"Flor Y Canto" in Chiapas, Zapatista Literary Life
Article written by JOHN ROSS
OVENTIC CHIAPAS. "Flor y Canto" (literarily 'flower and song'), the literary and musical expression of the indigenous peoples of Meso-America, is close to the heart of the Zapatista rebellion. No rebel celebration is complete without harps and accordions, songs and anthems, dramatic recitations, parodies, and poetry, and the 11th anniversary of the uprising marked this past
New Year's eve at the "caracol" of Oventic, the Zapatistas' most public cultural-political center in the highlands above San Cristobal de las Casas, was no exception. Guided by its silver-tongued mouthpiece Subcomandante Insurgent Marcos,
the Zapatista rebellion can be interpreted as an 11 year-long literary
workshop informed by Mayan Indian tradition and the culture of
revolutionary struggle. The EZLN General Command -- the Clandestine
Indigenous Revolutionary Committee (CCRI) -- has filled five volumes of
communiqués in the on-going ERA (a major Mexican publishing house)
series assembling the documents of the rebellion, most of them penned by
Subcomandante Marcos, reputedly a university philosophy professor who
wrote his doctoral thesis on the demented French 'filosophe' Louis
Althusser. Over the years, the communiqués have been translated into
English (two competing "complete" editions) as well as French, Italian,
German, Portuguese, Turkish, and a dozen other languages.
2004 proved a banner year for Zapatista literary fortunes as the
Subcomandante-Literateur added to his oevre with more than 30 new
epistles, essays, denunciations, greetings of solidarity, and political
fantasies. The output was the most voluminous since the early days of
the rebellion when Marcos served up fresh screed daily lampooning Mexico's
corrupt and tyrannical political class.
Although he produced no published poetry in 2004, the Subcomandante's
prose is infused with poetic metaphor. "A world without giraffes?" the
Sup asked in his "(Self) Defense of The Giraffes" published in October. The
answer: "a world without giraffes would be like a 'taco de pastor'
without the pork or the tortilla or the onion or the chile or the cilentro --
just the paper and a little nostalgia." The communiqué is a reasoned rant
against a globalization that would homogenize native peoples into one
faceless market: "the giraffes are like the Indians of the animal
world -- like us, they are 'muy otra' ('very other')âothere are lady giraffes
who do not conform to the norms of feminine beauty and giraffe youth that
is partial to piercings." Both the Indians and the Giraffes "need a law to
protect us as species in danger of extinctionâowhen we defend the
giraffes, we are defending ourserlves."
The Subcomandante clearly did not suffer from the writers' block that
has sometimes kept him silent for as long as 18 months at a time, cranking
out fresh communiqués on his laptop from a writing hutch in the mountain
camps above the Zapatista village with the haunting name of La Realidad ('The
Reality") on an average of one every 12 days in 2004 -- as has been the
practice for the past 11 years, virtually all of Marcos's writings
appeared first in the national left daily La Jornada.
The Sup's literary production included a three part series "The
Velocity of Dreams" which asked how fast dreams can fly, and an eight part
series "Videos To Read", a detailed study of first year experiences of the
"Juntas de Buen Gobierno" ('Good Government Committees') which now
administer Zapatista autonomous territory. The series was produced by
"The Zapatista Intergalactic Television Service -- television you can read."
In "The Torn Pocket", the Subcomandante analyzes the brutal world of
global capitalism through the prism of kids' candy transactions in La
Realidad. In "The Boot", Marcos muses Susan Sontag-style on a
photograph of a single abandoned boot in Iraq, comparing it to a boot lost on a
jungle road by a young Zapatista woman named Tonita -- the young women
of the zone eschew wearing their boots while walking the roads,
preferring to conserve them for Sunday soccer games. Readers first came to know
Tonita ten years ago when she was four and refused to kiss Marcos goodbye as
the Mexican army was closing in because he was "too scratchy" ("se pica.")
Marcos's writings in 2004 also feature a vitriolic debate with Mexico
City district attorney Bernardo Batiz over the "suicides" of two activists,
an official inventory of the Zapatista dead in the 1994 rebellion,
messages of solidarity for a jailed Chilean political prisoner and persecuted
globalphobes. Enlivening the Sup's repertoire was the reappearance of
two of his most popular characters -- Old Antonio, an ancient farmer who
speaks like the Mayan sacred book, the Popul Vuh, and Durito, a jungle
beetle with a galloping Quijote complex. Collections of Old Antonio and
Durito stories have been published in Mexico, the U.S., and Europe in
recent years.
Nor did the Quixotic Zapatista spokesperson miss an opportunity to
immerse himself in major literary brouhaha at the Guadalajara Book Fair,
Mexico's prime literary klatch. When a letter from Sub Marcos was read during a
homage to the late Catalan detective fiction writer Manuel Vazquez
Montalban, Sealtad Alatriste, Vazquez Montalban's Mexican publisher,
ommited several paragraphs chiding the city of Guadalajara for
mistreating and imprisoning anti-globalization activists last May (nine are still
in jail.) The blatant censorship was protested by Nobel laureate Jose
Saramago, a member of the Guadalajara panel -- Saramago himself has
visited the Zapatista zone on three occasions, often spending the
afternoon in serious conversation with Comandante David,
singer-songwriter commander of highland forces up at Oventic.
Other literary lions who have journeyed to Zapatista territory include
the late Sontag, Regis Debrey, the Uruguayan maestro Eduardo Galeano, and
the aforementioned Vazquez Montalban who published an acclaimed book-length
interview with Marcos "The Lord of The Mirrors". The Subcomandante
exchanges correspondence with the Anglo-French guru of the simple life,
John Berger, and periodically communicates with both Carlos Fuentes and
the prominent Mexican social commentator Carlos Monsivais, although not
always amicably.
The Sup's literary reputation on the continent is further burnished by
occasional contributions to Le Monde Diplomatique. In Mexico, the
Zapatista National Liberation Front (FZLN), a non-Indian support group,
publishes a monthly review "Rebeldia" (the 25th issue hit the stands in
December) in which Marcos's musings are often spotlighted.
Marcos's literary production in 2004 was further spurred by dozens of
children's stories like "Pamfila the Witch" that he has recorded for
Radio Insurgente, the short-wave and internet service that now link up
Zapatista communities in the jungle and the highlands with each other and
broadcasts Zapatista flor y canto to the rest of the world.
The broadcasts are not the Sup's first stab at the childrens' book
market. "The Story of Colors", Marcos's first effort in the field (but suitable
for all ages) borrows a page from the Popul Vuh to tell how the macaw
got its many colors. A bi-lingual edition published by the El Paso-based
Cinco Puntos Press has sold nearly 30,000 copies at last count despite a
last-minute nixing of funds by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts
whose director justified the cut-off by insisting a tale told by a
notorious left-wing guerillero was "not an appropriate use of U.S.
taxpayers' moneys."
But the piece d'resistance of Marcos's literary year is a serendipitous
outgrowth of the brouhaha at the Guadaljara Book Fair. As a tribute to
Vazquez Montalban, who had once proposed that the Sup join him and his
astute Catalan gumshoe Pepe Calvaho in a collaborative effort, Marcos
enlisted the spectral talents of Mexico's most sophisticated detective
fiction writer, the left historian Paco Taibo II, to produce a "policiaca"
(detective novel) that would honor the roly-poly Catalunian's memory.
"Incomodious Dead Men" ("Muertos Incomodos"), a novel written "with
four hands and 20 fingers" now appears Sundays in La Jornada and is a sort
of literary pingpong match in which the Subcomandante scribes one chapter
and Taibo II the next. True to the genre, Taibo II has trotted out his
battered, kind-hearted, Irish-Basque-Mexican private eye Hector
Belascoaran Shayne whom the author has killed off and revived by
popular demand on several occasions.
Marcos's shamus, on the other hand, is a Tojolabal Mayan Zapatista with
the nomme d'guerre of "Elias Contreras" -- although Contreras was
killed at the battle for Las Margueritas in the Lacandon jungle in January of
1994, he is apparently still on the job.
By the sixth chapter, Contreras, who insists he is not a detective at
all but rather a designated representative of the Zapatista Commission of
Investigation, had traveled up to the urban jungle from the Lacandon
one where he is expected to soon encounter Shayne under the great dome of
the capital's Monument to the Revolution. What happens after that is
anyone's guess (one hint: Shayne has been receiving arcane messages left on his
answering machine by a long-disappeared guerrilla leader.)
"Incomodious Dead Men" is Marcos's most ambitious foray into fiction
and fabula yet. The writing of both the Sup and Taibo II is lively,
mordant, appropriately hard-boiled, and full of false clues as merits a solid
policiaca. In one instance, a young Catalan solidarity worker in a
peace camp near La Realidad describes daily life in the village for two and
half pages when he suddenly interrupts himself: "I'm sorry. I have to go.
They just came to inform me that I'm not supposed to be in this novel. Its
all a mistake."
The Mexican publishing house Planeta will issue "Muertos Incomodos"
here and in Spain when it is completed and Seven Stories in New York is
bidding for the U.S. rights. All proceeds from sales will be channeled back
into indigenous communities.
Although he has yet to be reviewed on the pages of the New York Times
(the NEA's censorship story made the front page -- but below the fold),
2005 is shaping up to be Subcomandante Insurgent Marcos's break-out year as the
world of letters' most prolific guerrillero-literateur.
John Ross is at home on the Aztec island of Tenochtitlan nursing a bum
back. Pray for him -- and buy his latest instant cult classic
"Murdered By Capitalism--A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left".
OVENTIC CHIAPAS. "Flor y Canto" (literarily 'flower and song'), the literary and musical expression of the indigenous peoples of Meso-America, is close to the heart of the Zapatista rebellion. No rebel celebration is complete without harps and accordions, songs and anthems, dramatic recitations, parodies, and poetry, and the 11th anniversary of the uprising marked this past
New Year's eve at the "caracol" of Oventic, the Zapatistas' most public cultural-political center in the highlands above San Cristobal de las Casas, was no exception. Guided by its silver-tongued mouthpiece Subcomandante Insurgent Marcos,
the Zapatista rebellion can be interpreted as an 11 year-long literary
workshop informed by Mayan Indian tradition and the culture of
revolutionary struggle. The EZLN General Command -- the Clandestine
Indigenous Revolutionary Committee (CCRI) -- has filled five volumes of
communiqués in the on-going ERA (a major Mexican publishing house)
series assembling the documents of the rebellion, most of them penned by
Subcomandante Marcos, reputedly a university philosophy professor who
wrote his doctoral thesis on the demented French 'filosophe' Louis
Althusser. Over the years, the communiqués have been translated into
English (two competing "complete" editions) as well as French, Italian,
German, Portuguese, Turkish, and a dozen other languages.
2004 proved a banner year for Zapatista literary fortunes as the
Subcomandante-Literateur added to his oevre with more than 30 new
epistles, essays, denunciations, greetings of solidarity, and political
fantasies. The output was the most voluminous since the early days of
the rebellion when Marcos served up fresh screed daily lampooning Mexico's
corrupt and tyrannical political class.
Although he produced no published poetry in 2004, the Subcomandante's
prose is infused with poetic metaphor. "A world without giraffes?" the
Sup asked in his "(Self) Defense of The Giraffes" published in October. The
answer: "a world without giraffes would be like a 'taco de pastor'
without the pork or the tortilla or the onion or the chile or the cilentro --
just the paper and a little nostalgia." The communiqué is a reasoned rant
against a globalization that would homogenize native peoples into one
faceless market: "the giraffes are like the Indians of the animal
world -- like us, they are 'muy otra' ('very other')âothere are lady giraffes
who do not conform to the norms of feminine beauty and giraffe youth that
is partial to piercings." Both the Indians and the Giraffes "need a law to
protect us as species in danger of extinctionâowhen we defend the
giraffes, we are defending ourserlves."
The Subcomandante clearly did not suffer from the writers' block that
has sometimes kept him silent for as long as 18 months at a time, cranking
out fresh communiqués on his laptop from a writing hutch in the mountain
camps above the Zapatista village with the haunting name of La Realidad ('The
Reality") on an average of one every 12 days in 2004 -- as has been the
practice for the past 11 years, virtually all of Marcos's writings
appeared first in the national left daily La Jornada.
The Sup's literary production included a three part series "The
Velocity of Dreams" which asked how fast dreams can fly, and an eight part
series "Videos To Read", a detailed study of first year experiences of the
"Juntas de Buen Gobierno" ('Good Government Committees') which now
administer Zapatista autonomous territory. The series was produced by
"The Zapatista Intergalactic Television Service -- television you can read."
In "The Torn Pocket", the Subcomandante analyzes the brutal world of
global capitalism through the prism of kids' candy transactions in La
Realidad. In "The Boot", Marcos muses Susan Sontag-style on a
photograph of a single abandoned boot in Iraq, comparing it to a boot lost on a
jungle road by a young Zapatista woman named Tonita -- the young women
of the zone eschew wearing their boots while walking the roads,
preferring to conserve them for Sunday soccer games. Readers first came to know
Tonita ten years ago when she was four and refused to kiss Marcos goodbye as
the Mexican army was closing in because he was "too scratchy" ("se pica.")
Marcos's writings in 2004 also feature a vitriolic debate with Mexico
City district attorney Bernardo Batiz over the "suicides" of two activists,
an official inventory of the Zapatista dead in the 1994 rebellion,
messages of solidarity for a jailed Chilean political prisoner and persecuted
globalphobes. Enlivening the Sup's repertoire was the reappearance of
two of his most popular characters -- Old Antonio, an ancient farmer who
speaks like the Mayan sacred book, the Popul Vuh, and Durito, a jungle
beetle with a galloping Quijote complex. Collections of Old Antonio and
Durito stories have been published in Mexico, the U.S., and Europe in
recent years.
Nor did the Quixotic Zapatista spokesperson miss an opportunity to
immerse himself in major literary brouhaha at the Guadalajara Book Fair,
Mexico's prime literary klatch. When a letter from Sub Marcos was read during a
homage to the late Catalan detective fiction writer Manuel Vazquez
Montalban, Sealtad Alatriste, Vazquez Montalban's Mexican publisher,
ommited several paragraphs chiding the city of Guadalajara for
mistreating and imprisoning anti-globalization activists last May (nine are still
in jail.) The blatant censorship was protested by Nobel laureate Jose
Saramago, a member of the Guadalajara panel -- Saramago himself has
visited the Zapatista zone on three occasions, often spending the
afternoon in serious conversation with Comandante David,
singer-songwriter commander of highland forces up at Oventic.
Other literary lions who have journeyed to Zapatista territory include
the late Sontag, Regis Debrey, the Uruguayan maestro Eduardo Galeano, and
the aforementioned Vazquez Montalban who published an acclaimed book-length
interview with Marcos "The Lord of The Mirrors". The Subcomandante
exchanges correspondence with the Anglo-French guru of the simple life,
John Berger, and periodically communicates with both Carlos Fuentes and
the prominent Mexican social commentator Carlos Monsivais, although not
always amicably.
The Sup's literary reputation on the continent is further burnished by
occasional contributions to Le Monde Diplomatique. In Mexico, the
Zapatista National Liberation Front (FZLN), a non-Indian support group,
publishes a monthly review "Rebeldia" (the 25th issue hit the stands in
December) in which Marcos's musings are often spotlighted.
Marcos's literary production in 2004 was further spurred by dozens of
children's stories like "Pamfila the Witch" that he has recorded for
Radio Insurgente, the short-wave and internet service that now link up
Zapatista communities in the jungle and the highlands with each other and
broadcasts Zapatista flor y canto to the rest of the world.
The broadcasts are not the Sup's first stab at the childrens' book
market. "The Story of Colors", Marcos's first effort in the field (but suitable
for all ages) borrows a page from the Popul Vuh to tell how the macaw
got its many colors. A bi-lingual edition published by the El Paso-based
Cinco Puntos Press has sold nearly 30,000 copies at last count despite a
last-minute nixing of funds by the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts
whose director justified the cut-off by insisting a tale told by a
notorious left-wing guerillero was "not an appropriate use of U.S.
taxpayers' moneys."
But the piece d'resistance of Marcos's literary year is a serendipitous
outgrowth of the brouhaha at the Guadaljara Book Fair. As a tribute to
Vazquez Montalban, who had once proposed that the Sup join him and his
astute Catalan gumshoe Pepe Calvaho in a collaborative effort, Marcos
enlisted the spectral talents of Mexico's most sophisticated detective
fiction writer, the left historian Paco Taibo II, to produce a "policiaca"
(detective novel) that would honor the roly-poly Catalunian's memory.
"Incomodious Dead Men" ("Muertos Incomodos"), a novel written "with
four hands and 20 fingers" now appears Sundays in La Jornada and is a sort
of literary pingpong match in which the Subcomandante scribes one chapter
and Taibo II the next. True to the genre, Taibo II has trotted out his
battered, kind-hearted, Irish-Basque-Mexican private eye Hector
Belascoaran Shayne whom the author has killed off and revived by
popular demand on several occasions.
Marcos's shamus, on the other hand, is a Tojolabal Mayan Zapatista with
the nomme d'guerre of "Elias Contreras" -- although Contreras was
killed at the battle for Las Margueritas in the Lacandon jungle in January of
1994, he is apparently still on the job.
By the sixth chapter, Contreras, who insists he is not a detective at
all but rather a designated representative of the Zapatista Commission of
Investigation, had traveled up to the urban jungle from the Lacandon
one where he is expected to soon encounter Shayne under the great dome of
the capital's Monument to the Revolution. What happens after that is
anyone's guess (one hint: Shayne has been receiving arcane messages left on his
answering machine by a long-disappeared guerrilla leader.)
"Incomodious Dead Men" is Marcos's most ambitious foray into fiction
and fabula yet. The writing of both the Sup and Taibo II is lively,
mordant, appropriately hard-boiled, and full of false clues as merits a solid
policiaca. In one instance, a young Catalan solidarity worker in a
peace camp near La Realidad describes daily life in the village for two and
half pages when he suddenly interrupts himself: "I'm sorry. I have to go.
They just came to inform me that I'm not supposed to be in this novel. Its
all a mistake."
The Mexican publishing house Planeta will issue "Muertos Incomodos"
here and in Spain when it is completed and Seven Stories in New York is
bidding for the U.S. rights. All proceeds from sales will be channeled back
into indigenous communities.
Although he has yet to be reviewed on the pages of the New York Times
(the NEA's censorship story made the front page -- but below the fold),
2005 is shaping up to be Subcomandante Insurgent Marcos's break-out year as the
world of letters' most prolific guerrillero-literateur.
John Ross is at home on the Aztec island of Tenochtitlan nursing a bum
back. Pray for him -- and buy his latest instant cult classic
"Murdered By Capitalism--A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left".
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