Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala

by Diane M. Nelson

Following the 1996 treaty ending decades of civil war, how are Guatemalans reckoning with genocide, especially since almost everyone contributed in some way to the violence? Meaning “to count, figure up” and “to settle rewards and punishments,” reckoning promises accounting and accountability. Yet as Diane M. Nelson shows, the means by which the war was waged, especially as they related to race and gender, unsettled the very premises of knowing and being. Symptomatic are the stories of duplicity pervasive in postwar Guatemala, as the left, the Mayan people, and the state were each said to have “two faces.” Drawing on more than twenty years of research in Guatemala, Nelson explores how postwar struggles to reckon with traumatic experience illuminate the assumptions of identity more generally. Nelson brings together stories of human rights activism, Mayan identity struggles, coerced participation in massacres, and popular entertainment—including traditional dances, horror films, and carnivals—with analyses of mass-grave exhumations, official apologies, and reparations. She discusses the stereotype of the Two-Faced Indian as colonial discourse revivified by anti-guerrilla counterinsurgency and by the claims of duplicity leveled against the Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú, and she explores how duplicity may in turn function as a survival strategy for some. Nelson examines suspicions that state power is also two-faced, from the left’s fears of a clandestine para-state behind the democratic façade, to the right’s conviction that NGOs threaten Guatemalan sovereignty. Her comparison of antimalaria and antisubversive campaigns suggests biopolitical ways that the state is two-faced, simultaneously giving and taking life. Reckoning is a view from the ground up of how Guatemalans are finding creative ways forward, turning ledger books, technoscience, and even gory horror movies into tools for making sense of violence, loss, and the future.

Genres: Nonfiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2009

Reviews

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

To Reckon is to count something; it’s a notion of a day of judgment; it also has a futuristic understanding to measure possibilities of the future and settle penalties for actions. 

Nelson doesn’t present concrete solutions or methods for a reckoning process, but instead offers a series of questions and musings to play with how the past both creates and collapses possibilities for the future. Her fieldwork was collected over decades following critical points in Guatemala’s history, but it’s concerning to me that Nelson doesn’t provide a clear overview of her methodology, such as the number of people she interviewed, translation processes, etc. Nelson put me through epistemological acrobatics, and I wouldn’t recommend this ethnography as a leisure read. I do have deep appreciation for the word play and prose throughout the book.

[Whitney Borup · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like this book bit off more than it could chew while also not saying much about any of those bites. Kristeva, Clover, Lacan, and Bakhtin seem to have made the same arguments about trauma she is making - specifically about Guatemala here - in fewer pages. To use Nelson's term, "simultaneously" a memoir, pop culture critique, and history, I understand her motives to make the book as multi-"faced" as possible. But there were a few too many hyphens and a few too many parentheses to take seriously. "Corpo-ree(a)lity," "(La)tour de force"? The puns took over.