La Jornada: Poetry is “a way of feeling the power of the word, the root and the memory”

The Nahuatl writer Natalio Hernández considers poetry a way to “make history something that means to you, makes you feel the force of culture, the word, the root and the memory.” Offers his most recent collection of poems, Istacamatl (Trajín), to any Mexican, even foreigners.

About the text, subtitled Songs to Mother Earth, which will be presented on May 7, the poet told The Day that “it is no longer for indigenous people only. I am putting it on the table for all of us who make up the contemporary Mexican nation, which includes indigenous peoples and Spanish-speaking society as a whole.” It has trilingual poems: Nahuatl, Spanish and English.

The essayist also explained that Mexico “alludes to our founding history, of the navel of the Moon, of a cactus mounted on a stone, that means Tenochti-tlan Huitzilopochco, the residence of Mr. Huitzilopochtli, left-handed hummingbird, the priest. There is a lot of history behind the words. The book calls for that.”

Hernández (Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz, 1947) considered that the mestizo, with indigenous, European or Asian roots, “lives in a ‘nepan-tlismo’, as Don Miguel León-Portilla called being on the border: neither here nor there. The mestizo has two roots, but he does not assume them. The indigenous peoples in this moment of modernity have a lot to contribute to the Mexican mestizaje.”

The poet recalled that his mother said in her prayers: “in all humanity there is brotherhood. We are brothers. Some are black, others are white, others are yellow, others are red; we are brothers. The Mother of the Earth sustains us.”

“It is a postmodern thought, and my mother did not finish primary school, she did not know how to write or speak Spanish. The day that the mestizo recovers the indigenous roots, we will recover the energy of 5 thousand years of Mesoamerican culture.”

The also member of the Mexican Academy of Language highlighted that the concept of nation, which the Europeans think they brought, “we already had.” The historian Enrique Florescano explained it in books such as Ethnicity, State and nation y Indigenous memory. “We were not born as a nation in 1810, that is a historical myth, rather a rational history. We have to build new narratives.”

The collection of poems Istacamatl It is divided into three parts. The first, Natalio Hernández explained, “Our Mother Earth cries”, is very strong, because “there are laments from Mother Earth. She drowns us with her tears.” It is an anthem for him because of “all the influence of my mother, who in her prayers said: ‘we must venerate our mother, because she sustains us, she feeds us.’”

He recalled that he expressed this “mysticism” in his first book, Khochikoskatl (1985). “No one spoke the way I said, and last April 22 was World Mother Earth Day.”

The second part is called “Xochicuicatl / Canto florido” and the third, “Cuextecapan Cuicatl / Canto a la Huasteca”. “I close the book Istacamatl with a song about an ancient city founded by the Huastecs (tének) that has currently been converted into crops, but the people of the region continue to come for their traditional ceremonies to this place that they call the Cacahuatengo Table,” the poet noted.

Hernández, continuing with his story about Mesa Cacahuatengo, said that his father told him the story of a group of men who went to the mountain and were supposed to return in one day, but it took them eight. “They said they arrived in a city alive. It was like being in another country. They were seeing how our Huastec ancestors lived. They got tired of walking around in that world, in that culture from another time and another language, because those who went spoke Nahuatl and the city was Huastec.”

The professor added: “I grew up with that image and I asked myself: ‘does that city exist?’ Well, it does exist, researchers call it the Cacahuatengo Mesa.”

The House of Tradition

Hernández also said that “the European world is very rational and the Mesoamerican indigenous is very intuitive: they live between myth and reality. Today more than yesterday we are living it. In the Huasteca we venerate corn. The House of Tradition, which we call Xochicalli, literally, House of the Flower, is the residence of corn, in its duality of boy and girl. That ancestral memory has not died. It is buried. Now it begins to break the cement floor to dialogue with others cultures.

“For us, the path is of flowers, the ideal that you have to look for and find in life. It is there, but it is not perceived. It can be in the cornfield, on the road, in your house or in the House of Tradition. I can also say that the path is symbolized in ‘in xochitl in cuicatl, the flower and the song’.”

He added: “I understood it five decades later. I am almost 80 years old. I have been building that path. When I came to make this book, I have not abandoned my path since childhood, adolescence. Istacamatl means white paper or white book.

“It is the role that the tlamatini, the wise men of tradition, those who preside over the ceremonies, call istacamatl.” It alludes to the white book, the white path, the path of flowers (xochiohtli). There is a lot of symbolism at the bottom of this book, because I don’t want to write poetry anymore. “I’m already exhausted,” the author concluded.

Istacamatl It will be presented on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Rosario Castellanos bookstore (202 Tamaulipas Avenue, Hipódromo Condesa neighborhood). The author will be accompanied by the ñähñu poet Margarita León, the writer Moisés Ramos Rodríguez and, as moderator, Susana Bautista.