Time Commences in Xibalbá
Page 15
For Central America, all discourse is embedded to some degree in the Popol Wuj, as a cosmology that outlines acts of protest, the creative energy of indigenous events, and processes leading to a more just and equal society. For this reason, contemporary symbolic figurations in the Central American imaginary differ in significant ways from traditional Western parameters, and their repeated, often subtle, allusion to that foundational discourse renders many of their signs “illegible” outside the region.
The Popol Wuj creates an alternative macro-narrative to the Western Bible, by telling the story of creation in a fashion that conflates the origins of all Mesoamerican peoples in one foundational discourse. Its practices have been traced to the late Pre-Classic period, from about 300 B.C. to A.D. 300, though most surviving evidence dates from the Classic period (A.D. 300 to 900). Most of the figures associated with the Popol Wuj first appear in polychrome ceramic vases from this era. Archeologist Michael D. Coe has related this imagery to Xibalbá.8 It shows some of the main characters, such as the Hero Twins Junajpu and Xb’alanke, as well as the Howler Monkey Gods. Certain scenes have been associated with the shooting of Vucub-Caquix and the restoration of the Twins’ dead father as the emblematic representation of maize. Carlos M. López argues that the Popol Wuj is not a single text but a compilation of various texts of different ages and origins within the Mayab’ (Maya region), leading him to use the term Wuj in the plural: Wujs, or “books.” Popol in turn stands for “weaving,” itself a metaphor for “social fabric.” He claims that those books or texts related both to the origins of the Mayas and to Xibalbá date from the Pre-Classic period, the ones dealing with the Hero Twins Junajpu and Xb’alanke (associated with the sun and the moon) to the Classic period, and, finally, the ones dealing with K’iche’ genealogies (which include many Kaqchikel experiences, as the latter were originally a K’iche’ lineage that broke away from the former in a struggle for power), to the Post-Classic.9 The function of these books included a register of their religion, what López called the popol cabauil (deities belonging to the social fabric), day keeping, a task closely associated to religious practices given that the Maya calendar associates specific rites and meaning to every day of the year, an esoteric ritual register that chronicles the founding of cities and towns, and a list of the dynastic rulers.10
The creation story itself, present in the first three books, is one of a series of successful and failed creations, one where Xibalbá plays a prominent role. First, the cosmic deities, which include Tepew (Sovereign), Q’uk’umatz (Quetzal Serpent), and three other deities collectively named “Heart Sky,” succeed in creating the earth. Feeling lonely, they decide to create beings that will worship them. They manufacture beings made of mud, but they can neither move nor speak. After destroying the mud beings with a flood, they try again by creating wooden creatures that can speak, but they lack a soul and blood, quickly forgetting their makers. Angered over the flaws in their creation, the cosmic deities destroy them with fire.
The creation stories are then interrupted, and the books shift to the story of the Hero Twins Junajpu (Blowgun) and Xb’alanke (Hidden Sun). This is not a gratuitous interruption. It enables readers (and, also, ancient audiences, as the Popol Wuj was performed in public occasions as Tedlock has argued11) to understand the emergence of maize as the substance of life. The Hero Twins’ dual fathers, Jun Junajpu (One Blowgun) and Wuqub’ Junajpu (Seven Blowgun) are summoned to the underworld of Xibalbá for playing their ball game too noisily. They are given a series of trials to pass. When they fail them, they are killed. Jun Junajpu’s head is placed in a calabash tree. This skull later impregnates Ixkik’ (Young Blood Moon), daughter of a Xibalbá lord, by spitting into her hand. She flees the lords and lives with Ixmucane, mother of Jun Junajpu and Wuqub Junajpu, where she gives birth to the Hero Twins, Junajpu and Xb’alanke. When these two become adolescents, they discover their father’s ball-playing equipment suspended from the ceiling of their house. They then start playing ball themselves. Their noise leads to their being summoned in turn to Xibalbá for making too much noise while playing. Like their father, they are given a series of tests to pass. Unlike their predecessor, however, they outwit the lords of Xibalbá and destroy them. Afterward, they rescue the head of their father, Jun Junajpu, and transform him into a head of maize. They then ascend to the night sky as the sun and the moon.
At this point we understand the point of the interruption. Human beings could not be created without the germination of maize. With the sun and the moon in the sky, there is water and sunlight to enable the maize plant to grow. Once the cornfield is harvested, the Founding Parents grind the yellow ears of ripe maize nine times. They do the same with the white ears of corn. Out of this powder, mixed with water and placed over fire, were created the original human beings, the “men of maize.” Throughout these fascinating stories there is a constant play of the sun and the moon, associated with fire and water respectively. The symbology is present not only in the names of many of the characters (i.e., Young Blood Moon, Hidden Sun) but it represents a cosmological order as well.
In this logic, Xibalbá, or Xib’alb’a in K’iche’, meaning “place of fear,” is generically associated with the underworld, one ruled by deities of disease and death. Xibalbá is described in the Popol Wuj as either a city or a realm below the surface of the earth, ruled by twelve gods or powerful rulers known as the Lords of Xibalbá. Some Christian commentators have associated Xibalbá with the Christian hell. However, unlike the latter, Xibalbá is more a passage through which all the dead have to go, regardless of good or bad behavior. It is more like another dimension, one associated with suffering and disease, which all beings have to traverse. Symbolically, Mayas associated it with those times when the sun was invisible (the night), or when the moon was invisible (the day). Nonbeingness in the visible world seems to imply being in Xibalbá. But, since everything is cyclical for the Maya, all beings that cross through Xibalbá have the potential to return, as do the sun and moon every day, after completing their cycle. Though there is the cautionary tale of Jun Junajpu and Wuqub’ Junajpu who technically did not return by virtue of their getting killed, in reality they symbolized corn seeds. As such, they germinated, bloomed, were harvested (had their heads cut off ), and died, only to repeat the cycle as their seeds (Junajpu and Xb’alanke) succeed in replacing them on the surface of the earth. Thus, Xibalbá is simultaneously the place of death as well as the space underground where life germinates when there is enough water and sunlight. It is the space under the ground where seeds have to be planted, and where they transform themselves in order to germinate, ultimately emerging as new corn seedlings into the outside world.
During the Spanish Conquest, indigenous peoples endured the destruction of their cities and their cultures, the rape of their women, and the enslavement of their men, and in the fifty years following the event, they lost approximately six-sevenths of their total population. Those who survived were forced to accommodate their understanding of the world to new cultural realities alien to their beingness. But the Popol Wuj became the foundational manifesto of resistance.
The version that has come down to us was originally written in Santa Cruz del Quiché around 1550 to 1555 in K’iche’ Maya, but employing a Latin alphabet. It is thought that it was copied from either an oral recitation or a hieroglyphic manuscript that has since been lost.12 It was written after the first missionaries arrived in the 1540s, and it is assumed to have been written
before 1558 by prominent members, or rulers, of the Kaweq, Nija’ib, and Ajaw K’iche’ lineages (Colop, 17). The K’iche’ Manuscript was shown in the town of Chichicastenango to Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez in the early eighteenth century. He translated and copied it. This manuscript was kept in a neglected corner of the Universidad de San Carlos library in Guatemala City until it was discovered by Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg and Carl Scherzer in 1854. However, the original Chichicastenango manuscript has disappeared from history.13 Brasseur and Scherzer published French and Spanish translations a few years later. Brasseur found another copy of the Chichicastenango manuscript in Rabinal, also made in the early eighteenth century. He stole it and took it to Paris. Following his death, it was sold, finding its way to the Chicago Newberry Library. Since Brasseur’s and Scherzer’s first translations, the Popol Wuj has been translated into English and other languages.
A debate continues over the authority/authoredness of the text, but one thing is clear: after the holocaust of the Spanish Conquest, surviving Maya-K’iche’ leaders/priests sensed their imminent extermination. The need to leave a trace of their peoples’ experience on earth became urgent. Much as their ancestors had done in the Classic era by carving glyphs on stelae to record their history with astronomical associations, they chose to leave a testimony to explain their origins and their culture. The text also empowered those rulers to make claims even under Spanish rule. Most important, K’iche’ leaders declare in the Popol Wuj that they received the insignia and gifts of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkán, the feathered serpent, the highest deity in the cosmos, god of arts and culture. In other words, they were the chosen ones, the apogee of human civilization. To them, the Spaniards were simply the barbarians who won the war.
As a caveat to this statement, we should certainly remember that, as we know it, this text is already born in a colonial semiosis, where the written letter, the Latin alphabet, is employed for the first time both to name a non-Western referent, K’iche’-Maya significations, and to occlude the vaporous condition of the original, an unknown text, perhaps only familiar to selected priests after an initiatory rite, if it ever existed as such, though one performed ritualistically before mass audiences for thousands of years. Thus, we do have to nuance the quasi-celebratory mantle placed over this seemingly ur-text, emerging from a zone where the aura of the other, and of otherness, has been smothered.
The Popol Wuj also haunts Guatemalan Ladino literature. Modernist Ladino writer Miguel Angel Asturias, while living in Paris in the 1920s, became familiar not only with the Popol Wuj (and did his own translation, from French to Spanish; he spoke no K’iche’) but also with James Joyce’s Ulysses. Fascinated by the mythic potential of fusing both, he labored assiduously to create an analogous structure. Thus, adapting the Popol Wuj to a modernist novelistic structure, he published Men of Maize in 1949.
Though it created the illusion of speaking from an indigenous perspective, Asturias mythified the allegedly hybrid quality of mestizaje as a harmonious synthesis of Western and Maya values. The net result was that he was also guilty of relegating Mayas to a subaltern role within Ladino identity. Maya culture provides symbolic icons for his conception of nationality. Nevertheless, the subaltern voice is expressed exclusively from a Ladino perspective, and exclusively in Spanish. Given that the acquisition of agency implies control of one’s enunciations, his attitude wrestles agency away from Mayas. Asturias names the Maya community, speaks for it, and speaks in its defense. But he does not speak with it. And the community does not speak. In this sense, Men of Maize illustrates the limits of representation of ethnicized subalternity when the subaltern’s own enunciation is suppressed. If we consider Men of Maize as the maximum possible consciousness to which a Ladino writer could aspire in his immersion within modernizing Western parameters, we can clearly see the difficulty of representing alternative expressions of a complex heterogeneity in the literary discursivity of the continent. And yet, it was Asturias who defended Maya culture, and who bequeathed the Nobel Prize money to his son so the latter could create a guerrilla organization that would fight for indigenous rights.
Between the publication of Asturias’s Men of Maize and the emergence of a new Maya literature came thirty-seven years of civil war in Guatemala. In the latter part of that conflict, from 1979 to 1982, there was a spontaneous insurrection in the Maya highlands. The army counteroffensive, begun in the summer of 1982, was brutal. The UN Truth Commission has stated that the army wiped out 660 Maya villages. Over 100,000 people were killed; primarily older people, women, and children, and over a quarter of a million were driven into exile. However, this genocide led to a Maya cultural revival as well. Starting in 1985, Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil began to publish articles on the need to expand the use of Maya languages.14 His efforts led to the creation of the governmental Academy of Maya Languages created in the 1990s. The academy, and independent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), systematized the writing of all surviving Maya languages and published dictionaries of each. This was radically new, given that Maya languages had belonged to the oral tradition since the Spanish Conquest, and nothing had been written in them since the Popol Wuj. Nora England, who collaborated in all of these efforts, explains: “Maya are concerned with language maintenance in the face of increasing signs of language shift, they are concerned with expanding the domains of usage of Maya languages, especially written language, and they are concerned with achieving a balance between languages as a marker of local identity” (Fischer and McKenna Brown, 178). The systematization of Maya languages and the education of Maya children in those languages created the first generation of lettered indigenous people in Guatemala. The publication of foundational Maya texts, which were also incorporated within the state educational system, gave recognition and value to Maya culture. The establishment of presses dedicated to the publication of texts in Maya languages also created an outlet for new writing and a market for new writers.
The Emergence of a New Maya Literature
It was in this context of political terror and rebirth of a culture that Luis de Lión’s daughter Mayarí and Francisco Morales Santos undertook the job of bringing to light Time Commences in Xibalbá in 1985, a year after the author’s assassination, and two years before peace negotiations would begin in earnest. This text seemed to open the floodgates. Soon after, the poetry of K’iche’ poet Humberto Ak’abal was circulating to great international acclaim, and Gaspar Pedro González published La otra cara (A Mayan Life, 1995), originally written in Q’anjob’al, in 1992, the quincentennial year of the Spanish arrival to the Americas. Meanwhile, Víctor Montejo, still residing in the United States where he fled after his near-assassination in 1982, began publishing novellas, testimonials, poetry, and then novels in Jakalteko (Popti’), translated into both English and Spanish. By the early 1990s, critics were already problematizing emerging Maya works. By the time the First Maya Conference took place in 1996, the same year the peace treaty was signed, contemporary Maya literature was firmly established.
Mayas’ emerging literature represents an epochal disruption to the Central American Ladino canon. It inverts knowledge/power relations. Alternative knowledge producers become the purveyors of self-generated cognizance, one originating from nontraditional and nonconventional sites. The attitude of Maya writers breaks the myth that information and learning is produced exclusively by cosmopolitan Westerncentric academics, or through the disciplining of academic institutions. As Joanne Rappaport has argued, th
e recent growth of ethnic movements has created scenarios in which grassroots intellectuals can find their voice, identify their audiences, and participate in open political action.15 This overall process also evidences that a new geopolitics of knowledge is emerging, one blending grassroots knowledge with political activism. And a newly energized literary production is part of it. This also implies that these forms of knowledge can—and do in effect—become operative for contemporary social movements. It also illustrates a community’s ability to multiply the points of entry through which they can insert themselves within globalized textures. Maya literature is also a notable effort because of its bilingualism. By introducing new linguistic and representational challenges into the literary/symbolic process, Maya works manage to provincialize Spanish as an organic vehicle in the constitution of Latin American symbolic imaginaries, and especially succeed in problematizing the nature of the nation-state.