Sculpted Stones / Piedras Labradas

author: Victor Montejo

translator: Victor Perera

Curbstone Press, 1995

grades 7-up 

Maya

If our ancestors came to life

they’d surely give us, their descendants

thirteen lashes for being

sleepwalkers and conformists.

They always advised us

to struggle, build and forge ahead

so that no one’s left behind,

and no one’s forgotten by his brothers.

Yet today we Maya

remain hushed up

and have even forgotten the message

that might inspire us to break the silence.

That’s why if our ancestors came back to life

they’d give us thirteen lashes

to cure the amnesia of centuries

which has made us forget our names.

Victor Montejo is a poet, a human rights activist and an anthropologist, studying in depth his own people. After the massacre of his village in 1981, in which Guatemalan soldiers killed his brother, Montejo’s name appeared on a death squad list and he was forced to flee to the US. Since then, his life’s work has been to make known, in a variety of ways, the continuing human rights violations confronting the Mayan peoples.

After Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village, after The Bird Who Cleans the World and Other Mayan Fables, after a spectacular children’s version of the Mayan sacred book, the Popul Vuh, comes this book of poetry, Sculpted Stones. Here, in Spanish and English, Montejo’s poems express the resilience of the Mayan peoples, expose the Guatemalan army’s attempt to destroy the Indigenous population, and give lie to textbook anthrobabble about “history” and “culture.”

In the first poem, “Interrogation by the Ancestors,” Montejo asks,

Just think:

what can we say

to the ancients

when they return

with thunder and lightning

and ask about the fire

they left with us

in the cone of the great volcano?

And for the poor, betrayed, sad, humiliated, plundered, frightened people, there is this advice (beginning, of course, with an anthropological discourse):

Among the Maya

to cure a fright

you put a fresh-laid egg

in the armpit

of the frightened person

and in that way

the self-worth and health

that the phantom has stolen

will return to the afflicted.

But, how can we cure

the pain and fear

built up over the many centuries

of plunder and negation

of our Mayan identity?

Someone said

the egg is a great idea,

but in our day it’s better

to confront

and do battle

with those causing the fright,

then endure the centuries

warming turkey eggs

in your armpits.

This is really good advice. Sculpted Stones is testament to a people’s tenacious determination to survive in the face of centuries of colonization. Highly recommended.

—Beverly Slapin

(published 9/22/14)

This review first appeared in A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children, edited by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin (AltaMira Press, 2005). We thank the publisher for permission.

Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village

author: Victor Montejo
translator: Victor Perera
Curbstone Press, 1987
grades 8-up 

Maya

Guatemala’s 36-year civil war (1960-1996), in which leftist rebels fought the army—with huge numbers of Mayan campesinos caught in the crossfire—was one of Latin America’s most violent wars in modern history.[1] From 1982-1983, the military regime headed by Efraín Ríos Montt was responsible for widespread massacres of civilians, as well as torture, rape, and genocidal acts against Guatemala’s Mayan populations. As with many Latin American dictators, Ríos Montt was supported by the US, which trained him[2] and gave him monetary aid in his fight against the rebels. During the period of his presidency, Ríos Montt deliberately targeted the Maya in the countryside, whom the army suspected of sympathizing with and harboring the rebels.

“With the rise to power of Efrain Rios Montt,” Montejo writes, “all remaining human rights were abolished, and the army became the sole arbiter over the lives of Guatemalans.”

This history is the backdrop for a particular massacre that occurred on September 9, 1982. This is Victor Montejo’s Testimony—the testimony of a young schoolmaster, through whose eyes readers will witness the brutality and sadism that the Guatemalan army unleashed in Tzalalá, a remote Mayan village in northwest of Huehuetanango.[3]

In Spanish and English, Montejo dedicates this book “to the memory/ of the many thousand/ Guatemalans/ who were killed or disappeared/ during this decade/ of aggression and struggle./ And even/ if there are attempts/ to blot out their names/ little by little/ I know that wild flowers/ are growing daily/ from their clandestine bones—/ scattered there in the ravines and the mountains.”

Montejo does not hold back, does not mince words. His language is raw, and Montejo is a gifted educator, poet and writer. But in Testimony, he is a witness, perhaps his most important role. After a particularly savage beating, Montejo relates,

I breathed deeply to offset the effects of the beating and tried to keep my legs from collapsing with fatigue. It was now midnight, and my thoughts flew toward my wife and children, who would be alone in our home, worried sick over my absence. My clothes were stiff from the mud and water and stained with blood: they clung heavily to my body, causing my muscles to tense so as to repel the cold that bit at the marrow of my bones….

I followed [the soldier] like a starving and filthy beggar, eager to curl up in some out-of-the-way corner and wrap himself in trash or anything else he can find that will keep the cold from freezing his bowels. I understood then why beggars love their treasure trove of old and ragged things and why they sleep with one eye open to protect them at night, and why they guard them so jealously during the day. Whatever beggars have, beggars love. Those tattered bags full of fruit waste and rotting leftovers were precisely what I craved that night.

I encourage teachers to use Testimony with their eighth-graders, just before they go on to the next stage in their formal education. I encourage them to keep returning to the cover. It’s a photograph of Mayan refugees in Chiapas, Mexico, in November, 1982—one month after the massacre. How many survived? Where are they now? 

There’s no polemic here, just a horrible, graphic description of what happened through the eyes of a young schoolmaster who survived it—and lived to tell about it. Along with Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu, Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village is essential reading. Thank you, Victor, for your courage in bringing this shocking event—one of far too many—to the world’s attention. Highly recommended.

—Beverly Slapin
(published 4/7/13)

__________________________________________

[1] More than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed in the civil war.

[2] In 1951, Ríos Montt attended the notorious school for torture called the School of the Americas; and in 1954, the young military officer was part of the CIA-organized and –financed coup against the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

[3] Huehuetenango was also the birthplace of Ríos Montt.