Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women Review

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Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women ReviewIn Ambar's own words, Taller Leñateros, the "Lenyateros' Workshop" is a "cultural society of Maya and mestizo women and men who produce something in between a performance piece and an act of witchcraft. Over wood fires in the patio boil huge kettles of corn husks, gladiola stems, heart of maguey, palm leaves, recycled women's cotton huipil blouses...cattails, pampas grass and bamboo, along with recycled paper and who knows what other raw material for papermaking" (Ernandes, Past, Bakbakom , et al. 2005: 219). They are a book and print material enclave, but their own production practice itself is a distinctly Mayan vision, an application of a Mayan women's production aesthetic where work is done as a collective with open input and shared rewards.
Taller Leñateros was begun in 1975 with "an initial investment of $2.USD, a blender, a table, a household iron and a pair of scissors" (email from Past, 1-31-09). (Ideas about organizing Mayan culture clubs and other media production enclaves like Sna Jtz'ibajom were also discussed around the table in Ambar Past's kitchen in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Mexico.) Ambar's goal was simply to inscribe the countless stories, incantations, magic spells, songs, and poems she was hearing out in the highland Mayan countryside. Her particular interest was to inscribe the many women's incantations, spells, and conjuration practices that persisted through many early Catholic purges of such "satanic" renderings. (Mayans syncretized pagan Gods into the Catholic pantheon, and conjuring practices turned into prayers.) Through the edifice of Catholicism, much of the age-old pagan Mayan conjuring practices remained. Women, particularly, invoked their own Mayan theistic pantheon to lend the power to their incantation, to help them cope with life's circumstances.
Incantation: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women is a collection of Mayan women's poems, generally couplets employing echoes or rhyming of ideas that facilitates stories/poems to be committed to memory: one of many language styles or rhetorical practices Mayans use in the arsenal of their syntax choices. The poems are translated from Tzotzil Maya in the poetics of old and classic verses, reverberating phrases from ancient source material like the Popul Vuh, Incantations speaks to Mayan Women's culture, a reference point for orienting the subject matter of the poems.
Incantations, by itself, is an incredibly valuable ethnographic resource, a door that opens into Mayan women's lives, histories, desires, and testimonies. The background provided by Past is far-ranging, touching on poetic material from the Mayan book of creation, the Popul Vuh, and tapping into contemporary women's issues like cultural diaspora, and sexual abuse. With the assistance of Mayan writers and linguists like Bakbalom, Past condenses hundreds of oral histories and testimonies of Mayan women elders, clarifying and signifying Tzotzil terms in context, and creating an overview of a living Mayan women's cosmology distilled sometimes in irreducible terms like Kajval (lords and protectors), wayhel (animal spirits), nichimal k'op (poetry, "the word in flower"), and tz'ib (verb: to paint and to write). (Co-translator Xalik Guzman Bakbalom is also representative of an emerging number of Mayans working as auto-ethnographers.)
In eighty-nine pages of her essays, Past also references and synopsizes the extensive early research of Mayan literature by ethnographers Gary Gossen, Laughlin, Guiteras-Holmes, and Victoria Bricker, the early colonial history of Chiapas by ethnohistorians like Jan Rus, and contemporary researchers of women's issues like Christine Eber. (Laughlin undertook monumental research projects like cataloguing the first dictionary of the Tzotzil Maya, recording hundreds of stories for this book Of Cabbage and Kings. Gossen, with research conducted in San Juan Chamula, has composed volumes of ethnography concerning modern highland Maya cosmology) Incantations works well as an introduction to the impressive depth of Mayan literary research - now often ironically overlooked and trumped by misrepresented and appropriated versions of Mayan belief systems, or overlooked by the overly reductive, politicized renderings of the social topography of highland Chiapas.
In outlying contemporary Mayan communities, the traditional roles of men and women in Mayan society differ, and the sexes are segregated from each other until marriage. Courtship is still often formal, contracts between grooms and father-in-laws to be. (These traditions are changing rapidly within some communities, and with new options for life modes being offered in cities and in the U.S.) One of the colonial Hispanic traditions that have been absorbed into the chemistry roles of men and women is the pervasive Latin American idea of Machismo and Marianismo, which created from the colonial period on, an unfortunate tolerance for the macho, abusive nature in men. Maranismo stressed feminine passivity, and the pressures to maintain sexual purity. This view is rendered in the Compesino idea that loose women are associated with the behavior of laughing aloud (From Laughlin, Past et al 2005:43). In Tzotzil, "to speak (between sexes), we learn from Past, implies "to have sex" (74).
The delineation in roles of men and women with the Hispanic influence also dichotomized Mayan society into gendered-cultures: men's culture with their own traditions of storytelling and shamism, and women's with a cosmology orientated by "mother" creator gods. In the two different but parallel speaking worlds, "women have maintained their own cosmologies that men know nothing about" (74). The Earth Goddess "is now considered old fashioned and never mentioned among the men, contemporary Tzotzil women continue directing most their incantations to her" (54). This is gendered culture we are fortunate to be privy to in Incantations, a world where access was kept at a distance from male ethnographers in the name of propriety. In this world, women's textiles are "read" by one another, and women's issues come to the fore where they were for a very long time kept in the background and silenced.
In the many testimonies that Past and Bakbolom translated, the personal poetics of Mayan women come forward, the personal as 1) voicing in the incantation, 2) embodiment of cosmological understanding, and 3) life experience shaping poems. "Notes on the Creators" in Incantations provides a biographical context to the poems, linking them body and soul to their creators. Veronika Taki Vaj's poem "A Girl's Song about a Wild Deer," is written by a young Mayan girl from one of the remote Mayan villages Chalchihuitan; it speaks to the wild worlds of the highland remote:
How do you dance, wild deer? We are red fawns, we are grey fawns....Little dear you are my soul's companion. Hide yourself in a the cave, inside the clouds. Don't let the jaguar get you, don't be killed by a bullet (153).
The incantations encapsulate a world filled with the anima of objects, of animals, of plants and weather. All things are suffused within the influences of gods and in this constant dialogue, human attitudes about work and life are held in check, guided by stories that provide a moral compass within the topography of the sacred around them. Ernandes poem "To Enchant the Spindle" speaks to this conversation:
Holy spindle, do your work. Whirling, twirling, dancing in your gourd. Don't get angry, please don't scold me. Let us work together with one heart...(Ernandes in Past et al. 2005:129).
Ernandes' poem "Witchcraft for Attracting a Man" speaks to spell casting, desires of women reaching across the netherworld to the intentions of men, spells that are "important for getting your man" (Past 2005:70):
I want him to talk to my body. I want his blood to ache for me (Ernandes in Past et al. 2005:103)
The topics of the poems open up windows to the interior concerns of women in Mayan communities, to the great variety of thoughts and social issues occupying the minds and wishes of women. There is a close relationship with nature and the natural elements ("To Stop Mother Wind"), to fate and astrological elements ("During the Eclipse"), to corn and the sacred covenants with father-mothers. Contemporary social issues are also canted, "Prayer So My Man Won't Have to Cross the Line" speaks to the concerns of a Maya woman with desperate thoughts of having to work as an illegal immigrant in a foreign land, conjuring a prayer to relieve her worries (Utz'utz' Ni' quoted in Past et al. 2005:110). The poem "The Woman with a Mask of Earth" was written, as Past tells the story, by Maria Kartones. The poem is a shout, a scream of desperation, the anguish of rape that she suffered as a young woman, a rape which unfortunately helped to put Kartones in a sanitorium in Mexico City. These too are the stories of the women of Chiapas.
Past ties previous rebellions in Chiapas to "spirited" dialogue with saints, indicating as others have (see Vogt 1995) that there are spiritual/religious inspired dimensions to previous Mayan rebellions. It is another indication that populist rebellions do not gain widespread support unless there is underlying cultural or gendered repression occurring in a populace at large. Past quotes Commandante Esther, a small Mayan woman who played a huge role for the Zapatista in 2001 by speaking for Zapatistas in front of the Mexican Congress:
From the moment we are born we suffer from contempt and marginalization, because no one looks out for our interests. Because we are females, they do not think we are worth anything...We are the lowest of the low; the indigenous woman is the most exploited of an exploited society" (Past etal. 2005:25).
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