WHAT MA LACH'S BONES
TELL US:
Performances
of Relational Materiality in Response to Genocide
MARÍA REGINA
FIRMINO-CASTILLO
Acknowledgements: Ta'ntiixh to the many persons whose knowledge and ways of being in the world lent life to
the ideas in this article: Nan Xhiv Tzunun (Juana Brito Bernal), Pap Xhas Matom
(Jacinto Brito Bernal), Pap Xhasinib' (Jacinto Santiago Brito), Maxho'l (Lalo
Velasco Ceto), Petrona Tzunux Chivalan, Mariano Brito Santiago, Tohil
Fidel Valey Brito, Violeta Luna, Daniel Guarcax, Gloria Chacón, Melissa
Michal Slocum, and Amauta O.M. Firmino. Any errors and omissions
in the following are my own.
Dedicated
to Ma Lach (María Santiago Cedillo) and Nan Xhiv Tzunun (Juana Brito Bernal).
Introduction
I was invited to a funeral in
2014, but the bodily remains inside the casket had been stripped of its itiixhil
tiichajil—in Ixil Maya, its animating force—almost thirty years
before, at the height of the Guatemalan army's genocide against the Ixil Maya.[1] In the casket was a skull with perforations
where bullets had entered it; there was also a femur and smaller bones I do not
know the names of. But I do know the name of the person these bones once
belonged to: Ma Lach (María Santiago Cedillo); she was the mother of Mariano,
my husband's cousin. At the funeral, Ma Lach's bones were carefully arranged in
the casket by a forensic anthropologist, who, with great sensitivity, told the
story of what had happened to this body—the body that is/was/and had been
Ma Lach. He indicated where bullets had entered and exited and described how
remnants of cloth attached to bone helped identify the person the bones
belonged to. These bones held traces, genetic and other, that allowed for Ma
Lach's return home to her relations. Ma Lach was a set of bones that returned,
first to her son, and at the end, back to the earth. This body, the osseous remains
of a disinterred corpse, had once been a person; that day, she was remembered,
prayed for with song, and cried over. She was still Mariano's mother, and, as
in life, she was still part of this earth.
In
2013, about a year before Ma Lach's final rites, I was invited to another
funeral. This time it was Pap Lu, the father of our friend, Pap Xhasinib'
(Jacinto Santiago Brito). He had recently been found, and brought home, by the
same forensic team. Like Ma Lach, Pap Xhasinib's father had also been a victim
of this genocide. His casket was larger than Ma Lach's, and sealed. It was
painted turquoise blue and draped with a red hand-woven textile. At the foot of
the casket were bottles of distilled cane liquor that guests brought to share
during the wake. Throughout the night, Pap Xhasinib' took a bottle around the
room, serving each guest and drinking with them. Late into the night, he
reached my husband and me; passing the bottle, and pouring the clear liquid
on the ground, he explained: "We are the Earth. Our bones are the minerals. Our
flesh is the dirt, the rivers, our blood. Who am I to know!? But thats how it is. This is why we
offer our liquor to the earth before drinking."
Fig. 1 Pap Xhasinib' and author in Paxil Cave. Photo by Herbert Reyes, 2011.
Ma Lach and Pap Lu's transitions from persons animated by itiixhil tiichajil, to bodies, to cadavers, and then to hidden bones that become forensic evidence, and finally to 'things' such as minerals, rivers, and earth lead me to ask: What is a body? What is a thing? What is a person? What degree of itiixhil tiichajil survives through these changes? And what ontological categories are troubled by Ma Lach and Pap Lu's bones in these performances of life, death, and survival?
In
what follows, I draw from Freya Mathews and Mario Blaser's critiques of
genocide, modernity, and coloniality, in addition to the unpublished writings
of Raphaël Lemkin on colonialism
(in Docker), to interrogate three ontological tenets
associated with genocidal coloniality: that some persons are things, that
matter is inert, and that some humans are independent from an ecological
matrix. I examine these tenets through the lens of Guatemala's recent counter-insurgency war (1960—1996),
focusing on the genocide against Ixil Maya communities during the height of the
war (approximately 1979-1985). Since 2010, my husband, Ixil artist Tohil Fidel Valey Brito, and I
have worked with community members and leaders on a variety of multidisciplinary projects in
response to the after-effects of this
genocide.[2] I will share stories from
our work in which performance posed insistent challenges to genocidal
coloniality's three tenets through embodied enactments of the inextricable
relational ties between human and other-than-human persons and entities in an
agentive and person-filled material world. Three moments
of performance, ranging from the quotidian to the ceremonial to the
experimental, will be highlighted: performing name exchange with a wild edible plant important
to survival during wartime famine; performing chaj (ceremony) to
address collective trauma from the 1982 mass killing at Xoloche'; and, finally,
performing experimental theater in collaboration with Mexican artist, Violeta
Luna, and Ixil performance ensemble, Teatro Tichiil. I
reflect on two terms prevalent in Mayan languages—kamawil, or
living object, and kab'awil, "double gaze" (Adrián Inés Chávez in
Chacón)—to explore the potential of Mayan ontologies of materiality and
personhood to counter the colonial project's construal of (some) persons as
bodies only, to be used and disposed of as objects, in a world of inert
matter. I conclude by noting that this centering of persons (human and other)
as relational beings underscores the ontological workings of what Gerald
Vizenor termed "survivance," understanding it to be an active resistance to the
three tenets of coloniality through the embodied and storied insistence on
complex relational personhood and the continued enactment of "transmotion" as
inextricable relationality within a living and agentive material world.
I
am a Guatemalan-born and U.S.-based transdisciplinary artist and writer. My
ancestors are southern European and, most probably, Pipil/Nahua; and I have
kin, through marriage, who are Ixil. It is from this circle of family and
collaborators (who are artists, farmers, ritual officiants as well as intellectuals), that I first
learned about the ways that performance—whether gathering edible plants,
conducting ceremony, creating theater, pouring libation, or living in
community—creates relationships that weave together life worlds, or
ontologies, in resistance to genocidal coloniality's three ontological tenets,
which I will discuss in the next section.
Ontological Tenets of
Genocidal Coloniality
Genocide, which is always and
already embroiled in coloniality and empire, is not only the destruction of
people's bodies. It is an ontological violence that perpetuates three tenets
which coloniality is built upon: some persons are only bodies; all matter is
inert; and some humans are independent of an ecological matrix. As jurist
Raphaël Lemkin (in Docker) argued in his late unpublished writings, coloniality
has an "inherent and constitutive relationship" with genocide (97). To Lemkin,
genocide was not an isolated occurrence of mass killings; it was part of a
drawn out process spanning centuries, involving mass killings as well as
various forms of destruction aimed at a people's "attachment to and imbrication
in a nurturing cosmos" (in Docker 97). Furthermore, this genocidal destruction
of cosmos, Lemkin (in Docker) observed, is accompanied by the violent
imposition upon genocide survivors of "the national pattern of the oppressor"
(83). Writing about modernity/coloniality, anthropologist Mario Blaser argued
that its violence is simultaneously ontological and ecocidal, with "nonhuman
others" forming "part of how colonial difference gets established" (12). The
colonial domination of people through genocidal violence is also enmeshed with
the imposition—partial or whole—of specific ontological frameworks
that deny agency and subjectivity to some humans, to most animals, and, as environmental
philosopher Freya Mathews (Reinhabiting Reality) noted, all matter. This
attempt to render human persons and non-human persons into objects and to treat
all matter as inert describes the complex ontological violence that has marked
the history of Guatemala for the last five centuries. As I will discuss below,
this type of ontological violence has continued in the Ixil region during the
height of the so-called counter-insurgency war of the late 1970s and early
1980s.
The Massacre at
Xoloche'. The attempted construal through violence of
persons as things and world as object was at play in the massacres committed
between 1981 and 1983 at Xoloche', an Ixil hamlet outside of Nab'aa'. Nab'aa' (or Nebaj in its hispanicized
version) is located in Guatemala's Cuchumatánes mountain range at an
elevation of over one-thousand nine-hundred meters. The town is part of what
the Guatemalan army termed the "Ixil Triangle" (Manz 96), and is comprised of
Nab'aa', along with the neighboring
towns of Chajul, Cotzal, and numerous hamlets, including Xoloche', all
dispersed throughout the highlands and valleys. The so-called Triangle's population is of some 148,670
inhabitants: ninety-one percent identify as Ixil, with the remaining nine
percent identifying as either K'iche',
Kanjobal, Mam, or non-Indigenous (Fundación Ixil).
The
following is a description of the events of November 19, 1982 at Xoloche'
written by Pap Xhas Matom, a principal
in the B'oq'ol, Q'ezal Tenam
Oxlaval No'j Council of Principals Thirteen No'j:[3]
When
the milpas [maize
fields] were already in full harvest, the army executed its criminal
implementation of a scorched earth plan and policy: the army forced several
hundred Ixiles who were forcibly conscripted into the Civil Patrol (PAC) to tapiscar
[harvest] all the corn in Xoloché and its surroundings, with the promise and
deceit that everything they gathered would be transported by helicopter and
distributed among the population under army control. Once it was piled up in a
true volcano of maize, the army set fire to it. Until now we do not have an estimate
of the amount, but the fact is that the red heap of Xoloche' maize was visible
from the area of Salquil Grande [approximately twenty-five kilometers away].[4]
According to Pap Xhas Matom,
and as documented by Colectivo Memoria Histórica
(208-213), once the maize was amassed into a large pile, Nan Elsi'm, a blind
grandmother, protested aloud. The "volcano," consisting of maize, woven cloth,
baskets, pottery and other things, was doused with gasoline and set afire. Nan
Elsi'm continued to protest, while others cried silently. Soldiers silenced Nan
Elsi'm with a blow, possibly killing her prior to throwing her into the flames;
it is also possible that she died in the flames. Those who tried to pull her
out were shot dead and thrown into the fire as well. The surviving population
was forced to watch. This is how Pap Xhas Matom's account
continues:
The
army threw garments like güipiles [blouses]
and the red cortes
[skirts] of Nebaj into the burning maize, as
well as people's cadavers, among them an elder from Nebaj named Elsi'm, who had
lost her sight due to old age. Prior to this, the army left activated grenades
between the ears of corn, targeting those who attempted
to extinguish the fire. And so other Ixiles died when the grenades exploded
upon attempts to remove them.
Though I focus here on
events at Xoloche', it is important to note that this massacre was not an
isolated occurrence. A United Nation's commission documented the destruction of
four-hundred and forty-four villages in the Mayan highlands during the war, resulting
in the internal displacement of
more than a million people and the death or disappearance of at least
two-hundred thousand (Comisión
para el Esclarecimiento Histórico). The effects of this
collective trauma are difficult
to quantify, or to describe, especially considering ways that trauma persists
in our embodied memory across generations
(Brave Heart).
Trauma as Loss of
Relationality. What Eduardo Duran described as the "soul
wound" resulting from centuries of genocidal coloniality in the Americas is not
just a matter of unresolved historical trauma; it is also unresolved grief over
the wounding of the earth upon which one depends (16). This starts to describe
what happened at Xoloche', except that the relationship is also one of
ontological equivalence between people and maize. According
to Tohil and Pap Xhas, destroying maize is tantamount to destroying people. A
philosophy of regeneration based on an ontological intimacy with maize and its
biotic cycles is recounted in the Ixil oral tradition and
performed in rituals associated with the growing cycle. Maize is the substance
from which we are created, and upon death, our bodies return to the earth to
nourish new generations. Paxil, located on the outskirts of Nab'aa', is a
geologic formation mentioned in the Popol Wuj[5]
as the place where maize and other important crops were first revealed to
humans by their elder brothers: fox, coyote, macaw, and raven. In the spring,
seeds to be planted are blessed among the stalactite formations that resemble
cobs hanging from the cave's ceiling. Such is the respectful intimacy with
maize that it is a txaa (transgression)
to leave a fallen kernel of maize on the ground, as it is txaa
to build a chicken coop or latrine on a piece of
land that had once been used to store harvested maize. It is, likewise, a
transgression to burn maize fields. The destruction of maize
is comparable to the destruction
of people, for it is the materia prima
of human life.
As
Maxho'l explained to me, the Ixil phrase "Kat oojisa un yooxhil" ("My vital force has left
me") is uttered after an earthquake, or other comparable shock in which the
ground—ontological, and that is to say, also material, telluric,
relational, and social—upon which one stands is shaken. If one does not
call one's yooxhil[6]
back into one's body after
a terrifying event, one is condemned to a limbo state of surviving, but not
fully living. De-animated, the person becomes just a body, a
relatively inert object, eventually a corpse.
The body, without its yooxhil, ceases to sustain life, eventually
causing the death of the person. Disembodied, the yooxhil wanders
about, requiring ritual performance to bring it back to its corporeal home, re-incorporated into the body to re-constitute,
reanimate, and regenerate the person.
We
exist because we are embodied, and our bodies are inextricably enmeshed in a complex
self/world with beings who are different, but constitutive of our
subjectivities and identities. They are beings and entities with whom we
engage—exerting a mutual and ineluctable influence.
These relational ties are always and
already present, but not always acknowledged. Therefore, one's manners of
recognizing and enacting them are varied and have material effects in the
world. Not acknowledging these inextricable relational ties can cause
disharmony in our relationships to others, human and non-human. The yooxhil wanders about outside the body,
potentially causing the death of the person; however, the return of the yooxhil—though
it entails a re-embodiment—is never a matter of individual healing, nor
does it involve a transaction solely between the yooxhil, the body, and
the person. It is a process that requires embodied re-enactment and
performative re-acknowledgment of what is always and already there: an
inextricable relationality.
Performance and
Genocidal Coloniality: Embodied Assertions of Inextricable Relationality
In thinking about
performance and resistance to colonial violence, the centrality of the body has
been well-theorized, especially by performance studies scholar, Diana Taylor. Despite
the seeming ephemerality of performance, the body constitutes a way of knowing
that Taylor has described as an enduring "repertoire" able to survive written archives of knowledge
and attacks upon it by colonizing forces. She offers an historical example of
this observation. The codices of pre-invasion Mesoamerican societies stored a
vast array of knowledges, but Spanish forces destroyed entire libraries, prohibited Indigenous systems of writing, and violently
persecuted native intelligentsia who were not willing to become informants.
Though embodied forms of knowledge transmission—such as ritual, dance, drama, etc. —were
also criminalized, "[t]he space of written culture then, as now," wrote Taylor,
"seemed easier to control than embodied culture" (17). As Taylor's analysis
implies, embodied knowledge survives colonial violence as long as there are
living, performing,
bodies that remember their own agency
(31). One of the cases through which Taylor developed her thesis is an analysis
of the Danza
de la Conquista, a theatrical dance ritual with roots in the Iberian peninsula's performative representations of the 1492 expulsion of Muslims
and Jews by Castilian Catholic forces. The dance is performed to this day in
Mesoamerica and in the Andean region and is syncretized with various
pre-invasion ritual performances. As Paul Scolieri documented, Castilian Spanish
forces used this dance to compel new imperial subjects to portray their own
subjugation. On the one hand, the scenario of conquest represented in the dance
is a "reiterative humiliation of the native populations" (Taylor, 30). On the
other hand, the Danza is characterized by veiled meanings and parodic reversals
that mark it as a dance of resistance, despite its origins and the intentions
of the dance's originators. Taylor argued that the Danza's agency does not derive from its satirical content or "'hidden transcripts'" (citing James Scott), but from the embodied agency available
even in the most strictly scripted scenarios "to rearrange characters in
parodic and subversive ways" (31). This does not imply, however, that merely
having a body constitutes agency. For Taylor, performance's subversive power
stems from the body's capacity to change what is written down, that is, what is
discursively established. This points to another way that
embodiment is a source of resistance. It subverts the "colonialist discourse" which constructs the Indigenous body as an inert object
lacking voice and agency (Taylor, 64). Through the performers' insistence on
agency—even if satirical—the Danza overturns the idea of Indigenous
person as merely a body—or object—contesting colonial constructions
of Indigenous passivity and otherness.
The
indomitable capacity of embodied memory to counter erasures—whether they be colonial or Indigenous—of
ontologically challenging identities is powerfully articulated by Zapotec muxhe (third
gender) performance artist, Lukas Avendaño in this way: "What we can't find in
my peoples' codices.... you will find here, in my body."[7] Though
surviving Zapotec codices do not feature the muxhe person (and
we do not know if they once did, given the near total destruction by the
Spanish of Zapotec texts), Avendaño's performance puts forth in the world that
which relentlessly exists. Merely inhabiting the muxhe body is an
ontological defiance, but narrating and performing it into being is an act of
insistence and affirmation of the ontological complexity that always and
already exists. Avendaño's work is an indefatigable re-embodying, remembering,
and reminding of what may have been twice erased: the ontological
survivance (and not just survival) of non-binary genders in Indigenous and
non-Indigenous ontologies. Avendaño's performances onstage and offstage of
being-muxhe expand the ontological possibilities of our world.
Avendaño's statement, which I consider embodied theory,
implies that there is an agency of another sort that is experienced even before
accessing the body's capacity to change a story. Prior to the embodied
epistemic act Taylor writes about, an ontological agency is activated when the
colonized subject—discursively constructed as body only, that is, as object—remembers
themselves to be a person. By person, I invoke Sylvia Wynter's insight that the human
being is not a noun, but a verb—praxis—a
nondual composite of both bios (biology) and mythos (story) (Wynter and McKittrick, 33-34). We are not inert
objects, or bodies only, as colonial ontological constructions would have it. I will return to this nondual conception of
personhoods below, but for now I want to underscore the following: for performance
to be agentive in the face of ongoing genocidal coloniality, remembering and
enacting personhoods as performative praxis in opposition to colonial
objectification might be a first step toward overturning the three tenets of
the colonial project. Below, I will share a story of how this happens in the
everyday performances of living and surviving; this story complicates and
expands what it means to remember oneself as person in a way that powerfully
challenges the second and third tenets of the colonial project: that the
material world is inert and that (some) humans are independent of an ecological
web.
The Secret Names of
Plants: Ontological Relationality. In the
spring of 2013, Tohil and I accompanied Nan Xhiv Tzunun (Juana Brito Bernal),
my chuch (mother-in-law), on a walk in the countryside to visit Comunidad en Resistancia Flores de Turanza,[8]
a settlement near Nab'aa' founded by "retornados" (returnees). They were
people who, at the height of the war, were forced by the army's scorched earth campaign to
flee their homes, finding precarious refuge in the mountains, the Ixcán jungle,
or in México.
This military strategy of scorched earth, massacres, and forced displacement
was described by the counterinsurgency state as "drying up the
pond to get the fish," the armed insurgents (Cultural Survival; Steinberg and
Taylor). In the
process,
however, the genocidal campaign nearly destroyed the pond. Fig. 2 Nan Xhiv
Tzunun. Photo by Herbert Reyes, 2011. Along with genocide,
ecocide was committed as well, resulting in deep transformations in the
agroecology of the region and the disruption of ritual
practices associated with the agricultural cycle (Wilson; REMHI in Steinberg
and Taylor, 48). This impact on Mayan spirituality was not only an after-effect
of displacement; it was a strategic attempt, on the part of the army and the
oligarchy in whose interest it operated, to destroy the ontological
relationship of highland Mayans with the land. But relational ontology and
praxis continued to be performed in ceremony and in quotidian performances
which accompany many daily activities that sustain life, especially in wartime,
such as gathering wild edible plants. Along
the path to Turanza, Nan Xhiv showed us the plants she ate in order to
survive during her own time in the mountains. As a young woman in the late
1970s, she fled Nab'aa' after the army targeted her for assassination due
to her political organizing, involvement in the Catholic church, and later, in
the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP, Guerrilla Army of the
Poor). She and her family were exiled in México, Nicaragua, and
finally, Cuba, returning only after the signing of the peace accords in 1996.
While we walked the path to Turanza, we came upon a certain vine. She directed
her voice toward the plant, pronouncing: "In Tzuk; ax Xhiv'—así se le
dice a la planta, intercambias tu nombre con la planta!" (I am Tzuk; you
are Xhiv—this is what you say to the plant, you exchange names with the
plant!). And then she carefully bent back a stem to pull away a set of tender
leaves and shoots, telling us how delicious Tzuk can be and how
it helped her survive famine. But she also warned us that when gathering from
Tzuk, one must exchange names with her lest the leaf become bitter in one's
mouth.[9] Through
Tzuk, we have a point of entry for an Ixil ontology. As suggested by Nan Xhiv's
interlocution with Tzuk, here is a recognition of subjectivity and agency in
the many plants one must address with a regard for their itiixhil
tiichajil—also called yooxhil or tichiil—which is
described as that which gives a being its vitality and strength. It is
customary to thank a host at a communal meal for the increase in tichiil
when the food is deemed to be nourishing. When someone asks about one's
well-being, one can reply with these words, indicating that "there is a
future," one can expect to survive, to thrive even, as Nan Xhiv explained. A
maize plant, when it is healthy, strong, tall—when it promises a good
harvest—can be said to have tichiil (Felipe Brito, personal
communication). I
concede that there may be a difference in meaning between the words itiixhil
tiichajil (tichiil), and yooxhil, but I have not been able to
discern this through my consultations with friends and research collaborators.
Maxho'l (Lalo Velasco Ceto) asserts that the three are synonymous (Firmino Castillo, Maxho'l, et al., 63-65).
This is supported by the Ixil oral history transcribed and translated by Ayres,
Colby, Colby, and Ko'v, in which itiixhil and yooxhil are both translated as "espirito"—as in the spirit of
different animals, but also the spirit of money (286-287 and 290-291), and by
implication, other material and symbolic objects. Itiixhil / tiichajil / yooxhil may be a quality of organic or inorganic matter. It can also be the
quality of a collection of organic and inorganic objects, such as those that
constitute a place. A place can also have yooxhil, and it is the root of
yooxhib'al, an Ixil word for ceremonial ground (Firmino Castillo,
Maxho'l, et al., 31-32). There
are other plants in the Ixil world that also require specific gestures or terms
of address to show respect, gratitude, or to elicit desired medicinal or
culinary qualities. When we reached Turanza, we visited Pap Cax Chaas (Gaspar
Cobo), one of Nan Xhiv's cousins, who told us many stories of how trees,
tubers, wild greens, and other plants conspired to help the Ixil during the
war. Pap Cax and Nan Xhiv conversed at length about
giant trees that gave refuge from bombings, tubers that multiplied even after
being unearthed and chopped to bits by soldiers, and the many wild edibles that
provided nourishment during the war. On another occasion, Nan Xhiv Ko't
(Maxho'l's mother) told us about Chaapa Tze', a tree with writing on its leaves
and with fruits of all kinds growing from its branches. It was the source of strength and knowledge
for the people. But since the war, Nan Xhiv Kho't told us, Chaapa Tze' has gone
into hiding deep into the mountains. The tree would only return, she stressed,
through the frequent performance of chaj (ceremony) (Nan Xhiv Ko't in Firmino Castillo, Maxho'l, et al.
59-60). Nonetheless, even from afar, the tree is still connected to the people: The
tree is like the energy of the day. We don't see the energy, but it's there.
The tree is not in sight, but the plants are still here despite the absence of
the tree. We're also part of the tree, the serpents are part of the tree, all
living beings are part of the tree. (Nan Xhiv Ko't in Firmino Castillo,
Maxho'l, et al. 61)[10] The
relational ontology developed through performative gestures such as name
exchange, chaj, storytelling, and other practices, create and sustain an
agentive material world. In addition to name exchange with plants, there are
inorganic beings such as topographical features, natural phenomena, and cycles
of time which are ritually engaged and referred to as Kub'al (father) or Chuch (mother). These are beings with
consciousness, agency, and who exist in relationship to humans; if they are not
recognized properly in ritual or treated with respect in the small performances
with which many quotidian activities are executed, they make their presence
known through material effects ranging from changes in a plant's flavor or
medicinal properties, to fruits rotting on a vine, to nuchal cord births,
poverty, and other outcomes. These performances are daily acknowledgements of
an agentive material world, performances which contest genocidal coloniality's
second and third tenets: that all matter is inert and that humans exist independently
of a material and ecological nexus. In the following, we will return to
Xoloche' to see examples of how genocidal coloniality's ontological tenet of
de-realized matter is challenged collectively, via ceremony as a performative
enactment of human and other than human relational personhoods. Xoloche': Performances of Relational Personhoods. On November 18, 2012, survivors
of Xoloche' gathered to remember the massacres that occurred thirty years
before. The emblematic moment in the many violent events that occurred there
from 1981-1983 was what survivors called "La
Quema del Volcán de Mazorcas" (The Burning of the Volcano
of Maize). Pap Xhas Matom, one of the organizers of the commemoration, invited
us to the gathering. One of the goals of this event was the revival of memoria
histórica (collective historical memory) of the war
through chaj (Ixil
ritual) at the site. The creation of a ritual context for collective grieving
and remembering is of crucial importance, given the public denial of the
genocide by state discourse and the culture of silence that, to this day, keeps
children of survivors from knowing their histories. In this sense, the chaj
at Xoloche' was an act of healing historical trauma and an effort to make
visible what state forces deny. It was also an effort to heal peoples' relation
to the land that had also suffered the trauma of the war. In line with these
goals, Pap Xhas and other organizers petitioned the mayor's office to
officially declare Xoloche' a sacred site. In
total, about two hundred
people gathered on that day in a clearing at the end of the Fig. 3 The four colors of maize. Photo by the author, 2014. Around the clearing there were a few
simple homes built of cinder block with tin roofing; nearby there was a small
gorge leading to a forested area. The earth on the cleared ground near the
gorge was dark, almost black, and many small pieces of charred maize could be
seen there. While we waited for the activities to start, Pap Xhas invited Tohil
and me to gather some of the charred maize. Others did the same. The activities
took place near a large tree that stood to the side of the clearing, about five
hundred feet away from the homes. Pap Xhas spoke, as
well as other dignitaries and survivors, but the focus of the gathering was the
chaj which I will not specifically
describe here, for I have not received permission to do so. I will, however,
offer a general description of the sequence of events, emphasizing the presence
of non-human persons in relationship with humans through the performative
dialogue that constitutes this ceremony. In
general, chaj consist
of a b'aal vatz tiixh laying
out offerings on the ground in a circle. Candles are arranged by color and in
correspondence with the cardinal directions: red in the east; black in the
west; yellow in the south; white in the north; and green and blue in the
center. In between the cardinal direction candles and around the green and blue
ones are placed offerings of incense made from tree resin and tree bark, ocote
(resinous kindling pine), panela
(molasses sugar), cacao or chocolate, and sometimes sweet bread, tobacco,
honey, and flowers. The candles are lit to start the ceremony. Often, but not
always, the cardinal directions are greeted by kneeling and facing each
direction in turn (and in a counterclockwise motion) while the ritual officiant
opens the chaj and
greets all the directions before starting the calendar round. The ritual
officiant greets the creators, the mountain beings, and the protector of the
day. Then the recitation of the calendar round commences, with the naming and
greeting of the thirteen permutations of each of the twenty days in the tachb'al
amaq' tetz ixil (Ixil ritual calendar). At the recitation
of each of the twenty days, offerings are made of sesame seed, incense grains,
candles made of wax and tallow, liquor, and other gifts for the day-beings,
mountain-beings, and ancestors to partake in. At specific times, the ancestors,
as well as important mountains and other topographical features, are named,
greeted, and addressed. All
the beings invoked in a chaj are
persons or person-like; they are invited to be present (or acknowledged to
already be present) and invited into dialogue. The ritual officiants dialogue
with the fire, which is at once its own being and a vehicle for the other
beings to speak through. B'aal vatz tiixh often
wave their hands at the fire, or snap their
fingers over it in a circular motion, imploring the fire to speak through its
flames and its changes throughout the unfolding of the chaj:
flames rising and spiraling; flames gradually extinguishing; fire emitting
smoke—white, grey, or black; materials exploding into sparks and
crackling; embers and flames changing colors and manifesting forms; fire
melting wax and charring offerings in ways that are discernible to experienced b'aal
vatz tiixh. They are attentive to the signs in the
flames, the smoke, the burnt offerings, and changes in the surrounding
environment (for example, an insect flying into the flame, a dog's approach,
changes in the clouds or the weather, etc.). A chaj ends
when the fire extinguishes of its own accord. Often, a b'aal
vatz tiixh stays with the fire, keeping vigil until all
the embers die down. In
this particular chaj, many
ritual officiants were present and supported each other. At the end of the
ceremony, we were invited to pass the charred maize seeds we had gathered
earlier over the dying embers. The aromatic smoke enveloped my open hand upon
which were the five or six grains of maize; I moved my hand in a
counterclockwise circular motion over the smoke, careful that the grains not
fall on the ashes and embers left by the fire. Afterwards, with a few grains of
charred maize enclosed in a fist, Pap Xhas explained to me that these
seeds—burnt by the army, but consecrated in the chaj—represented
the Ixil knowledge that survived the war and
centuries of colonial violence. What once could not fit in the palm of one's
hand was now reduced to a few charred grains. But even if just one seed
remained, Pap Xhas explained, it was enough to start, again. Though
I was moved by the chaj
and all I was learning and honored to experience, I could not help but ask
myself (I dared not express my doubts then): How does one regenerate the world
from just a few seeds? What was before cannot return; even if it could, how
would it stand up to new dangers? I do not have answers to these questions that
still haunt me. But perhaps the point is not to regenerate what was once
before, but to experiment, to respond, to retry, again and again, even if one
seed is all that is left. After all, this is how the world was made in the
first place. Accessing Kab'awil,
Embodying Kamawil The
First Experiments. Through an
experimental process of trial and error, a council of
creator-beings—Tz'aqol Bitol; Alom K'ajolom; and Tepew
Q'ukumatz—made humans. The first were fashioned from mud, but were not
firm enough and dissolved. The second were made of wood, but these humans were
ungrateful towards their creators and abusive to the other beings on earth. In
other words, they not only ignored the creators, they also objectified the
world. As a consequence, all the animals, trees, mountains, objects, and even
their homes and hearth stones hurled themselves at the wooden humans until they
were destroyed.
The
council of creators, undeterred, tried again, this time with maize. With help
from the animals, the materia prima was sourced from a single seed of white maize ensconced under
an immense rock in a mountain in the eastern quadrant of the world. A
rain-being sent a lightening bolt to cleave the monolith, exposing the maize,
but also charring it. It is from contact with fire that the other three colors
of maize—yellow, black, and red—emerged. Ixmucané ground the corn
nine times; she mixed it with water and kneaded it into the dough from which Tz'aqol
Bitol; Alom, K'ajolom; and Tepew Q'ukumatz created the first four humans, our
ancestors.[11]
In
this narration of our human beginnings, there are pairings of things seemingly
in opposition, but related to each other, and couplings of seemingly distinct
entities which are, nonetheless, part of a complex unitary being. For example,
the creation of humans is paired with the destruction of the eastern mountain
where the primordial maize seed was hidden. The grandmother, whose name,
Ixmukane, means tomb (Sam Colop, 22), grinds the primordial corn for human life
to emerge; grandmother tomb grinds it nine times, suggesting nine months of
gestation (Sam Colop, 129). Here there is an inextricable relationality between
life and death that is not denied, but acknowledged, narrated, and performed.
Similarly, in the Popol Wuj, the creator beings' names are presented in "couplets," an example of
"association parallelism" that is common in Mayan languages (Sparks and Romero,
13). Strategic juxtapositions of things that exist in associative and agentive
relationship to each other (15) underscore the relational, rather than the
essence of any one thing. So we have Tz'aqol, Bitol (the creator of raw
material as well as the one who builds from that material); Alom, K'ajolom (the
one who impregnates and the one who conceives); and Tepew Q'ukumatz (Majestic
Plumed Serpent, the relationality between terrestrial and celestial spheres)
(Sam Colop, 20-22). This
juxtaposition of things that might seem opposed is represented by the Mayan
terms kamawil (living object) and kab'awil (double
gaze). These are at the core of an ontological relationality based on the
enactment of a simultaneous recognition of two things: of the animacy and
agency of matter in a living world and of the personhood of humans and
non-human others who are part of this living material world. In many Mayan
languages, including Ixil and K'iche' (in addition to Guatemalan Spanish), kamawil refers to
what are called, in English, pre-Columbian objects or archeological artifacts, and
thought of, within a non-Mayan context, as inanimate things. But in Mayan
contexts, when kamawil are found in the ground, often while planting, or on other
occasions, they are kept by ritual specialists as objects of power and invoked
as embodiments of the old gods (dioses
viejos) (Pap Xhasinib', personal
communication).[12] Colonial era and some contemporary commentators report that kamawil simply means
"idolitos," little idols, (Mondloch). But as Mondloch indicates, kamawil is a
derivation of the word "k'ab'awil" (177), which Sergio Romero describes this way: "K'abawil is a
pre-Christian [K'iche'] noun referring to divine essences such as deities,
ritual objects, caves, and so on" (629).
Kab'awil has a well-established contemporary usage as well. José
Roberto Morales Sic, after Daniel Matul, explains that kab'awil is the basis
of a theory of knowledge that allows us to "understand and value" the
"simultaneously multiple and unitary context which we inhabit" (250).[13] It is, according to Morales Sic, the "double gaze, the long
view, the near view, the gaze back, and the gaze forward" (250).[14] In her Indigenous Cosmolectics:
Kab'awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures, Gloria Chacón offers a thorough intellectual history of the
term, from its precolonial origins to present day deployments by Maya
intellectuals: [K]ab'awil's transformation from its glyphic etchings in stone
and its painted replicas in codices to its present significance, suggests a
relationship with the cosmos that goes back in time to the pre-classic era and
a resistance to the experience of coloniality in Mesoamerica. In its late
twentieth and twenty-first century deployment, kab'awil straddles spiritual
practice, politics, gender, aesthetics, philosophy, and a social experience. Chacón describes kab'awil[15] as "a vision that duplicates," countering the binary logic
and teleological dialectics of Western philosophy while extending a non-binary
theory rooted in a Mesoamerican genealogy of knowledge/being that she and other
Maya scholars are dedicated to articulating. Chacón notes that kab'awil
presents a challenge to ontological/epistemological frameworks of modernity and
coloniality that predate feminist, deconstructionist, and postcolonial
critiques. After Chacón, Arturo Arias associates the concept with k'ot, the
bicephalous bird in many Maya oral traditions (including the Ixil) that has
"'one head looking at the sky and the other at the earth'" (117). Though
further research is required on the connection between the terms kamawil and kab'awil, I speculate
that kab'awil, as double gaze, conflated with kamawil, as animate,
agentive object, suggests an ontological status for matter (at least some
matter) quite distinct from what Freya Mathews (For
Love of Matter) described as the
"derealization" of matter under "European epistemological colonialism" (175).
In this ontological and epistemological condition, matter is "perceived merely
as the inert backdrop to our meaning-making" (Reinhabiting Reality, 12), while "[o]ther-than-human subjects"—whether
organic or inorganic—are silenced (For
Love of Matter, 176). If one of the
violences of coloniality is this derealization of all matter, then kamawil, as living
object, and kab'awil, as double gaze, are both at the core of an ontological
relationality based on the recognition of the animacy of the world and the
personhood of humans and others. In generative juxtaposition, kamawil/kab'awil,
especially when enacted in performance, overturn the three ontological tenets
associated with genocidal coloniality: that some persons are things, that
matter is inert, and that some humans are autonomous of an ecological matrix. Trans-Temporal Experiments. With every performative gesture, no matter how small, in which the
agency and animacy of the material world is recognized, the charred seeds of
Xoloche' are activated. Life is breathed into them, and this is a way to start
again, over and over, keeping the world alive. I witnessed one of these small gestures during
my engagement in a performative theater workshop conducted by Mexican artist
Violeta Luna in
Nab'aa' in May of 2011. Performative theater, in the manner presented that May,
is a practice outside of the 'traditional' ones discussed above. Yet kamawil
and kab'awil manifested—briefly
and unexpectedly—to reveal the potential of experimentation to elicit of
ways of being and knowing that persist despite attempts to overturn them. Performing Kamawil. Mexican performative theater-maker, Violeta Luna, came to
Nab'aa' via my invitation and that of Pap Xhas Matom.[16] She presented NK 603:
Action for Performer & e-Corn (which
will be discussed below); Luna also offered a workshop on performative theater
in a bee-keeping cooperative's large tin-roofed meeting space. Over the course
of three days (with one rehearsal day), the workshop was attended by
approximately fifty participants, most of whom were Ixil and K'iche' youth. In
the workshop, Luna structured situations for participants to develop their own
movement vocabularies and narrative structures by way of experience,
observation, improvisation, dialogue, and experimentation. On the second day,
Luna organized participants into dyads of active and passive partners. The
active participant in the dyad consensually manipulated the body of the passive
one in order to make a human sculpture, using props—everyday object such
as ears of corn, ceramic bowls, censors, grinding stones, etcetera—to set
in the gesture. Luna invited participants to create a museum full of statues,
or a "Mayan temple." After the active members of the dyad finished creating the
statues, they walked around the room to see what others had created; later, the
roles were reversed. Petrona
Tzunux Chivalan, a young K'iche'
secondary school student, and her performance partner, an Ixil student named Vez,[17] chose to work with the following objects: dry corn husks
fashioned into a skirt, peacock feathers, and a basket containing dry ears of
corn in each of the four directional colors: black, white, yellow, and red. Vez
dressed Petrona with the corn husk skirt and peacock feathers, and positioned
her kneeling down on a petate (straw mat), with back straight, though inclined slightly
forward at an angle. He placed the basket of maize in her hands and positioned
her arms as if offering or presenting the basket of corn. Violeta asked
participants to hold the gestures for a few minutes, long enough for all who
were not embodying sculptures to visit the "temple" or "museum" of statues,
which varied greatly in the use of
Fig. 4 Petrona Tzunux Chivalan. Photo by Violeta Luna,
2011. Suddenly, not completing the time
allotted for this part of the exercise, Petrona giggled—collapsing out of
her form. She apologized, and explained that she needed to "become a girl
again," adding that she "felt shame because she felt so much pride."[18] Petrona's statement, which could easily be attributed to adolescent
timidity, is, I contend, more than that. It is suggestive of two Mayan concepts
related to the foregoing discussion: kamawil (living
object) and kab'awil (double gaze), terms at the core of an ontological relationality
based on the recognition of the animacy of the world and the personhood of
humans and others. Apparently, Petrona was simply embodying a statue, but this
was not a a mere object, or inert matter. She was embodying a kamawil: an instance
of living matter, and also a divine entity entered into relationally through
our gestures toward them, through the stories we tell, and through our
experimentations to embody them and know them through performance. In Petrona's
case, this kamawil was "la diosa del
maíz" and became the basis for the
performance her group developed and presented during the course of the
workshop. As I suggested earlier, this exercise might seem experimental in
terms of quotidian practice (not only in Nab'aa', but almost anywhere outside
of the life of a practicing performing artist); yet, it resonates with a
long-standing practice in Mayan performance. As Bassie-Sweet noted about
classic Maya ritual performance, humans "assumed the traits and power of the
deity or were temporarily transformed into the deity" (2) by the wearing of
objects associated with divinity and the use of embodied practices. Furthermore, Bassie-Sweet suggests that the category human/divine was
fluid due to the performance practices by which ontological categories were
transcended. And as the archaeological record and contemporary practices show,
the categories animal/human, object/anthropos, and element/person are also
fluid; through performance, a human being becomes any one of these, or at least
steps out of their selves to consider the reality of another. This, in itself,
is a pluriversal practice that pushes against the imposed universalities of the
West and its rigid divides between seemingly antipodal things that are, in a
relational ontology, inextricable connected.
In
the Popol Wuj, the divine being associated with maize is Hun-Hunahpu
(Taube, 175), father of the hero twins, and represented as male. In Petrona and
her group's reworking of the deity for the play she and her group developed in
the workshop, maize—as deity, as human, and as plant—takes on a
feminine form. But this is not an arbitrary reassignation; this fluidity across
ontological categories has precedents in Mayan languages, oral, and written
traditions, including the Popol Wuj, and in the daily performances of living. Bassie-Sweet notes
that what archeologists and epigraphers call "Mayan Corn God" (also "God E"),
as depicted in codices and the archaeological record from the classic period,
is male. He is represented, however, wearing a diamond-patterned skirt
associated with female lunar deities. Bassie-Sweet also notes that in the Popol Wuj, the first
human lineage heads are referred to as "mother-father" and that in many
present-day Maya communities primordial ancestors and some ritual specialists
are also referred to as "mother-father" (2). This is the case in Ixil, with the
word mamkuk'uy meaning "primordial grandmother-grandfather" (Firmino
Castillo, Maxho'l, et al., 19). And it is this putting together of disparate things, making
new things from them, taking these apart, and making yet other things, that is
an experimentation in world-making based on the double vision of kab'awil. This
simultaneous holding together of seeming disparate things, like a couplet of
apparently distinct ontological states, was present in Violeta Luna's workshop
when Petrona embodied a kamawil of the maize goddess, sparking in her a simultaneous feeling
of pride and shame, and I would venture, of being human and being divine, being
maize and being kamawil. What brought this on was her engagement in embodied
experimental practice that ruptures the colonial quotidian to open a space for
accessing a relationality rooted in ways of being that are not precolonial, but
decolonial and even anticolonial, and always and already present and available.
Experimentation, as much as tradition, is a way to remember, create, and embody
these relational states that can bring forth other possible worlds. Within
the ontology of the kab'awil, this simultaneity is not contradictory nor are these
states—divine, maize, human, kamawil—necessarily distinct. Indeed, in Ixil, K'iche' and
other Mayan ontologies, these categories are not so separate. As discussed
earlier, humans and maize share an ontological intimacy expressed in the Popol Wuj, in the oral
tradition, and, most importantly, in ordinary and extraordinary (i.e.,
experimental) praxis. "La Diosa del
Maíz" intuited the kab'awil nature of
maize and the gamut of beings it is in paradoxical association and opposition
with, according to Mayan narratives and, as will be discussed below, in its
plant biology. The
very biotic cycle of maize shares in the gender fluidity performed by "la Diosa del
Maíz;" it also depends on the
enactment of interspecies relational intimacy. Corn is a self-pollinating
plant, with both "male" (inseminating) and "female" (inseminatable) parts on
the same plant which must come into contact for pollination. In Ixil planting
practices, this happens most efficiently by human intervention. During maize's
maturation, a system of red root-like appendages develop at the base of its
stalk, reaching into the ground. As my husband's uncle, Pap Cul (personal
communication) explained, this is maize's vaginal opening. We must help maize
reproduce by sprinkling its own pollen, the semen, onto the sticky fluid found
there. Humans, who are made of maize, are essential to the maize's reproductive
cycle. In turn, maize is central to ours, for without sustenance, there is no
life. Finally,
as much as maize embodies life, it also carries within both its biotic and myth
cycles, death and regeneration. The Popol Wuj tells how
Hun-Hunahpu is vanquished by the lords of the underworld, who hang his
decapitated head on a gourd tree. The decapitated head spits into the palm of
Xkik', one of the daughters of the underworld lords, thereby engendering the
hero twins, Hun-Ajpu and Ix-B'alam Kiej. They, in turn, vanquish the lords of
the underworld through a performance in which they kill each other, only to be
reborn again and again. The lords demand that this be done to them, too. The
twins acquiesce to the demands, but they fail to resuscitate the lords. Like
the hero twins, maize must also pass through cycles of death to engender life.
Part of its growing cycle entails an important human intervention: the turning
down of the green ears of corn when it is at the ripest point, causing the corn
to dry on the stalk prior to harvesting. This is a sort of decapitation of the
plant to ensure human wellbeing (otherwise, the ears of corn open, remain
tender, and are eaten by birds) (Tohil Fidel Valey Brito, personal
communication). Along similar lines, after harvest, the remaining corn plant is
sacrificed, destroyed and burned to fertilize the soil with its ashes prior to
the planting of a new Fig. 5 Violeta Luna performing NK603 in Nab'aa. Photo by Herbert Reyes, 2011. NK 603: Performing Kab'awil. On the 28th of May, 2011, in Nab'aa's municipal meeting
hall, Violeta Luna performed her NK 603:
Action for Performer & e-maíz. This performative theater work is named after NK-603, a
genetically modified maize strain developed by the Monsanto corporation to be
resistant to the glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup. This herbicide has been
found to be a carcinogen, while the introduction of genetically modified maize
and other seeds has caused disastrous ecological and economic consequences,
especially for subsistence farmers in Nab'aa', all over Mesoamerica, and the
world. Luna performed this work before an audience of close to five-hundred
townspeople, most of whom were maize farmers and their families.[19]
Her
body painted dark purple is black maize She is dressed in a husk skirt, and at
the start of the performance, she is both maize and woman and the
interdependence between them. On her bare back is painted a resplendent maize
stalk, and over her breasts white maize
seeds are affixed over her purple flesh. Some young men in the audience whistle
at the semi-nude Luna. She silences them with a menacing glare. Despite some
audience performances of toxic masculinity, with her hat, rebozo, and bowl of
seeds, she inspires awe, and the audience is quiet, even reverent for the rest
of the performance. She moves with the bowl of seeds in her hands; her
Fig. 6 Violeta Luna in NK603 in Nab'aa'. Photo by Herbert Fig. 7 Violeta Luna and Pedro Velasco in NK603 Fig. 8 Violeta Luna performing NK603 She adjusts a metal dental dam clamp At
this point in the performance I look around to see audience reactions. I think
I see a grandmother weeping; maybe I am weeping. The children look
frightened. I am worried that this performance will provoke a scandal, with
the nudity, the violence, and a theatricality not common in Nab'aa'.
Suddenly,
there is a transition signaled, again, by audiovisual elements, with the
soundscape growing in intensity. Imagery that evokes the Zapatista movement (EZLN) provokes maize/woman to remove
the bindings from her body. The same man-in-lab coat/community member now helps
Luna cut the tape off her torso, but this looks difficult and dangerous; the
huge metal scissor could easily slip and cut into maize/woman's flesh. But it
does not. The tape corset is removed; we see its underside where the
resplendent maze that was painted on her back is now imprinted on the corset.
What did biotech take from maize/woman? Remnants of the resplendent corn are
still on her back, but it is smeared, distorted. Figs. 9 & 10 Violeta Luna performing NK603 in Nab'aa'. Photograph by Herbert Reyes, 2011.
Luna releases her braids and
ties a red bandana around her face, in the same manner that EZLN members
protect their
There is more to say about Luna's work in Nab'aa' and the performance of NK603 before an
audience of war survivors, their children, and their children's children. But
it must wait for another telling. For now, I want to return to the thread that
connects Petrona's embodiment of a kamawil and its sparking of kab'awil and Luna's
embodiment of kab'awil as maize/woman. Both were trans-temporal responses to
current conditions through embodied enactments of Maya epistemological/ontological resistance. By
retelling the Popol Wuj on their terms—with a female maize deity rather than
male— Petrona's performance responded to the erasure of Mayan historical
narratives by colonial and neocolonial state discourse in national schools that
obviate these histories and present Maya and other Indigenous peoples in the
past tense, only. In Luna's performance of NK603, maize is
human, and human is maize; both are agentive in the face of technoscientific
and necro/biopolitical eruptions in our shared natural and Fig. 11
Petrona Tzunux Chivalan offering candles The performing into being of a kab'awil/kamawil
ontology of relationality between humans and maize within an agentive material
context represents a re-realization of matter and an expanded sense of
personhood—both human and other than human—that has the potential
to contest the three tenets of genocidal coloniality. Conclusion To conclude, I
want us to return now to Ma Lach and Pap Lu's bones and
the stories performed in relation to them. It is their bones that led me to the
foregoing reflection on the relationalities humans have with each other, with
other organic beings, and with matter in general. Those bones led me to ask
what these relationalities have to do with surviving genocidal coloniality.
Those bones return to the earth and become, as Pap Xhasinib' reminded me at his
father's funeral, the veins, flesh, and bones of a living, breathing earth. As
such, I consider these bones, which are now reinterred in Nab'aa's municipal
cemetery, as kamawil, "idolitos," that is, objects of power, granting,
perhaps that "vision that duplicates" (Chacón n.d.), that is, allows for
increasing complexity. Ma
Lach and Pap Lu's bones are
the traces of persons who lived, who had names and engendered
children. But they are also forensic objects that establish the cold facts of
genocide. At the same time, around Ma Lach's bones took place a ritual of collective mourning—both
personal and impersonal—for many at the
funeral, including her son, hardly got the chance to know her in life.
Nonetheless, the bones stand in for the relationships she had, and may have
had, had she lived her life in full. As Pap Xhasinab's libation,
and the concept of kab'awil, suggests,
these relationships include humans, but also others. He compared bones, flesh,
and blood with minerals, earth, and rivers. Though a seemingly simple act, it
performatively theorized the relational ontology that constitutes the Ixil
world, created through a web that entangles persons, but also other kinds of bodies and things. The
itiixhil tiichajil that
animates flesh and bone to make persons
exists in humans and other animals, but also in the surrounding mountains, rivers, and forests of
the Ixil world.
Petrona
and Luna's performances, Nan Xhiv's
name exchange with Tzuk, Pap Xhasinib's libation to the earth/body, and the Xoloche
massacre survivors' dialogue with fire to heal from the genocidal fires of
three decades before, are each, in their own way, performances of kab'awil. This
ontological insistence, through small quotidian acts, collective ritual, and
staged experiments in performance, is a way of accessing kab'awil through kamawil. That is, it is a way of accessing a double-vision and even
pluriversal vision via living-matter in resistance to genocidal
coloniality's construal of all matter as inert and (some) persons as bodies only to be used and
disposed of as objects. This underscores the ontological workings of what Gerald Vizenor
termed survivance, meaning "more than
survival, more than endurance or mere response" (15). It is more than mere
existence, but what precisely does survivance entail? The foregoing reflection
suggests that survivance is a continuous and
insistent enactment of Indigenous worlds through all means—from the small
performances of daily existence to experimental aesthetic overtures, to more
direct resistance when necessary and possible. Another signature term of
Vizenor's is an important part of this ontological insistence and resistance:
transmotion. Visionary and performative "transmotions" enact,
wrote Vizenor, "a dialogical circle" of relationality and resistance, and "not
a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty" (15-20). This suggests transmotion to be a constantly dynamic and
trans-temporal acknowledgment of our inextricable relationality with and in a
living, agentive material world. Transmotion has the qualities of kab'awil; it is
double-headed and double-edged, requiring great care and responsibility in its
wielding—like a wild edible plant named Tzuk.
Reyes, 2011.
in Naa'baa'.
Photo by Herbert Reyes, 2011.
in Nab'aa'. Photo by Herbert Reyes, 2011.
in Paxil cave, associated with the mountain
where the first maize emerged. Photograph
by
Herbert Reyes, 2011.