Between Spanish and Zoque: Poetry and Translation in Mikeas Sánchez Faced With Violence Against Women and Culture

Abstract

In her book Mojk’jäyä Mokaya (2013), Mikeas Sánchez shows the discursive violence that affects the condition of being a woman and indigenous. It is a double domination inscribed in the body and speech and in the space of the translation: as indigenous, the violence of having been named in the hegemonic Spanish of the mestizo and criollo Mexico; as a woman, limited by the looks, the desires and bodies of men. Before that reality, the poet recovers the vision of the zoque world to resignify the role of women, presenting an idea of translation that works on the awareness of the fact that “na­ming things” is to give oneself a body and to recognize an origin, pronounced against the domina­tion exercised by the word of the others. Within the framework of the postcolonial studies that have evidenced the intellectual and epistemic dependence that still exists in Latin American theory, this work attempts to approach the translation praxis as a privileged space to intervene on the colonial mechanisms that impact on the culture and language.