Writing in an endangered language to honor and challenge traditions

This makes the suppression of the Zoque language all the more painful. Sánchez’s mother spoke no Spanish at all, and her father, who she says was “less afraid of speaking poorly,” spoke only a little. But Sánchez started picking it up at home from older siblings, and began studying it when she went to school. She grew up amid institutional and cultural pressures that discouraged the use of indigenous languages, and her poems often address the forces exerted against her language and identity. In ‘Jesus Never Understood My Grandmother’s Prayers’ she writes:

The Archangel Michael never listened to her
my grandmother’s prayers were sometimes blasphemous
jukis’tyt she said and the pain stopped
patsoke she shouted and time passed under her bed

Sánchez’s first attempts at written poetry were in Spanish. While studying education at a university in the nearby state of Tabasco, she accidentally joined a writing group, thinking it was a reading group. Poetry turned out to be a natural fit, perhaps because it was part of her heritage. In a 2021 essay for World Literature Today Sánchez notes how poetry is part of the “most solemn rituals of the Zoque people, such as the call for rain, dancing to ask for bountiful harvests, prayers to the mountains, and healing the sick.” As a child, she occasionally memorized verses she heard from her grandfather, a healer.

Since then, she has devoted much of her energy to promoting the use of Zoque, working as a bilingual radio host and developing curriculum for primary school students in the Zoque language. But her writing is an important contribution in itself. Zoque is an ancient language, but as such contains no surviving written tradition. A standardized Zoque spelling is even now being defined and solidified by linguists as writers, such as Sánchez, come to use it. Many of the poems in “How to Be a Good Savage” have been significantly updated from previous iterations, largely because the written Zoque itself is still being updated. This is no small feat, as the differences between variations of the language spoken between one Zoque community and another can be more drastic than the differences between, say, Spanish spoken in Mexico and Argentina.

‘How to Be a Good Savage’ is therefore an important work in more ways than one. It is the first Zoque entry in Milkweed’s Seedbank series, a collection of writings, primarily by indigenous authors, intended to protect the diversity of human language. The goal of the project is to “publish books that preserve or introduce different and in some cases disappearing modes of existence in the world,” says Daniel Slager, the publisher at Milkweed who created the series.

In “Mokaya,” Sánchez writes, “I had my own gods who taught me to curse/with my tongue gagged and wounded.” Despite the damage that centuries of oppression have done to her language, Sánchez’s poetry can clearly stand alone. But by putting writing in the Zoque language—literally and figuratively—on equal footing with English and Spanish, How to Be a Good Savage may be a small step toward repairing the damage.