ONLINE CURRENTS VOL3 - Flipbook - Page 30
Uc Be’s sentences are conceived and delivered in the moment but are plainly the result of
years of meditation. He is approaching his sixtieth year, but there is a lightness to him that
makes his age seem irrelevant, just another modern-world imposition designed to measure
economic productivity. His knowledge and storytelling feels genuinely timeless. When
speaking, he draws on experience, and writers, philosophers and history from across
centuries and locations in order to address his point. He as easily recounts his own
experiences as those of his great-grandfather, brothers, or even the future generations.
“It’s said that we Mayans remember the future and predict the past,” he says with a smile,
referencing the non-linear timeline which is inherent to so many indigenous communities
everywhere.
Very occasionally, he loses himself, looking into the middle distance, as though gathering his
strength and resolve to continue. When he looks up again, ready to continue, his brows
mirrors that of the man featured in a painting above his head: his father.
His father, who has taught him of the value and importance of the traditional Mayan growing
space known as the milpa 15; his father who would tell him the stories of their ancestors, of the
animals and the plants and of how their traditions came to bring them all together in
ceremonies; his father who felt betrayed when the son he loved left to pursue education in a
world outside the Maya.
His father who has now stepped over to the other side.
It is here that all time seems to concentrate into one moment, into one gaze, bringing
everything together, and it is clear that Pedro Uc Be is at once his father, and his grandfather,
and that they were also him before he was born, and that “the struggle of man against
power is the struggle of memory over forgetting.” 16
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