by Luis de Lión
Notes
1. The others would be the Mexican states of Chiapas, Campeche, Tabasco, Yucatan, and Quintana Roo. There is also a sizable Maya population residing in Belize.
2. Marroquín became bishop of the “Kingdom of Goathemala” on December 18, 1534. He became provisional governor of Guatemala after conqueror Pedro de Alvarado’s death, and the death of his wife, in 1541. She was swept to her death by a flood that destroyed the original town of Santiago de los Caballeros. Marroquín, as provisional governor, ordered the move to the valley of Panchoy, where the new Santiago was built. After its destruction by an earthquake in 1773, the capital was moved once more, to the present site of Guatemala City. Since then, the old city of Santiago is known as “Antigua,” short for “Antigua Guatemala” (old Guatemala City).
3. Approximately half a million Kaqchikel speakers still reside in Guatemala.
4. As of spring 2012 there are at least two Kaqchikel dictionaries, including one on the web.
5. Quetzaltenango, or Xelajú, is Guatemala’s second city. Juegos Florales translates as “floral games,” a bizarre name for a literary contest, yet one inherited from colonial times, associated with the many creative crafts implemented during the times of the annual fair celebrating the patron saint of the town.
6. This information was provided by Francisco Morales Santos via e-mail dated June 9, 2011.
7. See Delgado and Romero, “Local Histories and Global Designs: An Interview with Walter Mignolo,” 9.
8. See Coe, The Maya Scribe and His World.
9. See López, Los “Popol Wuj” y sus epistemologías.
10. Ibid., chapter 1.
11. See Tedlock, Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings.
12. Sam Colop argues that the second K’iche’ generation of leaders made a pilgrimage to Nakxit, near, or, in Chichen Itza, Yucatan. Here they received the original copy of the post-Classical versions of the Popol Wuj (17).
13. Colop speculates that it remained, or remains, in the hands of the “principals,” or traditional leaders, of Chimaltenango, but is in extremely bad shape, if it has not crumbled altogether (15).
14. See the introduction to Fischer and McKenna Brown’s Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala.
15. Rappaport, “Alternative Knowledge Producers in Indigenous Latin America.”
16. Laura Martin cites in her article a personal communication from Luis’s son, Xbalanque de Lión, dated from 2005, stating that “de Lión entered into a private competition with other writer friends whereby each would produce a novel written according to certain specifications. According to his son, de Lión’s contribution was to be circular, a novel you could begin to read at any point . . .” (49). I would argue that, notwithstanding this testimony, de Lión was fully aware of the circularity of time in the Maya calendar, and chose this form because it fit his design.
17. As both Poe and Martin have pointed out, Concha (shell) is a vulgar euphemism for female genitalia in Latin America. See Poe, “Sexo, cuerpo e identidad,” 89 and Martin, “Traditional Mayan Rhetorical Forms and Symbols,” 51.
18. Laura Martin notes the irony of the name Concepción (conception) for both the Virgin and Concha: “neither one can conceive, one because she is made of wood and one because she is infertile” (51).
19. Indigenísmo was a literary current in Latin America in the 1930s, whereby mostly urban writers celebrated indigenous cultures and berated their exploitation, advocating their conversion into “modern,” that is, “Western” subjects, thus depriving them of their culture. Del Valle Escalante states that de Lión explicitly told Mario Roberto Morales his opposition to the political stance of Asturias and spoke against mestizaje (212, n. 15).
20. The narrative voice informs us that it is not a hurricane but it echoes those possibilities, alluding not only to the Popol Wuj, where Juraqan (Hurricane) is one of the deities of Heart Sky, but also to Asturias’s Strong Wind (1950), the first title of his Banana trilogy, as well as to the wind that wipes Macondo off the face of the earth at the end of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
21. See Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being.”
22. A boy then discovers that the couple does not sleep together, because from the first time he refused to touch her or have any sexual contact.
23. If she was born at the same day and time as Pascual, she was also born on the Day of the Dead. Thus, all the symbolic twins in the text are “deceased.”
24. Even this scene evokes the Popol Wuj. The way in which Pascual cut the child’s finger off is reminiscent of how the bat Kama sotz’ cuts off the head of Junajpu. The twins were in Xibalbá, spending the night in the House of Bats. They squeezed themselves into their own blowguns to defend themselves from the circling bats. Junajpu stuck his head out of his blowgun to see if the dawn had arrived and Kama sotz’ immediately snatched off his head and carried it to the ball court to be hung up as the ball to be used by the gods in their next ball game. This points in the direction of the unnamed town actually being Xibalbá, and this would make Pascual and Juan the equivalent of the two principal lords, Jun Kame (One Death) and Wuqub’ Kame (Seven Death).
25. A similar scene of an indigenous subject falling in love with a blonde virgin is the topic of the film “The Other Conquest” (2000). Del Valle Escalante reminds us that Serge Gruzinski has traced the imposition of Catholic religious icons by Spaniards in the sixteenth century to legitimize the Spanish imperial enterprise.
26. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro argues that it is also necessary to explore a parallel category that he labels “nationality of power” in interim fashion. This would account for the structuring effects of national elites when articulating social relations reflecting the coloniality of power within a given nation-state, where they most often find their natural ground and stability, their space of emplacement.
Works Cited
Arias, Arturo. Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Asturias, Miguel Angel. Hombres de maíz. Edición crítica. Gerald Martin (coord.). Madrid: Archivos, 1992.
Carmack, Robert M. Quichean Civilization: The Ethnohistoric, Ethnographic, and Archaeological Sources. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Coe, Michael D. The Maya Scribe and His World. New York: Grolier Club, 1973.
Colop, Sam, ed. Popol Wuj: Versión poética K‘iche’. Guatemala: Proyecto de Educación Maya Bilingüe Intercultural, Editorial Cholsamaj, 1999.
De la Campa, Román. Latin Americanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Delgado Elena, and Rolando J. Romero. “Local Histories and Global Designs: An Interview with Walter Mignolo.” Discourse 22, 3 (Fall 2000): 7–33.
de Lión, Luis. Su segunda muerte. Guatemala: Nuevo Signo Editores, 1970.
———. Los zopilotes. Guatemala: Editorial Landívar, 1966. Published under the name José Luis León Díaz.
———. El tiempo principia en Xibalbá. Guat
emala: Artemis Edinter, 1996.
del Valle Escalante, Emilio. “Maya Nationalism and Political Decolonization in Guatemala: Luis de Lión and El tiempo principia en Xibalbá.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1, 2 (September 2006): 203–213.
Dirlik, Arif. “Race Talk, Race and Contemporary Racism.” PMLA 123, 5 (October 2008): 1363–1379.
Fischer, Edward F., and R. McKenna Brown. Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
Guatemala Presidential Staff, Archivo, list, “Death Squad’s Dossier,” c. March 1985, Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the United States, 1954--1999, ed. Kate Doyle (Washington, DC: The National Security Archive and Chadwyck-Healey, 2000), no. GU01030.
López, Carlos M. Los “Popol Wuj” y sus epistemologías: Las diferencias, el conocimiento y los ciclos del infinito. Quito: Abya-Yala, 1999.
Lugones, Maria. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise 2 (2008): 1–17.
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” Cultural Studies 21, 2–3 (2007): 240–270.
Martin, Laura. “Traditional Mayan Rhetorical Forms and Symbols: From the Popol Vuh to El tiempo principia en Xibalbá.” Latin American Indian Literatures Journal 23, 1 (Spring 2007): 43–65.
Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Olen, Amy. “Hacia una lectura decolonial de El tiempo principia en Xibalbá de Luis de Lión.” Graduate paper. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011.
Poe, Karen. “Sexo, cuerpo e identidad en El tiempo principia en Xibalbá de Luis de Lión.” Reflexiones 82, 2 (2003): 83–91.
Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder: Eurocentrismo y América Latina.” In La Colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. Edited by Edgardo Lander, 201–242. Buenos Aires: CLACSO/ UNESCO, 2003.
Rama, Ángel. La ciudad letrada. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1984.
Rappaport, Joanne. “Alternative Knowledge Producers in Indigenous Latin America.” LASA Forum 36, 1 (Spring 2005): 11–13.
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. “World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 26, 4 (December 2006): 363–386.
Sanjinés, Javier C. Mestizaje Upside Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de. “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges.” June 11, 2011. Http://www.law.uvic.ca/demcon/victoria_colloquium/documents/desousasantos.pdf. Accessed May 15, 2011.
Tedlock, Dennis. Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. New York: Touchstone, 1985.
About the Author
Luis de Lión was born José Luis de Leon Díaz in 1939 in San Juan del Obispo, Sacatepéquez, Guatemala. He was a primary teacher who worked in rural schools in various parts of Guatemala and later taught classes at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City. On May 15, 1984, he was kidnapped by a death squad of the Guatemalan dictatorship as part of the anti-insurgency “dirty war” because much of what he wrote was critical of the Guatemalan government and because he was involved with unions and union-affiliated political parties. We presume that he was killed three weeks later on June 5, 1984, by the military because a journal known as the Diario Militar—a military “accounting” book containing meticulous records of forced disappearances, subsequent torture, and assassinations during the US-supported military dictatorships—was smuggled out of a records storage facility in 1999. The Diario Militar (published online by National Security Archives and housed on George Washington University servers; see Guatemala Presidential Staff 2000) includes a code (300) that identifies the dates of extrajudicial killings. It is very likely that these victims were tortured between the date of their abduction and the recorded date of their presumed deaths. Luis de Lión was one of 183 victims in this volume. According to the Historical Clarification Campaign, a report sponsored by the United Nations and the Guatemalan government, which came out in 1998 under the supervision of Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, the US-sponsored Guatemalan military was responsible for 93 percent of the atrocities committed during the dirty war in Guatemala. According to this report and the UN Truth Commission, between 35,000 and 40,000 Guatemalans disappeared like Luis de Lión. Their families are still waiting for justice in these cases; most are also still waiting for the remains of their loved ones.
In 2004, as a result of the information released in the Diario Militar, the government of President Oscar Berger held a ceremony at the Casa Museo Luis de Lión, housed in the author’s home in San Juan del Obispo, in which they officially apologized for the military’s role in his forced disappearance. In late 2011 and early 2012 the remains of five disappeared people whose records appear in the Diario Militar were found in a mass grave on a military base in Comalapa along with 215 other people’s remains. They have been identified by a DNA-matching program run by the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG, available at http://www.fafg.org/Ingles/paginas/FAFG.html). De Lión’s widow, María Tula, his daughter, Mayarí, and his son, Ixbalanque, are hopeful that Luis’s remains might be among the rest of the bodies in this mass grave so that they may soon have a gravesite to visit to honor his memory. Mayarí and Ixbalanque have given DNA samples to FAFG in order to make an identification possible. De Lión was the author of several collections of short stories published both before and after his forced disappearance, including Los zopilotes (The Vultures) (1966), Su segunda muerte (His Second Death) (1970), Pájaro en mano (Bird in Hand) (1985), and La puerta del cielo y otras puertas (The Gates of Heaven and Other Gates) (1998); and two collections of poems, Poemas del volcán Agua (Poems of the Volcano Agua) (1980) and Poemas del volcán Fuego (Poems of the Volcano Fuego) (1998).
About the Translator
Nathan C. Henne was born and raised in Guatemala. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California Santa Barbara. Henne teaches Latin American Studies and Spanish at Loyola University in New Orleans, which provided a grant that partially supported the work of this translation. His research focuses on Maya poetics. In producing this translation Henne worked with María Tula de León, Luis de Lión’s widow and fellow teacher, to meticulously check each line against the original in order to best understand the context of the novel’s production.