Josué Maychi on teaching Maya to the Wakanda Forever cast and a word play in one of Namor's lines.
The actor told us about a word play that only Maya speakers can understand. ---spoiler ahead--- “There is a phrase that Namor says that I had to translate that goes: 'Máansa'ab u nej miis tin wich' which in Spanish literally means 'They passed the cat's tail in front of my face with the hope of an alliance'. If you see cats, jaguars or panthers wag their tails when they go hunting because it is a way of hypnotizing their prey, so that image is what happened to Namor, that someone did that to him with their tail. I proposed it to the director and he loved it, because it refers to the panther that warned Namor, ” he said. Josué Maychi told us that in English the phrase was translated as: "I was blinded with the hope of an alliance", which in Maya metaphorically means that someone was deceived, since in Spanish or English it is not literal.
Compillation of Namor's lines in Yucatec Mayan In the interview for Cultura Colectiva, Josué Maychi, who plays the shaman in Black Panther : Wakanda Forever, spoke about his experience in the film in which at the same time, he collaborated as the Yucatec Maya coach for Mabel Cadena and Tenoch Huerta, every day for a period of seven months. “No one knew anything about Maya and my first approach with the actors was to ask them if they could pronounce the consonants and sounds that do not exist in Spanish, English or other languages, and I was very happy to discover that they could pronounce them” he commented.
How was the process of teaching Maya? “We had sessions by Zoom and then in Atlantla we had scheduled meetings because I needed to listen to them. The first thing I taught them was the sound of the words, because in Maya there are five types of vowels that have to do with time, and if if they prolongued (a vowel) it can mean one thing or another. I asked them to imagine their lines as a melody and also gave them recorded audios to listen to, read and even write. For example, Mabel created her own way of writing, she created her own writing to have a personal approach to the language, ” he said.
Do you remember any funny anecdote? “There is a phrase that we say in the film that is Líik’ik Talokan, (there's Wakanda Forever) which is said by the people of Wakanda. Once, Álex Livinalli wrote to me and asked what we could say for the world we were creating, about the new universe and in Maya. I thought about it and thought it might be that phrase, which means something like 'Long live Talokan' or 'Rise Talokan'. I proposed it to them, they proposed it to the production, they loved it and it was integrated into the script, ” he said. Finally, the actor pointed out that the representation of indigenous languages IS very important to him and mentioned that there are Mayan people who have proudly written him messages of gratitude, since they understood what they saw on the big screen.
