Our Word is Our Weapon: Subcomandante Marcos reading His Work in English

Reviewed by Jeff Conant
06.21.05

“The victory of literature: thanks to his undeniable rhetorical and theatrical talents, Subcomandante Marcos has won the battle for public opinion.”
—Octavio Paz

The fables, jokes, anecdotes, and manifestos written by Subcomandante Marcos tell the story of a place between divergent histories—the place where Western colonial and postcolonial history meets the history of popular resistance and the more ancient indigenous history of the Mayan people. Where these histories collide, like weather patterns, a storm front is created that Marcos calls “the wind from below.”

Beginning January 1, 1994, and throughout the ’90s, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) published hundreds of communiqués, letters, speeches, articles, and stories to establish the terms on which their movement sought to bring about change in Mexico and the world. The communiqués were issued either by the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee—General Command (CCRI—CG) of the EZLN—often but not always with Subcomandante Marcos’ signature—or directly from the hand of Marcos. The first communiques were banged out on a battered Olivetti portable typewriter, and through mysterious channels somehow managed to arrive at the offices of Mexican media outlets and in the inboxes of first generation cyberactivists from Chilangolandia to Manhatitlán. Later, with the recognition of his needs as ghostwriter for the indigenous uprising in Chiapas, Marcos received a laptop and printer. Still without direct access to the information highway, the messages were carried out of the jungle on foot and published in the San Cristóbal’s weekly resistance rag, El Tiempo, before they reached the national dailies and the internet lists where they proliferated.

The texts have been available in English for years, thanks to many desktop-published pamphlets and several full-length books, including Our Word Is Our Weapon, published by Seven Stories Press in 2001. Thanks to the version just released on CD, we now have the voice as well.

The readings are powerful and affecting, and go some distance towards answering the question that Marcos himself poses: “What is it that the Zapatistas want?” Anyone wondering the same thing, or wanting insight into the deep ecology of the global justice movement, or even just ever so slightly curious about one of the most startling and articulate social struggles of our time, would do well to listen to this voice. Though lamentably brief—only four speeches—this is our first chance to hear Marcos in English. Hopefully we can expect more of these readings in the future.

I’ve heard Marcos speak on several occasions, in a strong and fluid Spanish, in person or over the radio. From behind the ski mask the voice contains a passion and a directness, along with a prankster’s deprecating humor and barbed wit, that strike chords of revolution and poetry, of a command over language that wins hearts and minds. Hearing his voice in English—slow, hesitant, occasionally stumbling—a vulnerability comes through that, more than inspiring righteous outrage at the oppressive system Marcos repeatedly denounces, evokes an almost bittersweet sense of curiosity. The voice and the rhetoric invite solidarity—not a militant, macho solidarity, as one might expect from a man wearing a ski mask and shouldering an automatic rifle, but a more humble, human solidarity.
Answering the question, “What do the Zapatistas want?” Marcos tells the story “To Plant the Tree of Tomorrow.” The story is about a crazy man who planted trees for tomorrow, rather than crops for today. The crazy man was laughed at and misunderstood until he died, until, a generation later, when “a group of boys and girls went out for a walk and found a place filled with huge trees, with thousands of birds living in them, and their great branches giving shade from the heat and shelter from the rain. Indeed, they found an entire mountainside dense with trees.”

Marcos’ communiqués serve at once to counter the propaganda of the Mexican government and the global neoliberal spin machine, and to reveal the humanity of the indigenous uprising in Chiapas. Appearing in an absurd variety of forms and styles—mock travel brochures, childrens’ tales, myths, ballads, manifestos, literary imitations, and military discourses—the communiqués have kept the Zapatista struggle moving in and out of the media spotlight in a political climate which easily does away with less articulate players. They have also brought a particularly Mexican brand of surrealism to the world’s attention, one which forces us to wonder which is the real reality: the subterranean reality of Indian women running through the jungle with ski masks and AK-47s; or the glossy, aboveground reality of the stock market and the global banking system, where virtual trading in noncommodities trades wealth for hunger. In dialects that mock old world Spanish and new world street slang, the communiqués have managed, in their own diversity of voices, to create a model for “a world in which many worlds fit.”

By articulating the indigenous position in a language which at once illuminates the terms of the ancient struggle—giving voice to the old gods and the native wisdom—and communicates to academics, journalists, and a popular audience, Marcos manages to bring life to the local histories and make them relevant on a global scale.

History is made by telling stories as you go. One of the hallmarks of totalitarian or official history is that it vigorously presents itself as The One Truth, The One Story. Marcos understands well the importance of creating an alternative discourse, of allowing a diversity of voices to speak. He reminds us, as the titles of the CD and the book that preceded it echo, that the word is a weapon. This weapon is the real history, because it is the history of everyone at once—messy, inharmonious, violent, and beautifully human.