The day: it is time to rebuild our literary world: Mikel Ruiz, author Tsotsil

The writer Tsotsil Mikel Ruiz said it is time for the members of the native peoples of rebuild our literary world and concentrate on how we want to tell usbut also to question the voices that have always told them from outside.

The narrator told The day that in his writing he cannot do without the human issue: The work, difficult for a writer, is to shed his garments, language and appearance, and reach the human beingwhich has been his search until his most recent novel, Sk’ak’alil Ayan Li Ak’obale / El Origen De La Noche, which presented on February 26 at the International Book Fair of the Mining Palace, and the next day, at the National Museum of Popular Cultures.

Ruiz highlighted the essentials of withdrawing the physical aspect and which culture belongs, then Love, hatred, heartbreak, death, pain, jealousy and compassion are elements that we all feel them. Although you are tsotsil, tseltal, nahuatl, mestizo, European or Asian you can love, hate, feel resentment.

He reiterated that when he gives workshops to new writers, he emphasizes that, unlike indigenous authors, “we cannot tell things, calling ourselves ‘Indians’, because that represents the ideological issue of an era.

Not only do we want to tell us, because they are not the narrative voices, but the question of the foci that represent an ideology, where our axes, of tsotsiles, tseltals, represent a world.

The narrator refused to say: “‘A tsotsil thus reacts’ or ‘what does not do a Nahua’. It doesn’t matter what culture you come, we can all react differently, and in the end do the same, only the trigger that drives us to do so is missing. We can all love, yes, but also kill, if an issue shines. ”

In The origin of the night, Winning work of the Nezahualcóyotl Prize for Literature in Mexican Languages ​​2023, Mikel Ruiz continued, “I play with the questioning of the imaginary, the good and the bad, victims and perpetrators.

“From my previous works I have sought to enter the mind of the most feared drug trafficker and see him from his thinking, feelings and desires, as well as in the victim’s. See how you think, feel and face a situation. Sometimes there is no big difference, the question is how we separate them socially, where we locate them: ‘This one committed this act, is the bad; These are the good and the victims’.

For me there is no one is bad and another good; Simply, social conditions led us to go on one side or another. Remember that social actors are changing, fluctuating.

Mikel Ruiz recalled that this novel arose because he wanted to tell the story of a girl who was a victim of the Actteal massacre, “but my investigations and other works led me elsewhere to question something crucial to me: the victims are always, they are heard, they manifest themselves, they are visible (…), but what seems more complex to me is how the government has known how to work on the perpetrators.”

The paramilitaries responsible for these murders “were released, one by one or in a group, and it is not known where they are, what they do, what they do. Nothing. They disappeared, but what is known is that they are in their communities, they have returned; They have even continued to exercise some power over their victims (…) They are already mixed. I am working that in another book, some of their children or relatives already have family relationships with the victims. ”

The literary critic also said that according to Documents of the paramilitaries, many of them were military, but were born in the same place where they went to massacre. When did they come out? Because? Why then they returned with all the courage to do this, dehumanized? And what is being, being and acts dehumanized?

Such fictional rethinking, Ruiz added, He has allowed me to filter and enter that human issue a bit in order to understand what happened in his mind, in his heart, which led them to do that, what is at stake; If you feel nothing, nothing happens in your mind; Could it be that he is not visualizing the future, he has no desire for something later? I think the opposite: there are a lot of things. It is the complex that I have always tried to find in my characters, at least in the main.

Around the title of the narrative, he explained that the character’s last name Pablo Ak’obal means eveningbut it also refers to the origin of its history, when It goes through complex processes and darkens your soul, your heart, the part in which this heartless character is built to do this.

Another meaning of the night is the girl, which as a result of the aggression loses her eyes and memory. Not only is it not seeing everyday life, but ignoring the past. It is also the origin of her darkness.

Ruiz concluded: “I ended up talking about the perpetrator because doing so about the victim is much more complex. It is easier to fall into certain social parameters of how the victim’s image is built, without respecting it, because it is politicized. The official and unofficial stories try to use these imaginary for their own benefits. Each six -year periods take advantage of these victims or survivors to play in their campaigns.

I talk about the perpetrators again. It is more difficult to take advantage of them in a political discourse of power itself. It is easier to use the victims. They look as a product. That is the most unfortunate; That is dehumanization.