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Tradition versus Modernity in Contemporary Yukatekan Maya Novels? Yuxtaposing X-Teya, u

puksi’ik’al ko’olel and U yóok´otilo´ob áak´ab

In Decolonizing Native Histories, Florencia Mallon argues that “decolonization…

involves the questioning of the racial and evolutionary bases of colonial power, and how these

have tended to underlie the construction of knowledge” (2). This process challenges scholars “to

re-think the ethical, methodological, and conceptual frameworks within which we locate our

work on questions of Native histories and cultures” (2). In the wake of Guatemala’s own history

of a Maya literature, one previously outlined in my book Taking Their Word: Literature and the

Signs of Central America (2007), I am now interested in broadening my research comparatively,

across distinct regional, ethnic and historical differences to explore the emergence of a

hemispheric literature written in indigenous languages, with a distinct decolonial perspective.

I had already stated previously that the most important response to the Central American

post-war period changes in Mesoamerica and to the hybrid contradictions of representation of the

subaltern subject by Mestizo letrados was provided by contemporary Maya literary production.

The latter revealed how modernity in the region depended on a colonial era perception that local

cultures needed to be Westernized if they were to be saved at all; yet indigenous knowledge

managed to resist this onslaught and survived through the various social crises and

transformations that took place from the Spanish Conquest until the late twentieth century. The

lingering effects of this contradictory and colonial modernity were manifest in the bilingualism

of contemporary Maya literature, as well as in the unique gaze of the indigenous citizen on the

Americas.

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My interest is one of engaging it in a dialogic relationship with contemporary indigenous

literature, while considering the implications of discursivities that placed themselves in liminality

between Westernness and Otherness. It is in this sense that I am presently broadening my

understanding of these problematics by looking at two novels still produced within the purview

of the Maya world, yet located not only in different languages from those spoken in Guatemala,

but in different conceptual spaces that feel at times as if located very far from the vortex that

gripped Guatemala during the last half century. I am thinking of two Yukatek novels, Marisol

Ceh Moo’s X-Teya, u puksi’ik’al ko’olel (Teya, the Heart of a Woman, 2009),1 and U

yóok´otilo´ob áak´ab (Night dances, 2010) by Isaac Esaú Carillo Can.

At first glance, both novels could not be more different. Even our gender preconceptions

are turned upside down. In Ceh Moo’s novel, the main character is, at least apparently, a male. In

Carrillo Can’s it is a female. In Ceh Moo’s, the narrative is primarily realistic and politically

engaged, with few references to ethnicity, whereas in Carrillo Can’s, it is mostly a fantastic tale

written in a dream-like atmosphere. Ceh Moo’s novel explores the last day and assassination of a

Communist militant in the Mexican state of Yucatán in the 1970s. Carrillo Can’s appears at first

reading to be more of a dream-like trance in which the character’s unconscious becomes also a

cultural unconscious as in many traditional, regional tales. Ceh Moo, however, has argued in

some interviews that some Yukatek Maya writers considered it inappropriate to write about a

topic that was not considered “traditional,” or ethnic enough.2 This problematic alone

differentiates Yukatek Maya literary production from Guatemala’s, where its recent history of

civil war has generated a novelistic production more along the line of Ceh Moo’s. However,

when we conceptualize this issue as an ideal horizon of possibilities that attempts to reconfigure

the political, revealing a contradiction within indigenous axiomatics, we can very well see that

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the difference is more one of recent and explicit historical experience than anything else, because

the normative element of culture itself bears the cultural trace of the community.

The problem of translation

One of the challenges we face with contemporary indigenous textualities, when seen as a

hemispheric response to the coloniality of power is how to classify it, how to elaborate a

cartography of indigenous textual production, and to what degree can their heterogeneous

discursivities be articulated within the confines of modern Nation-states, though indeed

colonialism and coloniality articulated specific traumatic experiences within specific national

borders signifying territorial control of a given state. For example, what we label in the late 20th

century the Maya genocide was confined to Guatemala, whereas the equally Maya Caste War is

confined to Yucatán in the late 19th century. The tragic experience of Shining Path is limited to

Peru. It may go without saying that any taxonomy of hemispheric indigenous literary production

is still a site under construction.

But then, there are the problems of language. As indigenous textualities grow in number,

they also complicate our ability as readers or critics to access to them other than in translation to

Spanish. We all know that in the wake of the Spanish conquest, native peoples were forced, if

they could or it was legal, to acquire knowledge of European languages to obtain minimum

rights and articulate claims. We also know that these linguistic phenomena fit into the European

project of colonization. Native peoples had no choice but to react to them, to accommodate

themselves, or, else, resist these processes. Now the roles have reversed, and hegemonic Mestizo

populations are the ones forced to do the latter. As subalternized subjects, though, indigenous

peoples are cognizant of this. They also know that the percentage of readers in their own

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languages is proportionately very small. Thus, authors themselves recognize that the bulk of their

readers will experience the text written in various indigenous languages more as a perplexing

element; they will perceive it semiotically rather than linguistically, and will then navigate a

dialogic process between their attempt to understand a few words or conventions of the original

language, together with their plunging into the material in translation, while also articulating to

the readability and their understanding of the translation, the historical contexts (social, cultural,

political, etc.), of the material narrated. Their reading thus become a sort of “transpositioning”

(coined by Julia Kristeva as an alternative to intertextuality) to refer to a “redistribution of

semiotic functions” articulating the meaning of the text in conjunction with the translation, which

can also be read as a transcreation; that is, two different compositions of the same topic in two

different languages.3 Transposition from one language to another, after all, does occur in a

primary mediation, given the authors’ role in the translation process itself. At the same time, the

indigenous novelist or short story writer knows the auratic role that the originary text plays for

the non-indigenous reader. Thus, the choice to articulate a text in the original language, even if

no one at call could read it, becomes a way of garnering authority and attesting to the veracity of

the author’s identity and heritage, a means to guarantee a perceived authenticity or empirical

“truth” to their belonging within the community they claim to represent, in much the same

fashion as the debate on testimonio from the 1990s. As we know, these terms often overlook or

repress elements in their derivation. Articulating them is, of course, also a display of a decolonial

affirmation.

In this context, it is important to remember the notion of “Rigoberta’s secrets” that Doris

Sommer articulated in the mid-1990s as an ethico-aesthetic resistance on the part of indigenous

speakers to keep hegemonic Eurocentric comprehension of their intimate world at bay.4 But even

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when no “secrets” are intended to be hidden in the original, indigenous languages encode

meanings that are not easily transcribable to a European language, even when the author chooses

to convey as clear a meaning as possible, rather than “hide” information within the confines of

their own. As we know, all forms of discourse, whether oral or written, are produced and

received in the context of a genre or tradition (Bakhtin 1986; Foucault 1977), and are tied in

many ways to the medium used to convey them. In this case, there are two discursive forces and

contexts interacting in the shaping of indigenous novels or short stories. The two languages

involved, as well as the particularities of the genres, in which these narrativities are written.

Since no scholar, no matter how fluent he or she may be in a given indigenous language, can

master all the languages in which literature is being produced, the question about the nature of

indigenous semiosis in literature will forever accompany critical reflections on this particular

scriptural practice.5 Whatever we may think, it certainly expands the definition of both writing

and literature. Still, in words of Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, they will always represent

…the will of native intellectuals to translate the principle of self-determination into the

field of knowledge production, and thus become agents in the formulation of concepts,

approaches and narratives in the linguistic, cultural, political, and historical terrains (5).

These languages, condemned as secondary and as being only worthy of “oral literatures” by

Eurocentric thinkers, are happily beginning to prosper once again in written form. Their study,

even in translations that deprive us of their jouissance, validates not only of their textualities, but

also the subjectivities whose discourses they represent, even if we are deprived of the

sedimentation of their signifiers. As Gayatri Spivak has argued, in their inevitable translation

“lies the disappeared history of distinctions” (2003, 18) that would have enabled readers to

decipher in more richly a fashion the staging of the rhetoric of their respective collectivities.

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Thus, when problematizing indigenous literatures through the Eurocentric lens of Castilian,

rather than reading the insurmountable difference of otherness into our language, the goal

becomes to translate oneself into the imagined horizon of the racialized other.

An allegedly non-Maya novel about a male Communist by a Maya woman?

Back then to those texts we meant to analyze. We have already mentioned a summary of

X-Teya, u puksi’ik’al ko’olel as centering on the assassination of Emeterio Rivera, Teya Martín’

son. In Emeterio’s wake, a labor leader, Carlos Casorla, is asked to speak on behalf of the union

of which the murdered victim had been its victim. After a powerful political speech embodying

the usual motivational points inherited from Marxism by independent Mexican unions, Casorla

adds:

—Es necesario unirse para volver a hacer de los mayas una raza orgullosa de su

origen—les decía, a veces con orgullo, a veces con vergüenza, apellidos provenientes del

tótem de la fauna o flora.

Los que tienen apellidos como Pech, Utzil, Catzín, May, Che, Ek, Uuh y otros

deben llevarlos con orgullo, les decía. Él sabía que el trabajo con los indígenas entrañaba

una complejidad teórica. Como marxista encontraba muy pocos elementos para

comprender, desde la óptica de la lucha de clases, la forma de conducción de estos grupos

que, en la mayoría de los casos, padecían una desvalorización étnica que los colocaba en

desventaja frente a los demás. (350)

[—It is necessary to unite so as to remake the Maya as a race proud of its origin—

he would tell them, sometimes with pride, sometimes with shame, last names coming

from the totemic fauna and flora.

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Those who have last names like Pech, Utzil, Catzín, May, Che, Ek, Uuh and

others, should carry them with pride, he would tell them. He knew that work with

indigenous subjects implied a theoretical complexity. As a Marxist, he found very few

elements from a class struggle perspective to understand the way to lead these groups

that, in most cases, suffered an ethnic stultification that placed them at a disadvantage

when facing others.] (350)6

This quote evidences the negotiation of the text between a Marxist/labor perspective and a

potential indigenous empowerment via decolonization. Were we to read this fragment from an

indigenista perspective, one written by a non-indigenous, most-likely male author such as

Ecuadoran Jorge Icaza or Peruvian Ciro Alegría, we would find this passage problematically

dogmatic if not demeaning, much like the representation of Benito Castro, the indigenous mayor

of Yanañahui in El mundo es ancho y ajeno (1941) who, having gone to Lima and transformed

into a Mariátegui-like socialist, returns 16 years later knowing how to read and write Spanish,

and with a Lima-centric understanding of Western modernity organizes the comuneros. But,

what are we to do with this passage when it is written by a Yukatek Maya woman in this

century? Why is her representation articulated in this fashion? For one, her discursivity,

originally in Maya Yukatek, appropriates Indigenista/Marxist rhetoric in a language in which

these words had never been enunciated:

—K’aabet a much’kaba’ex tio’olal beyo’ka sunake’ex tuka’aten jun péel

kuchkabal ku li’is ko’ob u jo’olo’ob tu táan u jel máako’ob — ku ya’alik ti’u jel

máako’ob yáan k’iiné ku ya’aliko’ob máas jats’uts’ u k’aababao’ob u jelo’obe’ yéetel u

su’talil ku ya’aliko’ob u k’aabao’ob ku táal ichil u káabao’ob baalche’ wa cheo’ob. —

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Pech, Utzil, Catzin, May, Che’, Ek, Uuh yéetel u jelo’ob k’aabet u bisalo’ob ka’anal

jo’olil —ku k’aas k’eyko’ob. (178-179)

It is clearly a sign of epistemic change, however indeterminate it may be, by virtue of the weight

of Eurocentrism within coloniality. The Yukatek Maya scripture is an inscription into political

responsibility on the part of Ceh Moo.

The notion of the unscathed, pure, and uncontaminated indigenous subject has been

romanticized and/or idealized both by sympathetic non-indigenous academics, as well as

indigenous ideologues and/or leaders of a new native peoples’ awakening. Ceeh Moh argues in

the opposite direction. By interpellating both Marxism and a public recognition of shame felt by

colonialized indigenous subjects, she both invokes the predicament of the indigenous letrado,

one who is the inevitable product of 500 years of coloniality, and, therefore, inevitably echoing

intertwined processes of periodization and shared spaces between the indigenous and Mestizo

worlds, even when this happens more along the lines of what Bhabha called mimicry in The

Location of Culture (1994), apparently repeating rather than representing. She names an

inevitable contaminated entity that implies a deliberate ethical stance, one where both cultures

are embedded one in the other, in the sense of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, a symbolic system

of dispositions constructed in the subject’s imaginary as a response to the objective conditions

she encounters. In any case, the awareness of historicity prevents the text from ever diverging in

the direction of an indigenous racialized utopia.

Of course we are only looking at one citation here. And the book is not titled “Emeterio,”

but “Teya.” The title also alludes to her feminine heart. Teya is the center of the first two

chapters, the second one being one of the longest in the novel. Then, the focus shifts to Emeterio

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for the remainder of the text until the end, where it switches once more; this time, to Indalecio

Uitzil Peba, who would become a political successor to Emeterio. Why, then, the title?

In the only academic article to date on this novel, Emilio del Valle Escalante argues that

the novel is a historical reconsideration of the importance of a Marxist left, one that, operating

within its known conceptual limitations, nonetheless contributed to an awakening of indigenous

consciousness at the end of the 1970s.7 Del Valle Escalante argues that this novel “disarticulates”

indigenismo (understood here in Mariátegui’s sense: as fiction written about indigenous peoples

by mestizo authors) “by appropriating the…mestizo world in order to establish… the authority of

indigenous rights movements” (2), and implies, within the same logic, the death of the Mexican

Communist Party, signaling, towards the end of the text, a transition to the dawn of a new

historical period, a decolonial one where indigenous subjectivity is inscribed within history. Del

Valle Escalante even adds an important context to the emergence of this literature:

In the Yucatan Peninsula, a key moment in the process of Maya literary

visibilization occurred in 1982 when on a trip to Mexico City, Yucatek author José Tec

Poot, then director of the Regional Unit of Yucatan’s Popular Cultures, met Mexican

writer and journalist Carlos Montemayor. They agreed to develop literary workshops in

the city of Mérida in order to form new generations of Maya writers and to help emerging

ones improve the quality of their literary works (May May, 113). The workshop started at

the end of that same year with twenty-four members that included, among others,

Gerardo Can Pat, Feliciano Sánchez Chan, Santiago Sánchez Aké, Miguel Ángel May

May and María Luisa Góngora Pacheco. Many of those who participated in the

workshops did not have a literary or academic background. They were generally cultural

promoters, elementary school teachers, translators and political activists (Rosado Avilés

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and Ortega Arango, 122). Five years after the first literary workshop, May May and

Domínguez Aké started the magazine Uyajal Maya Wiiniko’ob (Maya Awakening),

which included literary contributions from many of those who participated in the first

workshop. The magazine published four issues and, a year later, due to changes in

governmental policies, it was renamed U k’aayil Maya T’aan (The Song of the Maya

Language). Authors were required to publish in both Maya Yucatek and Spanish (1-2).

Without necessarily disagreeing with Del Valle Escalante, I would like to posit that the

book traces the trajectory of Emeterio, Teya’s son, because he is the offspring of the links

between racism and capitalism that were crucial for Teya’s intellectual development. At the same

time, Teya appears to disappear from the narrative, thus signaling a blind-spot where

understanding and knowledge is blocked. Her subaltern silence paradoxically operates as a

rhetorical strategy, one where only the subalternized indigenous male, passing for Mestizo, can

be represented in Mexico prior to 1980.Ceh Moo measures the silences of the subaltern

indigenous woman by re-articulating the originary archive of Communist militancy which is

covered over in the subsequent palimpsest of misinterpretations and mistranslations authorized

by the official Mexican left, one that would echo as well the situation of Maya populares in

Guatemala, and those indigenous leaders of labor unions in South America, such as Domitila

Barrios in Bolivia, or leaders of Ecuador’s CONAIE such as Luis Macas to name but these

examples.8 My reading thus emphasizes how a gendered discourse represents a validation of

indigenous political militancy to its community. The text begins by stating:

Lo que jamás olvidaría Teya Martín es que el día de la muerte de Emeterio se

quedó dormida. Para ella, dedicada íntegramente al cuidado de su hijo mayor, éste fue un

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desliz que le serviría como punto de referencia cuando sus recuerdos la llevaran por los

caminos que marcaron el asesinato de mayor consternación en la región. (197)

[What Teya Martín would never forget was that the day of Emeterio’s death she

had slept late. For her, fully dedicated to the care of her oldest son, this was a slip that

would serve her as a point of reference whenever her memories would take her back to

the murder that generated the greatest consternation in the entire region.] (197)

Thus, from the start, a public event—Emeterio’s assassination—is articulated from the private,

maternal/feminine perspective. The text proceeds to explain how Teya would prepare her son’s

breakfast and clothes (197-198) prior to his departure from home to the local court where he

worked as a lawyer. She would then wake him up by kissing him on the head (198). In the

second chapter, she describes her son’s office at home, starting with the desk, a carved,

mahogany piece of furniture in which “los relieves labrados en el frente del mueble retrataban el

martirio que sufrió Jacinto Canek a la hora de su muerte” (“the reliefs carved in front of the piece

of furniture pictured the martyrdom suffered by Jacinto Canek at the time of his death;” 203-

204). This description immediately evokes activist politics within the home, as well as

indigenous identity. Jacinto Canek (Jacinto Uc de los Santos) is a historical 18th-century Maya

revolutionary who fought against the Spanish in the Yucatán Peninsula in 1761, an insurrection

similar to that of Tupac Amaru in Peru. After the failed revolt, Canek was condemned to death,

to be tortured, his body broken, and thereafter burned. The ashes were scattered to the wind.9 In

1847 when the Caste War broke, an inter-ethnic rebellion against Westerners in the peninsula,

Jacinto Canek’s name was a rallying cry. The Maya were determined to drive the Mestizos into

the sea.10 For two years they pushed toward Mérida, taking town after town, finally laying siege

to the capital itself. This last rebellion continued until 1901 when Chan Santa Cruz (presently

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Felipe Castillo Puerto) was taken by the Mexican army.11 Thus, from a homely, domestic

perspective, we have in the first 7 pages of the text a genealogy of indigenous struggle for

liberation and martyrdom, one where we already know that Emeterio Rivera Martín will join.

Ceh Moo’s reading locates Emeterio’s narrative in relation to the metaphor of Canek as figure of

a liberator, an image prevalent during the Caste War against racist oppression. Yet, the Caste

War’s political mobilization did not lead to women’s political emancipation.

In this light, Ceh Moo highlights the particular social oppression of subalternized

indigenous women in the context of ethnic and class struggle. Ceh Moo problematizes not only

the male-centered definition of the working-class in Latin American Communist parties, a

heritage of classic European Marxism, but also the one linked to indigenous struggle proper:

from Canek, to her son Emeterio, to Indalecio Uitzil Peba, who inherits Emeterio’s mantle of

leader, and becomes, at the end of the novel, “el primer diputado comunista en el Congreso

estatal” (“the first Communist congressman in the State House;” 361). It is a situation almost

responding to Spivak’s claim that “from the point of view of mothering as work, (the political

struggle) ignores the mother as subject” (Spivak 1987: 258).

At the same time, the text also raises questions about Teya’s political agency by stating

that she

…conocía los pormenores de la historia del martirio de Canek no porque los aprendiera

en la escuela, sino porque su hijo disfrutaba en contarle, de tarde en tarde, las historias de

los personajes que adornaban las paredes del despacho. (204)

[…knew all the details of the history of Canek’s martyrdom, not because she learned

them at school, but because her son enjoyed telling her, every once in a while, on late

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afternoons, the various histories of the characters decorating the walls of his home

office.] (204)

Thus, the agent of knowledge is her own son, who also teaches her about Carrillo Puerto, whom

he loves because he spoke Maya despite not being one, and died for their cause.12 This reference,

while recognizing the genealogy established with Canek, adds Mestizo leaders who died for the

Maya cause to it through an unequivocal sign of political resistance and agency that broadens our

understanding of Mayas’ struggle in Yucatán. Teya then proceeds to clean her son’s office, and

the narrative voice describes her sympathies for the pictures of Che, Salvador Allende, Julio

Jaramillo, Emiliano Zapata, Rogelio Chalé, Tamara Bunker, Lucio Cabañas, Raúl Sendic, Marx,

Lenin and others “she does not identify” hanging on the wall. In so doing, she has placed her son

within this revolutionary tradition and genealogy, one emerging from Marx and embracing

socialist causes, leading to her own son, who is about to die. At the same time, besides admiring

Che and reciting from memory his testament, Teya murmurs that they are all dead. She

empathizes with their wives and mothers, while also alluding to understanding the terrible pain

suffered by Pavel’s mother in Gorki’s The Mother, an intertextual allusion to the framing of this

narrative. In Gorki’s text the mother becomes radicalized after her son’s arrest. Thus, from the

very start we have a sacrificial motif in Ceh Moo’s text, and the promise of her future

radicalization, an aspect that is not contained within the text itself, but is circumscribed to an

unnamed future in a post-textual topography. It is in this chapter that Teya will learn from Reina

Mendizábal that Emeterio has been murdered.

We thus have here the victim, Emeterio, as a gift, as the figure of a gift. The textual

discursivity is sacralizing victimization, articulating a tension between the legitimate limits of the

(Eurocentrically-conceived) State and the act of transgression represented by Emeterio’s

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assassination, in turn represented as a grotesque, carnivalesque practice, as an opening to

elucidate the abyssal practice of State racialization. It is this transgression what transforms the

victim into the figure of a gift, a symbolic différend postulating Emeterio as the symbol through

which Mayas—and, especially Maya women—will, in some imaginable future, gain a decolonial

consciousness and challenge the authority of the ruling elite. Needless to say, within the text

itself, this cannot but remain a symbolic and discursive element. However, as I have argued

elsewhere (Arias 2007), and as have most theorists of decoloniality (Hernández, 2002; Hale,

2004; De Sousa Santos, 2009; Mallon, 2012, et. al.) gaining a decolonial consciousness forms

part of a broad political struggle marking indigeneity during the last 35 years, from the

Guatemalan civil war (1979-1996), to the emergence of the Zapatista Front (1994) in Mexico,

and the election of Evo Morales as Bolivia’s President (2006), one that presupposes the

questioning of the racial and evolutionary bases of colonial power as indicated on the first page

of this article, not only by academic theorists, but primarily by indigenous peoples themselves,

with broad political goals including self-determination, recovery of land and sovereignty, among

multiple other claims.13 Indigenous literature grapples with the racial and ethnic politics of

knowledge production and indigenous activism, as a means of reconfiguring indigenous political

resurgence. Within a literary text, it is a figuration of the possible if the literality of this text is to

be followed responsibly; after all, culture helps shape popular consciousness. But it is

unfathomable as well, because of its potential impossibility within existing Nation-States such as

Mexico. In the text in question, this gesture becomes a possible aporia, as suggested at the very

end of it when Indalecio Uitzil Peba, the first (Maya) Communist representative in the State

Congress, is unable to gain the votes to place Emeterio in the official list of local heroes. The

novel’s last words are that this initiative “fue desechada por improcedente” (it was discarded as

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inadmissible, 361). Thus, the open implication is that, for Mayas to become successful

politically, they have to engage in cognitive justice as well. In order to succeed, their struggle

requires a new kind of thinking, a post-abyssal thinking, in the sense developed by Boaventura

de Sousa Santos.14 The overall text is thus derived from within the political consciousness of

state violence and oppression as felt from within the standpoint of a Maya, subalternized woman,

rather than from a more privileged educated perspective, one imbued in Spanish legal semantics,

the one belonging to her own son and his comrades. Teya’s last gesture upon learning of

Emeterio’s death is telling:

El dolor es inmenso pero ella no se doblega. Con movimientos firmes se levanta

del sillón. Sus vecinos presentes la siguen con la mirada, como esperando el momento en

el cual se doblará. Ella los mira y, en un acto de coraje e ira contenida, toma con una

mano la vasija donde remojaba la pasta de pepita de calabaza, con la otra las tortillas y las

arroja con furia en el bote de basura. Voltea ver a todos y les grita con coraje de fiera

herida, pero sin lágrimas.

— ¡Vayan y vean que les entreguen el cuerpo de Emeterio para que vengan sus

desarrapados a llorarlo, al menos que hagan eso! ¡Yo aquí lo esperaré! (210)

[The pain was immense but she did not break down. With firm gestures she pulled

herself up from the armchair. Those neighbors who were present followed her with their

gazes, as if waiting for the instant when she would collapse. She saw them and, in a

gesture of courage and contained anger, took in one hand the earthenware pot where she

was soaking the pumpkin seed paste, the tortillas in the other, and threw them with fury

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into the trash can. She turned to look at everyone and yelled with the bravery of a

wounded beast, but without displaying any tears:

—Go and make sure they turn Emeterio’s body over to you so his ragtag

followers can come and cry for him, at least do that one thing! I’ll wait for all of you

here!] (210)

Previously we had learned that she was preparing papadzules, Emeterio’s favorite dish and her

specialty, a typical Yucatek dish, one of tortillas stuffed with pumpkin seed sauce. Her throwing

the elements into the trash becomes a symbolic gesture of scattering the Maya seeds of life, of

the waste implied in the death of her son made of corn, not Junajpú, the hero twin of the classic

text Popol Wuj, but rather Vucub-Junajpú, his father, whose dead seed begot Junajpú and

Xbalanque. Her gesture may be read as a statement that generates a gendered notion of political

struggle. The female, much like Xmucané, the mother of Vucub Junajpú and grandmother of

Junajpú in the Popol Wuj, is the bearer of the roots of Maya culture, the carrier of the elements

that keep the collectivity united in the phase of Western modernity’s socio-political paradigm

founded on the tension between colonialized regulations and decolonial emancipation. Hers is a

ghost dance, one asking all aspiring revolutionaries to recognize the feminine elements of the

Maya community haunting their history of struggle so as to better comprehend the nature of

coloniality.

After the throwing of the food, the focus of the narrative shifts. First, to Indalecio Uitzil

Peba (210). We find out he was recruited by Emeterio, who hailed him as an example of “sangre

nueva” (“new blood,” 211). The last we hear of Teya is that she hates the smell of cigarette

smoke (216). From that point on, she remains a silent figure behind the scenes. The rest of the

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novel will be of and about men. But Teya has already been a site of displacement of meaning

from the very start. The staging of the assassination and its aftermath will be a function of the

stage of meaning of what Teya had said in the beginning. Her silence and non-appearance on the

plane of representation is not an absence. It has its own meaning; it guarantees the perspective

that should determine the reader’s apprehension of the sacrifice of Emeterio and his sacralization

as emblematic of the genealogical trajectory of Maya political struggle from Canek on down to

Emeterio. What is not said by Teya is also an important strategy of textual representation.

Silence signals the limits of discourse, a rupture in communication. Silence marks a liminal

space between what is said and what remains unsaid. Her silence becomes a rhetoric that is not

Communist, one anchored in the collective values of Mayanness. She is what will be.

Rhetorically, the emblem of crossing the liminal space from Communism’s eurocentricity to

Maya decoloniality; a space remaining unnamed if signaled, imprecise because of its lack of

description. What Teya does not name is what U yóok’otilo’ob áak’ab/Danzas de la noche by

Isaac Esaú Carrillo Can is about.15

Female figures in the night: Danzas de la noche

If Marisol Ceh Moo’s novel had, apparently, a male protagonist, Carrillo Can’s has a

female one. Flor is a pre-adolescent girl living in a small hamlet in rural Yucatán, kept at a

distance by her adopted parents, and seeking the symbolic companionship of Night, a female

spirit dialoguing with her in Flor’s dreams:

A la mujer con quien platicaba en el sueño, no se le podía mirar el rostro porque

se cubría con un rebozo.

18

— ¿Quién eres, mujer?—le pregunté.

—Yo soy Noche, Noche es mi nombre — respondió… (33)

[She could not see the face of the woman with whom she chatted in her dream,

because she would cover it with a shawl.

— Who are you, woman? — I asked her.

— I am Night. Night is my name— she answered…] (33)

We appear to be in a more magical world in this text. But it is one that also conveys the effect of

being inevitable—signaling, to some extent, that there was no other way for the Maya writer to

offer an account of his world. The transgressive element in the text feigns to be that of a male

writing about female subjectivity. This would appear to legitimize Mayan-ness as representation,

while also appearing to delegitimize Maya literature as one absconded within what Hale has

labeled “el indio permitido” (“tolerated Indian”); that is, a literature that reconstitutes “racial

hierarchies in more entrenched forms” (16) by appearing to play within the permissible rules of

the Mestizo state.16 This phrase may very well be a catachresis that best explains the symbolic

construction of the indigenous peripheral present, as Sanjinés has pointed out elsewhere.17 In

Hale’s logic, the apparently less “Maya” novel, that of Cee Moo, would be responding more to

an indigenous decolonial position, whereas the allegedly more “Maya” novel, Carrillo Can’s,

would seemingly be one responding to what Hale articulated as occupying a space that, by

default, acquiesced “to the regressive neoliberal project that the indio permitido is meant to

serve” (21). In other words, one referring to the ways in which governments and international

institutions use cultural rights to divide and domesticate indigenous movements. This very well

may be true of the politics of publication developed by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y

19

las Artes (National Council For Culture and the Arts, CONACULTA for its acronym in

Spanish), as a means of keeping its indigenous population within control, as Natalio Hernández

has argued:

Tanto la antropología comprometida como la emergencia del movimiento Indígena

contribuyeron para que el Estado mexicano reorientara el indigenismo oficial, a fines de

la década de los setenta, hacia un indigenismo de participación… Cambió el discurso, es

cierto, sin embargo, nada cambió… el INI burocratizó todavía más su quehacer

indigenista… Quedó entonces al descubierto que el indigenismo mexicano en sus 50 años

de práctica institucional, poco había contribuido a la reivindicación de los derechos de los

pueblos indígenas… (23-24)

[Both engaged anthropology as well as the emergence of the Indigenous movement

contributed to make the Mexican State reorient official Indigenism, at the end of the

1970s, towards an Indigenism of greater participation… It changed course, true, but

nothing changed… the National Indigenous Institute (INI for its acronym in Spanish)

bureaucratized even more its indigenous doings… It then became clear that Mexican

Indigenism, in its 50 years of institutional practice, had contributed little to the

recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples…] (23-24)

Hernández concludes that it took the emergence of the Zapatistas in 1994 for all Mexican

indigenous peoples to be able to articulate their demands, those moving from the space of the

indios permitidos to a new politics of culture that attempt to decolonize indigenous perspectives.

In this logic, is Carrillo Can’s novel one of an “indio permitido,” or not? Let’s examine the text

and see what it has to say.

20

In the second chapter, the text’s narrative voice steps out of Flor’s dreams, a dialogue that

has lent a fantastical air to the text as a whole up to that point. Flor overhears her adoptive

parents talking about something as mundane as going shopping to the village. She is excited

about accompanying her mother. But while her “mother” is taking a bath prior to their departure

for town, and while Flor is with her grandmother on an errand, requesting her to stay with the

younger kids on behalf of her mother, the hammock in which her baby brother was sleeping

breaks and he falls on the ground. When Flor returns, rather than heading to town excitedly, she

encounters a scene of desolation. Her baby brother is dying, and her father unjustly tells her it

was her fault. He twice calls her “Fuereña” (outsider), and gives her a beating, telling her that if

her brother dies, he will kill her (45). Later that night, she overhears a conversation between her

parents, one where her mother chastises her father for beating her, but adds: “No porque no sea

nuestra hija la vamos a tratar mal” (“We won’t treat her badly because she’s not our daughter,”

47). Flor immediately understand why she is called Fuereña, and also something we did not

know as readers: why her alleged father tries to look at her while she bathed, encoding a

traditional, if despicable, patriarchal and heterosexist pattern embedded within her adopted

father’s behavior in the narrative logic, regardless of the fact that he is a poor indigenous man.

The next day her parents take the hurt child to the doctor. Flor goes to visit doña Makin, the

hamlet’s midwife and the oldest woman in the hamlet, and the latter utters a discourse marking

the cultural divide in their community:

—En la mañana vinieron tus papás, me trajeron al niño… para que lo tallara, pero

les dije la verdad… el niño se lastimó muy fuerte, no va a sobrevivir… Además, anoche

escuché al tecolote cantar la última canción para el niño, pero ellos no me creyeron y

fueron a tirar el dinero con un doctor, todo por no creer en las palabras que les dije. (51)

21

[—In the morning your parents came, they brought me the baby… so I would

cure him, but I told them the truth… the boy got hurt really bad, he will not survive…

Besides, last night I heard the owl singing the last song for him, but they didn’t believe

me and went away to waste their money with a doctor, all of it because they don’t believe

my words.] (51)

The narrative draws on the tension and epistemological differences existing between the two

worldviews continuously faced by indigenous populations, one that in Mexico represented both a

cooptation and/or a postponement of indigenous aspirations, as modern nation-building took

place. Flor’s parents give credence to Western medicine rather than their own, even if, in a

modern Mexican State, it is of course practiced by Mexican citizens. They are, however, not

indigenous. Flor’s parents are. They have nevertheless given in to Western-centered nationhood,

indexing “modernity.” However, Flor, feeling threatened by her step-father, flees. But, before

doing so, doña Makin calls her back, hugs her to calm her, and tells her the story of how her

mother came to their hamlet and gave birth to Flor. In so doing, we enter a traditional space that

is robust and powerful, one where we shift to a positive evaluation of Maya culture, one flooded

with memory. It is a relaxed conversation, yet one brimming with machismo. We then find out

that a stranger, a pregnant young woman, came seeking doña Makin. “Me dijo la pobre que sus

padres la habían comprometido a casarse con un señor que la había pedido para hacerla suya”

(“The poor thing told me that she had been forced to marry a man who had asked for her hand to

make her his own,” 55).

Doña Makin explains to Flor how in the past women had no agency in their choice of

marital partners, the past being only 13 years old, Flor’s age, since that was what happened to her

pregnant mother. She ignored her parents’ wish, felt in love and slept with the main dancer in the

22

village: “El problema fue que los padres insistían en casarla porque ya habían recibido la dote y,

además, ya se la habían gastado” (“The problem was that her parents insisted in marrying her,

because they had already received the dowry and, besides, had already spent it,” 57). Flor’s

mother, named Flor del Cielo Chablé, gives birth to Flor and then dies. At the same time, Flor’s

step mother gives birth to a dead baby. Flor’s step father helps doña Makin bury the dead baby

and Flor’s mother, and then gives Flor to her step parents. She also insinuates that the spirit

visiting Flor is her mother’s.

The irruption of a personal history, combined with Flor’s dreams with Noche, the story of

her mother and father, and her subsequent flight away from the hamlet signal the artificiality of

Western historical time in contrast to indigenous trans-temporal memory. We also have a

sublime exaltation of the feminine figure, one narrated in a quasi-ritual voice that creates at first

an impression of belonging to an old, timeless, indigenous order. Yet it is also one anchored in a

historical present. By the end of the first chapter, we have been exposed to existing power

structures and societal inequalities within Maya society. Whereas traditional, dream-like

fabulation has served to conceal power relations existing within indigenous communities,

especially gendered ones, and often provide mythical justifications for the maintenance of

inequalities and the continued oppression of indigenous women, here we have the opposite. The

text articulates a displacement generated not by modernity, but by tradition. Flor’s subsequent

trip from hamlet to village in search of her father will also become a trip from an oppressing

semi-Western tradition to a “responsible” decolonial valorization of the community itself.

We will now understand that Night, the spirit of Flor’s mother, is also a temporal,

interruptive agent associated with girlhood. Night will accompany Flor to the village after

23

reminding her that she should desire to meet her father (69). Upon departing, she invokes Ek

Chuaj, the Maya deity that protects travelers, thus reaffirming her rootedness in tradition (71).

After this point, Flor’s journey will juggle tradition and modernity as contested concepts.

It is a rite-of-passage process, one where Flor eventually outgrows the presence of Night and

gains agency. But before this happens, the entire third chapter, titled “Songs of the night,” is a

learning process. As Flor travels, she no longer can distinguish between reality and dream. Night

again asks Flor for her age, and after Flor repeats that she is thirteen, Night says she will teach

her “nueve cosas” (“nine things,” 75). We are here within the Maya cosmology of thirteen layers

of heavens and nine underworlds. In other words, within a cosmogonic discursivity of the mytho-

genesic palimpsest of Mayas’ place in the universe. We read Night as the moon as well, and

understand her as X Chel, the goddess of weaving and childbirth. As readers we learn that Flor’s

step-parents back in the hamlet pretended to be grounded in tradition but, in reality, were

ignorant of it. Flor will have to learn it through her dreams. As she learns this worldview, one

where humans and nature are fully integrated in the phenomenological knowledge describing the

rhythms of creative energies she acquires in a single night of dreaming, Flor will no longer see

her reality as one of random events. She will understand microcosms within macrocosms, and it

will become far less fragmented and confusing. This chapter is a shamanistic learning process, a

rite of renovation and initiation, a rhetoric of interpretation connecting women to a cosmogonical

past, in order to have a future in the modern present. It is a moment of textual transgression that

reconceptualizes female collectivity, unsettling a more binary opposition of tradition (hamlet)

and modernity (the Mexican State).

Only then, can Flor reemerge in the daylight and “responsibly” enter her father’s village.

The text is articulated as a gender rearrangement responding to patriarchal heteronormativity. It

24

appears to stage the missed moment when Mayas “lost” contact with their cosmogony and

confused Eurocentric reality for tradition. However, the allegedly magical rhetoric enveloping

the relationship between Flor and Night, rather than a girlie fantasy (written by a man) in a

dream-like atmosphere is already proving to be in reality a subtle transgression of the

Eurocentric order. A questioning of patriarchy, when it has already been cemented into myth as

“tradition.”

From that point on, the textual process is represented as Flor’s search for her father.

However, there is an important twist. Her father is the “principal de los danzantes/U bjo’olpóopil

aj óok’oto’ob” (“the leading dancer,” 126-27). Why a dancer? Within the text, it does not make

sense, and simply adds lack of credibility by embedding one more pseudo-magical environment

within the narrative itself. But, when we see the description of the dance, meaning becomes clear

if we know the context:

Cinco hombres interpretaban la obra, y cuatro de ellos: el hombre rojo, el hombre

amarillo, el hombre blanco y el hombre negro, se ponían con orientación a los puntos

cardinales, al oriente, al sur, al norte y al poniente. Cuando se daba el primer golpe de

tambor, se dirigían hacia el centro, donde estaba Yaxal Cháak (Primera Lluvia). Él estaba

sentado sobre una enorme serpiente, diseñada de tal manera que se asemejaba a ella, y

cubría su rostro con una máscara que simulaba un lagarto. (103)

[Five men interpreted the dance, and four of them, the red man, the yellow man, the white

man and the black man, were placed in the four cardinal points, the East, the South, the

North, and the West. When the first drum beat was heard, they would head towards the

center, where Yaxal Cháak (First Rain) was. He was seated over an enormous serpent,

25

designed in such a way that he resembled her, and had his face covered with a mask

simulating an alligator.] (103)

We have here a contemporary description of the Rituals of the Bacabs, a manuscript from the

Yucatán containing shamanistic incantations written in Yukatek Maya in the 18th century. Dennis

Tedlock states:

Prominent among the deities named in the incantations are the Four Gods, Four

Actors (Kantul ti’ K’u. Kantul ti’ B’akab’), and for that reason, the compendium has been

given the title “Ritual of the Bacabs.” The manuscript itself carries no general title, but

each incantation carries a preface that names the illness or illnesses in question, and

describes the corresponding incantation as an “oration” (t’anil) or “dialogue” (ya’lab’al),

or else refers to its intended effect on the illness by calling it a “trap” (petz’il) or

“destroyer” (pa’il). (286)

According to scholarly sources such as Tedlock himself in the lines following the passage

quoted above, as well as Timothy Knowlton, the style of writing in the manuscript suggests that

much of the information included was copied from older works.18 He argues that the Rituals of

the Bacabs are a transliteration of glyphic texts, one moving from Cholan—classical Maya

language—to Yukatek. In other words, it is a linguistic odyssey that goes from classical stone

writing to postclassical codexes written in 17th and 18th century Yukatek, and, then, to

contemporary texts written in modern Yukatek while articulating Western forms such as the

novel. When you change the materiality of the texts, inevitably you change the semiotics. There

are, however, likely continuities, articulating an arc from the classical Maya period to

contemporary Yucatán. The Rituals of the Bacabs reference many figures in Maya mythology

26

that are for the most part unknown from other works. The collection includes some forty-two

main incantations, with fragmentary supplements throughout. In that which concerns this paper,

we can now see that colonial texts not only reflect the semantic field of the colonial encounter,

but also that of Yukatek indigenous contemporaneity.19 To make matters more interesting, we

know that some of the rituals were performed in colonial times, and, perhaps, in classical times

as well. Knowlton speaks of special codes, figurative language, parallelism, special

paralinguistic features, special appeals to tradition, and disclaimers of performance.20

Brotherston adds that they are written in Zuyua language, one that appears to be more Nahuatl

than Maya (147), and thus belongs to a larger Mesoamerican world of riddle images of language.

He also sees a relation to the Popol Wuj cosmogony in the formation of the human body,

“underpinning the rhetoric of the shaman curer in the fight against, say, contagion from the

underworld…” (239).

In Carrillo Can’s novel we have a ritual performance, a script being performed in

chapters 4 through 6, and this becomes the text’s objective: to familiarize Flor with her ancestral

tradition, one where she has a contemporary role to perform. In the dance quoted before, counter-

clockwise color directional sequences are described, elements typical in all the Maya area.

Mayas always start with red (East), then go to white, to black, to yellow, thus completing the

ritual circuit. It is meant to transcend to a cosmogonic level, rather than representing a historical

event. However, Knowlton points out that there is always a blurring between history and myth in

all colonial Yukatek literature. Dates appear in all incantations. In his reading, the use of

figurative language is one of the keys of performance. It is also associated with incantations. We

see them in Carrillo Can’s novel the moment Flor is acquainted with the dancers:

27

Primero, un hombre se ponía en medio, se frotaba las manos y luego las extendía

al cielo diciendo:

—Tú, el más grande del cielo, tú, el más grande de la tierra; tú, que hiciste nacer

mi pensamiento del silencio del universo.

Luego entraba el segundo y decía:

—Tú, quien hizo madurar mi conocimiento; tú, quien lo hizo caer del árbol que lo

fecunda; dame de tu cuerpo, dame de tu cuerpo y apártame de la oscuridad. (105)

[First, a man was placed in the middle, he would rub his hands and then extend

them to the sky, saying:

—You, the biggest one in the Sky, you, the biggest one on Earth; you, who made

my thinking be born from within the silence of the universe.

Then the second one would come in and say:

—You, who made my knowledge gain in maturity; you, who made it fall from the

tree that fertilizes it; give me your body, give me your body and disengage me from

darkness.] (105)

These incantations are all parts of the Ritual of the Bacabs.

Knowlton claims that we do not know if there were incantations in the classic period;

however, they not only exist in the Ritual of the Bacabs but also in the Books of Chilam Balam in

colonial times.21 He himself also points out that indeed we see some of them displayed in

Palenque lintels, like the fire drilling ceremony, or the “Birth of Gods” in the Lacanhá panel, and

28

we also see theogonies in the Ch’ab Akab Palenque Cross Tablet, as well as a conjuration scene

in Yaxchilán lintel 14. These observations have led Knowlton to argue the existence of a

multimodality of Maya texts. Ancient Maya texts made use of multiple modes for

communicating their esthetic/literary features.

This is likewise true of colonial period texts according to his observations, and we now

see them in contemporary texts such as U yóok´otilo´ob áak´ab /Danzas de la noche. Among

Yukatek Mayas, semiotic ideologies remain consistent from classical times to the present. The

performance of literature, like the Ritual of the Bacabs, necessarily involves ideas about various

modes of inscription and signification, including but not limited to spoken word,

gesture/embodiment, as well as writing, whether alphabetic as in the present or glyphic as in the

past, both following pre-established iconographic modes. Knowlton also notes that sometimes

you get instructions for performance in the Ritual of the Bacabs (Tedlock). Sickness, for

example, can be caused by the “wild animals of the sky” in the Book of Chilam Balam of Kaua.

Knowlton also notes that cosmogonic time is dealt often in incantations. The exorcist is working

to combat the illness in a ritual space, which is a microcosm of the macrocosm. For example,

“What says the glyph in the sky and the glyph in the clouds?” Ms. 47-48 (y al bacin uoj ti can, ix

uoh ti munyal). Mayas performed important segments of these rituals, but often it was not the

exact same narrative. Therefore, Knowlton notes the inconsistency of our semiotic ideology of

how alphabetic writing signifies for us versus how it actually signifies for the Maya.22 He

wonders whether it is transparent that alphabetic writing is operating differently than glyphic

writing, an issue that would explain the continuity and/or discontinuity of these literatures into

the present. Foregrounding Maya conceptions versus other systems, however, he notes that

29

letters, verses and glyphs are being equated with verse sentences. Signification is articulated

through the body, as in the dance described in chapter 4 of Carrillo Can’s novel.

In the novel we are studying, Flor confirms on the night she sees the dance and

incantations that Night had told her the truth “al orientarme” (“when she oriented me,” 105). She

then overhears her host and hostess talking about how rich the head dancer is, the son of the

landlord, and they plan to marry her to him, without knowing he is her father (109). She finds out

that, the following night, they will go out to see the dance again, because “justamente hoy se

cierra la cuenta de un tiempo e inicia la de uno nuevo” (“in fact today closes the time count and

begins a new one,” 119). The link to the daily use of the Maya calendar could not be more

explicit. The text proceeds to describe the dances one by one. When the featured dance begins,

“se sopló el ronco caracol” (“the hoarse seashell was blown,” 121). The dance ritualizes the

sun’s transit through the night and the emergence of the feathered serpent, “anfitriona de la capa

trece del cielo” (“hostess of the thirteenth level of the sky,” 121), followed by all the

cosmological signs associated with divination. Flor then adds, “Cuando golpearon los tambores

en cuatro ocasiones, salió una mujer que me recordó mucho a Noche… sólo que en la cabeza

llevaba una esfera que simulaba ser la luna” (“When the drums were made to sound four times, a

woman came out that reminded me of Night… except that she had a sphere resembling the moon

on her head,” 121-23). Noche, Night, is indeed X Chel, the moon goddess, and we then

understand mythologically the entire plot. Indeed, in the next chapter Flor is introduced to her

father. He asks her who her parents are, and she responds that she has none (133). He invites her

to join the dance troupe because “tu rostro… me recuerdas muchísimas cosas… en ti pude ver el

rostro de una mujer a quien hace tiempo amé como a nadie en la vida” (“your face… it reminds

me of many things… in you I could see the face of a woman whom I loved some time back like

30

nothing else in this world,” 135). Flor joins the dance troupe, and, eventually, is asked to create a

new one. She comes up with the “danza de la luciérnaga” (“dance of the glow worm,” 139).

Immediately, he asks her what her relationship to Flor del Cielo is, and she admits it was her

mother. He then tells her that Flor del Cielo wanted to stage it. That night Flor calls Noche, and

Noche enables her to enter her father’s dream. That is how she confirms that Noche is her mother

(143). She then stays with her father. No one calls her “fuereña” (145) since nobody knew her

old nickname. She learns to take her of her dreams, and matures under her father’s care:

Con todas las danzas que hice, aprendí que cuando me impulsaba del suelo estaba

sembrando mis raíces en la tierra de mis padres, y cuando estiraba los brazos al cielo,

estaba implorando la ayuda de los dioses para mí y para mi pueblo. (147)

[With all the dances I made, I learned that when I propelled myself from the floor

I was sowing my roots on the soil of my parents, and when I stretched the arms to the

sky, I was imploring for the gods to help both me and my people.] (147)

But there is one last, important detail in this text. In the Spanish version, the only word

not translated from the Maya is “xWaach” (39). Flor claims that’s how everyone called her at the

hamlet (“¡xWaach! me llamaban todos;” “xWaach! they all called me”). Why was this word not

translated? The “x” indicates gender: it marks her being feminine (as opposed to the “j”, which

would make her masculine). Waach, however, can mean both a foreigner, that is, a “fuereña,”

but understood more in the sense of being a “white” person. Is the encoding behind this word a

signifier that Flor is actually Mestiza? What would that make of our analysis? What would that

make of the text as a transgressive element? Is there a “secret” involved here, one where key

information is withheld? Is it an attempt to keep Western readers at bay? Is this a figure that dis-

31

figures, in Spivak’s terminology (Death, 71)? Or, could it be a secret code enabling Yukateks to

laugh at Westerners who think of indigenous peoples as essentialized, that is, pure,

homogeneous, pre-capitalist, pre-modern subjects? Do we have here a signifier marking this text

as literature? Or, is it a catachresis, marking an identity that cannot quite be described in

Castilian? Ethnicity is deflected through this signifier, standing out against any hermeneutic

intention on the part of the Western critic to know exactly the true meaning of a (non-Western)

text, a defense against Eurocentric semantics, much like the catachrestic lloqlla, the crude

metaphor in Arguedas’s El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971; The Fox from Up Above

and the Fox from Down Below, 2000) that Sanjinés sees as shining a light on the conflict of

displaced identity.23 It is a potential trace of the other marking the Western reader as, ultimately

unknowing, the non-Western text as unknowable. Or perhaps simply a secret that all groups

know: every group by definition is already divided, as Spivak has already pointed out (Death,

83-4).

Conclusions

Translation can be an instrument for disfiguring texts. Certain elements of rhetoric, such

as figures in fiction, are not susceptible to hermeneutic or analytic procedures rendering

something utterly comprehensible. Tropes cannot be conclusively and exhaustively revealed for

what they may indeed be. Figures cannot be pinned down to any definitive substance or specific

content. They are pure signifiers, instead of signifieds. We have to recognize the impossible and

therefore provisional character of the undertaking. Just as a reading or translation is never

conclusive, never the end of the story, we have to recognize the alterity of these texts. When

techniques of cultural knowledge-production (such as comparison) predicate recognition of

difference on the ability to systematize otherness within codes of Western intelligibility that are

32

not themselves subject to interrogation, knowledge of “the other” serves an ideological function:

it reinforces the inevitability and stability of the center; in this case, Eurocentrism. Reading the

other should unsettle the agency of reading. It should problematize reading itself as a social site

building both an-other identity and alterity. The obsession with taxonomy and classification is a

positivist reaction and an attempt at universalism that, ultimately, because of its presumption to

generality can end up being perceived as a variant of imperialism, however harsh this accusation

may sound. Not to classify also means a relinquishing of the rational center of course, and a

possible abandonment of intelligibility as a methodological ideal. Favoring the inevitable aporias

and un-knownness of alterity, I have opted here for exploring the dimensions of incongruity that

exist in those texts that we casually label may label as “literature.” Matt Waggoner comments on

this issue while regarding his reaction to Spivak’s Death of a Discipline:

Enthusiasm for difference is quietly circumscribed by the assertion of what Jacques

Lacan frequently called the sujet supposé savoir, i.e., the subject that is supposed to

know. This knowing subject confronted by difference performs a unifying function by

organizing alterity into intelligible, reasonable constructions of knowledge. And this

universal subject position underwrites, so to speak, the spectacle of difference that

classifications perform. But within the organization of classificatory knowledge,

difference remains purely specular. How does one translate this “specular alterity”

(Spivak) into the disfigurement of the universal subject itself? (Waggoner, 137)

There will always be discrepancy in all analytical processes; translation is necessarily

incomplete. This involves, as a consequence, more than “mere methodology.” It necessitates an

ethics of alterity that conceptualizes the visibility of the other as the founding gesture of both a

responsive and responsible cultural studies. With the transformation of the old disciplines, the

33

acknowledgement of “the ‘other’ as producer of knowledge” has to be turned against “us,”

Western producers of knowledge, to question our positionality as an “investigator” or

“researcher.” This methodological reversal suggests not bringing the others into our own jargon-

ridden, Western-centered academic universe, or to judge others in the views of, in this particular

case, my Ladino world, but to imagine and perhaps better yet, envision, Ladinos with Mayas in a

collective process working towards a plain of coexistence.

34

Works Cited

Abreu Gómez, Ermilo, Canek. México: Editorial Oasis, 1982. Print.

Alegría, Ciro. El mundo es ancho y ajeno. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1982. Print.

Arguedas, José María. El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. 5a ed. Lima: Editorial Horizonte,

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1Ceh Moo was born in Calotmul, Yucatán, in 1974. She has a bachelor’s degree in Education from the

Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, where she has taught courses in Mayan grammar. She is a translator

and certified interpreter of Yukatek Maya. 2 See “Primera Novela en Maya - Literatura indígena.” Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcyYa5-YltM. Consulted March 23, 2012. 3 See Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 59-60. 4 See Rigoberta’s Secrets.” 5 In Guatemala alone there is already literature written in 7 indigenous languages derivative of classical

Maya, and 4 more in Mexico; this means that in languages evolving from classical Maya alone, we

already have contemporary texts written in 11 languages. 6 All translations to English from both texts are my own. Neither novel has been published in English. 7 The article in question is titled “The End of Indigenismo? Gender Politics, Postcolonial Inversion, and

Mayanism in Marisol Ceh Moo’s X-Teya, u puksi’ik’al ko’olel [Teya, the Heart of a Woman].” In June

2012 it was still unpublished. Its autor shared it with me on April 16, 2012. 8 “Maya populares” is the name given by Mayas themselves to indigenous subjects who joined either the

guerrillas or the guerrilla-led mass movement during the 1980s. CONAIE stands for Ecuador’s

Indigenous National Confederation, a union that led Ecuadorian struggles. 9 See Canek (1940) by Ermilo Abreu Gómez. 10 During the 20th century, Mayas themselves came to be called, and to call themselves, as “Mestizos.”

From their own perspective, this categorization prevented acts of revenge against them as a result of the

Caste War. From the Mestizo population, it became a strategy through which modernity and tradition

were collaboratively produced by state officials and local elites. Such performative renderings of el

pueblo became paradigmatic signifiers of both Mestizo culture and regional Yucatecan Maya identity,

occupying pride of place in the cultural repertoire of rule embraced by Yucatán's regional elites from the

Porfiriato on through the Mexican revolution. This denomination has gradually begun to return to “Maya”

39

in the wake of the 500th anniversary of the Spaniards’ arrival in the Americas and indigenous pride in the

wake of the 1994 Zapatista revolution. See Paul K. Eiss and Natalio Hernández. 11 See Rugeley’s Yucatan’s Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War, and Sullivan’s Xuxub Must

Die: The Lost Histories of a Murder on the Yucatan. Mexicans still debate whether the Caste War was a

war between social classes or whether it was an ideological-military movement. Contemporary

perspectives make clear its inter-ethnic and anti-Occidentalist nature. 12This is a reference to Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1872 – 1924), Governor of the Mexican state of Yucatán

and leader of the Partido Socialista del Sureste, who organized Maya chicle producers in Quintana Roo

and was assassinated in 1924. 13 Suffice to see the relationship between Menchú’s testimonio and the Guatemalan struggle in the 1980s,

or, else, that of Mapuche poetry and the present Chilean state violence against Mapuche communities in

southern Chile. 14 Sousa Santos means by this an attitude whereby under the gist of rationality, ruling elites condemn

those subjects that they label as “the ignorant, the residual, the inferior, the local, and the nonproductive”

to social forms of nonexistence: “They are social forms of nonexistence because the realities to which

they give shape are present only as obstacles vis-à-vis the realities deemed relevant, be they scientific,

advanced, superior, global, or productive realities.” 15 Isaac Esau Carrillo Can was born in Peto, Yucatán, in 1984. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Artistic

Education at the Escuela Normal Superior of Yucatán. He now studies in the School of Creative Writing

of the National Institute of Fine Arts. He discovered his vocation while working at the Institute of

Education for Adults of the State of Yucatán, where his work consisted of writing Maya texts for adults.

Since 2007 he has been writing literature. 16 See “Rethinking Indigenous Politics in the Era of the ‘Indio Permitido’”. 17 See Rescoldos del pasado. 18 Timothy Knowlton. “The Incantations in the Glyph and the Glyphs in the Incantations: Ancient Maya

Texts and the Ritual of the Bacabs.” Topical seminar on Rhetorical Structures and Literary Aspects of

Classic Maya Texts. Sunday, March 11, 2012. Oral presentation. 2012 Maya meetings. Casa Herrera

Auditorium. Antigua, Guatemala. 19 Ibid. 20 Oral presentation. Knowlton quotes Bauman, 1977. 21 See also Roys for the Books of Chilam Balam. 22 Knowlton, op. cit. 23 See Rescoldos del pasado, chapter 1.