Guatemalan scholar Rita M. Palacios’ body of work reexamines the hegemonies that mediate literary, cultural, and knowledge production, particularly in Maya oral storytelling, literature, and material culture. In the book she co-authored with Asymptote’s former editor-at-large for Mexico, Paul M. Worley, Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (University of Arizona Press, 2019), they argued for a decentering from the Euro-American critical vocabulary of literary theory and arts criticism through the lens of ts’íib—”an understanding of Maya artistic and cultural production that includes and exceeds the written word.” Drawing from Maya artists and authors such as Calixta Gabriel Xiquín, Waldemar Noh Tzec, and Humberto Ak’abal, whose œuvre range from murals to textiles, from cha’anil (‘performatic’) to ceramics, from monuments to poetry, Palacios and Worley make the case for the ts’íib as one of the various Indigenous-centric departures from and unlearnings of our colonial worldviews on literary production and knowledge systems.
In this interview, I conversed with Dr. Palacios on ts’íib as a form of autohistorical knowledge production that is beyond the Western imaginary, the Maya and non-Ladino writers and writings within Guatemalan and Central American literatures, and the rightful refusals against translation.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In a conversation on Mexican and Guatemalan literatures with Paul M. Worley, you said
[T]he many challenges (structural racism, censorship, a lack of government funding, to name a few) that writers in countries in the Majority World face directly impact how and what is written, how it’s published, and who it reaches, and so we, readers and critics, would do well to pay attention.
Can you speak more about these gaps and dissimilarities in terms of knowledge production, especially in literature, in the Global Majority versus the North Atlantic?
Rita M. Palacios (RMP): Given the way Western political and economic powers have shaped our world, the anglophone North Atlantic enjoys a certain monopoly over the manner in which we think and write about each other, privileging certain modes of artistic production over others, as well as creators, reading publics, and even the critics. This is not to say that we are helpless or that we are wholly bound by a system that privileges and rewards those who uphold it. It does mean that things are much more challenging for those who live, think, and create outside those parameters.
Generally, when it comes to literature, that which is written, packaged, and sold by the millions is not a literature that aims to represent us all, but a literature that affirms the places (real and imagined) we already occupy and the systems built around them so that we continue to inhabit these spaces, sustaining those big great powers. Despite the challenges their authors face, the literatures of the Global Majority are rich, diverse, and challenging; they are multilingual, multivocal, and multiversal. Rarely are these literatures sold in the same manner as blockbuster novels because of the threat they pose. And these authors recognize the danger of being subsumed into “national” or canonical literatures, as is the case with Mikel Ruíz (Tsotsil) who notes the tokenization of Indigenous literatures in Mexico (2019).
AMMD: And how can platforms (fellowships, journals, courses, grants, workshops, magazines, residencies, publishers) and even translators—especially translators like us from the Global Majority who are treading North Atlantic literary spaces—become complicit with these power structures?
RMP: As a scholar of Indigenous literatures, I acknowledge that I am part of a Western system (academia) that determines how knowledge should be produced and disseminated, and I recognize that I am not free of its entrapments. But I do my best to change, as much as I can, the terms in which we, critics, participate because it is possible to do things differently. We, critics and reading publics, have been trained on who, what, and how to read and, though difficult, it is important to unlearn our training. We are equipped with important tools and strategies, which should not be cast aside (not yet, in any case), that can be used to build structures that are more just and that better honour those who write and those whose lives are represented in words. We are complicit when we refuse to recognize both our position in between worlds and the power we can yield to affect change, as seemingly minor as it can be.
At the moment, given the state of the world (genocide on the Gaza strip, Land Back movements, general strikes, to name but a few important struggles), there are many calls for action directed at academics. A student collective wisely noted the urgency on X, formerly Twitter: “Your ’decolonial’ theorizing can wait. Praxis cannot”, which is exactly what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang warn us about in their well-known work, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”.
As academics, wielding language has been one of our greatest powers and at the same time our biggest trap; it is easy to get lost theorizing and coining terms when that is what is rewarded in academia. ‘Doing’ takes much more time, effort, and is less rewarded, though is itself very rewarding. In our field, the work of translators is some of the ‘doing’ that is needed, particularly when more than half of the world’s languages (and along with them, biodiversity, ancestral knowledge, and entire ways of seeing the world) are in danger of disappearing. Those of us writing about writing and teaching about writing have the responsibility not to simply include the voices of people who are Black, Indigenous, of colour, LGBTQ2S+, with disabilities, refugees, etc., but to meaningfully engage and radically change the terms of the discussion (if not dismantle it and rebuild it completely). It is not sufficient to claim to be queering or indigenizing the classroom and the curricula by tolerant or mandated inclusion; it all needs to be radically changed.
AMMD: You also co-authored a book with Paul M. Worley titled Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (University of Arizona Press, 2019), an honorable mention for Best Book in the Humanities award by the Latin American Studies Association. At the Mesoamerican Studies On-Air podcast, you spoke about your co-authoring experience.
RMP: Paul and I began working on our book project sometime in 2015, but our collaboration began before that, when we realized we had a very similar outlook. The project sort of came together because of discussions we had had, a general sense of not having the right tools to do what we wanted to do, and conversations with the writers whose work interested us.
The writing itself was easy because we have similar styles and, in terms of expertise, it worked well because where one was lacking in in-depth knowledge the other could fill in. The real work took place off the page, as we each tended to our own professional and personal obligations and trusted each other to pick up where the other had left off. I like to say that we are Facebook scholars because living in different countries, we relied on DMs heavily to communicate and to process the different stages of research and writing, to commiserate about the obstacles we encountered along the way, and to check in on each other when things got difficult, like my dad’s many trips to the hospital. Since then, we’ve co-authored other pieces and have had the pleasure to write with other people as well. We continually add to our endless Facebook chat from which other projects have emerged and we often use it as a place to archive random quotes, impressions, and recommendations. In fact, we’re working on an experimental think piece as a Facebook conversation on what it means to think about what is and is not ‘literature’.
AMMD: In Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (2019), you and Worley examined and contextualised the multimodal Maya ts’íib—from weavers Calixta Gabriel Xiquín and Ruperta Bautista Vázquez to writers Jakaltek Victor Montejo and Armando Dzul Ek—as decentering from what was universally perceived: literature as the written word and literature as printed books, found beyond Maya glyphs in the “narratable patterns such as textile designs or the rows of a farmer’s milpa.” What is ts’íib as a multitude of knowledge production? And how does it depart from what we know of literature based on the neo/colonial imaginary?
RMP: Ts’íib is a Maya concept; it exists in all Maya languages except for one, according to Kaqchikel intellectual Irma Otzoy, and it encompasses writing, weaving, painting, and sculpture, among many other forms of artistic creation (Otzoy, 1996). This concept helped us understand what we couldn’t with Western tools of analysis; the texts we studied always seemed to want to leap out of the page and demand an alternate approach or at the very least a secondary reading. For example, the work of Maya women poets like Negma Coy (Kaqchikel) or Ruperta Bautista (Tsotsil) who are also weavers talk about weaving not as writing, but an art that is writing and vice versa. Other Maya writers tap into performance as an important extension of their work, and again, reading words on a page is insufficient when the artists themselves indicate that they are weaving poetry with the aid of different textualities. When you step back and ‘read’ this artistic production as ts’íib, honouring its Maya creators, a richer texture is revealed along with notions of collective history, subjectivity, cosmogony, etc. Ts’íib radically departs from notions of literature because the written word is not the be-all and end-all of society and culture; rather, the written word is but a tool, useful and wonderful, but not unique.
AMMD: In the chapter on the refusals of translation with a focus on Maya poet Waldemar Noh Tzec and new forms of k’anel, you and Worley posed a question when ts’íib is translated into the Spanish, the colonial language of hegemony in Latin American nation-states, in the printed word—thus, ‘literature’:
What meanings are elided, contested, or obfuscated in the production and reading of ts’íib as literature?
In what ways can the act of rendering Maya ts’íib into Spanish ‘literature’—or any form of Indigenous storytelling into a literature in the colonising language, for that matter—a “neoliberal translation” and “literary co-optation”?
RMP: This is an interesting question for a number of reasons. First, Spanish, the colonizing language is in many cases, the language that Maya writers speak and write in. That is to say, they did not grow up speaking a Maya language, because it was violently taken from or denied to them. Second, language and literature are constructs that can be taken apart, transformed, and welded back together, something that those who create literary worlds know very well. I think, if anything, Maya authors compose simultaneously literature and ts’íib, and the readers and critics may take away one or the other or both. The authors who do it strategically are the ones engaging in strategies like neoliberal translation to draw out more than one meaning for different publics. This dual labour is possible because these authors are part of a world that is not black or white but is both, ch’ixi, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explains in A Ch’ixi World is Possible: Essays from a Present in Crisis (2023).
AMMD: Speaking of weaving, can you tell us about the Maya K’iche’ poet Humberto Ak’abal, whose works you described as “a poetics of weaving” in Diálogo?
RMP: Humberto Ak’abal (1952–2019) was a phenomenal Maya K’iche’ poet who wrote beautiful verses. His work is best enjoyed in performance because, as I mentioned, the words themselves demand it. Fortunately for us, we can find many of his performances on Youtube and his work will continue to be printed for many years to come. When Ak’abal writes he sings and he weaves, drawing on the blanket wool weaving tradition of Momostenango, his birthplace. This is what I call a poetics of weaving, the movements, the links, and the knots that are drawn together to create a rich tapestry of word and sound:
En mi lengua
poesía se dice:
Aqaktzij
(palabramiel)
Je’ltzij
(bellapalabra)
Pach’umtzij
(trenzapalabra)
En fin,
no sé para qué sirve,
aún así
insisto.In my language
poetry is:
Aqaktzij
(wordhoney)
Je’ltzij
(beautifulword)
Pach’umtzij
(plaitedword)
In short,
I don’t know what it’s for,
but even so
I insist.–Humberto Ak’abal, Kamoyoyik (2002)
AMMD: In 2003, Ak’abal declined to receive his award after winning Guatemala’s Premio Nacional de Literatura Miguel Ángel Asturias, the first time it was given to a non-Mestizo/non-Ladino writer in the award’s then 15-year history. A year later, Premio B’atz’—a prize for Maya, Xínca, and Garífuna writers—was established by Rodrigo Rey Rosa. While the non-inclusion of Indigenous writers from writing platforms is no news for me, coming from a Christian-dominated Hispanic postcolony, I am interested if there is a divide between the Maya and Mestizo writers in Guatemala—and what kinds of literary ethnopolitics haunt this landscape.
RMP: That decision by Humberto Ak’abal was very important as it sparked a conversation that no one wanted to have out in the open. He had dealt with a lot of racism coming up as a K’iche’ writer, his work often diminished as “children’s literature” given its perceived simplicity. This particular event showed who were the allies and who were not; behind closed doors it is said that many writers and intellectuals thought he was being a diva and doing it for the exposure. However, the moment he was in the international limelight (before, during and after the award), the tune of many would change.
I think there is definitely a divide between Maya and non-Maya writers in Guatemala, particularly because the literary establishment is largely Ladino and it toes the line to ensure the succession of a national literature written in Spanish for a Spanish-reading audience. In general, Indigenous writers are expected to write in Indigenous languages to pass some sort of authenticity test—for a while, discussions about Indigenous literatures focused on precisely that, ignoring, willfully or not, that for many writers the loss of their mother tongue is part of a larger state-sanctioned violence, which is upheld by racist practices that to this date deem Indigenous languages inferior. Indigenous writers understand this much better than us readers, and in some cases play around with the contradictions and opportunities that arise. In our book, there is a chapter on neoliberal translation, which, in its first iteration written by my coauthor, won the Sturgis Leavitt Award for best article. Here, Paul looks at how Noh Tzec, a Maya Yucatec writer, plays with self-translation itself to tailor different messages to different audiences.
AMMD: You cited Maya scholar-theorists like Irma Otzoy, Gaspar Pedro González, and Pedro Uc Be in some of your critical writings. Who are the Central American, Guatemalan, and Mayan figures whose creative and critical works influenced you?
RMP: Thinking of the past two to three years, the things that have shaped my critical work most deeply are the conversations I have had with Maya visual artist friends. Their work challenges me to think outside the box, to really engage with the complex ideas behind it, and it provides a visual medium on which to hang concepts I, as a non-Maya critic, grapple with.
For example, Walter Morris has written about the embodied aspect of weaving; while this is perhaps not hard to understand, Angelica Serech, a wonderful Kaqchikel textile artist from Chi Xot, brought it home for me with her piece, Mi historia en nudos: Al dorso de mi huipil (My story in knots: On the underside of my huipil). In this piece, for the 2022 Bienal de Arte Paiz, she created a very large textile piece in the town’s palette, focusing on what is seldom seen, the underside of a traditional huipil, a woven blouse. She employed traditional materials and intentionally incorporated her own hair, her aunt’s, and that of other women. This move was meant to feature that embodiment of weaving, putting one’s body literally into a woven text, but behind it there was much more: Ángelica wanted to reflect what it meant for her as Maya woman to cut her hair short and what it meant to ask other women to do so as well. This large huipil represented a sacrifice, an amplified version (in size and in action) of what goes into creating a huipil: Maya women are part of their huipiles and vice versa; their mark is a physical signature.
Another absolutely fantastic Kaqchikel visual artist, who resides in Guatemala City, is Marilyn Boror Bor. Her work on memory, language, and cultural loss has made me reflect deeply on the work we do on literature and language in general. Her Diccionario de objetos olvidados (Dictionary of forgotten objects) shows that much more than words are lost when traditional objects fall out of use and are retired. Objects in the Diccionario are shown in gradation, according to the risk they face of disappearing; some of the objects are so light, almost translucent, that it is hard to make them out altogether. Each object’s Kaqchikel name appears alongside a definition in Spanish, followed by a sample sentence in Kaqchikel, which is also translated into Spanish. The objects vanish from the page, from language, and from memory, and in the case of the almost translucent image of ch’upäq, a type of soap fruit, Boror notes the loss of tradition and sustainable practices.
AMMD: In your opinion, which Maya and Indigenous, non-Mestizo/non-Ladino literary works from Guatemala and Central America, modern or from antiquity, deserve another look—and retranslation?
RMP: If it were up to me, I would want a complete overhaul of how and what we read. For too long, we have been shortchanged, readily accepting those grand canonical lists that do nothing but leave out more than 90% of what’s out there, the things that do not fit, that resist translation, that defy us as readers. The models that we rely on to inform our reading and writing about reading create these self-actualizing loops that reinforce the systems under which we find ourselves, thus making it impossible to change it all up. To do better, we must read against the current, and, as it pertains to Indigenous literatures, we must read in translation if we are to commit because we simply cannot learn all these rich, complex languages. Of course, the ideal is to read in the Indigenous languages themselves, but if that prevents us from doing so, then we do the best next thing: read in translation.
One work that has been rewritten, reread, retranslated, and mistreated is the Popol Wuj, the story of creation for Maya People. The Popol Wuj has been largely treated as a written text, incorporated into the Western literary canon as a ‘first’ Indigenous text of the Americas, when in fact it well predates invasion, it is multitextual, it lives in the oral histories as well as non-written records (vases, paintings, stella, etc.) of past and present Maya Peoples and yet, what is considered the ultimate, ‘original’, or official version is the transcription by a Spanish priest that lives at the Newberry library in Chicago. For a while, the Spanish translation of the Popol Wuj that circulated was by Miguel Asturias, who translated it from a French translation. There have been many other versions since then, and perhaps most notable is the one by K’iche’ intellectual Sam Colop, who gave us a poetic version in K’iche’ and in Spanish (2008). I’m glossing over quite a bit of history, so I recommend Nathan Henne’s Reading Popol Wuj: A Decolonial Guide (2020), a fabulous book where he discusses the different approaches to reading the Popol Wuj.
The emphasis on the written version of the Popol Wuj has led us astray, obfuscating the many other dimensions in which it speaks to us. I recently co-authored a piece on the sounds in the Popol Wuj with my colleague Paul Worley and Maya musician and musicologist Luis Cali. Back in 2019, we visited Luis’ studio in Chi Xot, and he introduced us to many instruments, their sounds, and possibilities. Something that really impacted me was the ‘death whistle’, a clay skull whose sound Luis said would have accompanied the hero twins in their descent to the underworld, an important scene in the Popol Wuj. Never before had we thought of the Popol Wuj in terms of sounds; while we know it has an important performatic dimension, we had not factored in the importance of sound itself. We wrote this paper with Luis leading the charge and we’re quite happy with the result—while it provides a small glimpse into how we can ‘read’ such a text, we hope it invites a further examination of this and other texts from a perspective that understands that the be-all and end-all of Maya literary production is not the written word.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on Guatemalan and Central American Literatures in Maya, Garifuna, Xinca, and other Indigenous languages, what books and works from these languages and/or in translation into Spanish and English would you wish to include as key texts? Who are the figures, classic and contemporary, that you would be inclined to incorporate into the syllabus?
RMP: There are so many wonderful authors who I’d like to include—it’d be a very extensive list. What makes including everyone difficult is that it is very hard to obtain print editions of recent works, let alone translations. Guatemala has a very modest literary establishment when compared to Mexico’s, for example, and when it comes to Indigenous authors, their work is published by small, independent presses, if not self-published. This is further complicated by the closure of the postal system for a number of years; it was expensive and difficult to send things abroad. Luckily, thanks to social media, authors can put their works out there, and phenomenal translators work with them to translate and promote their works.
Some of my must-read authors for an Indigenous literature in Guatemala syllabus are: Humberto Ak’abal, Manuel Tzoc Bucup, Miguel Ángel Oxlaj Cumez, Luis Chali, Calixta Gabriel Xiquin, Rosa Chavez, Maya Cu, Manuel Bolom Yaxcal, Víctor Montejo, Sabino Esteban Franciso, Gaspar Pedro González, Wingston González, Nora Murillo, and Rogelio Lino Franzua. I should add that my ideal course would integrate visual and textile art alongside written works. Some of my favourite Maya artists in Guatemala are: Manuel Chavajay, Edgar Calel, Ángel Poyón, Fernando Poyón, Marilyn Boror Bor, and Ángelica Serech.
Rita M. Palacios is an assistant professor at the School of Liberal Studies of Conestoga College in Ontario and formerly with Concordia University and California State University, Long Beach. With Paul Worley, she has co-authored Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (University of Arizona Press, 2019), an honorable mention for Best Book in the Humanities by Latin American Studies Association. She has also contributed to Indigenous Interfaces (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Human and Environmental Justice in Guatemala (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Rita Indiana: Archivos (Ediciones Cielo Naranja, 2017), La mosca en el canon: Ensayos sobre Augusto Monterroso (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2013), as well as Hispania, Cuadernos de Literatura, The Latin Americanist, Diálogos de Campo, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Chasqui, Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura, and served as a reviewer to Latino Studies. This is her website.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023) and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Published from South Africa to Japan, France to Australia, and translated into Chinese and Swedish, their latest works have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Their lyric essays have been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and their prose poem was selected for The Best Asian Poetry. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, their works can be found here.
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