Introduction to the Texts

Two of the stories are ultimately of foreign origin, but their origins are not the same. In one case, the story known to the narrator as An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him [CAC 002 R022], the story clearly comes from the European tradition, and must have been introduced to the Chuj by schoolteachers. It is the classic Greek tale of a couple whose child is destined to kill his father and how that came about, including the solution to a famous riddle: What animal walks on four legs at dawn, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?

The other tale, Coyote and Rabbit [CAC 002 R027], is probably ultimately of African origin, although some of its episodes are traditional in the American South and may have been introduced secondhand to the Chuj. This is the series of incidents that make up the Br’er Rabbit stories, stories that reflected earlier African tales involving Hyena instead of Fox (Diarassouba 2007). Here the story features Coyote instead of either Fox or Hyena. Coyote stories and stories of Rabbit Trickster abound in the native New World, and some of the episodes may be of American origin, adapted to the framework of the African stories. Some episodes have a local flavor (such as misty mountains) and are likely of local origin.

A third story, Friend of the Animals [CAC 002 R020], expresses such a universal theme that it could possibly be of foreign origin as well, but it has elements that suggest it is native. First, the moral of the story, that good acts are reciprocated, is basic to Maya belief (but not, of course, unique to that culture). Second, some of the incidents are similar to events related in the Popol Vuh, a sixteenth-century collection of Highland Guatemalan mythology, legend, and history (Christenson 2007). Finally, the relationship between the two protagonists, a good younger brother and an evil elder brother, is also present in known Mayan tales (see Hopkins and Josserand 2016:41–58), but of course it is likewise not unique to the Maya. Arguing for a native origin is the fact that the story contains no foreign elements. Critical events in An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him feature a card game and a pistol, and then there is that riddle. Coyote and Rabbit is filled with foreign elements: a tar baby and a cheese, for instance. But Friend of the Animals has no such non-Maya features.

The fourth story, The Sorcerer [CAC 002 R012], is clearly of native origin, because it relates events said to have occurred in the Chuj communities within living memory. It is local history even though it treats supernatural phenomena that an outsider might consider inventions of a creative mind. But these are the parameters of local understanding of events. Not all that happens is easily explained in terms of Western empirical science; other forces may well be behind the events, and in fact are assumed to be present in local worldview. That people have companion animals, and powerful people have correspondingly powerful animals, is taken for granted, and it explains a lot of things that have hidden causes. (For other manifestations of this belief system, see Guiteras Holmes 1961 for Tzotzil and Pitarch 1996 for Tzeltal.)

The story about The Communists [CAC 002 R036] is again local history. The evil elements present are not supernatural nor are they easily controlled. This story anticipates the terrible events that were to ravage the Chuj area some decades later and result in the diaspora of the Chuj people. It concerns the early stages of what is called la violencia, the government’s war on its most vulnerable populations, a civil war whose consequences are still felt.

The final narration, Taking Out the Salt [CAC 002 R008], is an extended monologue that outlines the production of San Mateo’s famous black salt. To an extraordinary degree the salt trade pervades San Mateo society—economics, politics, and religion are all involved and both genders and all social levels participate.

The presentation of these narratives is in matched columns of Chuj and English, and these stories appear here for the first time in English translation. Insofar as possible, the translation matches the Chuj line for line, but of course this is not always possible. However, the sense of the Chuj is preserved to the extent that a translation to a foreign language can do so. The Chuj text was transcribed directly from the tape recordings made in the field, and the transcriptions were done by a speaker of the same variety of the language. They were checked by me against the tapes, and I translated the tales directly to English. For those who wish to delve deeper into the original language of the narrations, I have appended a grammar sketch, summarized my thesis [CAC 002 R065], and employed the official Chuj orthography. An independently derived grammar of Chuj by the Mexican linguist Cristina Buenrostro is also posted in the AILLA archive [CAC 004 R001]. See also my Chuj-English dictionary [CAC 002 R066].

I have tried to avoid excessive editing. Mistakes and hesitations have been left in the text, although some of them are marked by parentheses or brackets. Preliminary conversations and closing statements are intact, and the transcriptions generally represent everything that is on the tape. That is, I want these stories to be presented as they were told; I do not want to try to outguess the speakers and change the language they employed, even if it might in some way “improve” the text.

In my opinion, the presentation of native oral literature is all too often edited to “improve” it. The worst-case scenario is when the texts are not presented in the original language at all, but are retold in a different language and in a style more familiar to the Western reader. The rough content of the story is preserved, but not the style of its telling. This is a common tendency in collections that are destined to be used in schools; out of a mistaken conception of respect for the native tradition, the translators want the stories to fit into a familiar—and more prestigious—canon. My favorite commentary on this sort of presentation is that of the Australian aborigine scholar, T. G. H. Strehlow (1947), in his introduction to the complex and beautiful tales of the Aranda. In order to illustrate how aboriginal oral literature was normally presented (in pidgin English translation), Strehlow gives parallel treatment to the Shakespearian play Macbeth, a jewel of English literature. The result (reproduced in Hymes 1964:80) is both hilarious and sobering: [ole lady Muckbet:] “Me properly sorry longa that ole man, me bin finishem; him bin havem too much blood, poor beggar. . . .”).

Even when the text is presented in the native language, “needless” repetitions may be eliminated, when repetition is one of the most characteristic devices in Maya literature, without which the tale can hardly be called Maya. And as we discovered working with Chol storytellers (Hopkins and Josserand 2016), the introductory remarks that are often edited out as “not part of the story” (“This is a story I learned when . . .”) are in fact an expected element in storytelling. You might as well delete from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address the opening sentence (“Four score and seven years ago . . .”), since it is just background information, “not part of the story” (which might be said to begin with “Now we are engaged in a great civil war . . .”). Since before learning better I was guilty of the same, I am particularly sensitive about this.

I do regret not recording more stories. At the time there were two reasons for this. Since my primary goal was to write a sketch of the phonology and morphology of the language, I really only collected texts in order to have extended samples of language that I could scan for instances of grammar and lexicon (the former destined for Hopkins 1967a, the latter compiled as Hopkins 2012a). The expected “package” for a linguistics dissertation in those days was the phonology, the morphology, and sample texts; syntax was not yet the principal (even the sole) focus of a thesis as it is today. The second reason I didn’t record more texts in the field was that the recording device was a battery-powered Uher tape recorder, and recording ate up batteries at a frightful rate. Since there was no electrical power and no source for batteries anywhere outside major towns, all the batteries for a two-week field trip had to be carried in. I didn’t even record most of my field interviews for this reason; while my Chuj was not fluent, I could at least do running transcriptions of wordlists during the interviews.

I believe that none of us anticipated the rate at which things could change among the indigenous populations we work with. There was a tendency to think of these societies as unchanging over time, although nothing could be further from the truth. I once believed that the women’s huipils and men’s clothing that I saw in highland Chiapas were so traditional that they must have been the same for decades if not centuries. Then I became aware of old photographs of people from the region, and it was obvious that features that I took to be fixed diagnostics for certain villages were in fact changing all the time. When I was working in San Mateo Ixtatán, the woolen tunic capixays worn by the men had vestigial sleeves, about elbow length but too narrow to accommodate the arm; they stuck out over the upper arms. I was told that a couple of generations earlier the sleeves had been wrist length, and men actually put their limbs into them. Then before I left the field, I saw a man wearing the next generation of sleeves: a triangular flap that covered the upper arm, not a sleeve at all. Chip Morris (2010) has documented such changes in highland Chiapas, where the rhythm of innovation has accelerated from a new design of outfit every year for the fiesta to a new design at least twice a year with ever more drastic changes.

The same processes affect oral literature. Once upon a time people learned the stories and how to tell them in informal contexts, boys with men together in the fields, girls with women at the hearth or collecting firewood, and both in long candle-lit evenings with the family. Good storytellers were a primary source of entertainment. I remember occasions on which I would ride in the back of a truck with the other passengers on the three-hour trip to and from Chenalhó and San Cristóbal de Las Casas. If we were lucky the Chenalhó butcher would be on the truck, and he could spin story after story to form a narrative that lasted all the way to our destination.

Now a lot of the contexts in which stories were told no longer exist. Children go to school to learn a different genre of stories, and home entertainment may involve books or a radio or television rather than an elder. One effect of the loss of context is the decline of indigenous botanical knowledge; children learn rudimentary Western botany in schools but not the plants in their environment. The effect of this cultural and social change can also be seen in government-sponsored collections of stories in indigenous languages. Tales told by younger speakers often seem to take comic books as their literary models, not traditional narratives. (For a sample of published texts in one Mayan language, see the inventory of Chol narratives in Josserand et al. 2003 and Hopkins and Josserand 2016.)

Countering this acculturative tendency is another factor. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a number of programs were founded with the goal of training speakers of indigenous languages to carry out research on their own languages. In Guatemala, for instance, the Programa Lingúístico Francisco Marroquín in Antigua; in Mexico the Programa de Etnolingüística in Pátzcuaro (and later elsewhere). These and similar programs have produced a cadre of native linguists who are closer to their traditions than any outsider could be, and to a certain extent they have contributed to the preservation of native lore (see Vásquez 2001). However, time is limited, and what is not collected while more traditional storytellers are still alive is lost. It would truly be a shame if feeble efforts like the present work were the only remains of an impressive tradition of narrative art.

Discourse Structures of the Narratives

The more traditional of these narratives display a structure familiar to me from Chol folktales (Hopkins and Josserand 2016), but with notable differences. Narrators tend to open their talk with what has been called an evidentiality statement, brief remarks about where the story comes from—on what evidence does the storyteller relate the events? More traditional folktales may be attributed to the ancestors: Ay wal jun yik’ti’ ko mam kicham chi’ ay kanih, There is a story of our ancestors that remains (Coyote and Rabbit). The narrator may cite a more recent source: Ay jun toto wab’nak, There is one I just heard (Friend of the Animals). The story may simply be relegated to the distant past: Ha’ t’ay pekatax ay jun winh icham chi’, A long time ago there was an old man (An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him). In any case, we are told that this is not something the narrator him or herself witnessed but part of the oral literature. In contrast, a personal narrative or a general discussion of things present begins quite differently: T’a jun k’uh tik, ol wala’ chajtil skutej sk’eta ats’am ats’am, Today, I’ll talk about how we bring up the salt (Taking Out the Salt). The historical account of The Sorcerer begins: Antonse swik’ti’ej winh anima chi’, porke tob’ te aj b’al winh, So, people talk about a man, because he was a great sorcerer. These attributions to one’s own knowledge or community lore are the equivalent of the evidentiality statement.

After the opening evidentiality statement, necessary background information is supplied to set the scene for what follows. This may be brief: ay jun tsanh yuninal winh, tsijtum yuninal winh chi’, He had some sons, he had many sons (An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him). It may be longer (Friend of the Animals):

In the long historical narrative The Sorcerer, the background segment runs to nearly twenty percent of the text before the use of the completive aspect marker ix signals the first event on the event line: Entonse, hanheja’ chi’, ix yab’an heb’ winh, jantak heb’winh chuk chi jun, So, just like that, they heard, many of those powerful men.

The background having been set, narration of a traditional tale proceeds to the event line, the framework around which the story unfolds. In the discourse style of the Chol, events on the event line are related in the completive aspect, like the example just cited in the Chuj story of The Sorcerer. But such is not the case in many of the present tales. Some contain not a single instance of the completive aspect. They are related in a timeless past, but there are other elements that place the events of the narrative in nonpresent times. One such marker is the reportative, appearing in various forms: hab’,-ab’, or simply-b’, which I have usually glossed “they say.” Identifying the events of the story as traditional knowledge places them in the past without the need for further marking. The avoidance of the completive aspect also makes the point that the events are not something that we can say actually took place at some specified time (unless they did). In the present set of texts, events as such tend to be heavily weighted with quoted dialogue. If the narrator is able to quote dialogue, the implication is that the events really did take place. Furthermore, the use of dialogue makes the actors real in a way that descriptive prose would not.

A series of related events, usually taking place in the same setting and with the same protagonists, makes up an episode. Each single event may be introduced by its own particular background segment that changes the scene or the actors in some way. A new event may be introduced by one of the standard introductory words (yuj chi’, entonse, yos, weno, and so forth [for that reason, then, yes, okay]). The last event of an episode may be closed out in a couplet (reminiscent of the scene-closing couplets in Shakespeare’s plays). In Friend of the Animals, for instance, the events end with sentences coupleted either by the main narrator or by him and the secondary narrator. This back-channeling is typical of tales told in a natural setting, where there are narrators and listeners all participating in the discourse. The full set of event closings in Friend of the Animals is the following (DGA and PSP are the two storytellers):

At the very end of a narration, there is usually a closing phrase that tells the listeners that the story has ended. There is no more to come. This may be as simple as Ix lajwih, It ended (An Old Man Whose Son Killed Him, The Sorcerer). Friend of the Animals was a tale told by two narrators that began with one saying he had just heard a story and that the other man knew it. It ends with a jubilant cry: Weno, na’an ku’uj! Okay, we remembered it!

In the narratives that are not traditional folktales, there is less formal structuring. They do tend to begin with an opening, something like an evidentiality statement if just an announcement of what is to come: Swik’ti’ej winh anima chi’, I’ll tell about a man . . . (The Sorcerer); Walb’at ha tik ne’ik, ol walb’atih, walelta chajtil ix k’ulej . . ., I will speak now, I will speak out, about how we did (The Communists); T’a jun k’uh tik, ol wala’. . . . Today, I will talk about . . . (Taking Out the Salt).

Following the opening, there may not be a clear set of events organized into episodes, and background information may be mixed in with what amounts to the event line. However, the narration will be segmented into paragraph-like sections by introductory words like yuj chi’, entonse and yos. In the transcription of these nontraditional narrations, I have added marginal notes that mark major changes in topic; in an oral presentation, pauses and alterations of vocal quality are used for the same purpose.

At the end of the narration, the narrator may recap the events or comment on them in some way (parallel to what we have called the denouement in Chol folktales): Yuj chi’, icha chi’, chamnak winh anima chi’ . . ., So, in that way, the man died (The Sorcerer); Icha chi’ ix ko k’ulej t’a jun tiempo chi’, Thus we did in that time there (The Communists); Yuj chi’, icha chi’ yet’nak yik ats’am ats’am chi’, So, that’s the way it is with the salt (Taking Out the Salt). Texts normally then close with some device that tells the listener(s) that the performance is over: Weno, ix lajwih, Okay, it’s over. Turn off the recorder.

The observation that traditional folktales are narrated in a more structured way than personal or procedural narratives emphasizes the point that there is a narrative tradition that has norms, an oral literary canon. This tradition goes back a long way. Based on our understanding of current narrative practices, we have been able to identify their antecedents in Classic period hieroglyphic texts. While the substance of the discourse markers may have changed, the structures they participate in are more resilient. The overall structures of formal texts are similar, as are the rhetorical devices employed. A comparison of two essays by the late Kathryn Josserand is instructive. In one (Josserand 1991), she described the literary patterns of Classic hieroglyphic texts at Palenque. In another (Josserand 2016), she provided a parallel discussion of the patterns of modern Chol storytellers. Others have made similar observations about the continuity of literary aspects of Mayan culture (see Hull and Carrasco 2012 for an excellent sample drawn from Classic, Colonial, and modern material). Not only do the modern Maya have a rich oral tradition; their remote Classic ancestors had standards of literature that deserve to be recognized along with their achievements in art, architecture, astronomy, and calendrics.