for Mauricio Ortega Valerio, disappeared September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero
I
The night eagle soared over the town
looking to increase your suffering
with a prophecy
that your children become kaagu,
xpún, xpún, xpún, xpún:
that they cut this adobe with blood
to build a house made of dawn
that at the entrance to the town they hang,
scrawled in their language, a prayer calling upon
the crab-armed lightning and the crab-armed thunder
to clothe the heart of these Mountains.
II
Let us renew the year.
Let us burn flowers
to the four corners of the earth.
Let us offer blood
to the Lord of the hills
that he protect us from the dogs
from the men with guns
from the silence in the streets
from the sunset-colored wells
from the ones who carry off our children
from them, the people in the places
we labor.
III
A finger that illumines the world
unfurls from a clutch of flowers for the dead,
stirring the ghosts of prophecy
here where we are bound
crossing this space.
Burying these masks
they have numbered our days
in the language of bullets’
leaden insomnia, these masks
born of pistils and stamens,
in the wombs of rocks
they are turning over
the thirst of our hardened skins.
IV
Go hide in the caves.
Wait for the mist to fall,
the hunt to end.
They are out for blood,
to carry off our dreams
in buses with no return. watchful,
stealthy, dressed in rain,
and counting us on their fingers,
counting as we hide in the Mountains,
we of the hidden hand,
we of the red earth,
we who dwell in the House of Lucio.
V
My voice became a nest
the day they took you.
Everything they do to you, don’t they
know, they do to me?
I howled lightning into your mouth
where with our friends we walked
and now . . . now no longer.
Where shall I hang this pain that burns hope?
Who shall lead our community?
Where shall I crucify these birds that buried my tongue?
In what world shall I have to follow your footsteps
now that your body is wrapped in fear
now that our rage sprouts from the earth?
VI
The bullet that bore your name
kicked up dust,
shocking the trees as,
along the thorns
of a rising sun,
fell
your scream
and broke, the cicadas burying
a watery umbilical cord
before the entire world,
to grow roots that will nurture our story
for future generations.
VII
Xtámbaa, I am with you in this world,
in this night of thunder,
faceless among the dancing spirits,
armless, ceaseless.
I am with you among the candles,
in the smoke that paves the road,
in the aroma of copal collecting
in the watery eyes
of all these voiceless tomorrows.
VIII
The sad fire sat down
on the delicate grinding stone.
It spoke to the lime and the hearth
about our father’s scar,
about why they flayed
the deer who was to be a teacher
and why they disappeared our brothers
who would have surrounded the dinner table with colors.
IX
Mauricio—
you come from the Mountains,
you come from the rain,
you embrace me,
and in silence
the fire of our land
burns in your memory.
X
Brother—
get up!
Look at the scars on our skin.
Look at our mother’s wandering.
Look at her rage
as she weaves your name,
searching until she finds you.
XI
You are alive in the tree,
a tree that flowers hearts.
Your foot-turned-earth shelters my Mé’pháá voice,
your navel-turned-root the song of my name,
your arm the weight of my abdomen.
You live for your children who won’t return,
who sat in full view of the town on that bloody night.
Tree of Iguala—
the shadows of our ancestors and their sad accents
in your flowering branches bring me to tears.
Earthen Skin
Hubert Matiúwàa
translated from the Mè’phàà and Spanish by Paul M. Worley
Editor’s Note: The translator worked primarily from the Spanish and consulted with the poet, as described in the translator’s note.
Read the original in Mè’phàà and Spanish
Listen to the poem read in the original Mè’phàà by the poet:
Without exaggeration, the ascendance of Mè’phàà poet Hubert Matiúwàa on the literary scene has been one of the most exciting developments in Américan letters during the last two years. From the publication of Xtámbaa/Piel de tierra (Earthen Skin) by Pluralia Ediciones in 2016, to the author’s being a recipient of a grant from Mexico’s Foundation for Arts and Culture (FONCA) and his being recently awarded the prestigious Indigenous Literary Award of the Américas (PLIA), Matiúwàa and his work have been a constant presence in literary circles. Indeed, the poems included here are not even the first of his work to be translated into English.
For readers unfamiliar with contemporary indigenous literatures in Abya Yala (the Américas), it’s important to underscore the nature of Matiúwàa’s achievement in publishing Xtámbaa in the first place (covered in some detail here). The poetry collection is the first ever published in Matiúwàa’s mother tongue, Mè’phàà (Tlapaneco), a language with fewer than one hundred thousand speakers, and as stated in a recent article, the development of his mother tongue is one of Matiúwàa's foremost concerns as a poet. Readers better versed in indigenous literatures will encounter a powerful voice, fearless in its denouncement of state violence in Mexico, that insists on the broader recognition and acceptance of indigenous peoples, languages, and cultures.
While the poems presented here deal with the 2014 mass kidnapping and murder of forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College in Matiúwàa’s home state of Guerrero, the urgency of that case remains palpable in Mexico today. The state where I translated these poems, Chiapas, not only just recognized the twentieth anniversary of the Acteal Massacre this past December 22, but the municipalities of Chenalhó and Chalchihuitan find themselves embattled in a land dispute that has displaced over seven thousand people and threatens to erupt in paramilitary violence.
While I have not studied the Mè’phàà language, I have studied other Mexican indigenous languages and worked with Matiúwàa in clarifying questions concerning these poems in their Spanish versions. Matiúwàa’s urgency and the situations of many indigenous peoples throughout the Américas demand the amplification of their voices, cultures, and concerns.
For readers unfamiliar with contemporary indigenous literatures in Abya Yala (the Américas), it’s important to underscore the nature of Matiúwàa’s achievement in publishing Xtámbaa in the first place (covered in some detail here). The poetry collection is the first ever published in Matiúwàa’s mother tongue, Mè’phàà (Tlapaneco), a language with fewer than one hundred thousand speakers, and as stated in a recent article, the development of his mother tongue is one of Matiúwàa's foremost concerns as a poet. Readers better versed in indigenous literatures will encounter a powerful voice, fearless in its denouncement of state violence in Mexico, that insists on the broader recognition and acceptance of indigenous peoples, languages, and cultures.
While the poems presented here deal with the 2014 mass kidnapping and murder of forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College in Matiúwàa’s home state of Guerrero, the urgency of that case remains palpable in Mexico today. The state where I translated these poems, Chiapas, not only just recognized the twentieth anniversary of the Acteal Massacre this past December 22, but the municipalities of Chenalhó and Chalchihuitan find themselves embattled in a land dispute that has displaced over seven thousand people and threatens to erupt in paramilitary violence.
While I have not studied the Mè’phàà language, I have studied other Mexican indigenous languages and worked with Matiúwàa in clarifying questions concerning these poems in their Spanish versions. Matiúwàa’s urgency and the situations of many indigenous peoples throughout the Américas demand the amplification of their voices, cultures, and concerns.
Hubert Matiúwàa (b. 1986 in Guerrero, Mexico) is a member of the Mè’phàà culture. He has a B.A. in literature and philosophy from the Autonomous University of Guerrero and an M.A. in Latin American studies from the UNAM. In 2016 he was awarded the Cenzontle Indigenous Languages Prize and participated in the Seventh Carlos Montemayor Indigenous Language Poetry Festival. In 2017 he won both the Indigenous Literatures of the Americas Prize and Guerrero state’s Youth Poetry Prize. He is the author of Xtámbaa/Piel de Tierra (2016) and Tsína rí nàyaxà’/Cicatriz que te mira (2017). His work has previously appeared in English in Latin American Literature Today.
Paul M. Worley (b. 1976, South Carolina, USA) is a translator and associate professor of world literature in the English department at Western Carolina University. He holds an M.A. in poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book, Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures, was published in 2013 by the University of Arizona Press, and his work on indigenous languages and literatures has recently appeared in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Latin American Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and A contracorriente. Co-authored with Rita M. Palacios, his next book, Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge, will be published in March 2019.
