Headfirst Editor's Pick
"Sell out warning! Bristol’s best new bookstore presents readings and reflections on poetry in the indigenous Mè’phàà tongue of mountainous Southern Mexico. Hubert Matiúwàa’s words are an act of defiant resistance against the violent reality of cultural exclusion, preserving ancestral wisdom in a dialogue between two worlds. "
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A event on Wednesday 26th March. The event starts at 19:00.
*Please note: due to an increase of violence in his community, very sadly Hubert Matiúwàa is no longer able to join us in person. EBB and Girasol Press will donate proceeds from sales of *Landskin* to the Mè’phàà community arts organisation Gusanos de la Memoria's Casa Residencia Artística fundraiser. If you would like to support the community you can donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/casaresidencia-artistica-gusanos-de-la-memoria.*
Join us for an evening dedicated to translating and publishing indigenous Mexican poetry, with Mexican poet and translator Juana Adcock and Bristol-based small publisher Girasol Press. Juana will read from and discuss her translations of Mè’phàà poet Hubert Matiúwàa's *Xtámbaa / Landskin / Piel de Tierra* (Girasol Press), a trilingual volume (Mè’phàà-Spanish-English), and *First Rain* (Flipped Eye), which presents Hubert's work in Mè’phàà and English. In Hubert's absence, we will hear the Mè’phàà word via video recordings of Hubert reading his poems and of Juana's work in the Mè’phàà community in the "Mountain" region of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.
The editors of Girasol Press will also present *Jukub: Poems for the Reverse Conquest*, an earlier chapbook of indigenous Mexican poetry from Zapatista territories in Chiapas in two Mayan languages, Ch'ol and Tsotsil. Jukub contains poems by Edgar Darinel García, Miriam Esperanza Hernández Vázquez and Canario de la Cruz, translated collectively by Juana Adcock, Leire Barrera-Medrano, Dan Eltringham, Rebecca Kosick and Annie McDermott. We'll hear brief video contributions from the three poets in Ch'ol/Tsotsil & Spanish (subtitled) and selected translations.
After the reading we'll discuss the role of poetry in the Mè’phàà community, the politics of writing and translating in indigenous languages, and how language informs political activism and ecological ideas, followed by audience questions.
On *Xtámbaa / Landskin / Piel de Tierra*:
Xtámbaa refers to the ceremony that is performed on a newly born child, in order to determine their animal sibling and entrust them to the land, to the forests and the rivers, so they will care for the child. The literal translation of “xtámbaa” is “landskin”; the root of the word “xtá” refers to the skin, whose role within Mè’phàà philosophy is to care for what it covers. “Let us raise the word to the ear of the wind,” writes Hubert Matiúwàa in the first poem of Xtámbaa (Landskin). The word comes first and must be cared for because the Mè’phàà language has a word for everything, living and dead, and the work of looking after those words also means looking after the relations with the living world and with the ancestors that they contain and enact.
On *First Rain*:
Written originally in Me'phaa, First Rain is a selection of poems that emerged from the poet responding to the death of his grandmother who declared to him in 2005: I will die in the days when the first rains come. The work mourns both the loss of a grandmother, and the fading away (like her sight in later life) of a culture and language that hold so much history and pride. In this way, they address social, racial and gender inequalities, environmental abuses and injustices faced by native peoples in Latin America.
On *Jukub*:
Jukub: Poems from Chiapas for the Reverse Conquest contains poems by three poets from Chiapas, first composed in Ch’ol and Tsotsil. Jukub, the Ch’ol word for canoe, alludes to the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation)’s maritime delegation, which this spring sailed to Europe to mark 500 years since the “conquest” of Mexico in 1521. Always attentive to the long histories of colonialism and resistance, the Zapatistas’ “voyage for life” is also a “reverse conquest,” which playfully re-inscribes and negates colonial history by renaming Europe Slumil K’ajxemk’op, or Rebel Land / Tierra Insumisa.
Bios:
Hubert Matiúwàa (b. 1986 in Guerrero, Mexico) is a poet writing in the Mè’phàà language. He has received numerous awards, including the 2017 PLIA (Indigenous Literatures of America Prize). He is the author of Xtámbaa/Piel de Tierra (2016), Tsína rí nàyaxà’/Cicatriz que te mira (2017) and Mañuwìín/Cordel torcido (2018).
Juana Adcock is a Mexican poet, translator and editor based in Scotland. She is the author of Manca, Vestigial, I Sugar the Bones, and Split, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice. She is co-editor of the anthology of poetry by Latin American women Temporary Archives, and the translator of Hubert Matiúwàa’s First Rain and The Dogs Dreamt, Laura Wittner’s Translation of the Route, and Lola Ancira’s The Sadness of Shadows.
Girasol Press is a small poetry publisher edited by Leire Barrera and Dan Eltringham that explores experimental approaches to translation, book-arts and old print technologies, and the recovery of forgotten or marginalised voices and languages. It sits between the world of poetry-pamphlet publishing, which is often fast and ephemeral, and the slow-paced ethos of the artist-book. Find out more at www.girasolpress.com.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions
Join us for an evening dedicated to translating and publishing indigenous Mexican poetry, with Mexican poet and translator Juana Adcock and Bristol-based small publisher Girasol Press. Juana will read from and discuss her translations of Mè’phàà poet Hubert Matiúwàa's *Xtámbaa / Landskin / Piel de Tierra* (Girasol Press), a trilingual volume (Mè’phàà-Spanish-English), and *First Rain* (Flipped Eye), which presents Hubert's work in Mè’phàà and English. In Hubert's absence, we will hear the Mè’phàà word via video recordings of Hubert reading his poems and of Juana's work in the Mè’phàà community in the "Mountain" region of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.
The editors of Girasol Press will also present *Jukub: Poems for the Reverse Conquest*, an earlier chapbook of indigenous Mexican poetry from Zapatista territories in Chiapas in two Mayan languages, Ch'ol and Tsotsil. Jukub contains poems by Edgar Darinel García, Miriam Esperanza Hernández Vázquez and Canario de la Cruz, translated collectively by Juana Adcock, Leire Barrera-Medrano, Dan Eltringham, Rebecca Kosick and Annie McDermott. We'll hear brief video contributions from the three poets in Ch'ol/Tsotsil & Spanish (subtitled) and selected translations.
After the reading we'll discuss the role of poetry in the Mè’phàà community, the politics of writing and translating in indigenous languages, and how language informs political activism and ecological ideas, followed by audience questions.
On *Xtámbaa / Landskin / Piel de Tierra*:
Xtámbaa refers to the ceremony that is performed on a newly born child, in order to determine their animal sibling and entrust them to the land, to the forests and the rivers, so they will care for the child. The literal translation of “xtámbaa” is “landskin”; the root of the word “xtá” refers to the skin, whose role within Mè’phàà philosophy is to care for what it covers. “Let us raise the word to the ear of the wind,” writes Hubert Matiúwàa in the first poem of Xtámbaa (Landskin). The word comes first and must be cared for because the Mè’phàà language has a word for everything, living and dead, and the work of looking after those words also means looking after the relations with the living world and with the ancestors that they contain and enact.
On *First Rain*:
Written originally in Me'phaa, First Rain is a selection of poems that emerged from the poet responding to the death of his grandmother who declared to him in 2005: I will die in the days when the first rains come. The work mourns both the loss of a grandmother, and the fading away (like her sight in later life) of a culture and language that hold so much history and pride. In this way, they address social, racial and gender inequalities, environmental abuses and injustices faced by native peoples in Latin America.
On *Jukub*:
Jukub: Poems from Chiapas for the Reverse Conquest contains poems by three poets from Chiapas, first composed in Ch’ol and Tsotsil. Jukub, the Ch’ol word for canoe, alludes to the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation)’s maritime delegation, which this spring sailed to Europe to mark 500 years since the “conquest” of Mexico in 1521. Always attentive to the long histories of colonialism and resistance, the Zapatistas’ “voyage for life” is also a “reverse conquest,” which playfully re-inscribes and negates colonial history by renaming Europe Slumil K’ajxemk’op, or Rebel Land / Tierra Insumisa.
Bios:
Hubert Matiúwàa (b. 1986 in Guerrero, Mexico) is a poet writing in the Mè’phàà language. He has received numerous awards, including the 2017 PLIA (Indigenous Literatures of America Prize). He is the author of Xtámbaa/Piel de Tierra (2016), Tsína rí nàyaxà’/Cicatriz que te mira (2017) and Mañuwìín/Cordel torcido (2018).
Juana Adcock is a Mexican poet, translator and editor based in Scotland. She is the author of Manca, Vestigial, I Sugar the Bones, and Split, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice. She is co-editor of the anthology of poetry by Latin American women Temporary Archives, and the translator of Hubert Matiúwàa’s First Rain and The Dogs Dreamt, Laura Wittner’s Translation of the Route, and Lola Ancira’s The Sadness of Shadows.
Girasol Press is a small poetry publisher edited by Leire Barrera and Dan Eltringham that explores experimental approaches to translation, book-arts and old print technologies, and the recovery of forgotten or marginalised voices and languages. It sits between the world of poetry-pamphlet publishing, which is often fast and ephemeral, and the slow-paced ethos of the artist-book. Find out more at www.girasolpress.com.
Entry requirements: no age restrictions
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