"The Language of Gods": The Pragmatics of Bilingual Parallelism in Ritual Ch'orti' Maya Discourse

Parallelism is the foremost stylistic device in Mayan and other Mesoamerican languages (B. Tedlock 1985; Tedlock 1986; Brody 1986). Metrical features common to Western poetic traditions play no significant role in Maya poetics. According to Josserand (Josserand and Hopkins 1991:21), what meter and rhyme are to Western poetry, couplets and parallelism are to Maya poetry. The most common forms of parallelism in Mayan languages are couplet, triplets, and the quatrain, though distich couplets remain the dominant structuring mechanism. Maxwell (1997:101) defines couplets as “the stylized repetition of all or part of an utterance, echoing either form or content.” Monaghan (1990:134) defines a couplet as the repetition of a line that is associated by parallelism in semantics or syntax to the previous line. Paralleled forms can be found in daily speech in some Maya groups, but it appears more commonly in narratives and ritual discourse. Gossen (1983:309) notes that all oral narratives of the Chamula Tzotzil use semantic couplets as the unidad poética principal (“principal poetic unity”). Ritual speech, however, is where parallelism really flourishes in Mayan languages. Parallelism is the defining sine qua non of ritual discourse, primarily in the form of couplet speech. Ritual speech among most Maya groups tends to be denser and more frequent in couplet forms than other varieties of speech (Gossen 1974; Maxwell 1997; Stross 1974). For example, the Ixil of Cotzal make considerable use of both figurative and non-figurative couplets in ritual contexts (Townsend et al. 1980). For the Ch’orti’ Maya of southern Guatemala, ritualized forms of speech are always performed in parallelistic fashion, especially in traditional healing ceremonies. Unfortunately, community-wide ceremonialism is in steep decline among the Ch’orti’ today as fears of being labeled a “witch” or “sorcerer” have driven most ritual specialists underground or out of business altogether.1 During my fieldwork of over 30 months with the Ch’orti’, I worked with many of the few surviving ritual specialists and recorded numerous healing rites. The data gathered during that process informs the discussion of Ch’orti’ ritual poetics that follows. The results presented here add to our understanding of the expressive creativity that can occur in bilingual communities in which two languages can be tasked the formation of parallel structures. Oral Tradition, 31/2 (2017): 293-312