Incantations
By Mayan Women
Chiapas, Mexico: Taller Leñateros, 2005.
10.5 x 10.75 x 2.5"; 29 pages. Recycled and handmade paper with silk-screened illustrations. Front cover is a three-dimensional rendering of the face of Kaxail, Mayan goddess of the wilderness, in recycled cardboard mixed with corn silk and coffee. The bas-relief mask has incised open eyes. Housed in a protective case lined with handmade paper.
Taller Leñateros: "Anthology of Mayan women’s magic spells accompanied by 70 pages of original silkscreen art by Mayan painters.150 Mayan women worked for over 30 years to create this treasure."
Incantations contains spells and hymns tape-recorded by the women and by Ms. Past, who transcribed and translated them from Tzotzil into Spanish and English.
Dinita Smith, The Poetic Hearts of Mayan Women Writ Large [New York Times Review]: "The Mayan women of the Chiapas highlands in southern Mexico are extremely poor, and many, especially the older women, are illiterate. The poorest own only a few blankets, articles of clothing and utensils. But what they do have is poetry, much to the surprise of Ambar Past, an American-born Mexican poet who first encountered the Mayan women 30 years ago.
"Ms. Past, 55, came to Chiapas in 1973 as a self-described hippie and renegade housewife, escaping an unhappy marriage. She stayed with some Mayan women and taught herself Tzotzil, one of the local Mayan languages.
"As she listened to the women, Ms. Past said she realized that they sometimes spoke in poetry, in couplets and in gleaming metaphors. 'I was so deeply moved hearing in these mud huts these breathtakingly beautiful verses, sometimes echoing verses and phrases spoken or written 500 years ago,' she said…. 'They live with no comfort,' Ms. Past said during a visit to New York in April. 'Yet poetry is an essential part of their daily life.'
"Now after 30 years' work, 150 Mayan women from Taller Leñateros (Woodlanders' Workshop), a paper- and book-making collective founded by Ms. Past in 1975 in the Chiapas city San Crist?bal de las Casas, have produced what may be the first book of Mayan women's poetry created almost entirely by them, and translated into English. ...
"Robert M. Laughlin, a curator of Mesoamerican and Caribbean ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution who has published two Tzotzil dictionaries, said of Incantations: 'There is very little publication about Mayan women's lives in their own language, and this gives a whole view of the culture that's been unknown before.' (Mayan men in Chiapas also incorporate poetry into some of their formal and religious discourse, but that group has been well studied, Mr. Laughlin said.)
"The Olmec and the Maya were among the first literate societies in the Western Hemisphere. Evidence of Mayan writing goes back to the first century A.D. Murals and ceramics from the height of Mayan civilization, A.D. 600 to 900, depict male scribes holding pens and brushes, making Incantations even more significant....
"One reason Incantations took so long to create, said Ms. Past … is that some incantations last for days. She transcribed hundreds of hours of tape, from which she culled essential verses. In fabricating Incantations, the women soaked recycled paper with palm fronds, making a pulp in a blender, dyeing it black with soot and campeachy wood. Mayan men helped with the offset printing."
$145 |
