Two Salvadoran Writers Speak Out in Exile : Their Words Relate the Plight of Peasants, Others in Their Homeland

Their written words speak for them--and for the people of Central America whose lives have been torn apart by years of war and revolution.

Listen to Claribel Alegria, the noted Salvadoran poet, writing of her homeland and of her childhood in the village of Santa Ana, a place now stripped of hope:

. . . The garden once filled with birds is empty. Poison finished Santa Ana’s birds and the flowers don’t grow as before in the garden of my house. My mother tended the carnations, she watered the grass and nurtured the jasmin. Now that she has gone everything has died. The dead eat their dead. The wood decomposes. The vultures, because they have vanished, rot piles upon rot . . . .

Echoes of Misery

Listen, too, to Salvadoran poet and novelist Manlio Argueta, writing in “One Day of Life,” a novel depicting the human misery of El Salvador’s peasants under that country’s military regime. The voice created by Argueta is that of Lupe Guardado, a woman who has seen her son beheaded with one stroke of a machete:

I foresee the worst. When death comes, it alerts you before; it does not come all of a sudden. It always makes a loud noise as if it were riding a horse galloping on a path of stone, its hooves clattering on the stones, miserable death. It makes fun of us because it knows we cannot restrain its runaway horses. It looks for us and finds us always poor. There are problems in life. A child is sick, the beans have burned. A son wounded or dead. We are always losing in this game . . . . We should not allow ourselves to get tired. For our children and for the children of our children. Someday the land will be ours and then we will begin to win . . . we are in water up to our necks but we will not drown.

Argueta, a reformer in blue jeans, remembers how it was for him as a writer in El Salvador before he was expelled from the country for the first time in 1960, taken from his home by the military police and put on a plane to Guatemala:

“They said I was writing naughty poetry. Why didn’t I deal with birds and butterflies and flowers? Why didn’t I just forget the whole thing and become a lawyer (as he had studied to do)? When they were telling me this, they had a pistol to my head.”

At that time, Argueta said, “The poets were the central focus of opposition so the dictatorship had its eye on us.”

But, he said, to be a writer in El Salvador, a country where a dictatorship has ruled for 50 years, “it was necessary to pursue other objectives besides beauty, to relate the art to the struggle of our people.” He added, “This might sound nice” but the reality, for writers, has been persecution, expulsion and exile.

A number of young writers, among them Guatemalan Otto Rene Castillo and Salvadoran Roque Dalton, both Argueta’s university classmates, died in that struggle. “Some have died in combat,” he said. “Others have been assassinated by the death squads.”

‘It was necessary to pursue other objectives besides beauty, to relate the art to the struggle of our people,’ says Salvadoran poet and novelist Manlio Argueta.

Despite the threats, Argueta kept returning to El Salvador--from Guatemala in 1961, from Honduras in 1962, from Nicaragua in 1963. Like many others, “I always came back clandestinely,” he said, “through the hills or by sea, what we call the roads of the people.”

Finally, in 1972, the Catholic university in San Salvador, where Argueta was teaching, his “island of safety” where he was editor of the widely circulated alternative newspaper and director of the university publishing house, was closed down, taken over by the army. “I was wiped out,” Argueta said, and he made the decision to move with his family to San Jose, Costa Rica, where today he works with other Salvadoran refugees.

On Saturday, before about 200 people at a meeting sponsored by the Westside Committee of Solidarity With the People of El Salvador, Argueta stood at a microphone in the darkened auditorium of St. Augustine by the Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica and, through an interpreter, said, “We should know each other a lot better.”

That is a primary purpose of the national tour that will take Argueta and Alegria to Gettysburg, Pa., to Washington and, finally, to New York where, in May, they will participate in a Dialogue of All the Americas, an international cultural conference.

Their visit is billed as a national literary tour, sponsored by the Cultural Front of El Salvador, a new organization of Salvadoran writers and artists, but, the writers acknowledged, it is as much political as literary.

“We would like to make known what is going on right now, to show the North American people the truth,” said Alegria, who was born in Nicaragua, grew up in El Salvador and, after many years abroad, returned to Managua to live.

She is here, she said, to tell people “that we love and we suffer,” to eradicate what she termed the “Ronald Reagan stereotype of ( contras as) freedom fighters and Sandinistas as totalitarian roughnecks.”

Alegria hopes that, as a writer, she is perhaps more credible than she would be as a politician. “We’re not fighting for any office,” she said. “What we say is the truth.”

Alegria, 60, and Argueta, 49, both of whose works have been translated into English and both of whom are recipients of Latin America’s most prestigious literary award, the Casa de las Americas Prize, have traveled very different routes but they share a passionate commitment to what he calls “humanizing our people before international opinion.”

They spoke of this, and their commitment to social reform, during an interview at the Santa Monica home of artist Bruria Finkel, who met Alegria during a visit to Nicaragua with a group of planners and architects last year. Alegria spoke in English, Argueta through an interpreter.

When Alegria was growing up, she said, it was customary for Salvadorans of a certain social class to send their children to North America to study. At George Washington University in 1946, Alegria met an American student, Darwin J. Flakoll; they were married three months later. His assignment as a news service correspondent eventually took them to Paris, where they lived for a number of years before deciding to settle in Deya, Majorca, and become full-time writing partners.

It was an idyllic existence, but eventually, Alegria said, “I began to get very guilty” about the struggle of “my people in Nicaragua and El Salvador.” It was after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador in March, 1980, she said, that “most of us felt we had to do something to fill the gap.” Being denied permission to attend her mother’s funeral in El Salvador two years later cemented her determination.

The Poetry of Destruction

In 1982, Alegria and Flakoll collaborated on “Nicaragua: The Sandinista Revolution”; currently, Alegria is writing a novella, set in El Salvador in 1978, about the ill-fated love between an older woman and a young guerrilla fighter. Her book of poetry, “Flowers From the Volcano,” published here by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1982, is largely about death and destruction, haunting and tragic and poignantly beautiful.

She feels strongly the obligation that goes with her talent. “In our countries,” she said, “a writer is very much respected. A writer is taken a little bit as a guru, is thought to have the truth more or less in his hand.”

Alegria spoke of the “very great” role of writers in fostering revolution in Nicaragua: Father Ernesto Cardenal, a poet who, she noted, “was a cousin of the dictator (Somoza). Because of that he hated him even more.” Poet Jose Coronel Urtecho, now an elderly man, whose farm on the Costa Rican border was a staging area for the revolutionary Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional. Sergio Ramirez and Lisandro Chavez, who lived many years in exile. Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, director of La Prensa newspaper when it was anti-Somoza, “a very courageous man. He was killed by the Somozas” in 1978.

Chamorro’s death, Alegria said, was “the detonator . . . then the people really rose up.”

(It was the beginning of seven years of civil war, which ended in the resignation and exile of Gen. Anastasio Somoza-Debayle).

Without Restriction

Today, she said, “I have found no restrictions whatsoever” on artists and writers living in Nicaragua. She spoke of the “great freedom” in the creative arts, of a flourishing theater, an outstanding museum, of books inexpensive enough to be widely affordable.

And she expressed her continuing puzzlement at what she views as the somewhat self-indulgent nature of North American poetry. Three years ago, she and Flakoll edited an anthology of North American poets--”It was great poetry, beautiful poetry,” she said, “but most of it was very subjective, with the exception of some Chicano poetry, black poetry and women’s poetry.”

This is not true, Alegria said, of the Latin American poets, who feel deeply the need to tell their story of “struggle and repression” and to fight for their beliefs.

Through poets and writers, Manlio Argueta believes, the people of Latin America can communicate their cultural roots and spiritual values, give what he calls a “deeper dimension” to societies that, Argueta said, Americans tend to depreciate as “banana republics.”

These are what he termed “delicate” times for Salvadoran writers. His own novel, “One Day of Life,” officially banned in El Salvador, was published in 1980 by the Catholic university press there although, Argueta recalled, “I told them I was worried about the consequences. The director said they were used to running risks. They’d already been bombed 13 times and he’d accept the risk of a 14th bombing.”

Reaction to the novel in El Salvador, he said, has been “good but limited” as it is sold only clandestinely. However, he still receives telephone calls from people who heard it reviewed on international shortwave radio from Europe or picked up a radio interview with Argueta during one of four European tours he has made since its publication.

They Still Write

Today in El Salvador, he said, dissident writers “have no opportunity to publish. They continue writing. Sometimes they send things outside and they get published. They participate in international literary competitions under phony names. If they write under their own names, it creates problems for them.”

Dissidents have found an outlet for expression in theater--street performances, mime acts, puppet acts in which “they make fun of the government, but it is hard to crack down on them. They don’t have the reputation of being subversive, as the writers have. And they have organizations that support and protect them.”

Argueta is working on another novel, “Cuzcatlan,” which is the Indian name for El Salvador. In essence, he said, it is “a treatise on why and how national guards who are of peasant origin themselves can be converted into torturers and killers.”

It is a question he poses, and then answers: “These people’s humility and poverty and misery is exploited” through special privileges, better food, the opportunity to further their education at military school.

“One Day of Life” is fiction but, Argueta said, it is fiction drawn largely from personal testimony. He dedicates it in his heart to “the peasants . . . these humble, illiterate people without shoes” whose labor produces El Salvador’s coffee and sugar and cotton but who themselves live a “marginalized” existence.

He hopes people are listening, and reading. For 30 years, Argueta said, speaking as a writer, “We’ve often felt we were carrying on an isolated struggle that didn’t matter to the rest of the world.”