Author Archives: mchees

11/2/23

Anger at Injustice and inability to comprehend difference

This was a hard thing to read. I can only imagine what it was like to live. My anger is individual and small, focused on the soldiers that lost every ounce of their humanity. But I am also angry because of the many ways this story is entirely common. In her testimony, we learn from Menchu about how she lives. How her family strikes an intentional and powerful balance between the necessity of working the finka, and the pleasure in returning to the highlands. As we have learned all throughout this course, indigenous and specifically Mayan understandings of the world are very different to the settler and colonial ontoepistemologies. I’m sure it would appear ridiculous to a landed owner of a finka for people to leave and return to the cold highlands to harvest their ancestral crops when paid work existed down on the coast. I’m sure the collective nature of these living arrangements, the communal field that the village maintained in case anyone got sick, are what lead to the labelling of “communist.” But the tragic and inexcusable thing about understanding the world differently is that, from a colonial, capitalist logic it somehow justifies eradication of the other way of knowing the world. At this time the “Cold War” was about as hot as war can get in Latin America, and these global ideas of communism and capitalism were clashing in the minds of those who tell the people with guns who to shoot. But nothing like that exists for Menchu and her family. They are not communists, not because it is an overly complicated ideology, but because everything it has to offer is already represented in their ways of life. The reason communism inspires the industrialized worker is because it radically presumes that they are worth more than their labour, more than their time, and that together they can make it so. Those are presumptions already baked into the lives of Mayan communities. Life is not perfect, but the ways people relate to one another and their labour, their land, their gods, and those they do not understand are fundamentally deeper, caring, and inherently opposed to all the capitalist logics imposed on them. When that way of life gets in the way of profit, reliable labour, or a regime caught in a Cold War discourse, surrounded by national revolutions and reliant on American dollars to stay afloat, anything can happen in the countryside when only those that cannot speak Spanish can witness it. Who will they testify to and about what? That is the power of Menchu’s account, and her effort to learn to communicate in the same language as the oppressor has left a voice that can be heard more widely. I was wondering what people found most surprising about life in the highlands, or perhaps in her description of it? How did her chosen words colour your reading of her testimony?

10/6/23

The Everpresent “Now” of Humberto Ak’abal

During my reading of Ak’abal’s poems, I was struck by never feeling I was anywhere other than here. “Here” being in his world and mine, right now. Ak’abal’s poetry has a thrumming presence to it, a contemporary murmur that relaxes you into the moments you spend reading. I think it is his use of language that settles us into the poem, his structure which conversationally pulls us in, and his subjects that while historical, anthropomorphized, or otherwise separate from now, appear real and textured. Ak’abal declares in the introduction that he wishes to “call ourselves contemporary Mayas with pride.” In so many ways these poems echo that mission.

At multiple points in his poems, it feels as if thoughts are occurring naturally to the poem itself. It feels live and current. In In the Woodlands, enjambment of the final three lines makes for natural pauses as the writer considers each new sensation. Being wrapped in a woollen poncho, dreaming, is like falling asleep… in the woodlands. Another example is in a poem with a completely different tone but equally effective delivery 500 years. The space left before the final declaration and the original premise of the poem, there is an orality to it, and thus a presence.

It is not just that we are present in Ak’abal’s poetry, it is that time feels different as well. In our McLeod reading we learned about the different forms of Mayan cosmology and the way cycles, some long and some short, create a different reference to time. I see cycles all throughout these poems. In Corn Harvest Maize is brought from field to kernel in a cycle the begins and ends with walking. Human input that brings the ever-present food through a day. In Paradise, I see a much longer cycle taking shape, one which evokes a period before the colonial, the christian, and ends without resolving it. The maize goes from plentiful to forbidden. What is most compelling is when these poems are put in the context of their places within the collection of poems. Here, a third even broader temporal cycle appears, one that doesn’t have clear beginnings or endings. The weight of the 500 years poem hangs over this cycle, reminding us of the weight the Maya are forced to carry. Simultaneously, within this cycle, muddy feet traipse through fields of maize with reverence in an ever present now. In writing poems containing I and We and Us and declaring the “contemporary Maya,” Ak’abal brings into concert the long, persistent, sacred Maya present. The one that harvests maize, even when forbidden, the one that takes joy in a dreamy poncho, and the one that wishes to be a scrap of cloth so that perhaps one day they can fill the holes where the chill of poverty creeps in. This cycle, long and disjointed, without clear delineation or beginning, is why these poems are so compelling to me. They speak to a Mayan conception of time, as we have come to understand it. Lix Lopez began his lecture with something akin to “let us be grateful for another day.” These poems, with all their weight, do just that.

I am really sad I had to miss class this week, I loved everything I read from home. I was wondering what the brilliant minds of this class thought their “Long Cycle” might be? What historical weight do you carry, and what small cycle, daily interventions lighten the load? For me, I feel a loss of direction, a loss of utopia. It felt like people were fighting for something when I read history, and living now feels like being pulled in every direction, moving towards nothing. Then I meet people who do see the long cycle, the moral universe that bends towards justice, and I learn from them and am grateful. My daily cycle would be the ways people come into our lives to remind us of our values, even when the long view might obfuscate them.

09/12/23

I Am From the Huckleberries (Matthew)

I am from the Butter Ration, the Flour Tax, the Scarce Tongues

From the laden fields thick with dark sugar, cut with darker hands

and the great injustice of that island in the sun.

I am from the sickly scent of the Rum, goose-neck waxed bottles.

Long in the tooth, witness to horrors and pride.

 

From the thinnest trails off western coasts, memory exhales still

From the salt hewn rocks and lonely cedar refusing to be killed

From his mother’s mouth like a river came the sound of wind in grass

She saw an eagle catch a fish, the sun dawn on its face at last

 

I am from the Huckleberry, eaten while in stride

I am of the open palm that beckons you inside

I am of the moving eats, the dates that go down smooth

Of being told to sit, be still and stop playing with your food

 

 

Thank you for reading. I’m very excited to see everyone’s poems. My name is Matthew and I grew up in so called “Vancouver.” I am descended of Barbadian sugar growers and rum makers on my dad’s side. It is a history I am still learning to grapple with. My grandmother grew up in London during the Second World War. She describes vividly the rationing system and how it has affected her cooking. She makes the most delicious food from the most meager ingredients. I am a hiking guide year round, but mainly in the summers. Many a meal has been mostly berries found on the trails meandering along coastal cliffs. I feel connected to food and the many ways it informs my relationships and history. I know this course is going to deepen that understanding. I’m very much looking forward to it.