Yásnaya Elena A. Gil: "Mexican literature has to be multilingual or it cannot be called Mexican"

Yásnaya Elena A. Gil during the Hay Festival in Querétaro, in September 2019 DANIEL MORDZINSKI

The Mixe linguist Yásnaya Elena A. Gil is, as historian Federico Navarrete describes her, "one of the most original and interesting thinkers of contemporary Mexico."

The Almadia publishing house recently published her new book,

Ää: Manifests on linguistic diversity

, a compilation of her best essays in Spanish in which the author painstakingly destroys all racist discourses against indigenous languages, and explains in detail all the cognitive universes that they are lost each time one of those languages ​​becomes extinct.

"Our languages ​​do not die alone, our languages ​​are killed," he said in a 2019 speech, included in the book.

"How are we going to strengthen our languages ​​when they kill those who speak them, silence them and disappear them?"

the writer pointed out.

The author was born in 1981 in Oaxaca and, after studying and working for a few years in Mexico City, she returned in 2015 to live in her town of Ayutla.

From there he spoke with El PAÍS about the linguistic violence that hides behind Mexican nationalism, or about the challenges to imagine a truly multilingual Mexico in which Mixe or Nahuatl are equally important to English or French.

Question.

Many of the reflections in this book come from conversations with your grandmother.

Who was she and how did she influence your way of seeing linguistics?

Reply.

I was born in Ayutla and was raised by my mother, my grandmother, my grandparents and my uncles.

It was a much more communal upbringing, so my grandmother was a fundamental person in my life, and she had a very strong passion for words.

She had a very high mixe register: she was sought out to give speeches or in ritual situations to pass the word.

She spoke a very poetic mixe.

Also, his brother studied Latin, so he knew a lot about Latin and Mixe, but not Spanish.

My grandmother sang in Latin and prayed in Latin, but she was very active in the Mixe language.

Many of my friends, who spoke to him in Spanish, were scolded.

He had a great passion for words and also for writing.

For my grandmother it was very important that I learn Spanish later, it seemed very important to speak Mixe for one more thing of defense.

Q.

A key idea of ​​your new book could be summarized in this sentence: "We sacrifice Mexico for the sake of creating the idea of ​​Mexico."

How is it that the Mexican nation-state project has gone against linguistic diversity?

A.

My initial question in writing was a very simple question: Why is it precisely at this moment in history that languages ​​are being lost in such an amazing way?

At a speed never seen before.

One answer that I was not satisfied with is that it was the fault of globalization.

I was not satisfied because, if it were globalization, languages ​​like Danish, which has a quarter of the speakers of Yoruba (which is an indigenous language in Africa), would lose speakers at the same rate.

But why is Yoruba losing so many speakers so fast and Danish not?

I realized that this was more related to the construction of States.

Never before in human history has the world been fragmented into 200 states, and there are 6,000 languages ​​in the world, or about 6,000 nations.

And the idea of ​​the nation-state has a very strong ideological component and is to make you believe that a state is also a single nation.

Hence the idea that we sacrifice Mexico, because it gives the idea that we are a single nation, and it has never been like that.

So, if those peoples were encapsulated within these little boxes, never before has the world been controlled so much as in boxes and borders.

We do not share any cultural trait all Mexicans.

Being Mexican is a legal status, but they want to convince you that it is also an identity and cultural status.

That is why the Dane is not at risk: it doesn't matter that they are so few, what matters is that they have a State behind them, an Army, a Navy, a construction of the nation-state.

Q.

In various parts of the book you speak of the violence of that nation-state when it does not provide translators into indigenous languages ​​in the health system.

Have you seen this continue during the pandemic?

A.

Yes. I recently wrote some thoughts on the fears of seniors in my community.

One of the biggest fears was that if they had to go to a hospital, they would not be able to have an interpreter to bring themselves.

Culturally, the idea of ​​dying without company, and without someone speaking words to you in your language, is very violent.

Obviously, we know that we are not a priority for the health system, which in itself is very precarious in Oaxaca.

The communication of symptoms is a fundamental part of the diagnosis, therefore, you cannot exercise your right to health and your human right to life without linguistic rights.

And the same goes for the right to due process in the judicial system.

And the same with the right to education.

Linguistic rights make it possible to enjoy human rights: they are also human rights.

Q.

In the book there are two fundamental criticisms: you are concerned about discrimination against indigenous languages, but also about the romanticization of indigenous languages.

How is the alternate path that does not romanticize or discriminate?

R.

Those are, in a way, two sides of the same coin: because in romanticization one goes from the 'myth of the savage' to the 'myth of the good savage'.

But in the end, wild.

I think that romanticization makes people not approach [languages], and that it seems like a matter for anthropologists or hippies who are interested in languages.

That is not a relationship of respect and equals.

In the end, you have to understand that an indigenous language, the only thing that makes it an indigenous language, is a position in history, it is a political issue and not a linguistic issue.

They must be seen as equals, with all the power that was denied them.

On the other hand, in colonial times you could, for example, have a chair at the Pontifical University of Mexico in Nahuatl or Otomí.

It was perfectly possible.

Or you could follow a judicial process entirely in Zapotec.

And the first books of this continent were in these languages ​​and there was much greater production of books in indigenous languages.

That is now unthinkable.

But you see that this was perfectly possible, and that it is possible to create multilingual societies.

These multilingual societies would make possible the construction of a society with more intercultural understanding and greater peace.

The best way to understand others is by learning their language.

P.

In fact, the book insists a lot on defending linguistic diversity because it allows us to expand the ways of understanding the world.

A.

Yes, I am very interested in that.

I'm going to make a somewhat crude comparison: let's imagine that I am a biologist and I arrive in a world in which all birds are blue.

You could say that an inherent characteristic of being a bird is being blue.

But what if what happened was that all the diversity of colors of birds that existed before was extinguished?

My conclusion would be wrong.

Likewise, the conclusions that we draw in the future about human language will be that they are all very similar languages: hegemonic languages ​​that come from the same family, because almost all are Indo-European.

Then I'm going to have the wrong conclusions about language, about human capacity for thought.

That extinction, as a linguist, worries me.

Every time we describe something in other languages, we realize the different possibilities.

For example, there are different metaphors to describe time.

Or the possibilities of articulating.

In Bantu languages ​​they do this [makes the sound of a kiss], and that click is a consonant.

But even though I am very sorry for these losses of metaphors or articulations, now I care more about speakers than languages.

Because if a language disappears, that is a symptom that there was violence against those who speak it.

Q.

One of your essays defends the thesis: “indigenous literature does not exist” Why does it not exist and how can we imagine a publishing industry in which it exists?

R.

Well, I do not want to romanticize the colonial era, because it was terrible: we lost more than half of our population between famines and wars.

But on the linguistic side, the Spanish had an obsession with imposing their religion but not their language.

How many people spoke Spanish then?

Almost nobody.

Evangelization, for example, was done in Nahuatl or Latin.

We met the Latin characters in Nahuatl, not in Spanish.

The lingua franca was Nahuatl.

The most logical and practical thing is that the Mexican State would have chosen that language, but very strangely they decided to impose the language of a very small minority, that of the Creoles who spoke Spanish.

But at that time it is possible to see that it was being printed in many languages.

The first Zapotec grammar was published eight years before the first English grammar.

Now, however, it is very rare to see books in Mixe.

Saying that indigenous literature does not exist was more like a provocation to say that we cannot make a generalization in linguistics, because there are 11 linguistic families that are very different from each other.

If we don't make that generalization with Persian and Spanish, why do we make it with Mixe and Tarahumara?

Mexican literature has to be multilingual or it cannot be called Mexican.

Because the Mexican reality is multilingual.

Q.

Most of the essays in the book were written between 2011 and 2015. Have you seen anything different in the new López Obrador government regarding the handling of indigenous languages?

A.

I feel that there is still no understanding of this problem.

I think it is a structural issue and not so much of one government or another.

It is believed that working for languages ​​is holding a poetry contest and that it does not involve the right to autonomy.

The linguistic is very political, it goes through the defense of autonomy, how your educational system or your judicial system operates.

And there has not been a greater will of the Government, neither of the left nor of the right, to give greater autonomy.

They are very afraid: they begin to say "Mexico is going to be balkanized."

And Mexican nationalism is very strong, and it crosses to the left and to the right.

So no, there is no change to make the state go multilingual.

The Administration should be multilingual not only in the Ministry of Culture but in everything: Finance, the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Communications, the Ministry of Agriculture.

Just as a gender perspective has to cut through everything, so a linguistic perspective has to cut through everything.