Cultural Perspectivas
By Tim Hazell, Nov 10, 2006

Native artistry, fleeting grace

“The dead can never truly die, they die only if we forget them.” 

—María Antonieta Sanchez de Escamilla, Puebla City, 1989 

Native oral and written traditions exhibit parallel developments of major themes, personal expressions and perspectives throughout the Americas. Fundamental human emotions were revealed in religious poetry, philosophy and humanism, popular songs, bawdy entertainment and theater. Cultures that evolved in complete isolation have left us rich chronicles documenting the fragility of life and beauty’s transience. Indigenous tribes and great civilizations shared the view that struggles for existence must be juxtaposed against nature’s awesome power and omnipotence. Against overwhelming odds, challenged and segregated communities produced works reflecting wonder, terror, humility and dogged perseverance, as the following example shows: 


We only come to sleep,
we only come to dream,
each spring of the grass, 
that is how our making is,
it is not true, it is not true that 
we came to live on the earth,
it comes and sprouts, it comes 
and our heart opens corollas,
our body gives out some flowers, 
it wilts!

Aztec poetry mirrored concerns for family life, productive and creative interactions with others in society and respect for all age groups. The elderly were revered for their accumulated wisdom. Losses of physical potency were balanced by the hard-won fruits of maturity and accomplishment. The Aztecs were the last inheritors of 2,000 years of refinement and aesthetics, and their reverence for natural phenomena and a pantheon of gods was expressed in vigorous and sophisticated verse. Effective communication skills were the best means for exchanging information and innovation in the preindustrial world of theocratic empires, often in the forum of the open-air marketplace. Members of the nobility and the Potchteca class of merchant traders were frequently multilingual. For the common people, poetry and prose, legend and myth passed down through oral traditions that became sources of joy and consolation. 

Each day for the Nahua people was a rehearsal for the afterlife. Most prominent among the veintenas, festivals honoring gods during the 18-month Aztec year, were the two feast days of Miccailhuitontli, “the Little Dead Ones,” and Miccailhuitl, “the Adult Dead.” Flowers and fruit were gathered, turkeys and dogs plucked and prepared for feasting. 

Altars, elaborate ceremonies, dancing, songs and sacrifices filled the next 20 days of the Aztec month. Aztec fiestas and Catholic All Souls’ and All Saints’ Days, concepts that overlapped, were consolidated into the religious holiday and time of ancestor remembrance that is now a Mexican tradition from October 31 to November 2. Festivities, including the elaborate depiction of skeletons involved in everyday activities, are never macabre but a reaffirmation of life and a triumphant snub against the inevitability of its passing.

Poetry for native peoples represented a form of immortality. They shared the common experience of being Indians, stretched across thousands of miles and inhabiting every climatic region. Cruel and violent warfare, militaristic regimes and harsh gods propitiated with human hearts have given rise to popular stereotypes. Native literature seen in its true historical and cultural context comes as a surprise. Reflective motifs unite tribes and idioms. The elusiveness of truth and delight in the delicacy of flowers and feathers, objects that represented grace in the process of slipping away, recur time and time again. The Aztecs referred to changing seasons, spring’s fecundity, summer planting, fall’s harvest and winter’s icy blast howling over Mexico’s central plateau. 

These poems in English and Spanish, translated from Nahuatl, honor those who have crossed over into the realm of light. They express doubts about the hereafter, fear of the rite of passage that awaits all of us and tenacious resolve to enjoy our earthly garden of delights while we can. Spoken and written literary forms that survive represent the bedrock of societies that flourished as extensions of nature. Language was the instrument of invocation and divination. Native literature becomes high art, more tantalizing and impenetrable as we fall under its spell. 



From Within the Heavens

From within the heavens they come, the beautiful flowers, the beautiful songs, but our yearning spoils them, our inventiveness makes them lose their fragrance, although not those of the Chichimec prince Tecayehuatzin. With his, rejoice! Friendship is a shower of precious flowers. White tufts of heron feathers are woven with precious red flowers, among the branches of the trees under which stroll and sip the lords and nobles. Your beautiful song is a golden wood thrush, most beautiful. You raise it up. You are in a field of flowers. Among the flowery bushes you sing. Are you perchance a precious bird of the Giver of Life? Perchance you have spoken with God? 



We stroll over the flowery earth. No one here can do away with the flowers and the songs, they will endure in the house of the Giver of Life. Earth is the region of the fleeting moment. Is it also thus in the Place Where in Some Way One Lives? Is one happy there? Is there friendship? Or is it only here on earth we come to know our faces?



—Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, English translation by Catherine Fountain

Fleeting Life
I begin the song, I try to take 
your flowers, author of life. 
Already we are playing our 
flowered drums. 
This is our duty on the earth. 
Flowers that cannot be taken, 
songs that cannot be taken 
to the Realm of Mystery! 
We go completely: no one 
will remain on earth. 
One day at least, oh my friends, 
we must leave our flowers, 
our songs. 
We must leave the earth, 
which remains.
Let us enjoy ourselves, friends, 
let us enjoy ourselves!

—Nezahualcoyotl



Tim Hazell is an interdisciplinary artist in the areas of painting, music, theater, education, writing and research. He is collaborating with composer Doug Robinson on a new chamber music work, “A Forest of the Americas.” See promusicasma.com for more information under “premieres.”