Questions and swords

This beautiful full-colored edition contains two bilingual stories by Marcos: The Story of Questions, and The Story of the Sword, the Tree, the Stone and the Water. Notes on when the stories were writter plus commentary from Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, Native American poet Simon Ortiz, and Marcos himself bring the book to a rich completion. On New Year’s Day, 1994, the Zapatistas, wearing their trademark ski masks, erupted on the world scene by declaring war on the Mexican government and attacking San Cristobal, Chiapas. Since that time Marcos, because of his charm, intelligence and charisma, has become a post-modern revolutionary icon. It is his person, more than any other factor, that has pushed the Zapatista movement and the plight of the indigenous people in Mexico onto the international scene. Marcos continues to be the focus of media attention in Mexico, in the States, and internationally, despite the Mexican government’s attempts to discredit him. Alma Guillermoprieto in The New Yorker has remarked that “the most visible and critical part of the Zapatistas’ revolution were the letters that the Mexican press publishes regularly, particularly the long, sometimes irreverent, personified postcripts that are the Subcomandante’s contribution to epistolary art. Now swaggering, now full of righteous fury, now impudent and hip, the Marcos of the postscripts is at all times both elusive and intimate, and this seductive knack has allowed him to become a faceless stand-in for all the oppressed, an anonymous vessel for all fantasies from the sexual to the bellicose, a star.” In his communiqués to the Mexican people, Marcos has often related folktales that the very wise Viejo Antonio has told him, stories that reflect the culture and wisdom of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. `Questions and Swords’ contains two of those tales.