This week in world literature, we hear from our Editors-at-Large reporting on the latest in literary developments! In Guatemala, we’re covering the literary community’s response to threats to the electoral process, as well as the country’s most recent award-winning authors. From the Vietnamese diaspora, we take a dive into two authors’ recent publications. Read on to learn more!
Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, Reporting on Guatemala
On August 31, sixty-two Guatemalan writers, editors, and artists signed a statement calling for the resignation of María Consuelo Porras, Head of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Ms. Porras, who was included in the Engels List of 2023 for obstructing investigations against corrupt political allies, has been the main actor in the attempt to sabotage the Guatemalan electoral process of this year.
On June 25, the progressive presidential ticket composed of Bernardo Arévalo and Karin Herrera surprisingly made it to the second round of the election. This started a series of legalistic arbitrariness from Ms. Porras in an effort to prevent the duly elected candidates from taking office democratically on January 14.
The statement signed by authors like David Unger, Dante Liano, Ana María Rodas, and Eduardo Halfon demands “that an end be put to this legal and unconstitutional foolishness through a resolution from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, or as a last resort, from the Constitutional Court because they cannot continue playing with ambiguity, giving the Pact of the Corrupt an opportunity to further criminalize the exercise of the people’s sovereignty and destroy Guatemalan democracy.”
In late September, the crisis deepened when members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office illegally entered the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to forcefully extract several electoral records. This triggered a social upheaval that has the country in an indefinite national strike called by the ancestral indigenous authorities. On the streets of Guatemala, thousands of people have spoken out against the attempted coup that is being orchestrated from within the ruling party.
Bernardo Arévalo is the son of the first democratically elected president in Guatemala after the 1944 revolution, Juan José Arévalo. During the period known as the democratic spring, when Arévalo’s father and his successor Jacobo Árbenz were in power, significant advancements were made, such as the Labor Code, women’s suffrage, and social security for workers. However, this progress was interrupted in 1954 by oligarchic structures that have remained in power ever since. Even so, the people of Guatemala continue to keep the hope of democracy alive, as Augusto Monterroso once said, “I am sure that in some way, somewhere, perhaps under a different name or a different surname, the October Revolution is alive, it is growing, it is well.”
Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting on the Vietnamese Diaspora
In their latest books published in October of this year, two diasporic authors—Marcelino Truong and Viet Thanh Nguyen, from France and the United States, respectively—both explore the concept of secondhand memory from their perspectives as inheritors of war trauma.
In Truong’s case, his graphic novel 40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina 1954 (40 Hommes et 12 Fusils: Indochine 1954), vividly translated from the French by David Homel, reflects a formative departure from his two previous, highly acclaimed graphic memoirs that were based on his experiences growing up during the Vietnam War as an offspring of a South Vietnamese diplomat father and a French mother. Calling his latest book “faction,” or a hybrid between fiction and fact, Truong, born in 1957, spent about a decade meticulously recreating events from the Indochina War that had ended French colonization of Vietnam in 1954. He provides the following explanation for his work:
If there is an autobiographical element in my graphic novel, it is that for the Vietnamese, the Indochina conflict [1946-1954] was only the first act of a tragedy, that of the bloody path to independence. The second act of this drama was the Vietnam War (1959-1975). I grew up during the Vietnam War. We had parents on both sides. This division lent a rich complexity to my work, because I was able to hear both sides of the story.
40 Men and 12 Rifles follows Minh, an aspiring artist from a wealthy family who dreams of a carefree life in Paris but is instead conscripted into serving the North Vietnamese Communist Army as a soldier and visual propagandist. Minh’s duality—in witnessing the two sides of Marxism, its romantic ideology that inspires adherents to achieve victory through sacrifice, and its totalitarianism that tolerates no dissent—aligns with Viet Thanh Nguyen’s concept of duality in A Man of Two Faces that explores the humanity and inhumanity of both oppressors and victims.
Chatting with writer Lysley Tenorio about his memoir that’s also “a history and a memorial” in front of a packed auditorium at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. on October 22, 2023—two days after an event cancellation at New York City’s 92 Street Y due to his support of Palestinians—Nguyen defines duality of perspectives as a necessary “compassion test” for diasporic writers. According to Nguyen, to guard against any dominant culture’s subjective view of history, and to achieve an “ethics of remembrance,” inheritors of secondhand memory—those who were not witnesses to the original event but learn about the past through testimonials, film, and literature—should investigate the intent in every narrative, as well as any system or mindset that does not acknowledge disputed or opposite viewpoints. His view thus embraces a diasporic writer’s divided self as a site of endless examination.
José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, Reporting on Central America
It’s finally out! In 2021, we published an interview with Costa Rican poet David Cruz about his book of poetry Lazarus, which won that year’s Manuel Acuña’s Poetry Prize. Now Lazarus (Mantis Editores) is finally out, and David has been on tour promoting the book. This comes after David’s other recent book of poetry, a collection called Cine Fractal (New Aleph), made it into the shortlist of this year’s Latino Book Awards for the Best Poetry Anthology Book category.
Moving on to two award-winning Guatemalan authors!
First, Maya Kaqchikel poet Miguel Ángel Oxlaj Cúmez received the Poet of the Year Award from this year’s edition of The Americas Poetry Festival of New York. Miguel Ángel is a professor at the Maya Kaqchikel University chi Xot, and a union leader who writes poetry and fiction in Kaqchikel and Spanish. You can find some of his poems on Poetry NY’s website, translated into English by Paul M. Worley and Juan Guillermo Sánchez, or an excerpt of his novel The Sarima’s Mission on Words Without Border’s website.
Also, Guatemalan author and visual artist Martín Díaz Valdés just won this year’s Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize for his novel El acto de los wayob. Martín has also published three books of poetry, a collection of short stories called Escolopendra (Editorial Cultura), and two YA books entitled El prodigioso de la montaña and Los cuatro de Tevián (Loqueleo).
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