Li kaxlan aatinob’aal yal k’anjelob’aal,
li qaatinob’aal, qach’ool.
A foreign language is just a tool,
our language is our spirit, our heart.
my heart
my remembering
my forgetting
my memory
my life…
this is Q’eqchi’
not indian or
indigenous
At k’o chi nuchi’ chi nuwach.
I have you here.
(You are in my mouth, in my face).
Nalemok aach’ool sa’ choxa.
Your heart shines in the sky.
Hector Rolando Xol Choc (Aj Chab’in) is a Q’eqchi’ Maya researcher, linguist, and writer from Guatemala. He was educated in Maya Linguistics and Education for Maya Peoples. He has worked as a researcher of and advocate for Guatemalan Maya languages since 1997, and was a member of his community’s Maya K’iche’ leadership in 2017. As a university professor, he teaches courses on Maya Thought, Sociolinguistics, the Thought of Guatemala’s Peoples, and Education. He has also been a linguist and epigrapher with the Proyecto Uaxactun in Flores, Petén, Guatemala. He is the author of numerous articles and books on Maya knowledge, and he recently started writing b’ich Q’eqchi’ (Q’eqchi’ Maya poetry).
Paul M. Worley is Associate Professor of Global Literature at Western Carolina University. He is the author of Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures (2013; oral performances recorded as part of this book project are available at tsikbalichmaya.org), and with Rita M. Palacios is co-author of the forthcoming Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (2019). He is a Fulbright Scholar, and 2018 winner of the Sturgis Leavitt Award from the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies. In addition to his academic work, he has translated selected works by Indigenous authors such as Hubert Malina, Adriana López, and Ruperta Bautista, serves as editor-at-large for México for the journal of world literature in English translation, Asymptote, and as poetry editor for the North Dakota Quarterly.
In that small town of Sapilica there lived a thieving woman, and she died in a terrible way, bewitched, because of her sin of thieving. That woman was called Isabela,…
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