worley presentation 2015 samla

8/20/2019 Worley Presentation 2015 SAMLA

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Worley Presentation given at SAMLA 2016 [email protected] Not Cite Without Permission

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When Words Are Ts’íib But Ts’íib Isn’t Always Words: Reading the Art of Maya Ts’íibas Literature

In addressing the theme of Maya literatures and the arts, this presentation explores

the conceptual consequences of considering the relationship between Maya literatures

and the arts from the perspective of the Maya category, “ts’íib.” Although frequently

translated as “writing,” as a category of aesthetic production “ts’íib” expands upon

Western notions of writing to include diversity media such as stone, wood, ceramics,

textiles, and even the natural world. In other words, “ts’íib” as “literature” is at best a

gloss for a host of Maya verbal arts as it glosses over the profound implications ofcontemporary Maya “literatures” that are quite consciously articulated as arising out of

longstanding non-Western practices of “ts’íib.”

In order to ground its examples of contemporary Maya literary practices within

traditions of “ts’íib,” this presentation will draw on multiple genres of Maya verbal arts

that range from the Pre-Hispanic era to the present in order to demonstrate, among other

things, how “ts’íib” theorizes an other kind of literary practices that not only operates

across different kinds of media, but also presupposes different kinds of relationships

between writer, reader and medium, as well as between the body, the word, and the text.

Slide: Native American Scholarship

This presentation’s orientation towards ts’íib as what we could refer to as a non-

Western category of verbal aesthetics arises, in part, to trend in Native American literary

studies that point towards the ambivalent limitations of applying Western literary

categories centered on the letter and alphabetic writing to non-Western contexts.

Recognizing that, although scholars do indeed tend to focus on traditionally “literary”


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texts despite the fact that many Native American writers work across multiple media,

Chadwick Allen argues that, “when we conceive written literatures within a more

expansive, inclusive context if Indigenous Arts, the alphabetic text becomes simply one

more option within a larger field of self-represntation” (xxii-iii). He goes on to call on

literary critics to “join writers, artists, and arts scholars to engage in Indigenous-centered

conversations across the boundaries of traditional disciplines” (xxiii). It should be noted,

however, that a failure to engage the plurality of indigenous textualities as constituting

things-in-themselves has material consequences as the assertion of the letter as the

primary signifier of literature, culture and civilization, and history has devastatingconsequences. As Birgit Brander Rasmussen notes, literary scholarships orientation

towards alphabetic texts “uphold[s] [European imperial legacies] by defining other forms

of recording knowledge and narrative out of existence” (3). Here in the US this approach

reinforces US nationalist discourses that configure US national territory as a tabula rasa

whose original inhabitants have been an uncomfortable afterthought for over 500 years.

Similarly, in countries like Mexico and Guatemala whose national subject is the mestizo ,

the mixed-race descendent of both Europeans and Indigenous peoples, readable objects

such as carved monuments, stealea, and codices are exalted as impenetrable artifacts

divorced from meaningful cultural context. If I may paraphrase Arturo Arias’s recent

observations on indigenous language texts, these objects are thus reduced to being

absorbed semiotically as symbols of indigenous cultures, and are so stripped of any

linguistic content that could potentially relate to the active, dynamic production and

reproduction of indigenous cultures in the 21 st Century. In other words, in disciplinary

contexts they frequently become art instead of literature.


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Slide: What is ts’íib?

Within the specific context of contemporary Maya literary production, the

arbitrary if not highly significant separation becomes all the more apparent in the light of

the Maya word frequently translated as writing, ts’íib. In his important work on the topic

which is, appropriately, entitled Kotz’ib’: Nuestra literatura maya, the Q’anjob’al Maya

writer and intellectual Gaspar Pedro González states that ts’íib, “etymologically can be

said to refer to anything that is painted or engraved on a surface,” going on to include a

graphic of various textile designs as also including “other forms of ts’íib” (35-6).

Similarly, Kaqchikel Maya scholar Irma Otzoy notes that in all contemporary Mayalanguages save Huastec, “the verb root tz’ib’ (‘to write,’ alphabetically or

hieroglyphically) encompasses other forms of ‘writing’ such as painting or drawing”

(151). As with Gonzalez above, she includes weaving as a form of ts’íib, and but goes on

to brief explication of how the käqpo’t -style huipil of Comalapa is both written (bottom-

top on a back-strap loom) and read (top-bottom while on the body of a woman) (148).

Slide: Blowgunner Vase

So, if we accept the proposition of Maya writers and intellectuals like González

and Otzoy, we are left with a notion of textuality and, potentially, the literary that far

exceed Western disciplinary classifications. For the rest of this presentation I will focus

on two specific examples of how this relationship unfolds, turning our attention first to

the K’iche’ Maya Popol wuj , or Book of Council. Although often referred to as “the

Maya Bible” and allocated to the “Pre-Hispanic” section of Latin American literary

anthologies, the document scholars now possess is a bilingual K’iche’/Spanish translation

of a K’iche’ Maya text that was done by Friar Francisco Ximénez between the years 1701


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and 1703 in the Guatemalan city of Chichicastenango (Tedlock 27). As observed by

Dennis Tedlock in his English-language translation of the work, the document that

Ximénez translated is not, in fact, a Western-style text but rather the transcription of the

reading of glyphic book (29-30). As I argue in a forthcoming article, this mode of

transcription attempts to place Latin letters at the service of a kind of performatic

textuality where texts are not to be read in the Western sense but performed and

reperformed, transcribed and retranscribed over time.

Although there is no extant glyphic version of the Popol wuj , there are a number

of Maya ceramics that depict scenes from the work that can productively shed a bit oflight on the relationships between words and picture in the text, and how these are do not

comprise separate categories of production but are both, in fact, twin aspects of ts’íib.

The image behind me is a so-called “codex-style vase,” specifically Kerr 1226, given the

nickname, “The Blowgunner Vase” for its depiction of the Hero Twins, Hunahpu and

Xbalanque, at the moment that Hunahpu lets fly a dart at the celestial bird Seven Macaw.

Tedlock translates this scene as follows:

And here is the shooting of Seven Macaw by the two boys. We shall explain the

defeat of each one of those who engaged in self-magnification.

This is the great tree of Seven Macaw, a nance, and this is the food of

Seven Macaw. In order to eat the fruit of the nance he goes up the tree every day.

Since Hunahpu and Xbalanque have seen where he feeds, they are now hiding

beneath the tree of Seven Macaw, they are keeping quiet here, the two boys are in

the leaves of the tree.


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And when Seven Macaw arrived, perching over his meal, the nance, it was

then that he was shot by Hunahpu. (78)

I have cited from the work at length in the hopes that, in the context of the image, you

can better capture a sense of the role that unscripted performance on the part of highly

trained Maya priests would have played in the explication of glyphic texts. Indeed, the

Maya hieroglyphic system itself is constructed on, images and text that “are closely tied

to each other in providing the full meaning of the sculptural or painted effort” (Hill

Boone, “Introduction” 20). Describing the writing systems of Central Mexico,

Brotherston finds that Mesoamerican writing so lends itself “to embedded data andmultiple reading” that “[t]he complexity of the statement that is made as a result […] so

far exceeds the limits of verbal language as to render transcription an unending task”

( Book 59-60).

Slide: Textiles

The role of embodiment and performance of text becomes all the more

pronounced when we consider textiles as also constituting “readable” objects, as we are

confronted by a sign system that, more often that not, is semasiographic as opposed to

glottographic in nature. That is, we are describing a way of writing that frequently lacks

phonetic features that one can use to reassemble an utterance, such that extensive

knowledge of the signs in the system is required, a priori, in order to be able to read such

texts. Now, it is important to note that, as in the example from the Popol wuj above,

Maya writing has historically implicated the body and embodied knowledge in ways

frequently ignored or downplayed within Western understandings and, in a sense, textiles

as semasiographic writing carry embodiment to an extreme through both their orientation


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towards how meaning is made and for the fact that they literally impact the bodies of

those that wear them.

To date Otzoy is foremost theorist of Maya textiles as ts’íib and, hence, an other

kind of writing. Citing the work of US-based anthropologists Dennis and Barbara

Tedlock, Otzoy argues that textiles as ts’íib that can be read date back to the Popol wuj ,

and uses the K’iche’ Maya text as a point of departure from which to demonstrate how

contemporary textiles, specifically the käqpo’t huipil from Comalapa, Guatemala, can in

turn be read in much the same way.

Slide: Tedlocks

The Tedlocks focus on the passage from the Popol wuj when the men who found

the three main K’iche’ lineages receive their cloaks and, in Dennis Tedlock’s translation,

“inscribe” and “write” their heraldic figures, a jaguar, an eagle, and swarm of yellow

jackets, respectively, onto them ( Popol 168). As writing, the Tedlocks argue that these

cloaks as readable objects possess iconic, indexical, and symbolic aspects. That is, they

are iconic insofar as each represents an image of an actual animal, indexical insofar as

“when considered in relationship to the owners of the cloaks, the figures were indexical

of lineage membership,” and symbolic “in the sense that their assignment to the three

lineages was a convention, established by the founders of the lineages, and in the sense

that their functions as signs transcended the temporal bounds of iconicity and

indexicality” (124). Beyond this explication of the founding of the K’iche’ lineages, they

go on to interpret the opening of the Popol wuj itself as a multilayered, multimedia

metaphor (126). On the one hand, they argue that the lines, “This is the beginning of the

Ancient Word, here in this place called Quiché. Here we shall inscribe it, we shall


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implant the Ancient Word […]” could just as easily be translated from K’iche’ as “Here

we shall design, we shall brocade the Ancient Word,” such that the passage constructs, a

“three-layered intertextuality that operates within and between three different arts, uniting

domains and technology in the process: the quotation of words from an ancient text, the

interplanting of additional crops in a cornfield, and the brocading of designs in a textile”

(Tedlock and Tedlock, 126). As they go on to observe, such an orientation renders the

production of traditional designs in contemporary weavings a kind of “quotation of an

ancient text” (ibid).

Slide: Otzoy

Such a position is underscored by the work of scholars such as Christine Eber and

June Nash, who feel that in Highland Chiapanecan Maya communities daily tasks such as

weaving cite the past in the present, thus transmitting ancestral knowledge (Nash 1993;

Eber nd). Moreover, their emphasis on weaving as performance moves us productively

away from the Tedlocks’s focus on intertextuality and towards Otzoy her articulation of

weaving as ts’íib. For example, in her book Identidad y vestuario maya (1996) Otzoy

provides readers with the following image on page 5. As written in an English-language

essay published the same year as the book, Otzoy proposed that one reads and Maya

weavers write pöt or the huipil in a systematized fashion that, when weaver and weaving

are united through the backstrap loom, hinges on the lap of the Maya weaver. As ts’íib

and thus readable if not also literary objects, the weaving done by Maya women situates

this production as a radically feminine enterprise that merits more attention by scholars in

all disciplines.

Example:


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Now, if I may hone in one a specific example from the Highlands of Chiapas,

Mexico, to provide a window on how individual designs are signs and where my research

in this area is headed. Before doing so, I would like to state that, as observed by a number

of scholars and Maya intellectuals themselves, research that focuses on the intrinsic

aesthetic value of Maya textiles without addressing the fact that the women who make

these are frequently among the poorest members of their communities ignores the fact

that their economic, cultural, and political marginalization is an aspect of coloniality

itself, and that reducing textiles to aesthetic objects divorced from their conditions of

production and their meaning as ts’íib reproduces this very marginality.From this marginality, let’s quickly consider the Tzotzil Maya batz’i luch or “true

design” an ancient design woven in the Highlands of Chiapas. Walter Morris claims that

this design owes its name to that fact that it constitutes the iconographic base for figures

of the world (earth and sky) and signals the four cardinal points (39). He also associates

the concept of “batzi’” with basic (as opposed to just true; ibid), to which Christine

Eber’s description of her friend Antonia’s learning process serves as a useful concept.

Antonia learns “the importance of becoming a batz’i antz (true woman) by cooking,

weaving, and working in her family’s fields” (Eber 79) and in a separate work tells Eber

that she successfully weaves the batz’i luch on a blouse when she is twelve years old.

Although there remains a good bit of research to be done here, I would tentatively assert

that the true design constitutes as way of writing on one’s own body in the context of a

weaver’s coming of age, with the act of successfully weaving the batz’i luch and

successfully becoming a batz’i antz existing in a reciprocal relationship.

Conclusion


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Moreover, dynamically producing and reproducing this image of the cosmos

situates Maya weavers at the center of Maya cultural production and reproduction and, as

we can observe in the related design, Xocom Balamil , or sides of the earth, at the center

of perpetuating Maya perspectives on the world through ts’íib. Not only does the Xocom

Balamil re-orient our sense of direction (east is top, etc.) but it also represents the

equinoxes and solstices. In other words, this is a representation of physical existence that

not only challenges Western maps’ privileging the Global North, but the map also

accounts for time itself. And if there were any doubt, notice that the sun at its zenith in

the Xocom Balamil is also the butterfly design, with the butterfly being, for WalterMorris, a metaphor for the sun (Morris 42).

Beyond these observations, it should also be said that many Maya writers,

predominantly female poets such as Tseltal Maya Adriana López, Tzotil Ruperta

Bautista, and Kaqchikel Calixta Gabriel Xiquin, construct weaving as writing in their

poetry. Whether we are discussing painted codices or weaving, however, from the

perspective of ts’íib this is not merely about reclaiming non-Western practices as writing.

Rather, through their works written in Latin script contemporary Maya poets, novelists,

and intellectuals situate their production within the broader trajectory of Maya ts’íib,

decentering Western literary practices and pointing towards the vitality of other verbal

aesthetics, verbal practices, and multimedia literary arts.

worley presentation 2015 samla

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