Nina Burokas Reviews "How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems" by Mikeas Sánchez
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems
by Mikeas Sánchez, Translated from Zoque and Spanish by Wendy Call and Shook
reviewed by Nina Burokas
I think this poetry is also a type of spell. It is a way to
invoke our ancestors and to be born again with them.
– Mikeas Sánchez
I recently attended a photography exhibit titled “Still Here,” a collaboration between members of the Chemakum tribe and the League of Extraordinary Observers (LEO). The photographs are a testament to the continued existence of the Chemakum people, the original inhabitants of the place I call home—a people often assumed extinct. A rich oral tradition is a blessing, but it is also a hazard, as reflected in the medical adage “what is not written does not exist.”
It was with this awareness that I celebrate Milkweed Edition’s Seedbank Series, and, in this review, Mikeas Sánchez’s How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems. The thirty-eight poems in this collection are drawn from the author’s six prior publications, dating from 2006-2019. The author both wrote and translated the poems in those bilingual—Zoque and Spanish—publications. How to Be a Good Savage is trilingual, making the poems accessible to English readers for the first time.
Sánchez is a member of the Mokaya people, Indigenous to the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Her native language, Zoque, is a branch of the Mixe-Zoquean languages of Southern Mexico. Translators Wendy Call and Shook note that Sánchez now writes primarily in Zoque; specifically, the regional Copainalá variant of Zoque, an endangered language. The author states that “[being] an Indigenous writer in Mexico is an act of protest, an act of cultural and linguistic resistance.” Indeed, Sánchez’s activism—as a poet, as a radio producer, as a translator and developer of elementary school curricula—has been a significant contributor to the survival of her native language and the associated culture.
In his Introduction, Jake Skeets reminds us that there is a universality in language, a shared gift of experience, of joy, as captured in Sánchez’s “My Father Gave Me a Gift”: “a bird that sings / and teaches the Zoques to sing / we we we. . .” Skeets calls on us to “let the story of this book river through you the way oxygen does. . . . Start here, read these poems, hear them sing.”
And “sing” is what Sánchez’s language does. She is a master of imagery, of evoking emotion, as illustrated in the following excerpt from “The Soul Returns to Silence’s Cry”:
I want to join the pilgrimage of butterflies
and cloak the sky
I want to braid my silence
with curling waves
I want to find the depths of the sea
that those who drowned lost
those the seafarers still seek
in the sirens’ songs
Where do the white butterflies
that cloak the sky migrate?
Where does the soul’s falcon cry alight?”
You can hear Sánchez read this excerpt and her poem “Yesterday” in Zoque at World Literature Today.
This collection resonates with presence, serves as witness to violence, to faith and the deep knowledge of what it means to thrive. “Mokaya,” a poem composed of twelve stanzas that name and speak for her people, begins: “I am woman / and I celebrate every crease of my body / each tiny atom that composes me / where my hopes and doubts flow / All my contradictions are marvelous / because they are mine.” In stanza three: “I name myself and speak for all the raped girls / who seek their childhood in a bumblebee’s buzz / and in a palm tree’s sway ///// I speak of the soul / its immortality untouchable by shame or doubt.” In stanza eleven: “I celebrate my sex / and the exquisite shape of my hips / where my lover reclines / I glorify my soul / as well as my inner and outer lips. . . .”
Consider the grounding in the opening lines from “Jesus Never Understood my Grandmother’s Prayers”: “My grandmother never learned Spanish / was afraid of forgetting her gods / was afraid of waking up in the morning / having forgotten the wonders of her lineage.” The poem titled “To Be Zoque is A Privilege” is a blessing, a greeting, to young boys and girls; the common blessing: “for both of you / radiance and wisdom.”
These poems are our cultural seedbank, our nagaul, not secured in a remote vault or sequestered in conservancies, but alive on the page, “[dancing] as if on fire, as if at fiesta.”
In this excerpt from “One day a man,” Sánchez contemplates death without flinching:
“One day
remember this in your prayers
chrysanthemums will cover your mouth
and you will be
a cigarette’s smoke
an atom of silence
and your name shall be erased
Sánchez, who also lived in Barcelona and New York City, observes the common experience of people displaced and marginalized. “We’re All Maroons” observes the black immigrants to Barcelona: “Sometimes I go down La Gran Avenida / or down the Barceloneta or down Las Ramblas / and I see all those Black men / spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage / So all they have left is the drifting / dinghy of their hearts. . . .”
In “Saspalanki’s Children Cry in the Big City,” Sánchez captures the disorientation of Indigenous people experiencing the pressure to earn, to spend, and to meet societal expectations: “We children of Saspalanki cry in the Big City, / break into wild frenzy when we see the rain, / going out to soak ourselves as if we’ve lost our minds, / but here the forest spirits don’t appear.” In closing, she expresses a longing for home and acceptance that is universal:
Here in this land our ancestors gave us
in this land where we can be happy
and never manage
to be somebody.
Sánchez’s intention is for her poetry to not only perpetuate the Mokayan language and culture, but to preserve their lands and lifestyle. The translators note several of the poems in this collection have been adopted as antifracking “anthems” in Chiapas and beyond, appearing on banners at rallies and painted on village buildings. In the poem “What Is It Worth?” Sánchez confronts those who would put a price on their blue sky, their mountains, their “children’s smiles / as they run in the rain.” Sánchez declines, asking “How much money will it take / to cleanse sadness from the soul?”
Translation is a gift of attention, an acknowledgement that what one has to say is worth experiencing in context—in a person’s native language, with all the complexity of that culture’s history and belief systems. It is also an invitation into another world—another world view. In this collection, Mikeas Sánchez offers her words, her womb song, the dreams and desires of the Mokaya—portraits of a people with a culture rich in scent, in ceremony, in sensuality. In “They Say The Mokoyas Will Go Extinct,” Sánchez responds: “. . . we recovered from the terror, / our sacred language sprang from our DNA, / stronger than ever / more Mokayas than ever. Don’t they know / the power of our gods?” Words are seeds, a celebration of identity and as essential to survival as air, as water, as food. These poems are our cultural seedbank, our nagaul, not secured in a remote vault or sequestered in conservancies, but alive on the page, “[dancing] as if on fire, as if at fiesta.”
Nina Burokas is a writer and educator exploring the intersection of art, nature and the human spirit. She lives on Quimper Peninsula, the original territory of the Chemakum People, where she cultivates bird song, words and wonder. An adjunct business instructor at Mendocino College in California, Nina has been a contributing author/editor for five digital business titles.
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems
By Mikeas Sánchez
Translated from Zoque and Spanish by Wendy Call and Shook
ISBN: 978-1-639550203
Milkweed Editions
https://milkweed.org/book/goodsavage
1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55415
Customer Service: orders@milkweed.org
Link to Seedbank Series: https://milkweed.org/seedbank
2024, paperback, 208 pages, $18.00