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Patrick Romero McCafferty:
Your work preserves the narrative forms, symbolism, and register of Me’phàà oral poetry. Phrases of Me’phàà and sounds like ‘cheen’ cheen’ cheen’ and ‘xx’xx xx’xx’ also make their way into the translations. Why is this important to you?
Hubert Matiúwàa: Human beings transform the earth in their passage across it, writing on it, forming peoples/scars, which are evidence of their journey through the world. Words are sounds that name the world, sounds are experiences passed from one generation to another and every culture develops this form of knowledge in language and names it. What is the sound for hunger? What is the sound for pain? In Mè’phàà, ‘choloo, choloo’ is the sound for hunger; ‘na’koo, na’koo, na’koo’ is the sound for bodily pain and it has a meaning: ‘it is stretched, it is stretched’… ‘Mikuí’ translates as ‘sky’ but also means ‘infinity’ and evokes feelings of peace and paradise. ‘Mide’ refers to the sour taste of unripe fruit so translating it is complex. ‘Mòjmó ríca’ is a word that refers to a shade of yellow only found in a type of mushroom. All these words are ways of naming the experiences of worldly knowing; they are the result of a culture’s knowledge of body, land, and environment. I feel it is important to conserve these words from within the place where they were coined. Every sound is a context and a world, announcing colours, sounds, emotions that often don’t have a translation or equivalent in other languages, they become untranslatable.
Across the globe, script has become the hegemonic means of memory-making and privileges writing as its only form; by its logic, marginalised or ‘indigenous’ cultures must write according to its rules to be considered to have knowledge at all. In this vein, ther forms of writing like the tsína’ / scar in the memory-skin that exists in Mè’phàà oral culture, are made invisible. Orality is a form of writing, it is just that we do not recognise the symbolisms in the way that writing is expressed.
Writing a poem in a regional language is complex: Mè’phàà and Spanish are of course different languages so words have a symbolic charge in each, a context from which they set out to name the world; those of us who write in a regional language always do so from our own linguistic territory, while simultaneously working within the structure of the hegemonic language. Why is it necessary to translate in order to have dialogue? Why is dialogue sought in the first place, and with whom?
PRM: Throughout your work, you portray the revolutionary spirit in terms of a land’s dream for its community. In ‘The Dogs Dreamt’, for example, you have the lines: ‘The tree dreamt / that we took root again each morning / as our rebellion was growing / in the house of the moon.’ How does poetry advance your sense of the bond between people and soil?
HM:
Poetic discourses are born out of the community’s material and spiritual needs. They are the house where memories converge from across all time, they are the breath that gives strength to the activities of daily life. They reactivate with each cycle, each time life begins again. They are the scar in the skin of memory.
We base our poetic experience in what we call naxto’o anjgáa / to make skin / the tie of words – which refers to the act of creating or building; it has a range of meanings, among them ‘to join to make strong’ ‘to stitch to make scar’ ‘to tie the knot to secure with the other’. This is derived from the concept of skin as the paradigmatic thought of Mè’phàà culture: the word ‘xtá’ (skin) is its ethical starting point; ‘xtá’ is the origin of the verb ‘estar’ and is a paradigmatic word. Skin’s function is to cover and protect that which it forms part of. Like the relationship between flesh and skin. In this sense, the bond between land, people, life, and body is present in the way the world is named, in the way it is poeticised. So it is important to recover the philosophy and poetics of the Mè’phàà culture in order to look after and heal it. A philosophy and poetics of care that proposes to reflect on, strengthen, and broaden the dialogue between philosophies and poetics of the original peoples, rooted in skin-thought and its practical implications for the defence of land and culture, while also reflecting on the urgency of a global and multicultural philosophy and poetics to care for the world.
PRM:
Can you please tell me about Gusanos de la Memoria, its successes, and the challenges it’s faced since you founded it?
HM:
For years governing institutions have failed to give literary creativity from within the language, history, and philosophy of our culture importance in their study programmes and school curricula. In some cases it is approached from another angle; the written language is taught without the thought it is based on, the literatures of the regional languages are studied, but not the process of creating them. In the schools in our community, children are not taught to reflect in their mother tongue; they don’t all read and write it, those who go out to study sometimes forget it, because it is an identifiable, racialised mark. Faced with this situation in the region of la montaña de Guerrero, Gusanos de la Memoria was formed as a cultural collective to work on these issues through creativity and self-reflection. We believe it necessary to implement cultural activities that guide children and young people and enable them to engage with the knowledge of their communities so we might recover an epistemology from within the language, and by these means resist the alienation of thought caused by the colonisation brought to bear on the region across numerous fronts and historical moments.
We started building the Gusanos de la Memoria Artists Residency in 2024 with the aim of creating a discursive bridge to strengthen conceptions of art among artists, intellectuals and communities in the area. It will be located in the community of Llano de Heno, near the provincial capital, Malinaltepec. It will be a place for hosting artists and researchers from different disciplines who will have the opportunity to deliver workshops and exchange thoughts on literature, music, photography, painting, theatre, philosophy, history, and other disciplines; as well as issues related to identity, language, and writing in regional languages. Those who stay there will work with the communities where the majority of indigenous people in the state of Guerrero live.
PRM:
What role does publishing play in the project?
HM:
We began the work of establishing ourselves as a publishing house in 2020 with a view to sharing work within and beyond the communities. We created a digital library on the Gusanos de la Memoria website where work can be accessed and downloaded for free. In 2022, we started a conversation series called ‘the collective body of a book in Mexico’s languages’. The politics of publishing rights that publishers have is based in the concept of property; this impedes the free circulation of work in digital form. There is little pro- duction of this sort of work as it is, and the politics of private rights reduces (coopts) its dissemination even more. Furthermore, those works are not shared where they should be, in the communities; few publishers offer them in a freely-downloadable form, especially important for teachers from the regions who are always searching for and bend over backwards to obtain materials for their students. This is why we decided to try and found a press that counteracts what we experience as writers from indigenous communities.
PRM:
Where does the name come from?
HM:
The name is based on the following story about the inchworm:
A long time ago they gave the inchworm the task of measuring all the world’s paths; it measured every story at its own pace, it came to know the suffering and the hope of every people, it learned to walk slowly but surely. An inchworm never falls, even from the highest leaf; it always finds a way back or a way forward, which is why it is the worm of knowl- edge, of fair judgement, and of the memory of our peoples.
The inchworm is our metaphor for walking and coming to understand how our language feels through an acquaintance with territory, memory and our own history, taking stock of hope as we walk, but also of the suffering. Others joined us in this objective and we focused on offering workshops in creative writing for children and young people in Mè’phàà, Nahuatl and Na Savi communities taking oral memory and creating in our own language as our base. To do this we coordinated with the education sector at its different stages: primary, secondary, and distance learning.
PRM:
You have called Me’phàà culture, ‘a fundamental paradigm through which to treat the topic of decolonisation.’ You document colonisation closely in Jaguar Commissioner especially, which looks at the erosion of culture and bonds in a community. In brief, what are the elements of this paradigm and how do you apply them in El como pensar de la gente piel?
HM:
It’s necessary to think about the history of words; each has its origin and thinking from within ours implies getting to know these origins so as to converse with the other. It’s necessary to identify the paradigmatic words of thought, those that give rise to others. In Mè’phàà we have the term ‘Ajngáa rèje’: the word ‘rèje’ has multiple meanings, ‘seed’, for example, and ‘the place where it grows’. It also refers to the acts of engendering and giving life, to fecundity and gestation in the womb. Another example is the word skin in Mè’phàà culture. Everything that ‘is’ (esta), everything we ‘do’ (hacemos) and everything we ‘carry’ (cargar) becomes skin; in other words, the skin is like the heart of everything that exists. Skin is moulded according to the form of the thing it contains and protects. Taking skin as our ethical horizon means we have to be in reciprocity with our territory, protecting it so that it can protect us. This is the origin for the philosophy of skin and protection. In Jaguar Commissioner, I used poetry to address the ritualised changes in Mè’phàà government, the structural conflicts commissioners face due to narco-violence in the region. It’s necessary to rethink form and symbolism in our politics when faced with governmental crises and the dissolution of community caused by party politics. Wearing the jaguar skin is the symbol for wearing the skin of the community; it is the beginning of Mè’phàà politics.
In my book, The Skin People’s How to Philosophise, I analysed two main paradigms of thought xó/how (oral pedagogy) xtá/skin (ethical horizon), derived from the following reflections: tsá ñajuan ló’/who are we? (our story told) xtámbaa/earth skin (territorialisation) gu’wá/house (place where we name the world), gu’wá ñajún ná narigú ajngáa ló’/work house (exercising community politics) xó naguma jùmà rí tsu’kan/how is sacred thinking born (a way of thinking) and xó jùwá go’ò/how do women live? (violence in the commu- nity). The book can be read for free on the Gusanos de la Memoria website.
PRM:
In an interview you gave at UPNA in 2020, you pointed out the diverse roles poets traditionally play in civic life in different parts of the country: the Lightning Poets who summon rain, the poets who sing to the dead on Día de Muertos and the poets of courtship. How do you understand the role of the poet in 2025?
HM:
As in all times and cultures, poets care for the word and its ways of naming and experiencing the world. In our time, where the death of cultures and their languages has accelerated, where those who defend land and water are assassinated, where there is constant dispossession, where other forms of knowledge are made invisible in persistent colonisation, poetry is necessary for healing. It is necessary that the poets of our time name their historical moment, its beauty and contradictions, in order to make sense of it, to live in love and care, and create spaces for hope.
As a Mè’phàà poet my vision in terms of change and resilience is never far from the terrible violence, economic marginalisation, gender inequality, and environmental devastation my culture has suffered over the centuries. I think it necessary to implement cultural activities that guide children and young people to help them engage with the knowledge of their communities so they might recover the root of their way of thinking.
PRM:
‘The Rooster’, one of three poems we published in WG5, moves through a symbolic order where the calabash, the cicada, the deer path, and the mountain bear additional moral and spiritual weight. Then it ends with the unequivocal lines: ‘If there is blood / so there will be guns to protect what is ours.’ What can you tell me about the relationship between the symbolic and the real in this poem and, if you like, your work more widely.
HM:
For me, poetry is a testimony of my time. Our region is faced with various problems: poppy production has replaced traditional crops like corn because poppy is more profitable, and when corn ceases to be grown, its cosmogony is lost. Similarly, the opium resin derived from poppies has instigated a war between organised crime factions over trafficking and planting in the region, which has led to communities being displaced and much violence. The fight for control over the territory translates to kidnapping, extortion, and the murder of activists and those who defend the land. An obvious example of this is the recent murder of Marco Antonio Suástegui Muñoz, defender of the land in Guerrero.
Our region also faces the latent threat posed by mines, seeing as the majority of our territory is under concessions to Canadian mining companies. Although the people have organised themselves and created CRAADET (Regional Council of Agricultural Authorities in Defence of the Territory) in order to raise awareness of the problem, the concessions have not been lifted.
The region has the resources the mining corporations look for and the displacement of indigenous groups in other regions has already begun, often with the cooperation of organised crime groups, who kill with impunity and in collusion with governing institutions, all with the objective of weakening communities and holding on to the power to exploit those territories.
So poetry becomes our means of naming our reality. Though we may not always find enough words to name so much injustice and suffering, poetry helps against the normalisation of violence, and to galvanise words of hope. In this sense, forming a popular front to educate and consolidate our people by way of our own philosophy, so as to defend our lives and land, is vital. The rooster poem reflects this fact.