Mil Cretins

Language Activists | Endangered Language & Poetry in Mexico

The world is home to almost 7,000 languages, but some 90% of them will go extinct in the next 100 years. Isthmus Zapotec, spoken by about 100,000 indigenous Mexicans in Oaxaca, faces a dire threat: fewer and fewer children are learning it, favoring Spanish for a variety of reasons. 

Languages die incredibly quickly; within the span of three generations a language can be entirely gone. There are powerful socioeconomic reasons for abandoning indigenous languages, but often more practical issues contribute equally to their attrition. Imagine not being able to access entertainment in your mother tongue; not being able to read a book or listen to the radio or watch television in it. 

A brave community of Isthmus Zapotec poets and artists refuse to give up in their fight against linguistic attrition—they’re writing in their mother tongue, Diixda—Zapotec, maintaining its vitality and uniqueness in an increasingly homogenous world. Their solution is radical: they are Isthmus Zapotec poets. 

Los Angeles-based artists Ben Rodkin and David Shook are collaborating to document the life and work of contemporary Isthmus Zapotec artists and poets, by producing both a short-subject documentary film and a 5-chapbook set of indigenous Mexican poetry. 

RIP Thomas “T-Man” Daniel Leavines III

28 January 1949 – 16 January 2012

Günter Grass: On Christa Wolf

What had caused so much malicious will to destroy? A text written in the summer of 1979 whose themes were doubt, self-doubt, and the eavesdropping and overt surveillance of Christa Wolf and her husband by the State Security Service of theGDR. From the security of their own desks and intoxicated by the sort of gratuitous courage that seems to flourish in editorial offices like a potted plant, these critics accused her of having been too cowardly to publish her story as soon as she had written it. To do so, claimed Ulrich Greiner, “would surely have been the end of Christa Wolf as a state poet and probably have resulted in exile.” From his safe corner he asserted magnanimously that “she could easily have found shelter in the West.” And Frank Schirrmacher went so far as to accuse her in the plural: “Everyone recognizes that these are sentences from 1989, not 1979.” Neither acknowledged that it also took a decade for Sommerstück (“Summer Piece”), the novel she wrote after “What Remains,” to be published in the GDR.

What a prodigious amount of hypocritical outrage from the pens of journalists who had never been subject to state censorship, but who officiously and opportunistically served the zeitgeist.

Led by powerful and influential newspapers, the press campaign of 1990 continued on, again and again springing back to life. Echoes of it can even be heard in some of her obituaries. It was especially the term Gesinnungsästhetik [an aesthetics based on policial convictions], coined to describe the work of Wolf and many other post-war German authors, that to this day inspires the petty minds that want to lock up literature and its creators in a piece of real estate known as the Ivory Tower. Hard on its heels, the personalized neologism Gutmensch [do-gooder, politically correct person], an expression of the prevailing cheap cynicism, came into circulation and was posthumously applied to Heinrich Böll. At this late date, after Christa Wolf’s death, we should probably not expect that the spokesmen of that bygone campaign might apologize in print, if only to acknowledge the pain their odious behavior caused. They obviously lack the self-doubt that Christa Wolf evinced all her life—in excess, in my opinion.

(via the NYR Blog)

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