Time Commences in Xibalbá
Page 16
Regardless of the genres in which their works appear—poetry, fiction, testimonio, and theater written in various Maya languages, translated into Spanish most of the time by the authors themselves—Maya literature reflects the changing role that “literature” plays in racialized subaltern societies. While their cultural practices include many other expressions, from traditional weaving to painting, to theater and representational ceremonial forms, such as the celebration of the Maya New Year in nontraditional sites like the Central Park of Guatemala City, literature has gained in importance as literate practices and education also increase in Maya society, without necessarily becoming a new doxa. The prestige gained by Maya literary figures include naming novelist Gaspar Pedro González as head of the Literature Division for the Ministry of Culture in the early 2000s and novelist Víctor Montejo being appointed as Secretary of Peace in 2004 (he resigned in mid-2005). Presently poet Rosa Chávez is working to become the first Maya female film director.
Time Commences in Xibalbá: Decoding the Textual Signs
Time Commences in Xibalbá is without a doubt the pioneer Maya novel of the movement outlined above. Written in Spanish, this experimental text destroys all possible attempts at any linear chronology. It almost feels as if it were rebelling against the temporal, linear explanation of history offered by Western philosophy as a means of decolonizing the Maya eco-space. The text is built exclusively through flash-forwards and flashbacks with iterative phrases and images to the degree that the prologue is the last part of the book and its last line connects with the first one. If to Western eyes this may seem to complete a Finnegan’s Wake–type of circularity, the vision behind its conception is the Mayas’ cyclical notion of time, the k’atun, which is already present in the earliest forms of the Maya calendar dating back 3,000 years.16 Time Commences in Xibalbá is clearly one of the most complex novels ever written in Central America. Kaqchikel/ Castilian linguistic fusion is indicated either by words that function like tropes or by popular sayings associated with village-style life (naguas, or canillas chorriadas, archaic Hispanisms closely associated with “Maya Spanish” meaning skirts and grimy legs), often articulated in the characters’ dialogues (—Allá, muchá.—¿Dónde vos?, similar to the above, meaning—There, guys.—¿Where, vos?), what Laura Martin calls “the conventional forms of high style expressive rhetoric still found in Mayan languages today” (59). Indeed, in her article she elaborates a rhetorical comparison of the styles of the Popol Wuj and Time Commences in Xibalbá (53–57) pointing out how grammatical markers are gradually reduced while highlighting semantic relationships and spatial associations, to conclude that “[t]he manipulation of internal structures, the ambiguity of interpretive association, and the overlapping referencing that are exhibited here are among the factors that make the highly constrained parallel Mayan discourse forms so entertaining and appealing” (58). The Popol Wuj is of course invoked in the title through the use of the term Xibalbá. Early on in the text it is further addressed as “that strange book,” a coded mise en abyme of temporal elements appearing in the larger context of the work itself.
Those are not the only connections to the classic text. De Lión also borrows the duality of the twins. The two main characters are named Pascual Baeza and Juan Caca. As we will see later, they are not exactly Hero Twins, nor are they actually true twins. They resemble more the Hero Twins’ dual fathers, Jun Junajpu and Wuqub’ Junajpu, who were defeated and killed by the Lords of Xibalbá. They are flawed, but represent the promise of a triumphant future. The heroine is Concha, who, despite being Maya, looks identical to the Catholic statue of the Ladina Lady of the Immaculate Conception in the church (they are even the same height) except for the fact that she is brown. Concha marries Juan and sleeps with all the men in the unnamed town of the text.17 Because of her looks, she is confused by local men with the local wooden image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.18
The novel goes beyond a brilliant display of stylistics, form, and Maya symbology. As Emilio del Valle Escalante argues, it is “also an attempt to articulate Maya nationalism as a political alternative in the struggle against racism and colonialism” (205), while adding that it is also “an epistemological challenge to the discourse of indigenismo” (210) and, in particular, to Asturias’s own Men of Maize, “which promotes the vindication of the indigenous world through cultural mestizaje (hybridity)” (210).19
The novel is divided into five parts, if we include the “Epi . . . taph” among them, with a “Prologue” at the end of the text. Each part is in turn divided into various sections. The first part, titled “First There Was the Wind,” begins with an allusion to the strong wind hitting the town.20 Afterward, the town’s dogs and coyotes howl. The narrative voice represents all the villagers as a nonindividualized collective. Laura Martin has argued that the use of a plural, unspecified voice is a key element in traditional Maya narrative (46). In her understanding, “[t]he most cursory reading of the Hero Twins’ exploits, introduced by the collective ‘we the K’iche’,’ illustrates all of them . . .” (ibid).
A cold wave then ensues, followed by silence. The sound of a cart is heard advancing noisily from the cemetery to the main square. A skeleton is in the cart. It laughs, plays marimba music on its ribs, and begins to dance. Then it moves on, stopping in front of all the houses and dancing in front of each. Finally it steps into the last house and disappears. The narrative voice then addresses the reader, stating that if you opened the gate of this “plastered and whitewashed adobe house with a tile roof,” and then went into the small room where all the saints were housed, you would see a table where there are pictures depicting images of Christ, saints, and one of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. The scene is described almost as if it were a movie camera traveling from a medium shot of the house to a close-up of the pictures on the table. This initial sequence finally unveils an unknown “I” behind the narrative voice: “So . . . if, from there, you walked ten paces to the left—and it was exactly ten paces; I know, because I counted them many times . . .” We still, however, have no clue as to who is talking, nor do we understand entirely why he is describing those items in the house.
All of a sudden this voice makes an unexpected and shocking claim: “The Virgen de Concepción was a whore. I never met her. But I remember her.” The shock passes when we find out that the narrative voice is describing a real fifteen-year-old woman: “that is, the age at which someone noticed that she looked like the image of the Virgen de Concepción there in the church from which she got her nickname: she had the same hair, the same face, the same eyes, the same eyelashes, the same eyebrows, the same nose, the same mouth, and she was even the same size; the only difference was that she was dark, that she had tits, that she was flesh and bone—and also that she was a whore.” Having thus introduced Concha, the narrative voice proceeds to describe her wedding night. When her unnamed husband mounts her, he describes her vagina as “the entrance to hell.” She felt insulted. Nevertheless he desires her. But “her body kept filling up with more and more birds,” an allusion to her sexual voracity desiring more and more orgasms, until her husband “wasted away to pure skin and bones from a real good case of tuberculosis” and died.
Sexuality is thus introduced in the text. Karen Poe argues that the novel is structured around masculine impotence or else fear of it (87). She adds that we are confronting characters who masturbate alone, who are always waiting for someone else who never arrives, and who fail to
obtain pleasure from sex. The only exception is Concha. Amy Olen sees her husband’s insult as an aural “rape” that launches Concha’s self-awareness of her status as a subalternized woman of color, and initiates her as a transgressive, counterhegemonic force by means of her sexuality (8–9). However, the sexual language of Concha’s body, denoting a budding transgressive, feminist position, defeats her husband’s injurious masculinist discourse, vindicating her sexuality as a powerful, transgressive force (10). In Olen’s understanding, then, Concha redefines the biopolitics controlling feminine indigenous sexuality.
An aggressive, desiring woman, Concha returns to her parents’ house and has sex with all the men in town. Males complain that she only uses them but never falls for any one in particular. When rumors about her grow and the local priest curses her, her parents kick her out of the house. She then moves to a little hut down the road and keeps having sex. Her father chases her farther, until “she ended up in the last little thatched hut on the last street. And from there she didn’t budge.”
The priest visits her to expel her from the town but possibly ends up sleeping with her as well. The local authorities definitely sleep with her when they make their attempts to expel her. At this point she feels “at the very height of her powers” and “she’d start feeling like crying from pure joy.” However, the narrative voice then informs us that men enjoyed their sex as well because they fantasized that they were “actually on top of the real Virgen de Concepción.” This articulation is followed by a racialized epithet, “¡Once a fucking Indian, always a fucking Indian!” It is at this juncture that the reader discovers the racialized element of the novel. Coloniality always makes reference to race, as we will see in the last section of this afterword. Indigenous men, victims of opprobrious discrimination, fantasize about having sex with the image of the Virgin not out of sacrilege, but because she is the only Ladina woman in town. Since Guatemalan Ladinos think of themselves as white, this would be the equivalent of having sex with a white woman. Here we stumble upon what Maria Lugones labels the “colonial/modern gender system,” one where “men who have been racialized as inferior” inflict symbolic or real violence to women of color as coloniality militates against masculinist beingness. Lugones claims that “colonized females got the inferior status of gendering as women, without any of the privileges accompanying that status for white bourgeois women” (13). Nelson Maldonado-Torres also associates the crisis of masculinist sexuality to coloniality. He argues that machismo is the consequence of what he labels the ego conquiro, a will to conquer and enslave that he associates with masculine sexuality as the source of aggression. For him, this syndrome includes the feminization of the enemy (in the novel, Maya males) as an expression of symbolic domination and dependency on exploiting female labor and their bodies.21 Concha is not seen as a subject by masculinist desire. She is a stand-in for indigenous males’ racialized desire, thus denying her the agency she has struggled so hard to achieve.
After the aforementioned incident, Concha moves with Juan Caca to the plastered and whitewashed adobe house with a tile roof described at the beginning of the text, but this is not first enunciated by the discursive voice. Men continue to visit her, and significantly, the narrative voices claims that they “all felt white.” Surprisingly, one day Juan Caca and Concha show up in church in the middle of mass and tell the priest that they want to get married. The priest acquiesces. However, they never have children. The text informs us that in her first marriage, she gave birth to a stillborn baby. She hated the pain of childbirth and loved intercourse, so she determined never to have a child again, and took measures to avoid getting pregnant.22
In the section that follows Concha confirms that all the men in the town indeed have had sex with her, leaving “their armies of Indian spermatozoids on her mountain,” another racialized reference marking her power over indigenous masculinities. Suddenly she recalls that there is another man in town. She sneaks out at midnight and visits him. She remembers that her parents told her she was born at the same time as this man. As a consequence, they had always desired each other.23 She thinks this is not true, because “it didn’t matter to her when he went off to the army.” Those reading the text for the second time know at this point that “army” is a giveaway reference to Pascual who did indeed join the army, but he remains unnamed in the passage. Concha tries to seduce him but he turns her down, claiming he is waiting for another woman, without naming his fantasy: the Ladina Virgen of Concepción. He tells her to run along. The narrative voice adds: “Yes, he’s waiting for the other one. For this one that’s here, only if she dies, then if she comes back years later, if her dust pulls itself back together, if that dust forms her bones again, if, with those bones, she walks.” Here we can also see the association of Concha with Wuqub’ Junajpu (whom, despite being represented as male in the Popol Wuj, is a feminine force; h/she becomes the moon, emblematic symbol of womanhood, fertility, weaving, and sexuality for the Mayas); not only was she born at the same time as Pascual, thus being a symbolic twin with him, but she will die, turn to dust, and then her dust will return to reconfigure her bones, as happens to Jun Junajpu and Wuqub’ Junajpu.
Concha returns home and tries to seduce her husband. She jumps on top of him but he resists, uttering another injurious speech at her: “Concha, don’t be such a whore.” She then claims he is not a man. He flees, then returns, machete in hand, to defend himself from her, but she ignores him. She goes to the kitchen, “picks up the piece of firewood with the reddest embers,” returns to the bedroom, lies down on the floor, and, opening her legs wide, “wields the glowing piece of firewood, and, little by little, as though it were a member, she slowly puts it up inside herself.” The smell of charred flesh spreads over the town.
Gruesome as this scene is, Olen claims that it raises Concha’s consciousness regarding the racial and sexual nature of coloniality. She reads Concha’s self-mutilation as an empowerment gesture, an alternate means to efface her sexual being so as to rearticulate herself as a subject (14) by eliminating gender domination in closing down her vagina for good to the town’s efforts to discipline her by controlling her sex. Poe in turn sees here a female flagellation, paired with a similar masculinist gesture when Pascual, later in the text, engages in violent sex with the wooden statue of the Ladina virgin (88).
In the ensuing section the narrative voice interpolates Pascual: “And it was to this town that you came back.” We learn that he has returned to die and be buried next to his mother, but has spent time in “that hated world, that Ladino world, where you were the target of discrimination.” Nonetheless, he is dying of boredom, drowning himself in alcohol, and continually masturbating. He goes to the church just to watch women go by, but is disappointed to see only “common, run-of-the-mill [women], with long hair, bare feet: Indians.” He decides to leave; but, before he moves, he sees the object of his desire: “it was her; he felt it. It was her he had been waiting for with lovehate.” The first part of the book closes without revealing the mystery of his desire. However, Pascual makes evident the intermeshing of the racialization and gendering process that violently inferiorizes colonialized women of color, thus contributing to the disintegration of communal relations that will take place near the end of the text.
The second part, “The Other Half of the Night They Didn’t Sleep,” begins with a short interlude about how all the townspeople are in the dark, cold and starving to death, waiting for the sun to rise. Convinced that th
ey may be dead and possibly only souls living in darkness, they try to determine whether they are indeed dead or alive. The brief section, reenacting the mythic move from darkness to dawn in the Popol Wuj, ends with the lapidary phrase “And so, in order not to go on suffering, they decided to invent the day, just in their heads . . .” In the Popol Wuj, however, daylight means the beginning of life and a cyclical transition from the darkness and cold of the night. In de Lión’s text, people seem mired in darkness and incapable of actually experiencing the arrival of the sun, in a reversal of the classic text, as Martin’s work has already pointed out (46). A good deal of the meaning of the entire novel could very well be traced to this short episode illuminating, oxymoronically, its greater signification.
The text then shifts to Juan, again without naming him. He is described as an unfeeling person who did not care for his parents but valued the land he inherited, which he never worked himself with his own hands; still, he was a “little village plantation boss.” Immediately following, the narrative voice provides the description of Pascual’s return to the town. We learn that his mother was named Piedad Baeza. She was ugly, marrying an old man who barely had time to procreate before he died. Pascual was born small and sickly on November 2, the Day of the Dead. Unable to name him Deceased, the calendar name for that date, she names him Pascual, “which is the same as calling him deceased, except that it’s a saint’s name, so it means alive.” We then follow his growing-up process. He is skinny but strong. As he grows he becomes a ruffian, beating up other kids and developing a cruel streak. His mother protects him at any cost. His meanness increases. He attacks other kids with a slingshot, and then learns to handle the machete better than anyone else. At age thirteen he begins molesting women and girls. One day he cuts a finger off the hand of another kid, and the town finally reacts against him.24 His mother offers to do time for him. Pascual hides at first, and then tries to obtain food from the townspeople, but everyone rebuffs him. In desperation he decides to enlist in the army. Everyone assumes he will rise in the ranks because of his evilness, but soon “a warrant for the arrest of one Pascual Baeza was delivered to the town on account of his having deserted from the army.”