Ask the Author: Eliza McCullen
Answered Questions (3)
Eliza McCullen
When I write, I am in another world. Often times I am so steeped in it that when I stop, I have to remind myself where I really am. When I was writing A Land Ruled by Silence, I was there again in Malawi. When I stopped for dinner, it was like, "Oh, here I am in Sedona."
Eliza McCullen
I usually read someone else's book. I gives me inspiration and new ideas. Or...I just write, even if I think it is total rubbish.
Eliza McCullen
It started out with a simple concept. What if an archaeologist in Guatemala searching for evidence of civilization of the ancient Maya of the highlands, instead uncovers a mass grave, a vestige of the thirty-five-year-old civil war that ended with the peace treaty in 1994? The discovery is just another mass grave among the thousands such graves where, in some cases, whole villages were massacred and buried. But what if one of the bodies is ladino, a man of European descent? Who is he and how did he come to be buried among these poor indigenous souls?
It was an intriguing idea, but frankly I didn’t know much about la Violencia, the period in Guatemala’s dark past when the brutal “civil war” ultimately lead to genocide. Thus, I purchased the book, Buried Secrets, Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala by Victoria Sanford, and read it from cover to cover.
She tells a chilling first-hand account of her fieldwork beginning in 1994, which focused on the exhumation of a clandestine cemetery by the Guatemala Forensic Anthropology Foundation. While in the Guatemala, she is approached repeatedly by indigenous women, wishing to uncover their loved ones in other known mass graves. I could see these women in my mind’s eye, shyly sidling up to the researcher as she is walking down a street to inquire about their own graves, their need to find justice overcoming their fear of retribution.
As I read Sanford’s first-hand accounts of interviews with survivors, I felt humbled. Who was I to write a fictional book about such a tragic period in human history? But then I thought about how little I knew about it even after living in Guatemala for nearly three years, how little the average person in the United States knew about it. One of the terms of the Peace Agreement was to establish an impartial commission. The report of this commission would then become part of the nation’s collective memory. The result was document of 4,400 pages in twelve volumes. Not surprisingly, few people were inclined to wade through it.
Thus, the conflict, “despite its scope, significance and impact, … remains largely unknown outside the country and inadequately understood by the majority of Guatemalans.” To render the commission’s findings more accessible both within and outside of Guatemala, they were condensed to some 270 pages and translated into English in the book, Memory of Silence, The Guatemala Truth Commission Report. This, too, I read from cover to cover, learning among other things about forced disappearances of leaders of political organizations, unions and popular organizations made up of students, professors, lawyers, and other concerned citizens in an attempt to dismantle or destroy them. The Maya weren’t the only ones to suffer during this period.
It was an intriguing idea, but frankly I didn’t know much about la Violencia, the period in Guatemala’s dark past when the brutal “civil war” ultimately lead to genocide. Thus, I purchased the book, Buried Secrets, Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala by Victoria Sanford, and read it from cover to cover.
She tells a chilling first-hand account of her fieldwork beginning in 1994, which focused on the exhumation of a clandestine cemetery by the Guatemala Forensic Anthropology Foundation. While in the Guatemala, she is approached repeatedly by indigenous women, wishing to uncover their loved ones in other known mass graves. I could see these women in my mind’s eye, shyly sidling up to the researcher as she is walking down a street to inquire about their own graves, their need to find justice overcoming their fear of retribution.
As I read Sanford’s first-hand accounts of interviews with survivors, I felt humbled. Who was I to write a fictional book about such a tragic period in human history? But then I thought about how little I knew about it even after living in Guatemala for nearly three years, how little the average person in the United States knew about it. One of the terms of the Peace Agreement was to establish an impartial commission. The report of this commission would then become part of the nation’s collective memory. The result was document of 4,400 pages in twelve volumes. Not surprisingly, few people were inclined to wade through it.
Thus, the conflict, “despite its scope, significance and impact, … remains largely unknown outside the country and inadequately understood by the majority of Guatemalans.” To render the commission’s findings more accessible both within and outside of Guatemala, they were condensed to some 270 pages and translated into English in the book, Memory of Silence, The Guatemala Truth Commission Report. This, too, I read from cover to cover, learning among other things about forced disappearances of leaders of political organizations, unions and popular organizations made up of students, professors, lawyers, and other concerned citizens in an attempt to dismantle or destroy them. The Maya weren’t the only ones to suffer during this period.
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