It was usually at a Sunday picnic and after church services. Children ran in and around the legs of adults. And the adults ate. All surrounded a tree and a figure. Upon a pyre. The crowd cheered, and, despite the crackling sound of the lapping flames, the screams, loud at first, became a mournful sound that never really died out. They can still be heard...
Country of mine you don't exist
You're just my bad silhouette
a word that I got the enemy to believe.
Rogue Dalton, "El Gran Despecho"
I became familiar with the El Salvadoran poet, Rogue Dalton, back in the 1990s while working on my dissertation on American Literature. And violence. The consequences of white supremacy and of being anything but the mythical pure. Racially. I still keep a copy of "The Warrior's Rest" on my kitchen wall.
Seems to me they're
starting to figure out
that they're the majority.
Dalton describes them as having become "insolent". The dead. They know, he continues, that they are the majority.
Jonathan Blitzer's Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here recalls Dalton's description of a country that is no more, except as a place where the enemy resides, yielding power and terror. Disappearing and murdering citizens of El Salvador until it's clear that those citizens were born already dead. Blitzer's book is a page-turner account about the impact US interference played in the lives of citizens in Central America.
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