José Vicente Anaya: from Híkuri (Peyote), some excerpts from a masterwork of Infrarealism

Translation from Spanish by Joshua Pollock

[Reprinted from publication by The Operating System with permission of the author]

I come across thousands of cloudy mirrors
and the reflection peers back fractured


I WILL BE THE WORLD’S ABCESS
            black angel of our darkness
            plumed serpent
            devil’s advocate



I woke up uttering: ALL POETS ARE THE SAME



EN ESTE INFIERNO                      (Vallejo)                  thrashed heart
in this hell                                          (Ginsberg)              ulcerated saintliness
in der hiesigen hölle                        (Hölderlin)              scorned vision
dans cet enfer                                    (Rimbaud)              rotten flesh



no more wagging broken fingers at Pound,
he was politically mistaken, just like Mayakovsky /
assassinations
manipulated in the backrooms of Political Power and
the poets immolated
because they actualized THE NEW LIFE / they
never executed the innocent
or oversaw the pecking beaks of buzzards
(true UTOPIA was never achieved, which is
why they sacrificed themselves to the poem)
and now their enduring offenses are absolved



THEY BROKE FREE FROM OBJECTIVITY
leaving messages
to be deciphered by free-spirits
love’s ship has foundered . . .                 
I have tried to write Paradise . . .




HERE!                        we should make                       PARADISE!



On Superhighways we hallucinate
in order to carry on living, Victor,
let’s build an anti-neutron bomb
that leaves life standing
demolishing suffocating buildings /
new machines working for everyone
so that time raises us
from joy
to Art
to joy / and
HUMANity governs without government



/ FEAR RELEGATED TO A FORGOTTEN RELIQUARY /



/ FEAR RELEGATED TO A FORGOTTEN RELIQUARY /



THE PATHS WE TAKE



ENDLESS SPIRALS



TOWARDS TOTAL LOVE




SCORCHING SUN SHINES FORTH / LOVE REBORN



and at dusk, without rain,
a rainbow
with a thousand shades of green
that shimmer
twinkling



In the Zone of the Tropic of Cancer



at night in the pine-tree wilderness
of your eyes, Ruth, I see miniscule stars
orbiting
and we penetrate another firmament (Himmelszelt)



I BECOME WATER



mixed with water



while you sail
the sea of your memory
to see a girl from a naïve landscape (. . .)
there are ancient traces on my face too



lovers that flee / fleetingness in love

[Translator’s Note.  Alongside Roberto Bolaño and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, José Vicente Anaya was one of the founders of Infrarealism in Mexico in the 1970s. Infrarealism was a post-communist avant-garde movement that existed in opposition to a complacent Mexican literary status quo. The movement is mainly known from Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, in which he changed the name Infrarealism to “visceral realism.” I mention this, but also want to add that the discourse surrounding Infrarealism has been completely Bolañocentric despite the fact that Anaya is easily an equally if not more interesting poet. Hopefully sometime soon we will see a more complete study of the Infrarealists.

After Infrarealism dissolved as a coherent milieu José Vicente Anaya traveled around Mexico, going back to his native Chihuahua where he connected with Rarámuri culture and partook in peyote ceremonies. Híkuri—which means “peyote” in Rarámuri—was born out of this experience. Written in 1978 and awarded the Plural Prize in 1980, it wasn’t published until 1987.

Híkuri is an outlier in Mexican poetry; it is a poem that has been systematically excluded from anthologies and critical discourse (until the recent publication of Caminatas nocturnas—a collection of essays about Híkuri), instead thriving as a subterranean cult classic. With Híkuri, Anaya charts a transformative journey inwards, towards a psychedelic convergence of inside/outside, male/female, past/present, self/other. The poem is multilingual: in addition to the quotes in German, English, and French included in this excerpt, the indigenous Rarámuri language is used throughout in the form of ritualistic shamanic chants.

While Anaya is clearly engaging with modernist poets, the linguistic estrangement created by the Rarámuri and the psychedelic imagery, along with references to his ancestors and their dead, suggest a return to an ancient and nearly lost way of thinking—a utopian alternative to Euro-American colonial modernity. Anaya is critical of industrial civilization as a destructive force that represses the individual and reduces autonomous cultures to ruins. He dedicates his poem to “all those who have shouted premonitory poems, and have been condemned as: paranoid/schizophrenics/visionaries/despised/rebels;” he “stands with the dead in their lost causes” just as he stands with all of the unconquered, with all outsiders. The writer and critic Heriberto Yépez has written, “for Anaya, poetry is revelation, a sacred practice against brainwashing and lobotomy,” and I think that is exactly what we need right now.