In the beginnings of the 1990s the dramatist and actor Petrona de la Cruz Cruz founded FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya), an organisation for Maya women who make use of theatre as an educational and...
The writer and researcher Manuel Bolom Pale belongs to the Tsotsil people, the largest indigenous group in Mexico’s southernmost state Chiapas. “Writing in Tsotsil means reviving and reconnecting with...
“Globalization is without a doubt a flood that will entomb more than half the languages of the world under water during the twenty-first century,” writes Carles Torner, a Catalonian author and the...
According to the UN more than one million Uyghurs are detained in so called re-education camps in the Xinjiang province in North Eastern China. Their crime is that they speak the ‘wrong’ language and...
Writers all over the world are today subjected to daily threats for practicing their basic human rights to freely express what they want in whichever language they choose. During her term of office...
The right to use the Kurdish language has been a major controversy in Turkey all through the Republic’s existence. Ciwanmerd Kulek belongs to the younger generation of Kurdish writers who out of...
How far do our words travel? This is the question that author Simona Škrabec asks in her essay about the importance of small, marginal, and “invisible” languages. She starts off in Chiapas at a three...
Alfred Msdala is a poet, critic, and currently the chairperson of PEN Malawi. During his term as chairperson, PEN Malawi has established a translation committee with the aim of translating important...
What is it to be Jts’ibajom te jbats’I k’optik – meaning, what is it to be a writer writing in one’s indigenous language? Does it entail a certain responsibility? Resistance? Defense? Taking a stand...
Enriqueta Lunez, born in Chiapas in Mexico in 1981, is a poet and writer who belongs to the new generation of Tsotsil writers in the country writing in Tsotsil instead of Spanish. Her poems revolve...
Text: Enriqueta Lunez
October 18 2019
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