Time Commences in Xibalbá

Afterword: Racialized Subalternity as Emancipatory Decolonial Project: Time Commences in Xibalbá by Luis de Lión - Arturo Arias

85 Afterword Racialized Subalternity as Emancipatory Decolonial Project Time Commences in Xibalbá by Luis de Lión Arturo Arias it is nearly impossible to understand Luis de Lión’s masterpiece , Time Commences in Xibalbá (1985), without knowing the context of what happened in Guatemala, his country of origin more or less since the 1970s, or without understanding the emergence of a new, contemporary Maya literature in this country, one of the places where Mayas constitute the majority of the population.1 These two elements inform how his book came about, without taking away de Lión’s singular genius and personal struggles, and how he would eventually be kidnapped by a death squad on May 15, 1984, and subsequently assassinated. Luis de Lión was born as José Luis de León Díaz in the small town of San Juan del Obispo, a few miles away from Antigua Guatemala, the former colonial capital of Central America, on August 19, 1939. 86 afterword San Juan del Obispo was the spot chosen by Guatemala’s first Catholic bishop and founder of Antigua, Francisco Marroquín (1499– April 18, 1563), for his personal residence.2 De Lión knew this. The old bishop’s palace is still the main tourist attraction in this town, named “del Obispo” (the literal translation would be “St. John of the Bishop”) literally because of Marroquín’s residence. Those who built his palace, or worked as his servants, established themselves around the palatial structure, giving rise to a new indigenous town without a pre-Hispanic existence, a focus of de Lión’s acerbic irony in some of his earlier short stories and poems. De Lión was a Kaqchikel Maya, as are most indigenous people from this region of the country, transplanted there by the Spaniards to serve them. The Kaqchikels are the second largest Maya group after the K’iche’s and have vied for hegemony with them since the 1400s.3 De Lión’s father was a policeman. This enabled him to provide Luis an elementary and high school education, something extremely unusual among Mayas in the 1940s and 1950s, given the marked discrimination against them, which, combined with their economic and cultural subalternization, placed them in a precarious condition of misery and exploitation. De Lión thus was able to go to Guatemala City where he managed to complete his escuela normal in the city’s poor public school system (exclusively Spanish-based in language and Eurocentric in culture), which granted him not only a high school diploma but also a teacher’s certificate. He became an elementary school teacher, working at first in the indigenous countryside, and later in the city itself. He was also a precocious writer, producing many poems and short stories on a daily basis, most of which have been lost. His literary language was Spanish. In the 1960s there still was no Kaqchikel dictionary in existence, or indigenous scholars working in Kaqchikel that he knew of.4 However, whether by instinct or in a personal trajectory aimed at developing a personal style, he succeeded in incorporating many Kaqchikel apocopes and other linguistic traits into his literary Spanish, thus producing a unique double-voicing that enriches his best work. In 1970 de Lión met Marco Antonio Flores, a controversial figure in Guatemalan letters, who, along with the critic José Mejía, was the co-editor of the national university’s journal Alero. Flores was indeed breaking new literary ground and de Lión chose to become part of 87 Racialized Subalternity as Emancipatory Decolonial Project his group, which included another young writer, Mario Roberto Morales. Perhaps more than by just grounding de Lión in literature , Flores contributed to his life by helping him publish in a literary magazine, La semana, and by encouraging him to take courses at Guatemala’s San Carlos University, where he studied literature and philosophy. There he joined another young writer of indigenous origin living in Guatemala City, Francisco Morales Santos, in forming a Saturday study group where they read major literary figures such as Jorge Luis Borges or Octavio Paz and discussed them. De Lión published his first book of short stories, Los zopilotes (The Buzzards), in 1966. His second one, Su segunda muerte (His Second Death), appeared in 1970. Throughout this period he wrote numerous poems, but most were not published until the 1990s. He...