{"id":103408,"date":"2020-08-04T11:00:16","date_gmt":"2020-08-04T16:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/toiletovhell.com\/?p=103408"},"modified":"2020-08-03T09:26:18","modified_gmt":"2020-08-03T14:26:18","slug":"xibalbas-anos-en-infierno-and-the-hell-of-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toiletovhell.com\/xibalbas-anos-en-infierno-and-the-hell-of-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"Xibalba’s A\u00f1os en infierno<\/em> and the Hell of Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On\u00a0A\u00f1os en infierno<\/em>, Xibalba<\/strong> asks the question, “How could empire be any worse?”<\/p>\n

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\u201cWhile it may not follow from our present crisis,\u201d writes Samuel Miller McDonald, \u201cit is certain that eventually this empire will fall. Every single empire that has existed has crumbled and this one must, too, if only by destroying itself.\u201d This empire, the fossil fuel empire, is the most expansive empire in history. More than just a land empire a la <\/em>the Mongolian Empire, which stretched over 16 percent of the Earth and expired after 160 years, the fossil fuel empire is more totalizing in scope: \u201cIn the sense that it is contained in the carbon dioxide particles in the atmosphere, or the microplastics in the ocean, it already has <\/em>covered every inch of the globe.\u201d For McDonald, the material contamination of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere and oceans by the fossil fuel empire\u2019s microscopic marauders is part of this empire\u2019s efficient homogenization of biodiversity, economy, and human life. Maniacally monocultural, the fossil fuel empire is the \u201cEmpire of Same.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Reading McDonald\u2019s piece in the latest issue of Current Affairs<\/em>, I kept thinking about Xibalba\u2019s A\u00f1os en infierno<\/em>. Drawing together Bolt Thrower<\/strong>\u2019s battle-tested (and battle-vested!) death metal, Crowbar<\/strong>\u2019s None Heavier attitude, an L.A. hardcore aesthetic, Weekend Nachos<\/strong>\u2019 preposterously down-tuned powerviolence, and Evoken<\/strong>\u2019s dismal death\/doom, Xibalba wring out of themselves and their influences an album that could serve as a capstone on their impressive career. It\u2019s tempting to call Xibalba\u2019s approach to A\u00f1os en infierno <\/em>tried-and-true, as their sound at this point is unmistakable, but that would undermine, or even flatten out, what Xibalba hope to accomplish with this record. On A\u00f1os en infierno<\/em>, Xibalba bring their unique form of DMxHC to bear on present and past crises in an opus on empire.<\/p>\n

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Setting aside the 2009 self-titled debut and their splits with contemporary bruisers Incendiary <\/strong>(2012) and Suburban Scum <\/strong>(2014), Xibalba\u2019s 4 albums featuring art from Dan Seagraves depict the story of empire. Hasta la muerte <\/em>(2011), Tierra y libertad <\/em>(2015), the Diablo, con amor\u2026 adios <\/em>EP (2017), and this year\u2019s A\u00f1os en infierno<\/em> all feature variations on the Maya step pyramids. Hasta la muerte <\/em>and Diablo, con amor\u2026 adios<\/em>, Xibalba\u2019s two albums most firmly rooted in Terror<\/strong>\u2019s West Coast fury and the East Coast mosh of Shattered Realm<\/strong>, feature a lone figure standing in the shadow of a great pyramid. On Hasta la muerte<\/em>, the figure aggressively faces the pyramid, while on Diablo, con amor\u2026 adios<\/em>, the figure seems to have turned its back, walking back towards the viewer. On each cover, something looms between figure and pyramid, between viewer and object, between the current Empire of Same and the past Maya civilization.<\/p>\n

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Tierra y libertad<\/em>, in an homage to Bolt Thrower, replaces the solitary pyramid and lone figure with a forest of step pyramids and a cavalcade of futuristic battle tanks and soldiers. Laser blasts streak across the facades of ancient architecture, a palimpsest of colonial conquest, present atrocities, and dystopic sci-fi. This is, as the album title tells us, the eternal battle for land and freedom. No longer looming invisibly, the Spanish Empire and its centuries-long quest to extinguish the Maya people irrupts into view. Crucially, it is also a moment of resistance. The Spanish Empire will inevitably fall, beginning to contract in the 18th century, but not before it decimates innumerable indigenous civilizations. Ancestors of those civilizations, however, still survive, persisting through and against erasure.<\/p>\n

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On the cover of A\u0144os en infierno<\/em>, step pyramids are utterly consumed by fire, while the central pyramid appears volcanic in its spewing rage. Near the bottom right corner, a stone carving of a cloaked figure, possibly a howler monkey\u2014an animal that plays a significant role in Quich\u00e9 mythology\u2014reminds us of the absence of humans. The battle is over and lost, the city of Nojpet\u00e9n has fallen, and the mythological underworld that is Xi\u2019balb\u2019a has been reduced to Hell. But what does it mean to reduce the underworld to Hell?<\/p>\n

Such a reduction is the clash of invasion. The Spanish Empire\u2019s conquest of the Quich\u00e9 Maya was pursued through spiritual and linguistic domination, where the language and religion of the Quich\u00e9 people were all but eliminated and replaced. As McDonald reminds us, \u201cLanguage loss is very real\u201d in any Empire\u2019s quest for homogenization. 600 languages \u201chave disappeared in the last century, while up to 90 percent are unlikely to survive this century at current rates of decline.\u201d Part of the Quich\u00e9 story, part of the story of Xibalba the band and Xi\u2019balb\u2019a the underworld, is the story of invasion and loss. Allen J. Christenson, in the introduction to his 2003 translation of the Popul Vuh<\/em>, the sacred book of the Quich\u00e9 Maya people, tells us that the Maya people were perhaps the most literate peoples of the Americas with an intricate hieroglyphic form of writing dating back at least 1500 years prior to the Spanish Empire\u2019s arrival. But, as Christenson laments, \u201cThe Spanish conquest in the early 16th century was a devastating blow to Maya literacy in Mexico and Guatemala. Christian missionaries burned great numbers of hieroglyphic texts in an attempt to eradicate indigenous religious practices. Native scribes were singled out for persecution to such an extent that within one hundred years, the art of hieroglyphic writing had virtually disappeared from among the Maya people.\u201d Perhaps this is why the howler monkey, often honoured as a patron of writing, sits motionless on the cover of A\u00f1os en infierno.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Though this story of empire is one of invasion and loss, it is also one of survival and transformation. We must keep this in mind when listening to Xibalba, named as they are after the Quich\u00e9 word \u201cXi\u2019balb\u2019a\u201d (meaning “Place of Fear”) that is the mythic underworld described in the Popul Vuh<\/em>. The Popul Vuh<\/em> itself has survived and found its way to modern readers through numerous translations deriving from a written copy of the text made by the Spanish priest Francisco Xim\u00e9nez in the first decades of the 18th century. The manuscript from which Xim\u00e9nez made his copy was hidden for centuries by Quich\u00e9 elders and has not been seen since Xim\u00e9nez returned it to them. We can only hope that this manuscript still survives, safely hidden away and transmitted between generations of trusted shepherds of this history. Few texts containing Maya hieroglyphics still exist today, and it is unknown whether the manuscript Xim\u00e9nez translated was written in hieroglyphs or not. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that the Quich\u00e9 elders had already translated the document. Xim\u00e9nez\u2019s translation, too, was written in a modified Latin script and not Quich\u00e9 hieroglyphs. Scholar-translators such as Christenson have worked to phoneticize and bring the Quich\u00e9 oral language back to Latin-Spanish-English translations of the Popul Vuh. <\/em>As such,\u00a0the Popol Vuh <\/em>should be understood as a living document of languages, temporalities, histories, cultures, and people crossing back and forth within the contact zone that demonstrates the inextricably political and personal stories of empire.<\/p>\n