1 “Up There in the Mountain”: The Poetry of Humberto Ak’abal and Life in a Highland Guatemalan Town Hannah Crawford SOAN 295 Prof. Jay Levi March 7, 20082 Abstract Humberto Ak’abal is the first Maya poet in Guatemala to achieve nation-wide and even international recognition. Because he writes of his experiences growing up as a Maya in the Maya K’iche’ town of Momostenango, his poems are often seen as representative of the lives and beliefs of the entire Maya people of Guatemala. This ethnography is a study of the poetry of Ak’abal and the life in the small Highland Guatemalan town of Zunil. It attempts to compare the cultural themes found in the poetry and in Zunil to determine to what extent they are similar and different. This comparison is also used to write an ethnographically informed literary criticism of the poetry. The general conclusion is that although many of the ideas about nature, cosmovision, and language present in the poetry of Humberto Ak’abal are also present in the culture of the people of Zunil, these ideas are at times lost when the time comes to put them into practice.3 Introduction “Si no fuera por la poesía/ el mundo ya se habría quedado mudo.” This one-line poem, called “El mundo mudo,” is by the poet Humberto Ak’abal, a Maya K’iche man born in Momostenango, Guatemala. This poem makes a statement about the nature of poetry, and how it has been used to express feelings and ideas that otherwise would not have been able to be expressed. However, the reference to a world that has been kept mute also applies to the K’iche people and the Mayan culture in general, which has long been without a voice in Guatemala and in Western civilization. Because Ak’abal writes about life in his town of Momostenango, and because he has recieved an amount of fame and influence relatively greater than most Maya in Guatemala, his poetry can be seen as giving a voice to those who were previously mute. Indeed, part of the reason Ak’abal is so famous is for his steadfast promotion of the rights of the indigenous people of Guatemala. In 2004 he was awarded the Guatamalan National Prize in Literature, but he declined to recieve it because it is named after Miguel Ángel Asturias. He cited as the reason the fact that Ángel Asturias, a Guatemalan who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967, also was the author of an essay entitled The Social Problem of the Indian. Ak’abal is outspoken against against racism and a government that he sees as not doing enough to support and promote indigenous rights, but he is not bent on cultural seclusion. In addition to visiting other countries for conferences, he translates his own poetry from K’iche into Spanish to make it more accessible for everyone. Writing about the life and culture in a Maya town in Guatemala, Ak’abal obviously intends his poetry to resonate with the the people who live that life. Though Ak’abal states that “[m]e siento profundamente conmovido cuando mi propia gente se acerca para decirme que se siente representada en mi modesto trabajo,” he also says that he writes his4 poems in first-person perspective “porque no soy nadie para hablar en nombre de los demás” (Ak’abal 1999:15) In other words, though he hopes his poems speak to his people, he does not presume to speak for them. Nevertheless, the fact is that as he is one of the few indigenous poets to be internationally recognized, Ak’abal’s poetry is one of the few resources an outsider has to gain a glimpse into the Mayan life. Therefore, it is often seen as representing that life. In reading Ak’abal’s poetry, one quickly learns what themes predominate the poems, including the simplicity of daily life, nature, and the K’iche language, among others, and the reader infers that these themes also dominate Mayan life in general. These literary themes are interesting when looked at in relation to the “cultural themes” explained in James P. Spradley’s book Participant Observation. He explains that understanding all the cultural themes in a culture can be used to obtain a holistic view of that culture. He also states that “[i]n looking for universal culture themes, a rich source lies in fiction. The themes in a novel often reflect universal cultural themes and by examining them carefully one can find clues to themes in the cultural scene being studied” (Spradley 1980:153). The purpose of this ethnography, then, is to determine if the themes found in the poetry of Humberto Ak’abal are cultural themes for the Maya living in Zunil, a small Highland Guatemala town. What was learned from the themes found in the poetry of Ak’abal was compared to what could be discovered about cultural themes through research in Zunil, and this comparison was used to write an ethnographically informed literary criticism of the poetry. Methodology The three weeks (Feb 10- March 3) of field work that I conducted in Zunil, Guatemala, were spent interviewing, of course, but a good deal of the time was simply5 spent observing life there and listening to what people wanted to teach me about their culture. For example, much of what I learned about daily life and worldview in Zunil was from what occurred in the lives of my host family and their closest neighbors while I was living with them. Going into the town, I expected to be researching many different cultural themes, including nature, family, love, poverty, and spirituality. I quickly learned, however, that the themes most present in the works of Ak’abal, and most talked about in the literary criticisms that I was able to get ahold of, were nature and the K’iche’ language. These two themes presented more than enough opportunities for research in the field. The formal interviews were conducted with the purpose of first establishing what kind of work the person did, whether Ajq’ij (a Mayan priest), healer, comandrona (midwife), teacher, or student, and what was involved in the work. Then questions were asked about the significance of nature and the K’iche’ language in the work of the interviewee, then about what he or she perceived about views of nature and the language in the community in general. Due to the fact that my host family, and that of the two other students living in Zunil, were all Catholic, I got a very Catholic view of the town. The town being observably very Catholic, however, (simply observe