience the
temascal construct a body sense and nudity that is without morbidity. Acquiring
a very human concept of the body from its own discovery and the perception of
other bodies constitutes the basis for the construction of respect for female
or male bodies. The tuj is a space where you can observe human difference, in
terms of male and female bodies, and also generational differences: children’s
bodies, teenagers, old and young. To apprehend this diversity is to understand
that bodies are different in size, color, and also in smell. This set of
elements constitutes the basic material for the construction of richer concepts
and more human relationships in societies, not only in Mayan culture but in
other cultures that have made pain sacred and have buried pleasure.
If children’s perception of the female body is stimulated in the
tuj at an early age, they may discard stereotypes and other misconceptions that
induce the objectification of the woman’s body. In the tuj, without much talk,
the bodies communicate, which allows clarifying doubts and prejudices, and
invites us to reflect on the urgent need to know who we are, without clothes
that hide us, and to strengthen our identities. The social construction of the
body usually reflects difference and when it is perceived from a dominant
model, social inequalities and injustices are embedded in its discourse and
attitudes, for example, when large bodies are valued at the expense of small
bodies, or white bodies at the expense of colored bodies. Some cultures have
been founded beneath this umbrella of this superiority.
The health of the body of Comalapan Maya women depends on some
humanizing social practices that promote the life and well-being of people but,
above all, on the care lavished by the hands, knowledge and wisdom of midwives.
They have been the ones who have strengthened the principle of care among
women. The work of body caregivers is more of an expression of resistance than
a maintenance of “tradition”, as it has been perceived by modernist
anthropologists. This resistance lies in the reproduction and experience of ancestral
practices that promote life.
Several informants maintain positive memories in relation to the
use of the temascal. Victoria recounts her experience as a child:
“I remember when we bathed, we were little. I came to spy on the temascal, they used just one blanket like this, it would have been better if they had covered everything, but it half hung. I would come to spy on those who were bathing. My mother’s or my grandmother’s breasts were (this big), their breasts hung and they would all bathe in there, and when they would finish, they took them [the kids] out one by one.”
Generally it is women, especially mothers, who take care of
bathing the little ones. Tuj bathing is another female practice; those
responsible for bathing girls and boys are mothers. At that age, the
interviewees, being girls, saw the collective women’s bathroom as normal. From
childhood, Marta has always used the tuj, and has always relied on its
benefits. She is currently using the tuj with her children.
When women have a life partner, the two usually enter the tuj. In
that first tuj experience together there is a bit of shame, but little by
little it disappears: “One body looks at the other and is different from the
other body, when you are first intimate with a man it is not the same, it feels
bad, but not after.” In the tuj they learn to practice reciprocity, the
woman lathers with soap and scrubs the man’s back and he does the same with
her: “Because one cannot scrub one’s own back with his or her own hand,
one cannot.” This practice in kaqchikel is called ninjos a wij (I
scratch your back).
The tuj is considered as a space to appreciate bodies, smells and
nudity. Regarding the appreciation of nudity, men said they felt no shame:
“You hardly feel anything, you look at your body, you look at the other,
you almost don’t feel anything.” The oldest in the group of respondents
said the same. Jesusa married at approximately 20 years old, in 1942, and she
tells us: “Yes, I bathed him, so what is wrong with that? We live together, so
I wash his back, I bathe him with paxte, lather him, and he does the
same to me, we were not ashamed. If someone comes in then one does feel
embarrassed but since it was just us two, then no.”
The tuj has been a place where people bathe, appreciate bodies,
where a couple shares intimacy, where you can ask about the body and where
women are taken care of by midwives after childbirth.
One issue I want to expand upon here is in regard to the benefits
of tuj. Many generations have transmitted cultural knowledge and practices
related to the tuj through oral narration. Among the Kaqchikel families, the
tuj or temascal is advised not only for personal hygiene, but also as a remedy
for diseases that have a cold origin or when someone “has been hit by air.”
It serves to calm muscle contractions and body aches caused by emotional stress
or cold; it corrects circulation problems; it prevents and corrects varicose
veins and low blood pressure; accelerates the healing process of a wound;
relieves respiratory problems; it is useful during pregnancy and postpartum. It
is a space that heals, cleanses and purifies the body and spirit, and is
conducive to having sex.
Approaching corporeality through language implies being attentive
to life stories, perceptions, experiences, power relations, signs, symbols,
metaphors, jokes, nudity, body transformations, violence, pleasures; this
allows you to approach places where other ways of perceiving are possible and
where the body is accepted without fear.
Corporality expressed in one’s own language, connected to nature,
with the logic of temperature — cold-hot — and interrelated with intimacy and
respect are factors and values that are expressed daily, despite the
sexism, violence and objectification of bodies and communities present in
families.
Among the kaqchikeles, ancestral ideas, values and beliefs that stimulate the taking care of bodies are saved and practiced, and it
is women who nurture the continuity of these ideas and social practices. From
childhood and under the principle of care you learn to watch over the body and
bodies. The tuj or temascal is perceived as a physical and social space that
contributes to satisfying bodily needs. Women legitimize its usefulness because
it continues to grant life and well-being to people and communities. Women,
tuj, language, midwives and a critical analysis are elements that energize an
indigenous worldview and constantly challenge a modernist thinking of the body.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL PARTS OR BODY HISTORY?
One way to approach the ancestral knowledge of the body is through the “archaeological pieces”, as they are called in archeology and western anthropology. These disciplines give an account of the conception of the body in pre-Hispanic times. The pieces found and saved from the general destruction that indigenous books and documents were victims of are an objective sample of how pre-Hispanic cultures looked at the human figure, but they are also body representations that take us back to the past to understand the present. The ancient Mayan, Nahua, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Huasteca cultures have bequeathed us artistic expressions in which it is possible to appreciate the human figure. The same happens in ancient Peru with the Salinar, Vicús, Virú and Mochica cultures. [7] Many of these manifestations not only show the human figure, but erotic signs and images, without a negative or sinful sense. Human images and figures offer different readings of the universe and the body. Each of the body parts expresses relationships and tensions with the cosmos. On a subjective level, these human figures invite us to alter ethnic and generic consciousness because they allow analysis of not only history and culture, but also of individual and collective identity. In my personal case, these figures reflect my status of belonging, and are part of my culture, because the men and women represented by them were my people. They are my fellow kind, my ancestors, because I descend from them, I am a Mayan woman. These figures lead us to reflect and articulate the past, or our past, with the present, or our present.
[7] To illustrate the meaning of the body of pre-Hispanic
cultures, I relied on Praise of the Mesoamerican body, magazine-book number 69 of Arts of Mexico (2004), and Erotic Art in Ancient Perú (Larco Herrera, 1998), edited by the Archaeological Museum of that country. Many of the archaeological pieces exhibited in the aforementioned number of Arts of Mexico are currently in the Regional Museum of Guadalajara, the National Museum of Nayarit and the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico. The Anthropology Museum of Guatemala also stores several pieces of the human figure of the Maya.
Another way to enrich knowledge about the body is through history. It is important to note how some historians are contributing to the understanding of the sense of the body. Elvira Sánchez-Blake [8] analyzes the image of the body and what it represents historically:
[8] A Colombian social communicator.
The opening scene of Américo Vespucio before a naked woman who incorporates herself from the hammock is the point from which Michel de Certeau departs to develop his theory of the writing of history. This image prefigures the discourse of colonization, the representation of the New World, America, as the naked woman’s body – the blank page – where history is written, and the conformation of the nation state from that body-text. This establishes the relationship between body-text-nation, the basis of literary and historiographic study. In the specific case of Latin America, due to their historical and geographical circumstances, and the effect of colonization, these factors will play a decisive role in their political and social development. (Sánchez-Blake, 2001: 7)
Analyzing the body from a historical and political point of view
allows the invasion of the new world to be remembered. This fact imposed a
sexual model and a beauty model. In this regard, Miguel Güémez Pineda points
out: “Western beauty models have been imposed and their male and female
prototypes are governed by European physical features such as white skin, blond
hair and light eyes” (Güémez Pineda, 2000: 314). This Western influence, which
Güémez Pineda defines as “the coloration of the body,” implied
silence for indigenous women, running over it, its use as cheap labor, and
living tied to servitude and slavery, monogamy and the construction of
mestizaje ideology, an ideology that “was made based on the exploitation and
rape of indigenous and black women. The women were always instrumentalized to
satisfy the sexual appetite of the white man and thus ensure the mixture of
blood to improve the breed. Whitening policy fed and promoted by incipient
states” (Curiel, 2007: 98) to legitimize exploitation, servitude and domestic
work.
Regarding the conception of the body, it is important to remember
how the Spaniards were scandalized by the nakedness of the natives, how
Columbus felt “scandalized by the nakedness of the other.” (Todorov, 1989: 47)
Institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the body were established,
whose purpose was to turn people into a moralizing social being and that
motivated the rationalization of pain, guilt, punishment, exploitation, double
standards and fear of pain.
The first to question the nakedness of the Indians was the small
group of Spaniards who invaded the territory, but the most moralistic were the
Spanish priests, who questioned the fact that the Indians wore so little
clothing. Colon narrates his encounter with the inhabitants of these lands:
“These people are very meek and very fearful, naked as I have said,
without weapons and without law (…) the Indians resemble each other because
they are all naked, deprived of distinctive characteristics (…) particularly
those belonging to a lower social strata.” (Todorov, 1989: 44) (It should be
remembered that attire was another sign of social position). The Dominican
chronicler Tomás de la Torre stated that in the Tzotzil town of Zinacantán,
Chiapas, the men went naked, and when the cold or a party forced them to dress,
they wore only a knotted blanket over their shoulders. For his part, his
co-religionist Ximénez pointed out that in Guatemala, dresses “were so few
that they can hardly be called such.” (Ruz, 1996)
There are more recent examples of the disapproval of nakedness and of ideological imposition. The women of Cahabón (Guatemala) previously did not cover their breasts, and now the only one who continues to dress in this way is one grandmother. The Poqoman women of Palín used to wear a short huipil that covered only their breasts until General Ubico ordered them to wear long huipiles. [9] Faced with the dilemma that nakedness unleashes in which on the one hand the desire and freedom to show the body persists, and on the other, in this oppressive society, mitigating freedom with the objectification of the body of women is easier, whether indigenous or mestiza.
[9] This story is currently told by the Poqoman women of Palín. A young woman tells how this change happened. Poqoman women used to sell fruit to the vans that went to the south coast, and by offering their fruits in baskets over their heads, the huipil was lifted, leaving their breasts uncovered. On one of his tours, General Ubico observing this expression of nakedness, did not agree with it and ordered women to cover their breasts.
For indigenous men, nakedness creates an ambivalence that fluctuates between the desire to see and at the same time to hide the body. In Ladino men, it provokes a racial ambivalence that, together with anxiety, is expressed in jokes that underlie a base of mockery that suggests a self-betrayal that calls into question their Indian side. According to Diana Nelson, the jokes:
[…] help understand the diverse and complex ways in which ethnic and national political bodies rely on gender. The traditional costume of Mayan women occupies a prominent place in jokes and seems to mark a space of particular ambivalence or challenge to the notions of national ethnic identity […] that is why the corte (or the long wrap skirt of Mayan women) is a topic of particular interest in jokes, in many of them with the idea of ”unwrapping it.” (Nelson, 2006: 298) [10].
[10] Diana M. Nelson makes an in-depth analysis of the gender issue in the ethnic-national issue in her book Man Ch’itïl. A finger in the wound: political and political bodies of the body in Guatemala of the Fifth Centenary (2006).
In racial ambivalence, Nelson continues, “the jokes allow
ladinos to satisfy their opposite instincts” (Nelson, idem). There is the
symbolism of undressing indigenous women in order to send the following
message: “Look, she doesn’t ‘have it’.” This also reflects the
“ladino fear”, the fear of seeing what you don’t want to see. In
racial ambivalence two ideas are combined, on the one hand, the symbolism of
undressing indigenous women to affirm that they have a desirable body, but what
a pity that this body is that of an Indian.
Oppressive, conservative and moralistic thinking has forced indigenous Christian women to cover themselves and dress “like the Virgin Mary,” but other women, especially younger women, have transgressed these conservative ways of dressing in order to show a body freely owned. Some women have started the fashion of using huipiles with a lower neck, or raising the hem to show the “yams” or calves. The women of the Q’eqchi’ people, who live in a warm climate, take off their huipil and expose their necks and shoulders. Another way to expose the body freely is to breastfeed by showing the breast, since Mayan women do not cover themselves or hide their young ones with “mantillas” [11].
[11] A recommended reading: Marilyn Yalom's Breast Story(1997).
Indigenous people learned to see themselves with moralistic eyes and to submit. The rooting of this perspective changed the concept of nakedness and sexuality. Another vision was applied, another value system, another way of dressing. [12] They were instructed to live sexuality as a sin, as dirty and impure, as something private and as a shameful activity: “Thus, the concepts of transgression and immorality were emptied of sexual delight.” (Ruz, 1996: 6) The human body was considered unworthy of enjoying pleasure.
[12] This statement is not made with the aim of legitimizing the version of the Ladino domination that states that the current indigenous attire was imposed by the Spaniards because this argument, paraphrasing Diana Nelson: is to strip indigenous people of their garb and of the fact that the body shows national equality. It is possible that the encomenderos uniformed their Indians, but they did not create the Mayan designs.
Another element of analysis in the perception of the colonizers towards the natives is the following: they saw Indians as things, “because after all, they are also part of the landscape.” (Ruz, 1996: 26) This thought is still alive and is reproduced by criollos, mestizos and some state institutions. The Guatemalan Tourism Institute (Inguat) and the Ixchel Museum, specifically, continue to see the attire of Mayan women and bodies with indigenous dress as part of the landscape [13]. That is why it is important to reveal the history of sexuality, because revealing it implies undressing history and confronting a reality of submission to indigenous peoples by the State, private initiative and NGOs that work with a folkloric and patronizing perspective.
[13] No indigenous weaver participates in the board of
directors of the Ixchel Museum; all of its members are “white” women who live off of Mayan art.
However, despite the invasion, evangelization, colonial life,
modernity and capitalism, both the Indigenous worldview and the resistance of
indigenous women come alive in the construction of autonomy and
self-determination of communities and bodies. The human body that is mentioned today
in Mayan languages is interrelated with nature and the
cosmos, but it has not been associated with the territory, because doing so
implies seeing the body as a political body and the territory as a woman’s
body, because in wars and in the process of colonization, the ultimate
representation of invasion has been the penetration or rape of women, and in
this case of indigenous women. It is necessary to remember how “in patriarchal
culture, women are seen as the property of men, and, in the context of war, as
the property of the enemy, which, like all other properties, is expropriated
and destroyed in order to weaken the enemy.” (Actoras de Cambio Consortium,
2006: XIV)
So far, the indigenous movement and indigenous women’s organizations have not delved into this issue departing from the invasion in the processes of assimilation and in the recent war in Guatemala, [14] and we must not forget the daily sexual violence indigenous women continue to be subjected to by indigenous, mestizo and white men.
[14] There is a significant contribution written by mestiza Guatemalan Women in the book, Rompiendo el silencio. Justicia para las víctimas de violencia sexual durante el conflicto armado en Guatemala (Actoras de Cambio Consortium, 2006).
To recall a sense of the body through human figures from a critical perspective allows us to rescue the memory, not to stay in the past, but as a way to link that past with the present in order to understand the diversity of cultures, but also the diversity of knowledges and truths about bodies. Social groups, especially those who identify as indigenous, have defined corporeality through their worldview, and this has been the privileged place from which to express a dialogue with the world. [15]
[15] On this subject see also García, 2000.
About the translators
Gloria E. Chacón is
Associate Professor in the Literature Department at UCSD. Both her research and
teaching focus on indigenous literatures, autonomy, and philosophy. She is the
author of Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab’awil and the Making of Maya and
Zapotec Literatures (2018). She is currently working on her second book
tentatively titled Metamestizaje, Indigeneity, and Diasporas: Challenging
Cartographies. She is co-editor of Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces,
Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America by Arizona Press
(2019). She is also co-editing an anthology Teaching Central American
Literature in a Global Context for MLA’s Teaching Options Series. Chacón’s
work has appeared in anthologies and journals in Canada, Colombia, Germany,
Mexico, and the USA. She has co-edited a special issue on indigenous literature
for DePaul’s University academic journal, Diálogo.
Juan G. Sánchez Martínez is originally from Bakatá (the Colombian Andes). He is the author of Memoria e invención en la poesía de Humberto Ak’abal (Abya-Yala, 2011) He is co-editor of several collaborative projects dedicated to Abya-Yala’s literatures: Arte, Literatura y Cine Indígena Frente al Extractivismo en Latinoamérica (Diálogo 22.1), The Five Cardinal Points in Contemporary Indigenous Literatures (Diálogo 19.1), K’obéen. Indigenous subjectivities in Latin American Literatures (RCEH 39.1), Indigenous Message on Water (IWFWP, 2014), and Poetics and Politics of Indigenous Americas (Cuadernos de Literatura 22). In 2016 he won the National Prize for Literature in Colombia, awarded by the University of Antioquia, with his book Altamar. He is Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where he works in the Department of Languages and Literatures, and collaborates with the American Indian and Indigenous Studies program.
Walter Paz Joj is an ajtz’ib (a Maya Kaqchikel scribe), a designer, musician and community leader in Pan Ajache’l (Sololá, Iximulew/Guatemala). Like many young people in Iximulew, Paz Joj is revitalizing the tz’ib’ (in its form of gliphs/epigraphs) with which the ancients painted the codices, sculpted the rocks, and registered the cycles of the heavenly bodies and of the peoples. In 1997, the Q’anjob’al Mayan writer Gaspar Pedro González explained that tz’ib’ “covers the distinct modes of thought through the use of signs, symbols, colors, weaves, and lines.” Since that time, the force of tz’ib has multiplied, bringing into question the patriarchy of alphabetic writing. Today, Paz Jojs’ tz’ib serves as a bridge between the amatle-paper and the electronic screen: the ukux (heart) of his illustrations challenges the understanding of time as linear. (Juan G. Sánchez Martínez)
My work is based on and inspired by the form of ancient Maya writing (tz’ib). It seeks to represent, in my own way and my own style, ideas, feelings, and emotions as a Maya kaqchikel. I come from Pan Ajache’l, Sololá, within Lake, Atitlán, Guatemala. I am dedicated to researching and sharing the ancient Maya writing through its function and use, as well as in its artistic application, so that it might serve as inspiration for all Maya people who are interested in contributing to the revitalization and use of Mayan hieroglyphic writing from their own territories, ways of thinking, and languages. I have also dedicated space to music through the re-creation of ceramic instruments, invoking forms of expression through sound that were created by the ancestors.
The themes in my illustrations are varied and are always dedicated to an element of nature, a person, or a way of thinking- philosophy, language, territory, among other elements- all based in my own practice of maya thought and life.
In my consideration, every illustration/drawing represented with tz’ib’ possesses a heart, an essence, that allows it to take on a life of its own. The illustration/drawing is not merely observed as a decorative thing, since its function, aside from being a form of communication, also possesses a reason for being and existing that reminds us and allows a link that unites us, the present day Maya with our ancestors, the Maya of the past, leaving no doubt that we possess an ancient and valuable past, and that despite the intent of the extermination, we still continue living and contributing, from our spaces, to life, to life’s protection, to life’s happiness.
As an ajtz’ib’ (Maya scribe) I do not consider Maya writing to separate itself from the spiritual, the material, from living, language, music, art, weaving, or from philosophy, all of the expressions that sustain the cultural legacy that brings us into being, existing, and expressing ourselves from within ourselves.
The use and revitalization of the written Maya hieroglyphs (tz’ib’) is also an act of protest and resistance that assures that we do not forget our history, our legacy, and that we express that we are living Maya people with much to contribute to the collective good.
We are contemporary Maya who paint/draw with the heart and who speak out through the ancient signs and forms. As our ancestors did, we paint/draw in order to tell our story.
About the translator
Lorrie Jayne is a poet, translator, writer, and educator from the desert border region of the United States. She teaches Spanish and Portuguese in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina in Asheville, NC. Lorrie’s interests include poetry, plants and healing, memoir, Amazonian literature, and intercultural communication. She lives with her husband and daughters in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina.
Roderico Y. Diaz is an independent photojournalist and documentary videographer who has worked in the areas of photo-documentary, photojournalism, and documentary for fifteen years. He has focused his work primarily on the path of people from indigeneous communities who search for justice and reparation after surviving the genocide in Guatemala (1960-1996).
This 2013 short documentary addresses the historical trial for genocide against retired generals José Efraín Ríos Montt and José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, as well as the brave and constant struggle of witnesses and survivors of the genocide in various communities of the country to keep the charges against Ríos Montt and Sánchez alive and to continue working for justice. It also shows the impact and reactions generated at the national and international level as a result of the court verdict.
Here, in the artist’s own words, are some of the elements that guide Roderico’s work:
First of all, I am a descendent of an indigenous, Maya Kaqchikel family. My parents and grandparents were ‘mozos colonos’ (indigenous slaves) and workers on coffee plantations. I was born on a coffee plantation, owned by Dutch families, at the end of the 1970’s, and have experienced directly the effects of colonization and the forced displacement and violence provoked by the genocide in Guatemala.
Secondly, despite the fact that historically indigenous peoples have been subjected to colonization, interference, plunder and inequality of culture and goods within their territories, they have, at the same time, maintained the fight to continue their way of life. For this reason, I have found a tool in photography to make known (from our indigenous perspective- rather than that of others, or of re-victimization) the resistance and resilience of indigenous peoples that is harnessed in order to keep going and heal the traumas and after-effects of war. These after-effects often end up being just as violent or more violent than war itself.
Roderico has documented the postconflict in Guatemala, denouncing the ways in which extractivist projects that have impacted the lives and territories of indigenous communities have been implemented in recent times. In this context, the Guatemalan justice system has criminalized social leaders (see the Bernardo Reyes short) and has generated continual forced displacement of campesinos and indigenous peoples.
Roderico has published in various mediums in Guatemala, the United States, Europe and several countries in Latin America. His work has been exhibited in galleries and universities in Guatemala, and the United States (see “Defending Truth and Memory, Roderico Y. Diaz“, at New Mexico State University.) He has also participated with his documentaries in national and international festivals.
Currently, Roderico follows the migrant struggle in the northern triangle of Central America: people are escaping their countries because of violence, organized crime and corruption. For Roderico, the situation for migrants today is similar to that of those who arrived in the United States many decades ago when escaping civil war and military dictatorship (people who are, in fact, refugees in the sanctuary churches in the state of North Carolina to this day).
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