Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women

by Ambar Past (Editor)

Overview

Mayan women sing sacred magical woman poems.

This book of poems and stark, vivid illustrations is rooted in the female soul of indigenous Mexico. The Tzotzil women of the Chiapas Highlands are the poets and the artists. Ambar Past, who collected the poems and drawings, includes a moving essay about their poetics, beliefs, and history.

In the 1970s, living among the Maya, Past watched the people endure as an epidemic swept through a village. No help came. Many children died. One mother offered her dead child a last sip of Coca-Cola and uttered a prayer:

Take this sweet dew from the earth, take this honey. It will help you on your way. It will give you strength on your path.

Incantations like this—poems about birth, love, hate, sex, despair, and death—coupled with primitive illustrations, provide a compelling insight into the psychology of these Mayan women poets. The Cinco Puntos edition of Incantations is a facsimile of the original handmade edition produced by the Taller Leñateros, which was covered in The New York Times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933693095
Publisher:	Lee & Low Books
Publication date:	06/01/2009
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Poet Ambar Past immigrated to Mexico when she was 23. Thirty years ago she made her home in rural Chiapas and learned to speak Tzotzil Mayan. Since moving to Chiapas Ambar has worked to collect, record and translate Tzotzil ritual poetry. She published several anthologies of this poetry with Taller Leñateros, a book cooperative in Chiapas.

Editorial Reviews

"A weirdly beautiful volume." — The New York Times

"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." — Robert M. Laughlin, curator of Mesoamerican and Caribbean ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution

"Incantations as a document reveals a culture that holds at its core a strange faith: Though downtrodden in daily society, not even considered worthy of education, women are the healers, and they write the necessary poems. The narrative entwined around the poems in this book tells a remarkable tale. Both women and men historically in Chiapas trust in the indomitable power contained by women's bodies, to the extent that many times in history, a chanting army of warriors approached their enemies in battle fronted not by horns or flags or banners but by naked and painted women, some held aloft on pallets and others bearing weapons and marching alongside the men, everyone believing that such beauty and vulnerability could stop the conquistadors.

The importance of these incantations is that they magically preserve both the violence and the moment just before it. These poems arrive like a book you read in a dream, and this is the central belief about naming and writing in Tzotzil, a poetry both preserved and disseminated orally. Despite the destruction of the Mayan codices five centuries ago, and all the violence that has occurred since then, Incantations performs for us how a culture lives." — Eileen Myles, author

"There has to my mind never been a project quite like this: a collective body of poetry—and women's poetry at that—coming directly out of an indigenous culture and gathered as a deliberate work of poetry and art by the women themselves. The poems, created and spoken in Mayan Tzotzil by individual poets, then translated by Ambar Past into faithful and readable Spanish and English versions, show how deeply rooted language traditions can transform into vehicles of personal as well as collective expression. Incantations represents a major contribution to poetry in general and to ethnopoetics in particular." — Jerome Rothenberg, poet, author of Technicians of the SacredandShaking the Pumpkin

"[S]imple and evocative...It's a witchy book. Be careful." — Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher