Guest post by Nathalie Bléser, part two in a series of 5
From the Realm of the Dead, Malina’s Letter:
“Dear Plume writers, dear Plume readers, do you know about my Plume dancers? There is a dance in Mexico called la Danza de la Pluma It moves me to tears, and it tears my heart out every time I see the two little girls who cross each other between male adult dancers. One little girl represents Doña Marina, the other represents la Malinche. Both of them are me; one bears my Spanish name and the other my Indigenous name. I am still ONE, regardless of the antagonist roles different people gave me in their stories: mother of mestizaje –translated into the less nice-sounding ‘interbreeding’- / whore and traitor of her “country”.
Stories are powerful. They will build you up or bring you down, especially if they talk about you. If those stories are repeated for a long time, you will end up believing them, regardless of the truth. To end the vicious circle and the cycle of self-loath, I had to rediscover the true teocalli, the “house of god” or sacred temple which is me. Soon after the Mexican Revolution and up until recently, many people from the group of nations now called the Republic of Mexico chose to hate me. I had become their perfect scapegoat, the translator-traitor who turned the tables on “her” tribe and tore the patterns of Time, the wretched whore who wiped her own out of the map of the Americas, the cynical collaborator capable of ditching her caring culture to conquer a cold conquistador’s heart and raise ranks of rabid malinchistas…
I could go on and on, crafting more awesome alliterations to list some of my lovely labels, but I think you got the picture. Thankfully, since the second half of the past century, many more literary voices have come to bring balance to the stories of me, to help their readers ponder through the feminine “plumas de las hijas de la Malinche” (the plumes of the daughters of Malinche). Women chose to call themselves my daughters as an answer to what Octavio Paz (whose last name means ‘peace’) once wrote in his Labyrinth of Solitude. Funny that Soledad and Solitude both spell the Spanish word for ‘Sun’, a sound so close to ‘son’, blessed filial love… Yes, I agree with Octavio, our complex and somehow split identity rambles like a mouse lost in a labyrinth. However, I profoundly dislike his description of Mexicans as “Hijos de la Chingada, hijos de la nada” (sons of nothingness and sons of the woman who was *fucked*, which, to me, sounds like ‘son of a *bitch*’) Yes. I do write those full, raw, crude words with their respective “u” and “i”, because it’s precisely what it’s all about; it’s between you and I, self and otherness, White and Indigenous, past and future, man and woman. In this English language I borrow to talk to you, the three-letter word ‘man’ is carried by ‘woman’, as it should be… How and when did they start to represent opposites? All the basic “oppositions” I have mentioned are the principles of Ometeotl, the necessary, divine duality without which oneness could not be attained. Many, many, many times was I called la chingada, the fucked one, the whore, la traidora, the bitch, la zorra, the mistress, la otra, you name it. I am done with it. Oh I no longer feel anger. And I sure don’t feel shame either. Never again will I feel the sting of that senseless shame spat at my soul by those who project their self-hatred on me. I feel pity for those who still need to blame and insult me, I hope they can heal and learn through their own demons and contradictions, and as for me I long to finally create the world I once envisioned when the strangers came, a world that might look like that Island Huxley wrote about before stepping into Mystery. My dreamed world was made of cultural encounters and the rejection of blood sacrifices as a return to Quetzalcóatl’s teachings. I wanted to revive ancient Tollan, the one you call Tula. I ended up being used by the conquistador to bring, the irony, genocide and a new type of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual violence that keeps on nailing us to the cross of a jaded man who is done with self-sacrifice and is asking you to finally take your spiritual responsibilities seriously. I had to relearn how to enter the four rooms of my personal teocalli, to balance the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of me. And to tell you part of this story, I chose this woman busy typing words on a word machine as we speak. She is my lengua, although a writer’s lengua, so I will call her mi pluma lengua. When I was a little girl, I saw my father, Teoteotingo, the cacique of Copainalá, killed in a so-called sacrifice because he refused to pay more abusive taxes to the rulers of Tenochtitlán. Even before my father’s death I hated those crimes clad in the disguise of worship. I have a feeling that his murderers also thought that they punished him for “blasphemy” because of his particular theories about us. I loved his stories. He would always tell me about the joy he had felt when I was born, because of my relatively fair skin. He made fun of me calling me frog belly. He thought that my skin color was a sign that Quetzalcóatl, whose return we were all awaiting, had laid his hands on my soul before sending me to my earth family… I asked my dad what we look like as souls, and what the Plumed Serpent looks like, and if Quetzalcóatl was one or two or more, but he never answered. Maybe he didn’t know either. What he told me was to always follow my heart and intuition. The day my family fled from Copainalá to Oluta, my heart leaped because we would be closer to Coatzacoalcos, there from where the great Toltec ruler-priest Ce-Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcóatl once left, on his snake raft, promising to return. My father had told me about his own dream of a world where no human deaths were demanded by the gods, where the blood of women’s moons and that of cihuateteo, women who died in the life-giving battle of childbirth, was enough to nurture the thirsty Earth and receive bounty in return. Such was my spiritual creed. Seven centuries had passed since Topiltzin’s departure, and my dad was convinced our times were the times of his return, and with him the non-violent core values of our wise ancestors. In Oluta, in memory of my father, I would often look towards the northeast at dawn to see if Quetzalcóatl would appear. Sometimes I thought I saw Him in the serpent of lightning coming from its feathered cloud wings, the blessing of the fusion of the earthly and heavenly. When my soul left my body and I flew far, far in the north, I did catch glimpses of Him, although the name His followers uttered was not ours, and it sounded like that of a father figure the Spaniards mentioned from their religion. Sometimes I saw him as the union of two beings dancing the snake dance of human and divine DNA inviting me to climb the ladder to the cloud where I would remember who I had been, was and would be. You see, in pre-Hispanic cultures nothing is linear; all is cyclical. Men take on gods’ names, both in an honorific and metaphoric manner, which can make it complex to really understand our stories and prophecies… When my mother, Cimatl, birthed a son from her new husband Maqueytán, she thought I would cause them problems in the future. She had always been the materialistic one who did not understand my father’s spiritual quest. My mother’s name evokes beans in her language, so maybe the gods found it appropriately funny that I would “spill those beans” with strangers, letting them know about our world, our words, our ways and weaknesses. Was I unconsciously searching revenge from my mother? I don’t think so. When Cortés took me with him on the long journey to Las Hibueras, I saw her again, and my half-brother too. By then they had also been given Christian names: Marta and Lázaro, Biblical siblings of another woman called a whore… There and then I forgave my Mayan mother for what she did to the little girl that I was. When my half-brother was born, mi madre Cimatl thought I would claim the caciquato for myself, but she wanted her son to be the ruler. How little she knew me! I did not want anything but love from my family… She took advantage of the death of a little girl my age to tell our people I was the dead child… She did not bury me alive, but she declared me dead in her heart, secretly selling me to slave traders from Xicalango. Those in turn sold me to people in Tabasco. I learned the language of my masters, I learned to obey and serve. When once again I was given away, as a war tribute to the strangers who came from the other side of the great water, I did my best to survive, serve and learn. The strangers would have never defeated Tenochtitlán without the help of those of us who were tired of the Mexica tyranny. Moctezuma knew about the prophecy. He was aware of Tenochtitlán’s abandonment of the peaceful ways of Quetzalcóatl. He remembered how Huitzilopochtli had also abandoned Malinalxóchitl, my namesake goddess who established Malinalco, a town of powerful shamans whose magical gifts remain active to this day. Maybe Malinalxóchitl was the one who taught me how to fly towards your writers’ den…
(to be continued)