In the Belly of Night and Other Poems | En el vientre de la noche y otros poemas | Ndaani’ gueela’ ne xhupa diidxaguie’
Poems by Irma Pineda | English translations by Wendy Call | Illustrations by Natalia Gurovich
Pluralia Ediciones | 2022 | 160 pages
We live in a time of mass extinctions. About one million plant and animal species are currently endangered due to human activity, many of which could be extinct in a matter of decades. Climate change and war cause mass human displacement, fracturing communities and threatening cultural continuity. Even in places where people have been able to continue their ancestral connection to the land, minoritized languages, often Indigenous, are threatened with erasure. If current trends continue, by the end of this century, half of the languages spoken in the world today will have disappeared.
Isthmus Zapotec, which originated in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, is one such language. Though classified as critically endangered, extinction is not a foregone conclusion, and many of its speakers are working to preserve it, along with the knowledge, culture, and beliefs it holds. Language artists such as the poet Irma Pineda play an especially critical role in this work. Her first trilingual (Zapotec-Spanish-English) collection In the Belly of Night and Other Poems, with English translations by Wendy Call and illustrations by Natalia Gurovich, represents a significant contribution not only to world literature but also to cultural survivance.
In the Belly of Night gathers a selection of poems from six of Pineda’s poetry collections, providing the anglophone reader with a broad introduction to the poet’s work. With themes such as motherhood, loss, and humanity’s relation to the natural world recurring across several of her books, this collection allows the reader to glimpse how Pineda’s thinking has evolved over time, and observe how her poetics have adapted to these changes.
In her poetry, Pineda cultivates vivid, provocative symbolic systems that often draw from Zapotec culture but never settle for simply re-presenting the given meaning of an image. Take the tree, for example. The ancestors of the Zapotec people are called binigulaza, a word which, according to the late Zapotec writer and politician Andrés Henestrosa, can be understood as “people born from the roots of trees.” Additionally, as in many Mesoamerican religions, Zapotec theology features a sacred tree uniting the three levels of the cosmos: heaven, earth, and the underworld. In her poetry, however, Pineda does not restrict the image of the tree to these preexisting meanings but, like the best poets do, challenges and complicates them, as we can see in her poem “It Happens Sometimes”:
It sometimes happens,
that you fall in love with trees,
for the shade they create,
the strength of their branches
or the sweetness of their fruits.
It also happens, sometimes,
that the tree you love
turns into a man,
and you love his ideas,
his lips,
his heart,
his arms
or his sex
(because trees have sex).
And later, it sometimes happens,
that the tree you love
is close enough to astonish,
frighten.
Ceasing to be a tree
and appearing as a sun
that dazzles your besotted eyes.
And then it happens, sometimes,
that you don’t know
whether to close your eyes and hide,
or regard the sun-man-tree
until going blind.
Here, tree is plant, human, and divine. The poem traces shifts in states of love as the speaker’s awareness of different spheres of existence and their interconnectedness grows.
In “Time Won Over Love,” a later poem, the image of the tree has another significance:
Time won over love
stole mystery from us
and I don’t know what to do with indifference
with this loneliness
that sometimes gently hugs me
and sometimes chokes me.
Love
my belly is now a dry tree
that once wanted to bloom stars for your nights.
My belly is now a hard mountain
no longer astonished by the passing of time
by the lifeless days.
This is a tree that can no longer blossom or bear fruit, for whom the land is no longer hospitable; it reflects the perspective of an older speaker, one who has watched loved ones cross to the other side. It is the perspective of a person who feels the threat of extinction.
Oaxacans have a long history of resisting state oppression. Demonstrations calling for justice, reform, and improved school conditions—a perennial issue in a country that publicly celebrates its multicultural identity while providing little material support to bilingual and bicultural education—have often been met with violent military suppression. Protestors and community organizers are routinely harassed, illegally detained, and sometimes killed. Pineda herself has lost loved ones in this way.
This state violence is not unrelated to the endangered status of the Zapotec language. Irma Pineda’s poetry, composed as parallel “mirror poems” in both Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish, is an act of resistance and a testament to the power of art to take the difficult present we inhabit and turn it into something that helps us live, love, and thrive despite the violence and loss. The syncretism in Pineda’s writing reminds us of our interconnectivity and interdependence, and the need for us to care for each other and all the beings with whom we share this world. We are all part of an ecosystem, after all; and an ecosystem suffers if even one of its members is lost.
Gillian Esquivia-Cohen is a writer and translator who received her MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her writing in English has appeared in Guernica, The Kenyon Review Online, and Latin American Literature Today, and in Spanish in Polis Poesía, where she is a contributing editor. A dual citizen of the US and Colombia, she lives between Bogotá and Alabama.
Header illustration from In the Belly of Night and Other Poems by Natalia Gurovich.
