Guatemala: A country and peoples with roots deep enough to survive intergenerational trauma
Due to me appalling photographic ability, It may be hard to believe, but sometimes the meal is the armchair travel highlight! This week, for example, I made vegan Pepian de Pollo and learned much about Guatemala along the way thanks to a Guatemalan friend who explained the cultural importance of this one pot dish, which is cooked with whatever vegetables are in season and whose history goes all the way back to the Aztecs. It required no oil, and the sauce was made by pan frying the vegetable and tortilla and then blending them. It went incredibly well with a chilli mango salad. The proof is in the children’s response — they both scraped their plates clean.
This week’s film was also a crowd pleaser, a slow-paced year in the life affair focused on José, a young gay man trying to get enough money to survive whilst working out how to be happy. Unlike many LGBTIQ+ films I’ve watched, nothing too traumatic happens and it was the perfect thing to collapse in front of after a couple of nice Guatemalan rums. The only sadness was that I wanted to watch Ixcanul (Volcano), the first film produced in the Mayan language, but could not find it to stream anywhere! If you know where I can see it, please do let me know.
But anyway, back to the rum… Like so many countries in that neck of the woods, rum seems to be the drink of choice. I started by drinking a plantation rum in a Belgian bar and then at home chose a 14 year old rum from Darsa brewery which was nearly 60 quid a bottle — luckily you can buy one shot and get a momentary insight into how the other half live.
It is important to remember, however, that rum’s history is linked with slavery and torture, as it was generally a by-product of the sugar industry. This week’s book I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala gives some insights into how the sugar industry and government continued to exploit the Indigenous Peoples of Guatemala at least into the 1980s though I fear that even today plantation workers may, in many cases, still get a very raw deal. The book is extremely hard to read as it intricately details many of the trauma’s experienced by Rigoberta and her family. It is also quite controversial as much of the story is just that, a narrative intended to outline the kind of suffering experienced by many in Guatemala, rather than an exact autobiography. Whilst this should, surely be made clear in the introduction to the book (to make it more convincing if nothing else), it seems churlish to ignore the extreme suffering of millions because of flaws in the narrative of one of their spokespeople. It is accepted that more than 100,000 women were raped during the civil war and so I feel the book should be taken as a testament of a people, not a family. As always I was left feeling that to truly have an opinion, I would really need to read multiple stories by multiple people, but this is just not possible given the short lives we are allowed on the earth.
Similarly, it is always hard to try to experience the music of a country in one week, as there are so many peoples, so many types of music, and so many decades of recordings! I tried pan-pipes and Mayan traditional dance, but soon moved on to the Garifuna Collective which, like Plantation rum, comes from Guatemala/Belize (though only 0.13% of the country is Garifuna). I chose them as their story seemed to encapsulate much of what I have read about this area of the world. Guatemala is a truly a blend of Indigenous Peoples, European, Mestizo (people of mixed Indigenous/European descent) and Garifuna — mixed Carib and African communities who escaped the invasion and enslavement of the Caribbean Island of Saint Vincent.
As always I have run out of space and time so must stop there are head to Guinea!
