ABSTRACT
This chapter engages in close reading of Javier Abelardo Gómez-Navarrete’s In lu’um / Mi tierra [My Land], and argues that the poem re-signifies the Peninsula from Yucatán to lu’um, the Maya term for “land”. The lu’um has different affordances for human development to Yucatán, and so the reconstitution of place sets the precedent for a reconstitution of humanity (developed in the parallel chapter in Part 2, Chapter 6). Through close attention to cultural and geographical references, and comparison of the Maya and Spanish versions, the chapter reveals the poem to be highly ambiguous in its simultaneous references to life and death. The chapter demonstrates how this ambiguity is an expression of cyclicity, whereby the co-constitution of land and humanity (habitat and inhabitant) is enacted as an unfolding, self-renewing, event. By comparing my interpretations of the poem with those of another Maya writer, Wildernain Villegas, the chapter illustrates the dialogic, open-ended nature of literary inhabitation. The work of Villegas, a student of Gómez-Navarrete, features in Chapter 6, and so the first chapters of Parts 1 and 2 set the precedent for a constant dialogue between the two halves of the book, a reflection of the co-constitution of habitat and inhabitant.
