Translated from Spanish by Lorrie Lowenfield Jayne

Javier Jayali (Javier Díaz Correa) was born in Cota, Colombia, in 1988. He is a writer, community leader, cultural manager, and promoter of reading, writing, orality, and the Andean collective flute music, Sikuri. Javier studied Literature at the National University of Colombia (2007-2012). He directed “Weavers of History,” a workshop for literary creation, at the Biblioteca Municipal de Cota. Through the workshop, he published three anthologies of poetry: Cota se cuenta en copla, 2020; Cuerpos y palabras, 2022; and Senderos, resiliencias y otros espejos,  2022. In 2018, Jayali created a kusmuy, a house of thought, for the research and pedagogy of community-based practices ranging from agro-ecology, orality, to ancestral and intercultural music and knowledge. He is the author of Sangre de tabaco, 2023, and Sobre el dorso del río, 2024.

Javier takes part in a collective process that brings together the community, self-determination and the institutional educational process from which he has nourished his poetic works. In 2018, together with the collective strength of a voluntary cooperative effort, a minga, he built a house of thought (kusmuy), and formed the community music group, Sikuris de Majuy,  on a piece of land, Fiba we, located in the village of La Moya, in the foothills of the Serranía del Majuy (Cota, Cundinamarca, Colombia). This community kusmuy provides a space for many people to gather to tell stories around the fire, to study, to deepen their traditional botanical knowledge, and to develop pedagogies and approaches to the Muisca language. It has become a place to hold workshops on traditional knowledge, to compose and perform songs to the water in the Muisca language, and to build a platform for water conservation through reforestation, native seed use, literature, the construction of dry toilets, music and land-based education. The community is diverse and intercultural, with participants who are Indigenous, mixed race (mestizo), and country dwellers, as well as those who have migrated from the city to the countryside. The majority of participants are youth, and all are united by the mountain guardian of the territory who offers water for the town: the Majuy mountain range.

The poems that follow are from his second book of poetry, Sobre el dorso del río (Cibeles ediciones, 2024).