The ‘Zapatista Manifesto’: A poetic translation: Excerpts
Posted by anarcholatina on 2023-07-13
Hello friends! Have y’all heard of the Zapatistas? So ok, the Zapatistas are an indigenous-led, anticapitalist, autonomist movement in México. They seized land back from the Méxican government, as in by force, as in with guerillas, guns, everything, back in ’94, and then implemented stateless, ecological, bottom-up democracy. They’re still there in Chiapas, resisting.
The Zapatistas have announced themselves to México and to the world with the Declarations of the Lacandona Jungle, originally by pirate radio. And look, I don’t have anything against spectres haunting Europe, but if you think the Communist Manifesto is poetic you ain’t seem nothing on Mayan political communiqués. So today, I want to share with you some of my favourite passages of the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, in a translation that tends to the music and the dance of the words.
Cuarta Declaración de La Selva Lacandona
There won’t be death for the flower which is the word.
There may be death for the masked face of those who today name it, but the word, this word born from the depths of land and history, cannot be rooted off anymore by the arrogance of power.
We are all born of the night. In the night we live, and in her we shall die. But this light will prove to be the morning for all others, for those who today cry the night, for those to whom the day is denied, for those to whom death herself is a consolation, for those who were forbidden life.
For everyone: the light.
For everyone: everything.
For us: the pain and the anguish. For us: the joy of rebellion. For us: our future torn apart. For us: the dignity of insurrection.
For us: nothing.
The ambition of the powerful has been our silence. Being quiet, we died. Without the word, we didn’t exist.
We fight, to raise our voices against oblivion. We fight, against death, for memory, for life. We fight, for we fear dying the death which is being forgotten.
They kill us for fighting back—but this is how we build a world where we all fit together, a world where everyone can live, without the death of the word. They take our land, so that our stride finds nothing to step on. They take our history, so that our word dies in its oblivion. They do not want us indigenous. They want us dead.
The arrogant wants to put down a rebellion which, in their ignorance, they place at the dawn of 1994. But the rebellion which now comes with the brown face of the land, with the language of the land, is not born today. It was spoken before in other languages, in other lands. In countless mountains and countless histories has it walked, the rebellion against injustice. It spoke Náhuatl, Paipai, Kiliwa, Cúcapa, Cochimi, Kumiai, Yuma, Seri, Chontal, Chinanteco, Pame, Chichimeca, Otomí, Mazahua, Matlazinca, Ocuilteco, Zapoteco, Solteco, Chatino, Papabuco, Mixteco, Cuicateco, Triqui, Amuzgo, Mazateco, Chocho, Izcateco, Huave, Tlapaneco, Totonaca, Tepehua, Popoluca, Mixe, Zoque, Huasteco, Lacandón, Maya, Chol, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojol-ab’al, Mame, Teco, Ixil, Aguacateco, Motocintleco, Chicomucelteco, Kanjobal, Jacalteco, Quiché, Cakchiquel, Ketchi, Pima, Tepehuán, Tarahumara, Mayo, Yaqui, Cahíta, Ópata, Cora, Huichol, Purépecha and Kikapú. It spoke, and speaks, the Castillan language [“Spanish”].
For rebellion is not a thing of language; it is a thing of dignity, a thing of being human.
A society which is plural, accepting, inclusive, democratic, fair, free: such a society will only be possible as a wholly new system. And it won’t be power to build it. For power today is only the salesforce of ruins, of countries destroyed by the real subversives, the real desabilising force: the rulers.
The projects of independent opposition are lacking something, that is, more than ever, crucial. We all oppose the agenda of a system that destroys itself, but we need a concrete proposal for a new society, a model of what to build as we rebuild.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the EZLN, is part of this proposal; it is not the whole of it, nor its “vanguard”. It has been, and continues to be, part of the effort of a transition to self-rule.
The world we want is a world where countless worlds fit in. The country we build is a country where all the peoples fit in, where all the languages are spoken. May all paths walk her, may everyone laugh her, may everyone dawn her.
We talk unity even when we are silent. In murmur we rain the words, to find one another together in history, to ward off the danger that confronts and destroys us: the danger of being forgotten.
There won’t be death for the flower which is the word, even if our strides stride in silence. For in silence the seed of the word is sown. Because so that it may flower, the word screams itself into silence;
So that it may live, the word dies, sown into the womb of the land;
“So that they see us, we mask our own faces;
So that they name us, we deny our own names;
We risk our present, so that we have a future,
And so that we live, we die.”
Our word, our song and scream, is here to stop the dead from dying. We fight so that they live. We sing, so that they live.
And the word is alive.
The cry of “Enough!” is alive.
The night that makes of itself a dawn is alive.
Our proud stride, side-by-side with all those who cry, is alive.
We fight to destroy the clockwork of death, wound up by the powerful.
We fight for a new era: A time of life.
Aquí estamos. No nos rendimos. Zapata vive y, a pesar de todo, la lucha sigue.
Desde las montañas del Sureste Mexicano, / Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena, Comandancia General del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. México, enero de 1996.
Excessively verbose translation notes
The night is the “long night of 500 years”, the arrival of colonialism and its procession of horrors: dominion, capitalism, industrialism, neoliberalism. We are all born of it: indigenous folk in Latinoamérica have had ‘the Indian beaten out to save the man’, their own lifeworlds have been taken, they too have needed to rewild. The word, language itself, culture, myth, society, politics, is what the powerful tried to silence—nothing less than cultural genocide: the Fourth asserts that the deeper the word is buried, the more it flowers. Thus the beauty and importance of listing the languages they took from us (in that tiny corner of México alone!), invoking the name of each language like Homer’s Catalogue of Ships.
The original declaration is highly local to time and place: the selling out of México to the USA via neoliberal trade agreements in the 90s. The EZLN is the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, it began within the framework of nationality, striving to reinvent México as a México that can contain many nations (“a world which contains many worlds”). Without rewriting the text, my selection takes the liberty to efface the nationalism and highlight the universal, for two reasons: one, the movement itself headed in this direction with the passing of the decades, I am faithful to the movement—motion and direction—more than the moment. And two, I personally know Zapatistas and I know they are highly amused by my shameless cheating. This movement is grounded on oral history and personal relationships, not holy texts from chairmen. Besides, there’s already a more literal translation to serve historical purposes; this one aims to capture the beauty of the wording of the Castillian.
Nonetheless it should be noted that this is an anarchist-friendly framing of a movement which neither anarchist nor state-communist, and refuses to be appropriated by either European current. Zapatismo is zapatismo. I strove to not add to the text or distort it with my own political ideology; but I, like anyone who retells a story, am biased.
The part quoted as “so that we see us…” isn’t from the Fourth Declaration, it’s from the Sixth. I recognised the seed of that little song in the bosom of the Fourth and took the liberty to transplant the later words back into this ground, because I think it looks good here (doesn’t it?). Pedro Guerra set that passage to music, in Chiapas; I’m far from the only one struck by the poetry of the Fourth, parts of it have been sang by Manu Chao (in EZLN… Para Tod@s and elsewhere in the Clandestino album), and more recently Adiós Gota in La Alegre Rebeldía.
Filed under Uncategorized