Editor’s note: Vacation, business travel, migrant labor, language study, study abroad, international marriage, immigration—many of us have such experiences of crossing national borders, and there are many immigrants living in our country. Ilda examines the emigrant sensibility we will need in order to live equally and peacefully in the age of globalization. This series is supported by the Korea Press Foundation’s Press Promotion Fund.

 

Another world, and a language not Spanish

 

I had come to Xela to study Spanish, but as time passed, I ended up learning not Spanish but a different language. That meant that I entered a world in another dimension.

 

I met Lupe at a café. Lupe was a woman in her 30s who painted and did massage therapy. Compared to the other people I met in Guatemala, she was very open-minded and easy to talk to. She was a talented and brave person who hadn’t majored in art and had started painting at a relatively late age, yet had already had several exhibitions. Through her, I met many people who made music, painted, or studied humanities, and started to participate in their big and small events.

 

▲ Artist Lupe. She utilized the Maya ceremony mindset as a resistance and an alternative to Western material civilization. ©Luna

Lupe lived in a relatively quiet part of Xela’s downtown. If you opened her main gate and stepped in, you would see a wide hillside tract similar to a [traditional Korean] mountain village. Within it, there was a large house where Lupe’s family lived, and her relatives in similar houses. It was a kind of family village, and had no trace of the colonial style.

 

“That’s my uncle’s house, the one next to it is my aunt’s, the one next to that is my cousin’s. Let’s go say hello.”

 

I thought Lupe’s artwork might have been inspired by this communal environment. Paintings of Xela’s alleys and traditional houses, some representational and many abstract. It occurred to me that her unique love of art and spirituality must have been birthed by this environment. And that it had also developed out of a rebellion to this same environment.

 

“This is the land that has been designated for me. I have to build my own small house, but I don’t have enough money yet. I could cook and eat what I wanted without having to worry about my mother’s feelings, fill it with my own furniture, make an altar... I hope that many of my paintings sell at the next exhibition.”

 

But it didn’t seem like she was saving up the money from her sold artwork to build a house. One day she invited me to a really special activity.

 

 “Luna, do you want to go to a Mayan ceremony?”

 

As I had participated in an Apache ceremony in Mexico a few months before and had had my eyes opened to Native American ceremonies, I happily accepted the offer.

 

If you ask me what the Mayan ceremony is...

 

That night, we took a bus for about an hour along a bumpy mountain road and arrived at a village called Momostenango. A group of natives, carrying large bundles on their backs and wearing thick clothing, got into a delivery van without speaking. Without introducing ourselves, we followed these strangers, silently climbing the dark mountain road with only the moonlight and lanterns to guide us. Far from wearing hiking clothes and backpacks, they were wearing Momostenango’s traditional clothes and were shifting the boxes they carried from shoulder to shoulder as they walked. A few women even climbed the mountain in traditional skirts and sandals.

 

▲ A Mayan ceremony, which began at the mountaintop altar ©Luna

Finally, after 3-4 hours, we reached an altar at the top of the mountain. People got down on their knees and began to pray in a language that I didn’t understand.

 

“It’s the K’iche language. It’s what our Mayan ancestors spoke and the everyday language of the people in this area.”

 

Countless white candles, yellow candles, red candles, blue candles, black candles, solid objects emitting unknown scents, plants like rosemary and pine needles, candy, chocolate, sugar, rum, and so on were thrown into the fire on the altar, and the people continued to pray in a mix of Spanish and K’iche. Not only could I hardly understand a word they were saying, I couldn’t understand their behavior. Throwing so many things into a fire in such a poor country, and also secretly building such a large fire at the top of a mountain...

 

But what I really wouldn’t have guessed was the fact that when Lupe invited me to a Mayan ceremony again a few months later, I followed along again.

 

The priest that held the second ceremony was a woman of about my age who wasn’t fluent in K’iche. It was in a neighborhood in Xela and all of the participants were Lupe’s fellow artists, whom I knew. This meant I had a chance to understand the ceremony in more comfort and a friendlier atmosphere: the order in which the ceremony progresses, the meaning of each offering and the part of the natural world with which its energy is in harmony, the configuration of the Mayan gods and calendar, the prayers made by the participants, and why they spend time and money to participate secretly in this event.

 

“Please show me my life’s mission more clearly. I want to continue making music. Help me.”

“Please help my mother forget her sadness and recover her health.”

“Make my cousin pay me back the 50 quetzal soon. I really need the money.”

“I came here after arguing with my partner, who couldn’t understand why I am participating in this ceremony. Please sweep away my negative energy. I apologize to everyone for coming to this place with angry energy.”

 

“Please rid my departed grandmother of the worries for her children that she must have held onto until the end.”

 

As I participated in more ceremonies, this mentality also seeped into me. I realized that if saving up what you have, using it for “practical” purposes, and then repeating the process is called capitalist economic activity, the ceremony’s wastefulness should be labeled a step in the other direction, and its lavish squandering is a donation and a sacrifice.

 

If someone were to ask me what the Mayan ceremony is, I would answer, simply, that it’s the idea that we must respect the natural energy that surrounds us and live each day in peace with it in order to be safe and happy.

 

▲ Listening to Mayan priest Virginia describing Mayan customs while we look at a photo album of her early years. ©Luna

“Let’s pray for the Koreans who died in the war”

 

One day Angel, one of the Mayan priests, asked about my family. I told him that my father was born in North Korea, that when he was 13 years old and the war broke out, he went south with his father and brothers, and they settled in Seoul after many difficulties, and that they never found out what happened to the mother and sisters they had left behind.

 

I explained that this story was not unique to our family but a history that all Koreans had suffered, and that our relatively recent experiences of colonization and civil war made modern Korean history into such a disaster that everyone found it too difficult to try to decide who had done right and who had done wrong, and there were many people who didn’t pay attention to whether war would break out again or if reunification would happen.

 

When I finished by saying that in order not to pass on their poverty and hunger to their children, my parents’ generation had brought prosperity to South Korea by working incredibly long hours, but even now they were desperately worried about their children falling into poverty, Angel seemed shocked.

 

“Luna, write down the names of your father, mother, paternal grandparents, and maternal grandparents here. We have to pray for your family members. And let’s pray for the Koreans who died in the war.”

 

Angel taught me an important lesson about making a relationship with the dead: remember them. What makes them sad is being forgotten. He said that by burning the things that they like, here and in this way, we remember them and make them happy. The more sadness their lives contained, the more we have to remember them.

 

▲ The dawn that comes at the end of a dark night of ceremony always seems to have something mysterious about it ©Luna

People seeking the Mayan spirit of the pre-colonial era

 

From that time I began to think about my family history and Koreans’ roots, which I had hardly ever given serious thought to before. And many things began to happen. I started to listen to Korean folk music in my room, and Lupe said approvingly that it was similar to Spanish flamenco music. Out of a wish to wake up every part of myself that had asleep, from my head to my toes, I started going to a yoga academy Xela.

 

There, I became connected with yet more communities. These communities were groups with no ties to Guatemala’s traditions; for example, an Indian guru-led meditation groups or a group for what could be called “esotericism.” Some people that I met in that place were not welcoming towards other groups, though others were friendly and aspired towards harmony.

 

“In order to become a seed for other people, I first have to know what light is.”

 

That is what my teacher, who advocated harmony, taught me. He wanted to learn about Asian spirituality, especially Buddhism and Confucianism, from me. He pointed out that there is similarity between Mayan spirituality and Asian spirituality.

 

Compared with the leaders of other religions, Mayan priests are very down-to-earth and don’t care much about religious precepts. I’ve seen numerous priests who love alcohol or young women. Some accept money to perform rites to pray for harm to others, and others earn a huge sum of money in return for their ceremonies. Of course, there are also many renowned priests who are terribly poor.

 

Some priests are kind of social activists, claiming that their people should regain the harmony with nature and happiness of the pre-colonial period, reflecting the spirit of Maya, just like the community that I entered had done. Lupe and her friends in their 20s and 30s tend to take the spirit behind Mayan ceremonies as an alternative to Western materialism. One young priest wrote a rap in K’iche against the Western culture that neglects life’s essence, and covered all walls in the city with graffiti about Mayan ancestors and the Mayan spirit every night.

 

▲ A pleasant meal with Momostenango’s Mayan priests. Mayan priests are very simple and ordinary ©Luna

Indigenous people are losing their tribal languages as a result of discrimination

 

In the meantime, most Guatemalans know less about Maya’s ceremonies and calendar than I do. Some are even hostile towards these things. They once mockingly asked if I [as someone who had studied these things] could show them some magic. It was an entirely new experience for me as someone who had lived in a society where ethnocentrism is considered interchangeable with the conservative right wing.

 

Half of the entire Guatemalan population are native peoples; this group consists of 20 to 30 tribes that each have their own language. K’iche people, to look at one example, use their language only when they are with their family, and when meeting people from outside their area or when in the workplace, the y speak in Spanish. This means that they are bilingual.

 

Today, a number of K’iche people don’t teach their children their language, and have them speak only in Spanish even at home. To them, being bilingual means that you’re a native K’iche person and are thus subject to extreme discrimination in any kind of formal situation. Indeed, many K’iche people I know don’t know how to speak K’iche. Angel doesn’t. His parents know the language but Angel only knows a few words. He has always regretted that he had no chance to learn it and has studied it little by little through ceremony prayers. 

 

Many of my friends from Western countries as well as Guatemala want to know about Asia’s religions and spirituality. To my knowledge, Asia’s spirituality was exported to Western society and incorporated with other cultural elements and became a sort of New Age thing that was then imported back by us. Given that it has been thus filtered through the West, it’s no wonder that it is so capitalism-friendly. And once it comes into ultra-competitive Korea, needless to say, its commercialism doubles.

 

But I’m not sure how meaningful it would be at this time to seek our own essential nature and roots that have not been tainted. I feel both proud of and sad about Koreans’ nurtured talent of transforming [at the cost of losing our roots] at an incredibly fast rate. [Translated by Marilyn Hook] 

 

*Original Article: http://ildaro.com/7265 Published: Published: October 20, 2015

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