Murmurs from the Inexhaustible Ancestral Source by Alain Lawo-Sukam Ph.D.

Murmurs from the Inexhaustible Ancestral Source

 by Alain Lawo-Sukam Ph.D.

Reading the verses of Lips of Stone is a mental exercise along the paths of the origins to (re)discover the elixir of Mexican identities. The text gives shape to the Olmec cultural ethos from within the shelter of a language that is living, varied and ethnicized, which allows it to become a literature “of identity,” as René Depestre calls it. This work constitutes a challenge to the language itself, to the fundamental medium through which the poet perceives and constructs her world. Linguistic interference (in this case, the use of English) is not only the fruit of scriptural trans-territoriality nor a simple linguistic game of translation, but allows a transmission of knowledge, of cultural heritage and effective communication between peoples. The English translation of Lips of Stone is by Sandra Kingery. In this multilinguistic and multi-perspectived context, the book forces us, as Borges would say, to see the threads that often remain invisible but that can nevertheless guide us or impede our progress. Xánath Caraza creates a space that allows the enquiry that questions without concessions, doing so with words rendered bare by the bard’s dexterity. The style is humble but natural and detailed in its descriptive thoroughness. The poems are constructed upon sound images that shape a universe that vibrates with rhythmic movement. The resounding symbolisms are doors that lead the lyric voice to find itself in the space and time of the heroes who, with their works, left an indelible mark on Olmec history and on humanity in general. 

Lips of Stone produces an enchantment whose cloth woven out of one small segment after another builds a tower of thoughts, memories and images. The reader is about to hear a voice that speaks for many other voices. Individual and collective identities sometimes tend to merge. The poetic “I” mutates into an organic group. The poet presents an “I” that fuses with a collective and plural “I” that penetrates past and present. Ultimately, the poet becomes the voice of the ancestors. In this respect, the poet philosophizes and recuperates the ancestral voice as she did previously with the Mayan tradition in Balamkú (2019), her bilingual poetry collection. Like a surgeon, Xánath Caraza wears the gloves of memory to dissect history and return to the ancestral past that has been forgotten, ignored, silenced or distorted in the collective imaginary. It reveals the axiology of a rich communitarian people who value rituals and spiritualism, interpersonal relationships and interdependence between nature and human beings. As the lyrical voice expresses in this poem, native peoples live to the rhythm of the flora and fauna that determine their destiny and the joy of their descendants: “I learned to be happy/ in the solitude of the jungle./ I had forgotten how./” (“In the Solitude of the Jungle”). The cosmological aspect of the ancestral tradition is reflected in the interconnectivity between that which is human and the universe. Whether the perception of phenomena is logical or illogical, human beings and animals live in a fundamentally communal universe. It is also a universe in which the Gods are humanized and people and especially animals are deified in idolatrous veneration. The jaguar, the serpent, the crocodile, and the quetzal, for example, are not only animals but deities. In the Olmec universe, human beings are material and spiritual entities. This ontology is rooted in the conception of the nature of reality and being as spirit and energy. This energy is materialized, for example, in the sculptures and colossal heads 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9 that the poet illustrates masterfully in her verses. The ability to express the nature of the knowledge of the Olmecs whose meanings are transmitted through the symbolic imaginary such as gestures, words, rhythm, dance, and objects, allows the reader to begin to penetrate the epistemology of the Olmec people.

Memory allows the author to re-appropriate personal and collective history in order to reconcile with the ancestral culture. This way of affirming the national culture of the past is not mere chance since it is responsible, as the theorist Frantz Fanon notes (1963: 210), for an important change at the level of the psycho-affective equilibrium of that which is native.  Memory allows Xánath Caraza to reconstruct and provide coherence to the history that has been interrupted, altered or is in the process of being forgotten. The writer invites the reader to delve into this labyrinth of the Olmec world, be carried away by the music of her verses, discovering everything anew and looking beyond the words.

Alain Lawo-Sukam Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Hispanic and Africana Studies

Department of Hispanic Studies

Africana Studies program

Texas A&M University

 

 

Labios de piedra / Lips of Stone

by Xánath Caraza (The Raving Press, 2021)

Translated by Sandra Kingery

ISBN: 978-0-9989965-85