The chattering fills every window now. The squeaks and trilling squabbles layer into the whistling rhythms and chirps, the syllables each too strangely accented to write out precisely. There appear to be more birds in the boughs now, bursting from their winter hiding onto the human hiding that has taken hold in the present public health crisis. The flocks of bugs are thinner this spring. From early morning through the night the birds—especially small and swift ones—hold dominion in the dappled blue passes between the leafy green and crimson. Even brightly flamboyant ones like the scarlet tanager are bolder in their appearances, darting from the trees into the open skyline while others whistle in envy and admiration. Joining them are sightings of the flicker-winged redstart and the rushlight-necked oriole, rarer birds in previous years. Even the usually immovable solemnity of the ravens and crows has been pushed from its high perches by these impetuous songbirds.

I wrote those words in the depths of last April, when cases of the coronavirus were suddenly rapidly escalating, when it was still largely unclear how the virus transmits (when we were still disinfecting our groceries and scarcely leaving the house, still hopeful that with a few weeks of intensive isolation the virus might soon run out of vectors), when each exit from our home felt like a walk into an abyss, a world in which only the birds felt at home. In Chicago it was cold then, but the migratory songbirds had started to come through with a brightness and warmth that was all their own. It was unclear if there really were more birds in the trees or if I was just noticing more of them because there were fewer people out to draw my attention.

I decided that there had to be more birds, because even the ravens and crows—usually regnant in the rooftops and trees around our house—seemed less confident in their perches. The emerging spring raged in the voices of birds I'd never seen or heard before. Most startling for me, and maybe for the ravens and crows too, was the return of the whip-poor-will. You may know that the whip-poor-will is a night hunter, swooping through the darkness between the shadows of the trees and sending out the constant refrain after which it is named. If you shine a light in its eyes, it will shine back in two flashes of round, open, ghastly red. The bird looks and acts more like a bat than a bird. It flies in the pitch fast and nimble with its mouth agape catching moths, mosquitoes, and flying beetles. Because it hunts best in the brightness of the full moon, it harmonizes its reproductive cycle to the moon's phases—baby whip-poor-wills are born in rhythm with the full-bellied moon, when its parents can catch enough food to feed their nest. They make their nests on the ground in piles of dead leaves, dusting themselves with the earth to sleep in its umber hollows during the day. For these reasons and more, these earth-dwelling nocturnal sky-hunters have been seen as liminal beings in the legend, folklore, and religious traditions of the human cultures situated along their migratory path, from Central America to southeastern Canada. Wherever they go, they are associated with prophecy, darkness, death, witchcraft, and spirit possession. Even the saturnine crow does not typically speak its sibylline hexameters in the darkest moments of the night.

My reading at that time readied me to hear the nighttime cry of these morbid warblers. The whip-poor-will was especially on my mind because I had finished teaching a class on the K'iche’ Mayan story of creation, the Popol Vuh Footnote ¹—and the books that I had at my home during the lockdown were transcriptions and translations of the Popol Vuh, along with commentaries and creative adaptations of this work. One of the key moments in this story of creation relies on the whip-poor-will, whom the Lords of Death in the underworld entrust to guard their gardens from the hero twins. The hero twins must overcome a series of trials in the underworld, after which they retrieve the material from which humans can be made (maize), giving way to the book's culmination of world creation, when the humans finally speak the poetry that brings the sun out of the darkness. In one of the trials the twins must pick four bowls of flowers from the gardens of Xibalba or Xib'alb’a—the “place of fear” that is the K'iche’ Maya underworld (folio 12 verso).Footnote ²

Here, in Xibalba, death and disease rule. Here, the whip-poor-will is entrusted to guard the funereal gardens so the twins cannot pick its treasures—here, flowers are called cotzih, or kotz'i’j, which means also candles and poetry (folio 26 recto). In picking the flowers the twins would get closer to finding the inner light that would defeat the Lords of Xibalba. Fearing that, these lords order the whip-poor-wills to “laqui chivila ca cotzih miya chi elecaxic rumal ri mi xecachaco ri qaholab a navi xpevi rilo cachacon cu mal mahabi chivarah hun a cab” (“keep vigil over our flowers. Do not let them be stolen. For by these we will have defeated the boys. Imagine if they were to have such a treasure. You'd better not sleep this night”; folio 26 recto). The world-making power of poetry is a constant theme in the Popol Vuh. The Lords of Xibalba guard the flowers—synonymous with poetry—jealously from the twins, because these lords understand that this gift would give the twins (and the humans that come after them) the ability to bring light out of darkness, to bring the sun into existence. To grasp a deeper meaning of this theme, let us contextualize the story of the Popol Vuh in the world of its authors.

The text of the Popol Vuh that we have, which is housed in the special collections of the Newberry Library in Chicago, was transcribed by a Dominican friar in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, in 1702. This friar, Francisco Ximenez, collected the story in a kind of guidebook for converting the indigenous Mayas of Guatemala. Along with grammars of several Mayan languages, this colonial factbook included a section on the art of evangelization and a commentary on the Popol Vuh that depicted it as a devilish work that had seeded itself in the feeble ignorance of its authors (Quiroa). These authors thus communicate their story of creation to posterity in the utterly hostile context of colonial power. What they set out to transmit to future readers must move through channels operating for the sake of colonial erasure, transplantation, and outright racism. Strikingly, these authors acknowledge as much in the text itself. In the book's preamble, they tell us that they “vae xchicatzibah chupan chic vqhabal Dios pa christianoil chic” (“write these words amid the preaching of the Christian God, in Christendom”; folio 1 recto). In other words, these writers emphasize that their world creation must take place within the historical crisis of colonialism. When they speak of the darkness before the dawn, of the dark days before the emergence of the sun, they equate cosmic darkness before the sun's emergence and the darkness of the colonizing process. And just as the first people speak poetry to bring the sun into existence, these authors bring creation out of colonial erasures and obfuscations. The Mayan writers even tell us that their “instrument for seeing clearly” (ilb'al saq, which is how they describe the Popol Vuh) is now hidden (folio 1 recto). This statement has the double effect of casting their work in the forced occlusion of colonial inquisitions and of casting the work they are giving us—the text of the Popol Vuh, which they are bringing out of the darkness—as the means by which to see clearly past such colonial occlusion.

To put it another way, the book is savvy about its self-location in its historical circumstances, in the emergency of colonialism, while also insisting that its world creation is a source for the emergence of indigenous and countercolonial worlds. While the book is entangled in problems of colonial power from its transcription to its archiving, the words of the book itself insist on their ability to capture such problematics, to transform emergency into emergence, and to reframe a scene of crisis into an instance of creativity.

As I reread this work during the depths of the lockdown, I came to appreciate how much it has to say about the uses of emergency, how emergencies can have long durations extending from 1702 to the present, and how such emergencies persist through their entanglements in racial discrimination, hierarchies of vulnerability and exposure, and plain disregard for what noncanonical sources of knowledge have to teach us about crisis and creativity. Even the whip-poor-wills have something to teach us in this work. While the whip-poor-wills do not sleep on the job given to them to them by the Lords of Death, they are bypassed by a troupe of leaf-cutter ants in the twins’ service. When the lords leave, the hero twins’ insect friends are already in the garden, scissoring free the flower petals and carrying them from the thickets; all while the whip-poor-will sings its night song: “Xpurpuwek, Xpurpuwek . . . puhuyu, puhuyu” (folio 26 recto).

This is the K'iche’ Mayan onomatopoeic name for the whip-poor-will, who names itself in its singing. The bird that names itself in its singing or the animal that signifies itself in its cry is a constant trope in the Popol Vuh, and such onomatopoeic naming is how the K'iche’ language—and Mayan-language poetics more generally—projects its sense of linguistic power in a world of animal beings. Poetry is the attempt to temporarily inhabit the perfect language of animals, whose sounds are synonymous with meaning. The contemporary K'iche’ Maya poet Humberto Ak'abal thus writes:

I've translated cholaj here as “purpose”; the word also denotes method, order, reason, meaning, line, row, order, arrangement, and attitude (Christenson, “Cholaj”; Edmonson). Any of those alternatives would give the poem a slightly different meaning. I've chosen “purpose” because the poem's act of telling us that animals have language begs consideration of what humans might think the point of human speech is, knowing that it is mere echo of the animal speaking that surrounds and precedes them. The animal purpose of language is the signal for which these words I write now are mere resonance; so why write at all? Why should there be poetry in the world, if the animals are out there speaking to us now in a more intimate resolve? What's the purpose of it?

This question gets to a still more fundamental question in the Popol Vuh: Why should the gods have made anything after the animals? Why should they want to make humans? The Popol Vuh emphasizes that the animals are linguistically and ontologically perfect beings—self-enclosed wholes who speak their intimacy with the world as such in every utterance. The whip-poor-will's song in the underworld is a precise example of this. “Xpurpuwek, Xpurpuwek . . . puhuyu, puhuyu,” sings the whip-poor-will in the K'iche’ Mayan transcription of the animal language spoken in Xibalba in the days before humans arrived on Earth. Strikingly, this bird's speech is also heard in the onomatopoeic English-language name for the bird: Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will, poor-will, poor-will. In reading these two names next to each other—Xpurpuwek and Whip-poor-will, puhuyu and poor will—one can hear the natural language of the animal world imposing itself on human terms, shaping two very different human languages into a unified sound and signification. This signifying sound is the most elemental component of what we might call a rhythm of the Americas—a rhythm as migrant as these migrant birds, as hemispheric as their yearly migration, as indigenous as their relation to the land and its varied inhabitants, and as unbound as their relational network burrowing into the dusty earth and reaching up through the tall grass, trees, life, and death into crisp skies.

With such perfect beings already in the world, why should the gods make humans? In the Popol Vuh the gods ask themselves this very question. They worry over it and hesitate at its implications. Gathered over the ocean in the time before anything has been made, long before the hero twins set out to defeat the Lords of Xibalba, and thus long before humans are formed from the flesh substance of maize, the gods discuss the difficult project of creation. At this moment, we are still “varal chi quecumal chi aqabal” (“here in the darkness, in the earliest aurora of dawn”), in which most of the book takes place (folio 1 verso). The gods (either three or seven depending on how you count the names and aliases) get together over a roiling ocean, and together “ta xenaohinic ta xebizonic” (“they thought” and “they worried”; folio 1 verso). As they consider how their creativity will make creation happen—asking themselves, “hupacha ta cha uaxoc ta caquiro puch, apachinac tzucul” (“How should the sowing be? How should the dawning be? Who will be the provider? Who will be the nurturer?”)—they distinguish themselves from a kind of Creator with a capital C who might be more familiar to readers (folio 2 recto). Unlike the primordial creator of biblical tradition, who creates by authoritative decree, these creators displace the fiat lux with something more like quomodo lux? In what way should there be light?

This analytic quality of creation is what these hesitant creators call their puz, or power to split things open (folio 2 recto). Rather than decree, they question, investigate, consider, debate, and differentiate. The world before creation is thus already one defined by contradiction and the necessity of interpretation. Its closest approximation in the biblical tradition would be the ambivalent gnostic craftsperson who is also a Creator in William Blake's fiery spiritual meditations, the kind of Creator about whom one might ask, “What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame [this] fearful symmetry?” In such spiritual questioning, which is also fiery critique, is a sense of the divine whose seat of redemption is not clothed in faith as much as it is in knowledge, criticism, and searching.

Thus, when these stormy gods of Mayan criticality make the people of the world, who shall speak to their makers and make good offerings, the gods are frustrated by their first three attempts. In their first attempt they make the birds and animals, whose language is perfect monadism, each gibber, chirp, squeak, squawk, bleat, hum, howl, gobble, and roar signifying a self-enclosed and perfect world that is alien to the experience of these gods. They do not want a perfected relation between signs and the world because their relations are nothing like that. The gods are beings of fracture, fragmentation, difference, and crisis.

In their next attempt they make such critical creatures to speak to them out of mud, but these mud people can scarcely speak because their mouths are sodden mush. There is a problem in seeing their faces, which seems to be a problem in seeing whether these beings can perceive anything at all; they are able to mutter some words, but these words are “chichau nabec mahabi vnaoh” (“without knowledge”; folio 3 verso). Unlike the animals, these mud people are so dissatisfying that they are destroyed by a rain that recalls the destruction of the mud people—the descendants of Adam—in the biblical tradition.

After that the gods make people out of coral wood (tz'ite) and reeds, and these people fare better than their predecessors (folio 4 recto). They speak and make civilizations, populating and spreading themselves over the whole earth. But they have no feelings; their hearts are as hollow as the ornate masks with which they hide their faces. Thus, like their predecessors, “quehe cut maui xenau chivi” (“they were not capable of understanding”), so they too are destroyed, but in a more vicious manner (folio 4 verso). They are drowned and burnt with hot resin, their eyes are gouged out, the jaguars tear their flesh from their bones, their bones are ground to dust, and even their pots, pans, grinding stones, dogs, and other animals turn on them, saying, “vacamic cut xchitih cabac qo pa ca chi xquixcatio” (“We will eat you; we will try you in our mouths and tear you up!”; folio 5 recto). The few survivors of this wooden generation become what are today the spider monkeys that swing in the mountain trees of Central America.

The problem with all three of these defunct creations is that they do not perceive and speak in a way that is relatable to the gods. The gods want people who have a sense of the crisis that motivates creation, including the crisis of having a creation that is inseparable from failure, criticism, contradiction, and revision—and indistinguishable from the inherent polyphony of creativity, that chattering of implacable others in the making of made things. The birds were too perfect, the mud people too porous, and the wood people too insensitive. What these gods want are people with the same sense of urgency that reflects their (the gods’) experience of a world that is fundamentally incongruous, in dialectical or contradictory tension, and hence constantly changing and inspiring differentiation. The emergence of people can only happen with a people who have a sense of real emergency.

The Popol Vuh is at its heart a book about emergencies. But it has a peculiar sense of what an emergency can do. It aspires to teach its readers how emergencies are sites of profound fracture and disarray, while also being sites of social, intellectual, and artistic emergence. And its understanding of the power emergent in the emergency involves the primordial crisis of the gods in the crises of colonial and contemporary life. It encourages readers to see such crises in an implicated way—to see how cosmogenic movements affect, and are affected by, the happenings of historical and contemporary times. The gods wish to see themselves reflected in their creations because they understand that the actions of their creations will, in turn, affect the experiences of the vulnerable, anxious, and certainly not omniscient or omnipotent creators.

Humans, when they are finally made, are given that inner light—that pus of poetry and critique, the power to split things open—that brought them into being (and that the Lords of Death so desperately wanted to keep from them). With this power humans are entrusted with the ability to make life—to make emergence from emergencies—that the authors of the Popol Vuh cannily assume. Witness as these Maya writers begin the story and blur themselves into the gods they describe:

The present-tense telling of the story of the Popol Vuh puts its storytellers in the immediate time of world creation. Their creativity is synonymous with Creation with a capital C, as the made world comes to form itself in their words. But these are not just endeavors to speak words and make worlds outside historical time. These words are spoken soon after these Mayan writers tell us that their ilb'al saq (“instrument for seeing clearly”) is now hidden, for they “vae xchicatzibah chupan chic uqhabal Dios pa christianoil chic” (“write these words amidst the preaching of the Christian God, in Christendom”; folio 1 recto). These writers emphasize that their world creation must take place within the historical crisis of colonialism. This is a story of creation that must begin in colonial depredation; it bears a sense of creativity that must start in historical experience.

As colonial transplantation, wealth extraction, and European diseases devastate the Guatemalan highlands, driving these writers underground, with their books hidden and their words occluded, these writers (writing in 1702, when the extant text of the Popol Vuh was transcribed) set out to remind their readers that the world-making power of that hidden book is still here, still there in the splitting power of their words. The emergency is very real for these writers, who write under a colonial duress that frames even the beginning of their act of world creation. Yet such emergency only seems to animate the necessity of the Popol Vuh, in its aim to translate crisis to creativity. In its pages, the darkness of colonialism becomes the darkness before the dawn, the world before it is made, staging the descent into an underworld to retrieve an inner necessity by which light and the means for seeing clearly can be brought again to the world, and the world itself be thus brought again into being. The historical context of the writing of the Popol Vuh is certainly one of profound fracture and disarray, but the book presents itself as a means for stepping out from the darkness into a new day. Its content is shaped by colonial history, there “amidst the preaching of the Christian God,” but its form is designed to absorb that history into an indigenous, K'iche’ Mayan cosmogony, which is “still silently rippling . . . still murmuring undisturbed.” The message is: if such things as we see today must take place, they take place in a sky-womb of Mayan making.

Flitting through that womb the whip-poor-will is not exempt from historical reckoning. Though the gods were frustrated that this little bird, like the rest of its animal kin, could not speak with change and difference in its vocal inflections, those inflections nonetheless come to define centuries of exigency that would directly affect the lives of these gods. How strange it is that in the whip-poor-will's migrating song a Mayan language finds itself echoing and echoed in a spread of West Germanic speaking over the northern hemisphere in the last few hundred years. It is almost as strange to think about that as it is to consider that the only extant copy of the Popol Vuh abides nearby me at the Newberry Library in Chicago, after its own forced migration out of Central America to France and then the United States. For birds, migration is not an ahistorical matter—they change migration patterns regularly, adapting to climatological and environmental pressures, navigating with ancestral insight on stars, low-frequency sound, and perception of magnetic fields and polarized light. Finding themselves after a long journey in a new place, they learn about risks, dangers, resources, and lifeways from local birds. They observe and adapt. But they also impose their resilient rhythms on the new landscape—they sing their songs and hail on the layers of whistles and chirps to interpolate in their music. They return in emergency and crisis to acts of emergence with startling consistency. They perch at the gateway separating life from death, leaping through it with their wings and syrinxes. The syrinx is what makes them so hard to translate: unlike the larynx, this vocal organ is split in two, allowing birds to vocalize two sounds at once—to harmonize with themselves, but also to perform difference in their speech. Like the gods of the K'iche’ story of creation, birds speak in constant contradiction. I wonder still why these gods bother with anything more after making the birds.