Time Commences in Xibalbá

by Luis de Lión

  Juan is a primary example of a Ladino in the village; he looks indigenous on the outside but has spent much time in the city (even training for the priesthood) and no longer talks or acts like the others in the village.10 While the village itself (which is modeled on San Juan del Obispo) is no longer indigenous in language or dress, it clearly is indigenous in several other ways that correspond to its rejection of the Western model of Progress. So Juan is certainly hollow in terms of what he “is” versus what he looks like on the outside.11 To a nonindigenous person in Guatemala, the prominent surface markers of Maya indigenous race often mask ethnic identities that have purposely distanced themselves from indigenous culture. What’s more, these indigenous-looking, “non-indigenous-acting” individuals often even develop racist attitudes (sometimes overt) toward those who still act “indigenous,” most notably toward those who still speak indigenous languages and/or use indigenous dress, but also toward others, such as those who still work the land. The use of the term hueco speaks to such a situation in Juan’s case. Though he is a benevolent landowner/overlord (he is the main source of charity in difficult times in the village), his obsession with cleanliness, with white, belies his disdain for those who have not achieved his separation from indigenous culture and from the earth itself.

  But “hueco” also serves as a comment on language itself, especially in the case of a “Spanish” America that often celebrates exotic markers of its indigenous past—especially its temples—while deprecating as backward the many indigenous people who choose to live outside the Western model to varying degrees. The language that supposedly unifies these peoples is Spanish, just as the religion that supposedly provides the foundation for their nationhoods is Roman Catholicism; but that language, as a singular, fixed set, excludes the very heart of what makes these Americas so different from the Spanish. The language has evolved, to be sure, picking up and incorporating indigenous words along the way; but the need for a singular national language stands for the singular Ladino identity available to Guatemalan citizens who look indigenous; and it is hueco: hollow and emasculated, like Juan. I have finally chosen “hollow-ass faggot” as the translation for hueco to hold both the strong, derogatory tone and this secondary meaning; this term also hints at the etymological relationship in Guatemalan Spanish.

  Of course, one who is emasculated—literally castrated, except that emasculation, unlike castration, includes the removal of both the testicles and the penis—does not become feminine (as a poetics of the certain would imply, with its two sides of the binary pair: man/ woman); nor does he become homosexual. He who is emasculated technically becomes only mutilated.12 In this context, Concha’s use of the term hueco implies that emasculation is a devastating condition resulting from a sociopolitical situation that refuses a poetics of the uncertain, a place between which is something other than empty/ hollow. But ultimately Concha’s own “healthy” handling of the dilemma (embracing the duality) has its limits as well. In Concha’s “reverse emasculation” she literally deforms and scars her own body by putting a burning log inside her own vagina. Of course this reverse emasculation does not make her male. It just mutilates her. And though she is literally filling in a space, it still makes her figuratively hueca, not because she becomes homosexual, but because her position as Juan’s wife no longer allows her to embrace the poetics of the uncertain between the virginwhore.

  From Schizophrenia to Nawalismo

  The age of the nation-state and the Western notion of a singular self demand a stable, fixed definition of Guatemala and of the individuals living in it. Both, however, are ultimately only translations that pretend the chosen word is the original enunciation, translations that refuse to acknowledge the poetics of the uncertain and refuse underlying intermittent, multiple identities. This refusal to acknowledge the inevitable deferral in definitions of the self and the nation wreak havoc in both the country of Guatemala and in the novel Time Commences in Xibalbá. But the challenges are most devastating on the individual level in terms of the identities of people struggling to find where their various mestizajes fit into what has been impossibly constructed as a Ladino/indigenous binary.

  De Lión’s novel negotiates various aspects of the trauma indigenous people in Guatemala undergo because of the multiple worlds in which they must simultaneously construct themselves. I have attempted to position this problem as an offshoot of translation, or more precisely as a problem of two different ways of thinking about the outcome of translation. Like language, both before and after translation, a concrete definition of the self cannot ever be more than an approximation and must be acknowledged as such. Yet Western notions of the self imagine an a priori self each person strives to ultimately become. By contrast, any definition of the self within a poetics of the uncertain must be understood to be fluid—always being constructed and reconstructed by a person’s various interactions with the multiple realms in which he or she moves. The indigenous mestizo self is constructed in translation—and its “true” meaning, too, is continually deferred—because it must express itself differently depending on which of the many different social (and other) spheres the person engages at any time.

  The resulting deferral of the definition of self, a floating mestizaje, does not sit comfortably in a world dominated by Western global structures that are to a certain extent inextricable from corresponding Western notions of self. In a Western context, a deferred notion of self is liable to be diagnosed as dissociative identity disorder, a severe psychosis in psychoanalytic categorization; thus, in that context this deferral can soon develop all the debilitating consequences associated with psychosis, as we see with Juan Caca in this novel. In the first three-quarters of the novel these symptoms would correspond to dissociative identity disorder; later in the novel he seems to also suffer from schizophrenia. This change is evident when he holds the long conversation with his dead mother at the end of the last full chapter and then again in the Epi . . . taph when he is certain that every woman and animal is following, watching, and laughing at him. These are the diagnoses that would correspond to Western notions of the healthy self. However, in indigenous terms, an endless deferral of self might be better understood as a wider, more pervasive notion of community, both in the human sense and in the sense of the other realms in which humans participate. This self is always inextricably linked with and perpetually (re)constructed by its changing interactions with the world and its own past. This concept runs directly up against the impossible choice the Western concept of mestizaje offers to Guatemalans with varying relationships to indigeneity. Simply put, they must be either indigenous or Ladino.

  The term mestizaje has been used historically to refer to people of combined indigenous and European ancestry in the Spanish Americas, as though it stands in opposition to the purity of both indigenous and European peoples before Contact. But both the history of the term and its meanings are of course more complicated because the mixing of blood has no beginning point; it always is (and always has been) ongoing, even before the Spanish arrived in the Americas. And it is always incomplete, changing. Therefore, the terms mestizaje, indigenous, and Ladino, cannot ever be depoliticized.13 The political charge running under the various meanings associated with these categories at different times has fueled much controversy in the critical approach to this novel.

  This controversy grows directly out of the fact that the author of the novel himself personified the inevitable complications of a binary indigenous/La
dino category. Much of the debate in Guatemala surrounding this novel has had to do with identity politics and whether this novel should even count as an “indigenous novel.” After all, it was written in Spanish by an author whose first language was Spanish. Of course Spanish was the only language in which any formal education was available at the time, and de Lión’s mastery of Spanish ultimately made his academic success possible. In turn, his advanced education—relative to the great majority of Guatemalans—and his voracious appetite for knowledge made it possible for him to read and thoroughly understand the better part of the Western canon of philosophy. And these two factors certainly show in his work. But do these two facts—language and a thorough grounding in Western philosophy—mean that Luis de Lión, and by extension this novel, are not indigenous? Or does the indigenous condition actually depend most on the very processes in which de Lión participated his whole life: various simultaneous translations on different levels that continually defer meaning and enforce a poetics of the uncertain on more than the natural language level?

  Certainly any useful understanding of the category “indigenous” in modern-day Guatemala cannot be reduced to a correlation with what natural language/s a person uses, though certain elements of language, more broadly conceived, must necessarily play a part. Time Commences in Xibalbá shows that although the political constructions of the indigenous as a category are impossible and disingenuous, a real aspect of indigeneity that is worth fighting to retain—not regain—is related to language, but not just to natural language. It is the unending deferral of language, the poetics of the uncertain, that functions as a rejection of Western logos. And the solution is not simply to reject all things Western in order to replace them with all things indigenous, as the villagers try to do in the last chapter of the novel (just before the Epi . . . taph and Prologue). The solution must be to embrace the space between, while refusing the psychosis-inducing colonial mandate to privilege the Western.

  This solution is specifically enabled as language by the concept of the nawal—an important, but often misunderstood—or mistranslated—element of indigenous philosophy. The nawal—a person’s companion in the natural world, to which he or she is intangibly linked—is most often translated as “animal spirit”; but this structuralist interpretation illustrates the kind of Western misreading that creates the trauma of identity crises. Another definition for nawal that was popular for a time during the Chicano movement was “the other in me,” but this too is inadequate because it prioritizes the me (the human) and situates the other as a subcategory. The person and her nawal (animal, rock, tree) together make up the self, the me, non-hierarchically. Neither one is other. The self is enacted in the space between. The nawal makes it impossible to define selfhood in terms of a human being as divisible from the other realms in which that human participates. In effect, nawalismo allows that the self is no more and no less than the ongoing—and often competing—translations of one’s being, simultaneously overlapping other realms of life. The nawal takes the self out of isolation and brings it into conversation with the realms that in fact define it.

  Xibalbá suggests that the poetics of the uncertain underlying nawalismo can speak to the identity crisis tearing at the foundation of the modern Guatemalan nation-state. As expressed in Maya poetics, the concept of the nawal provides a philosophical framework within which the translation of mestizaje can be normalized for the individual without resorting to the erasure of assimilation. However, because modernity so firmly establishes the subject/object divide, the enactment of the nawal can take on the debilitating symptoms of dissociative identity disorder.

  Though the words “nawal” and “schizophrenia” never appear in the novel itself, the narrative trades on the concepts on several different levels. The most straightforward nod to nawalismo is the coyote/hen interlude at the end of the second chapter, in which these animals clearly borrow the voices and the histories of Pascual and Juan Caca, respectively. But more subtle nawal-like rejections of the Western inviolate self are also at work here. And one of these is directly related to translation. A specific difficulty of translating from Spanish to English in general involves the grammatical need to use explicit subjects or their related pronouns in English structure. Because Spanish, unlike English, reveals much more information about the grammatical subject in the corresponding verb conjugations, the grammatical subject need not be explicit. That is, a sentence in Spanish does not require an overt subject as a sentence in English does. For this reason, it is much easier for a writer to hide who specifically a sentence is talking about in a narrative like this one that switches back and forth in time and place.

  This ambiguous pronoun reference in the first half of the novel creates a poetics of the nawal in terms of the two main male characters; specifically, it is never entirely clear whether the “he” (explicit or implied) in several scenes refers to Pascual or Juan. This ambiguity suggests that Juan and Pascual may in fact function on some levels as two different aspects of the same character.14 However, this example suggests the Western concept of schizophrenia rather than nawalismo for two reasons: First, the pairing in nawalismo necessarily connects a human and a nonhuman participant in the notion of shared self. This undercuts the ontological priority of humans in the world. Second, this Juan/Pascual pairing clearly produces trauma as evidenced by their self-loathing and associated obsessive behaviors.

  Both Juan and Pascual had traveled extensively outside of the village and looked for Ladina women and other conspicuous nonindigenous indulgences to mollify their loathing of the indigenous markers still plaguing them, in spite of their adoption of largely Ladino lifestyles and language. But they both return to the village having failed to negotiate the Ladino world, precisely because they could not successfully translate their hybrid indigeneity. In the end, their trauma results from the fact that they can neither completely leave their indigeneity behind nor go back to a “pure” indigenous identity. And these are the only two options offered by the either/or binary of Western mestizaje.

  These two aspects of failed mestizaje illustrate the schizophrenic split. Juan and Pascual are each other’s schizophrenic voice. Although they handle in very different ways the trauma of no longer belonging in either world, the result is the same. Juan removes himself from the mundane aspects of the world, concentrates on Catholic purity/ whiteness, and becomes an eccentric patron of the poor and destitute. Pascual also isolates himself, hiding behind the haze of alcoholic excess and obsessive masturbation. Both live in the village but neither is of the village. Both are clearly traumatized by their inability to translate their hybrid indigenous identities in the indigenous context of the village just as they were in the context of the wider modern world.

  A more nuanced understanding of the nawal could fill in the empty space between the two extremes of their schizophrenia. In other words, identity need not, in fact cannot, be singular, as Western concepts of the self seem to demand. Instead, the self is best understood as taking form in the spaces among the various identities that are enacted by its participation in different realms. By pointing to the empty middle, the Western binary produces absence; the complimentary pair of the nawal, on the other hand, produces presence by pointing to the filled middle of the two joined terms. Xibalbá finally argues that Guatemala must produce indigeneities in the spaces between rather than erase indigeneity in its impossible attempt to define it precisely as a political weapon.

  What is lef
t for me to do here then is to extend this notion of translation from the individual to the collective level. Specifically, the village’s collective problems work in a similar way to the complications of identity that beset Concha, Juan, and Pascual. These problems of identity (as opposed to identities) in the postcolonial era speak to the problem of Guatemala as a whole. Xibalbá ultimately defines culture as a series of inevitable translations that stack multiple and often contradictory meanings. Just as on the individual level, however, those meanings or that culture can never coalesce because the only place that meaning is ultimately constructed in the crosscurrents of Guatemala’s mestizaje is in the act of translation itself, the spaces among languages. The mestizo culture of the village in the novel and of de Lión’s San Juan del Obispo comes to be, or is always becoming, only in the space between.

  A major problem for the village in the novel is that it finds itself struggling between two poles of cultural identity that, in and of themselves, are both impossible. On the one hand, the legacy of the colonial era of “civilization” has left indelible cultural markers that come from the Spanish/Catholic past/present. On the other hand, their enactments in the current context are neither Spanish nor Roman Catholic as names and symbols imply. Both the language and the religion have changed in adapting to this place at least as much as this place has changed in adapting to them. So, the Spanish/Catholic identity, which stands on one pole of the village’s cultural identity—represented by the village church and its light-skinned Virgen de la Concepción—cannot in itself offer a viable cultural identity for the village because of its ongoing complicity with the racism of the colonial period. The people still look indigenous, not like the Virgen or the various images of Christ in the village church. Allying themselves with this culture is a visual contradiction and a sure path toward a self-deprecating future like the one that brings on the schizophrenia of Juan and Pascual. This culture leaves no healthy space for Concha or for her insistence on her own agency.