Mark Anderson, Volcanic Identities: Explosive Nationalism and the Disastered Subject in Central American Literature

7/27/2019 Mark Anderson, Volcanic Identities: Explosive Nationalism and the Disastered Subject in Central American Literature

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Disaster Writing

The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe

in Latin America

Mark D. Anderson

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London


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University of Virginia Press

2011 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2011

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anderson, Mark D., 1974

Disaster writing : the cultural politics of

catastrophe in Latin America / Mark D. Anderson.

p. cm. (New world studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3196-8 (cloth : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3197-5 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3203-3 (e-book)

1. Latin American literatureHistory and criticism. 2. Disasters in

literature. 3. Catastrophes (Geology) in literature. 4. Literature and

societyLatin America. 5. National characteristics in literature. I. Title.

PQ7081.A566 2011

860.9'3556dc22

2011015738

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative

publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers

University Press, emple University Press, and the University of Virginia

Press. Te Initiative is supported by Te Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.


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3 Volcanic Identities

Explosive Nationalism and theDisastered Subject in CentralAmerican Literature

With a volcanic soul I entered this hard lie.

Rubn Daro, Momotombo

Oh, belatedness o re, o the hurricane, o lightning!Miguel ngel Asturias, Salve, Guatemala!

Volcanic eruptions fgure among the most destructivenatural orces conceivable in the human imagination. Memories o theincredible devastation wreaked by volcanoes on human populationsrom Pompeii, Italy, to Krakatau, Indonesia, and Paricutn, Mexico,linger on in the collective imagination and mythology ar beyond the

eects o the disasters themselves. Visions o silent cities immersed instone and, in the case o Pompeii, unsuspecting humans converted in-stantaneously into monuments to human ragility give material orm tomillenary ears o an antagonistic nature. Far rom the loving mothero human evolution, this vindictive nature stalks us rom just beyondthe walls o civilization, lying in wait permanently and impatiently orthe chance to devour us in a single gulp. Beore the nuclear era, at least,volcanic eruptions embodied the nearest thing to total annihilation thathumans could envision.

For people living in volcanic geographies, however, volcanoes loom-ing presence means much more: dominating the cultural as well as thegeological horizon, they play a wide range o roles in the construction oindividual, social, and environmental identities, through both symbol-ism and lived experience. To be certain, those who live under the vol-cano, to piler Malcolm Lowrys title, reside permanently in the aware-ness o potential doom; consequently, they must devise coping strategiesor dealing with the psychological trauma that this implies. Many othese coping devices are cultural, ranging rom local personication ordeication o the agent o destruction (the residents o the fanks o Po-


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pocatpetl in Mexico reer to the tul giant intimately as Popo or DonGoyo, or example, while the association o volcanoes with deities suchas the Roman god Vulcan or Tlaloc and Pacha Mama in the Americasabound) to myth making and its modern equivalent in music, literature,art, and lm.

On the other hand, the shear power o volcanic eruptions translatesinto equally orceul metaphors in social and political discourse. Un-like other natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, the last-ing physical presence o volcanoes scores the geographical and culturallandscape with inescapable reminders o the impermanence and violentmutability o the very element that grounds our conception o stabil-ity: the earth itsel.1 This constant, overshadowing physical presence en-dows volcanoes with cultural signicance that cannot be matched evenby recurring disasters such as drought in northeastern Brazil, in whichdecades may pass between catastrophic events. More than the disastersengendered by the volcanic eruptions themselves, it is the potentiality oeruption that inscribes volcanic geography with such powerul culturalsymbolism and utility in the construction o individual, collective, andnational identities.

Volcanic identities play o concepts o sel rooted in the land; butparadoxically, volcanic land embodies the potential or explosive trans-

ormation rather than the immutable groundedness that one normallyassociates with emplaced identities. In volcanic identities, external na-ture and the nature o the sel converge not through shared experienceor human cultivation o the land, as in the Latin American regionalistnovels, but because the environment and the sel are seen as sharing astheir essential characteristic the potential or violent eruption. Ironically,or perhaps purposeully given the political and economic instability thathas historically plagued the nations in question, these volcanic identitiesanchor themselves in the enduring certainty o disruption, thus securing

stability rom a geography o instability. In this sense, they engage math-ematician John Allen Pauloss maxim that uncertainty is the only cer-tainty that there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the onlysecurity (v).

Clearly, identities rooted in the capacity or eruption are highly use-ul in projects o political transormation, but political actors who wishto engage them must also develop containing mechanisms i they hopeto avoid being consumed by the fames that they an. Harnessing vol-canic imagery through historical narrative is one central strategy or

containing explosive identities, particularly at the national level. For in-


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stance, the metaphor o volcanic eruption acquired historical centralityas a national trope in nations that based their political legitimacy on vi-olent social struggle, as is the case with Spanish American colonies thatramed their independence movements as popular uprisings against aoreign power. The use o volcanic imagery in oundational narrativescreates the impression that the national geography itsel joins the re-bellion against external oppression, while simultaneously discipliningpotentially explosive identities by inscribing them within rameworkso action mediated by the state. Similarly, in nations in which volca-noes dominate the geography, institutionalization transorms them intomarkers o political spaces rather than o geophysical processes. Na-tional imaginaries appeal to volcanoes as centripetal ocal points in theconstruction and reproduction o national heritages and histories: thevolcanic geography orms a kind o monumental landscape that inspirespatriotic sentiments and memory as well as uniting the nation visually. 2

The basing o national legitimacy on volcanic tropes is a highly vol-atile proposition, however, leaving it vulnerable to inversion and ques-tioning o projects o internal colonialism. The volcanic metaphor o anation orged by re is oten turned on its head by proponents o socialrevolution, coming to symbolize internal class warare between the im-poverished masses and the political and economic elite. In this revised

version o the metaphor, the lower strata o society, that most closelytied to the land itsel, erupts violently to overthrow the supercial, Euro-peanized or US-backed oligarchy. The national essence, orced into thesubstrata o the national soil by oppression rom above, erupts orth totake its rightul place on the surace, purging with re all nonnative ele-ments. And clearly, this metaphor o social eruption has racial as well associal implications. As much as Jos Mart may have argued or a kindo postrace autochthony based on tilling the land guratively and literal-ly, the majority o Latin American social representations posit the chil-

dren o the earth as the indigenous, and it is their culture that will burstorth rom its bowels to remake the national landscape in their image.

It is no accident that Nicaraguan poet Rubn Daros A Roosevelt(1905) employs volcanic imagery to describe what most Spanish Ameri-cans viewed as the disastrous politics o interventionism ollowing thehand that the United States took in Panamas 1903 secession rom Co-lombia.3 I relatively inrequent in Daros poetry, which tends to privi-lege intimate or abstract spaces over local landscapes, volcanic imageryis ubiquitous in Central American cultural representations. Nearly all

Spanish American nations geographies have been sculpted by the vol-


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canic activity o the Pacic Ring o Fire that wells up between tectonicplates, but perhaps in none do volcanoes hold such a central positionin the national imaginary as in the Central American nations o CostaRica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. This is partially due, ocourse, to practical considerations o scale: one is rarely, i ever, out osight o volcanoes in any o these nations, and volcanoes constitute theirmost imposing geological eatures, orientating their viewers toward theheart o the nation and away rom the dispersion and dependence on or-eign shores that the equally omnipresent coasts symbolize. On the otherhand, volcanoes have infuenced nearly every aspect o lie in these coun-tries, rom endowing their soil with the ertility o volcanic ash to aect-ing the climate, dictating the social geography, molding history, and oc-casionally sowing terror and death in eruptions and mudslides.

Rather than ocusing on the political circumstances surrounding aparticular disaster event, as did the previous two chapters, I scrutinizehere the centrality o volcanic imagery to politicized Central Ameri-can cultural identities at the local, national, and regional internationalscales. I am particularly interested in the way that volcanic imagery isused to mediate interactions between individual and collective identitiesand the state. As the rst part o the chapter shows, volcanoes gure re-quently as benign beacons o nationalism in ocial Central American

iconography rom independence on. I explore national iconographies ovolcanoes in national heraldry and Rubn Daros poem Momotombo(1907), analyzing the way in which volcanic landscapes are endowedwith cultural and political memory and symbolism.

Nationalist concepts o landscape as heritage oten lead to the exclu-sion o certain groups rom the national conceptual geography, however,and the long history o confict between ethnic groups and social classesin Central America led to competing claims to ownership o the volca-nic landscape. The second part o the chapter ocuses on the construc-

tion o identities that resist the imposition o nationalistic iconographyover their lived landscape, turning volcanic imagery against autocraticsymbolic orders and emphasizing the metaphorical potential o eruptionas social revolution. I study the elaboration o a volcanic topography othe individual in the poetry o Guatemalan writer Luis de Lin, as wellas the way in which he creates a collective identity o resistance based onthe lived experience o the Volcn de Agua. I then turn to more negativeassociations in which volcanic tremors suggest the immanence o a trau-matic schism in individual as well as social identities due to psychologi-

cal trauma inficted on the individual living under repressive regimes, re-


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sulting in representations o what I call the disastered subject. In thissection, I base mysel primarily on Cenizas de Izalco (Ashes of Izalco;1966), a novel cowritten by Salvadoran Claribel Alegra and AmericanDarwin Flakoll. Finally, I continue with my discussion o Cenizas deIzalco as well as Manlo Arguetas Magic Dogs of the Volcanoes/Perrosmgicos de los volcanes (1990), Roque Daltons Parbola a partir de lavulcanologa revisionista (Parable Derived rom Revisionist Volcanol-ogy; 1974), and Jos Coronel Urtechos parodic Oda al Mombacho(1931) to reveal how institutionalized representations o volcanoes wererewritten as tropes o social revolution, which were in turn reincorpo-rated into the national imaginary ollowing the triumph o the Sandini-sta revolution in Nicaragua in 1979 and the peace accord that ended theSalvadoran civil war in 1992.

The Volcanic Nation: Fiery Nationalism andEmblematic Landscapes

The concept o national landscapes incorporates both old and new vi-sions o humans relationships with our environment. Humans havealways identied with the places we inhabit, but up until the rise othe nation-state, territoriality tended to be delimited by the centrality opresence rather than xed borders. In the nineteenth century, however,

the expansion o colonial capitalism coupled with rapid advancementsin communications and transportation made territorial control possiblein ways that had never beore existed, turning the national eye outward,away rom the center toward its borders.4 Controlling and patrollingthe borders between nation-states became the measure o national ter-ritoriality. This centrality o the margins ran counterintuitive to the wayin which humans had related to their lived spaces up until that moment,however, leading to conficting symbolisms in national imaginaries. Onthe one hand, borders were xed symbolically through the use o ter-

ritorial signiers such as national maps that blanked out or discoloredadjacent states and territories, thus creating conceptual separation whereoten no natural divisions existed. As Kenneth Olwig states, The ten-dency to see the shape o a nation as a body-like organic whole is en-hanced by the act that many national maps simply leave out adjacentstates, or represent them as empty space (77). Furthermore, J. B. Harleynotes that maps have ew genuinely popular, alternative, or subversivemodes o expression, as they are preeminently a language o power,not o protest (Maps 301). In this sense, the mapping o borders ex-

presses the political power o those who inscribe them, as well as the


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subalternity o those who do not have access to the national symboliclandscape.

On the other hand, the national imaginary elaborated a cardinal vo-cabulary based on the human body and its relation to its surroundingsin order to conserve the conceptual centrality o lived space: terms suchas homelandand heartlandabound in this discursive construction o thenation as an organic whole.5 As Oliver Zimmer has suggested regard-ing the position o the Alps in Swiss nationalism, these central spaces inthe national body were imagined as a physical dimension o the nationalpast that had played a key role in determining the national character(24345). In other words, the heartland was conceived o as the in-ternal, geographical embodiment o national moral qualities and socialvalues. This comorting conceptual geography oered stability and aninward orientation amid the uncertainty o rapidly changing politicalcongurations and economic expansionism (Zimmer 243).

I the Alps came to represent the essence o the nation or the Swiss,volcanoes became national emblems or Central American nations con-stantly threatened by oreign intervention. As Allaine Cerwonka com-ments, citing Antonio Gramsci, the impulse to essentialize the nationalgeography intensies when a nation encounters deterritorialization,or increased transnational fows, as a result o both colonization and

decolonization, oreign interventionism, and global trade (6). The Cen-tral American volcano drew the national eye inward and upward, awayrom the coasts that had become sites o oreign penetration. Indeed,the volcano as symbol embodied the sense o mountains as natural or-tresses and repositories o essential, even divine knowledge as well as thepotential or eruptive violence in deense o the nation. This symbolismworked particularly well within national and regional Central Americanoundational narratives, which situated the legitimacy o the nation inviolence against oreign aggressors, whether Spanish colonizers, Mexico

(which attempted to annex Central America directly ollowing indepen-dence in 1821), American William Walker and his army o libusters, orUS military, political, and economic intervention in the twentieth cen-tury. At the same time, Olwig notes that national identity is most otenviewed as a natural rather than articial phenomenon: natural, nation-al,and native all share the Latinate prex nat-,meaning birth (73).In the Central American imaginary, volcanoes exteriorize the native es-sence, dredging up national landscapes rom deep within the earth.

Tellingly, the nationalistic use o the volcanic landscape was pres-

ent in the earliest visual representations o Central American autono-


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my ollowing independence. The ocial coat o arms o the ephemer-al Provincias Unidas del Centro de Amrica (United Provinces o Cen-tral America, 18231825) depicts ve stylized volcanoes, each o whichrepresents one o the ve member provinces (El Salvador, Guatemala,Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica). This conederation existed onand o throughout the nineteenth century, changing names and mem-bers requently. Ater 1825, it endured in a new orm as the RepblicaFederal Centroamericana (Federal Republic o Central America), but acivil war rom 1838 to 1841 resulted in its dissolution into separate na-tions corresponding roughly to the colonial departments delineated bythe Spanish. Subsequent attempts at restoring regional unity, such as theFederacin de Centroamrica (Central American Federation, 1851) andthe Repblica Mayor de Centroamrica (Greater Republic o CentralAmerica, 1898), were short-lived. Despite the drastic changes in politicalorganization, however, successive coats o arms retained a similar com-position, highlighting the volcano as a uniying symbol in the midst opolitical dissolution, civil war, and regional rivalries.6

The Central American ederations coat o arms rst appeared on Feb-ruary 20, 1822, on a fag designed by Coronel Manuel Jos Arce thatwas presented to Salvadoran troops who went o to battle Mexico orindependence.7 Following the triumph o the Central American orces,

the fag was adopted by the National Constitutive Assembly o the Unit-ed Provinces on August 21, 1823.8 The conguration o the coat o armsvaried slightly in successive iterations, but it maintained the key elementso the ve volcanoes (except or that o the 1851 Central American Fed-eration, which had only had three member states) inscribed within anequilateral triangle. A wake symbolizing progress led across the sea tothe volcanoes, which were illuminated rom above by the red Phrygiancap, icon o liberty and equality during the French Revolution, and anoverarching rainbow that united the ve volcanoes in peaceul raterni-

ty.9 In the original coat o arms, the triangle was urther bound by a cir-cle bearing the words Provincias Unidas del Centro de Amrica.

The importance o the national landscape or Latin American nationsanxious to establish territorial and cultural autonomy rom colonialpowers is well documented in the literature o the independence period.Poems such as Cuban Jos Mara Heredias A Emilia (1824) and Vene-zuelan Andrs Bellos Silva a la agricultura de la zona trrida (Ode toTropical Agriculture; 18261827) sexualized local landscapes in termso the emale body, as the site o national economic production as well

as the reproduction o the national subject. Like Jos Marts Nuestra


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Amrica (1895), which was written in a similar mode three-quarters oa century later, these works deploy tropes in which the male patriarchalounder legitimizes himsel as autochthonous (despite his European ormixed-race origins) by cultivating the native, emale land-body. In thisimaginary, sex as metaphor or the oundational act o nationality in-volves the intertwining o the masculine national subject with the arche-typically passive, emale landscape.

This trope becomes somewhat more complex when the national land-scape is volcanic in origin, however. Passivity cannot be assigned un-critically to a landscape that threatens cataclysmic movement. The Cen-tral American nationalist imaginary engaged two primary strategies todomesticate the phallic violence associated with volcanic eruptions: theconceptual delimitation o threatening elements and incorporation othe volcanos masculine symbolism into the national cultural landscape.Artistic depictions were central in this process o transorming volca-noes into sae, national icons. In the coat o arms, the ve volcanoes arerendered geometrically, made to resemble man-made pyramids in a he-raldic moti rather than uncontrollable eatures o a threatening land-scape. Furthermore, these volcanoes are inscribed within the ormal per-ection o an equilateral triangle, delineating gurative borders that con-tain the volcanoes potential or violent eruption as well as converging

the nations physical geography with the ordered masculine, geometriclogic o the Enlightenment. The positioning within the triangle o thevolcanoes below, with the rainbow above, and the Phrygian cap as pupilin the center conorms the Freemason Eye o Providence symbol thatappeared commonly in independence-era texts, engaging the trope o di-vine oversight o human and natural aairs to deposit yet another lay-er o saety over the volcanic imagery. In addition, the placement o thedarker green volcanoes between the light blue o the seas on either sidemakes it appear as i the volcanoes themselves emanate light. Not only

are they illuminated by the Phrygian cap, but they also become illumi-nating beacons o liberty and equality in their own right.

The conversion o natural geological eatures into ideological symbolsresults in the confation o the volcanic geography with the national proj-ect: the volcanoes come to symbolize the masculine principle in a per-ectly ordered, natural national oundation narrative. The prevalence omasculine elements does not mean that the trope o the eminine madrepatria (literally mother-atherland) is abandoned entirely, however:the entire collage is inscribed within the circular border o the seal, sug-

gesting the union o the masculine (triangular) and the eminine (circu-


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lar) in the concept o nationality. Furthermore, the lush green color othe volcanoes together with the depiction o water, whose apparent pas-sivity and enveloping properties are oten associated with emale sexu-ality in patriarchal societies, suggests a return to the tropes o eminineertility invoked by poets such as Bello and Heredia. In this way, the coato arms coalesces masculine and eminine tropes in its representation othe national landscape, depicting the volcano as patriarchal ounder andprotector o the ertile emale landscape. The destructive potential o thevolcano is harnessed in deense o the nation, serving as the counterpartto the emale reproductive potential o the land, which is in turn ertil-ized by the emission o volcanic ash. Through this symbolism, the na-tional political project roots itsel in the natural authenticity o the vol-canic landscape. Volcanoes become heritage, and the coat o arms be-comes a geography o nationalism, a conceptual map o the nation.

Although the Central American union had a relatively brie and tu-multuous existence, even ater it disbanded, nations such as Nicaraguaand El Salvador conserved versions o the original coat o arms on theirfags, in part to dispute each other or political legitimacy as the directinheritors o the original Republic. Costa Rica has abandoned the orig-inal coat o arms, but its seal conserves three stylized volcanoes, andHondurass coat o arms also eatures a lone volcano, perhaps to empha-

size its autonomy rom its more politically prominent neighbors. OnlyGuatemala has eschewed completely the original coat o arms, which,when contextualized, must be seen as a conscious rejection o the politi-cal dominance o El Salvador and Nicaragua during periods o coneder-ation as well as a rejection o symbolism that heightens ethnic divisions,as I study in depth urther on in this chapter. In any case, it is evidentthat volcanic imagery became canonical in the construction o nation-ality throughout Central American history and that its centrality in thenational imaginary continues unabated today.

Volcanic Subjectivity in the National Imaginary

Strangely enough, one o the rst narratives that explicitly linked CentralAmerican volcanoes with nationalistic resistance to the colonial impo-sition o identities was not written by a Central American nationalistat all. In a burst o romantic exoticism inspired by a passage in E. G.Squiers Travels in Central America (1853), iconic French author VictorHugo penned a anciul poem entitled Les raisons du Momotombo(Momotombos Reasoning) that narrates a verbal duel during the colonial

period between a Spanish priest and Nicaraguan volcano Momotombo,


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personied as a wise indigenous chietain.10 The Spanish priest has beencharged with baptizing all the pagan volcanoes o the New World in or-der to reduce the incidence o earthquakes in the region. Flame-crownedMomotombo, unique among his ellow volcanoes, reuses to allow him-sel to be baptized, alleging that the Spanish god is as demanding ohuman sacrice as was the indigenous counterpart that he drove away.He reers repeatedly to atrocities committed by the Spanish Inquisitionto back up his arguments, which explains why this poem was includedin the section on the Santo Ocio (Holy Oce) in Hugos La lgendedes sicles series (1859). In any case, Momotombos reusal to acceptbaptism gains additional signicance in the colonial context, as baptismwas associated with the erasure o indigenous identity and renaming,which implied acculturation. Similarly, the priests stated motivation inreducing the requency o earthquakes suggests a link between naturaldisasters and identities o resistanceMomotombo was only dangerousas an indigenous volcano. Once stripped o its indigenous cultural trap-pings, the volcano would become an innocuous natural curiosity.

Hugos poem served in turn as inspiration or two works by Nica-raguan archpoet Rubn Daro: a brie chronicle o volcanic activity inCentral America entitled La erupcin del Momotombo, which he pub-lished in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio on July 16, 1886, shortly

ater his arrival in that nation, and the poem Momotombo, which heincluded in El canto errante (The Roving Song; 1907). Although Daroalludes to Hugos poem in both works, his perspective o the volcano,and o his homeland itsel, shits drastically in the later poem. La erup-cin del Momotombo tends toward the descriptive, reconstructing orhis Chilean readers a lush but tragic Central American geography o vol-canoes and lakes. Daro divides his chronicle in ve sections correspond-ing to the ve Central American nations (Panama did not exist as a sep-arate nation until 1903), each o which links volcanic activity to tragic

oundational myths and their literary representations.In the section on Guatemala, he cites Jos Milla y Vidaurres novel

La hija del adelantado (The Governors Daughter; 1866) in reerring tohow Doa Beatriz de la Cueva, wie o governor Pedro de Alvarado, per-ished in the mudfow rom the Volcn de Agua that devastated the co-lonial capital in 1541. Complementing Hugos poem, this reerence un-derscores the symbolism o volcanic activity as a visceral reaction o theland to the colonial enterprise, although it establishes no direct causal-ity. The section on El Salvador continues to elaborate the link between

volcanism and political identities, but again, Daro draws no clear con-


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nection beyond parallelism. He describes El Salvador as the most vol-canic o all the Central American nations, and he cites the Volcn deIzalco in particular, but he glosses over particular eruptions, stating onlythat the capital has been destroyed more than once by volcanic activity.He then writes, not without irony, that although there have been severalattempts to move the capital to saer ground, they have been rustrat-ed: The valiant children o the Salvadoran homeland are stubborn andstrong, and they wouldnt care even i it were Vulcan with his Lipari andMongibelo. Unortunately, they are as disdainul o seismic revolutionsas they are o others, that are highly detrimental to the progress o thosenations (Los valerosos hijos de la patria salvadorea son testarudos yuertes y no se les dara un ardite del mismo Vulcano con su Lpari y suMongibelo. Para las revoluciones sesmicas tienen tanta altivez como,por desgracia, para otras, que son harto atales al progreso de aquellospueblos; 2).11 Once again, volcanic activity poses a challenge to politicalauthority and the domestication o what is now the national landscape.Daro purposeully employs an ambiguous and stilted sentence structurein which it is not at all clear whether detrimental (fatales) reers to thevolcanic and other revolutions or to the disdainul Salvadoran policy-makers themselves.

Daro was not known or political activism, a act I believe owed

more to childhood entanglements in the political strie between con-servatives and liberals than to the apolitical, escapist attitude that crit-ics oten attribute to him. Nevertheless, there certainly seems to be aveiled political message in these lines, and he condemns outright theratricidal civil wars that have plagued the Central American nationssince independence: A sad reputation, that o all my Central Americancountrymen: not even a ew years can go by without shedding the bloodo brothers! (2).12 The volcanic eruption and political inghting poseequally catastrophic threats to the well-being o the nation. In contrast,

he concludes by lauding Costa Rica or its more sane (cuerdo) politicalhistory. The ollowing section remarks that the Costa Ricans have notsuered greatly rom volcanic upheaval, thus linking, again i only byparallelism, political stability with a lack o volcanic volatility.

Daro continues the concatenation o the national geography and pol-itics with volcanic activity in the section on Nicaragua. Momotomboreprises his symbolic role in Hugos poem, which Daro incorporates inprose translation. He describes Momotombo as the most imposing butalso most beautiul Nicaraguan volcano, postulating an aesthetics o

power and indomitability to which he returned in the poem in El canto


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errante. Citing the recent eruption o October 11, 1886, which hal-de-stroyed Len and also aected seriously Managua and Chinandega, hepersonies Momotombo as a militar de alto rango (high-ranking mili-tary ocial) who reuses to abandon his warlike ways (2).

Tellingly, the preceding paragraph reers to the 1550 Contreras Con-spiracy, in which two sons o governor Rodrigo de Contreras were im-plicated in the brutal murder o Bishop Antonio Valdivieso. Motivatedby concerns o social justice or petty politics, depending on who tells thetale, the bishop had denounced their ather or reusing to enorce the1542 Nuevas Leyes de Indias that were designed to protect the SpanishCrowns indigenous subjects against exploitation by unscrupulous en-comenderos. According to legend, the day the bishop was killed, LakeManagua boiled and Antiguo Len was fooded in divine retribution(Daro, Erupcin 2). Instigated to action by ollowers o GonzaloPizarro, who ironically proclaimed Hernando Contreras the inheritoro the Incan empire with the title Prncipe de Cuzco y Capitn Generalde la Libertad (Prince o Cuzco and General Captain o Freedom), thebrothers led an initially successul uprising against the Crown, sackingPanama. When conronted by royal troops, however, they fed into thejungle never to be heard rom again. It is said that Hernando was de-voured by a caiman. In any case, the narrative order links Momotombos

1886 eruption to political strie even i there is no apparent direct con-nection. And although Daro could hardly be considered a champion othe rights o the dispossessed, particularly given the scorn in which heheld socialism, one needs little imagination to associate the excesses olandowners during the colonial period with those o the coee baronsin Daros present. Furthermore, by tying together a colonial eruptionassociated with divine retribution against political repression and thato Momotombo in his present, Daro establishes a genealogy o volcanicheritage in which the nations destiny and political legitimacy (which,

though questioned, is at issue) are linked intimately with the nationallandscape.

Daros poem Momotombo, written nearly twenty years later, ur-ther develops the connection between the volcanic landscape and na-tional identity, using it to anchor the subjectivity o a poetic voice adritin an ocean o cosmopolitan indeterminacy. Tellingly, Momotombo isa travel narrative, a meditation on Daros exodus rom Nicaragua as ateenager, but it also represents a nostalgic, literary return rom decadeso exile that anticipates the literal repatriation retold in El viaje a Nica-

ragua (Journey to Nicaragua; 1909). The opening lines o the poem jux-


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tapose images o displacement and permanence: The train rolled alongits rails. It was / in the days o my golden springtime / and it was in mynative Nicaragua (El tren iba rodando sobre sus rieles. Era / en los diasde mi dorada primavera / y era en mi Nicaragua natal). The contrastingimages o the train in movement, with its connotations o linear prog-ress and modern development, and the nostalgic longing or a return toyouth and nature suggested by golden springtime, together with theassertion o national origins, converge in a portrait o the exiled subjectas a conficted being, disoriented, torn between distant spaces and imag-inaries. But Suddenly, between the treetops, I saw / a gigantic cone,bald and nude, and / ull o ancient, triumphal pride (De pronto, entrelas copas de los rboles, vi / un cono gigantesco, calvo y desnudo, y /lleno de antiguo orgullo triunal). Not only does Momotombos suddenapparition orient the poets vision, drawing it up and away to the heightso sublime contemplation rom the dizzying spectacle o the landscape inmovement, the perspective o exile, but it also roots him in national au-thenticity. The allusion to Hugos lines bald and nude, which are alsoincluded in French in Daros epigraph, suggests venerable age (histori-cal legitimacy) and natural authenticity, a complete lack o human arti-ce. O course, this nudity represents an artice o its own: as AnthonyPym notes, Daro redresses the volcanos nakedness with ornate linguis-

tic garb that includes the use o Hugos original French (187). Indeed,Daro uses reerences to Hugos poem, here and in La erupcin de Mo-motombo, to revalidate his own cultural background as well as that othe nation: as a key writer in the Romantic renovation o the Westernaesthetic, Hugos interest in the Nicaraguan landscape and cultural his-tory amounts to an acknowledgment o Nicaraguas cultural sovereign-ty and legitimacy as a nation, particularly given the anticolonial drit othe poem.

Indeed, Daro reads Momotombo through Hugo: I had already read

Hugo and the legend / that Squire taught him. His individual experi-ence o the landscape is clearly mediated by culture, and by one that em-phasizes volcanic identity as a marker o resistance to the colonial impo-sition o identities. For Daro this would resonate not only with Hugosindictment o Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth century but also withthat o the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It canhardly be coincidental that Daro returned to Hugos poem ater two de-cades, directly ollowing the scathing attack on US imperialism that heproered in A Roosevelt in Cantos de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life

and Hope; 1905).


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Daros armation o Hispanic identity and cultural autonomy nec-essarily extended to the nation. It is true that Daros vague politicalwritings tended to champion Hispanic unity in the Bolivarian model,particularly when it came to the project o restoring the aborted CentralAmerican Republic, which one could take as a rejection o the nation-state model. However, Bolvars ollowers rarely advocated the dissolu-tion o the nation; they were more concerned with uniting the existingnations in an international superstructure to counteract US and Euro-pean neocolonialism. In this sense, there is no contradiction or Daroin arming simultaneously his Nicaraguan heritage and his desire or aunited Spanish America.

Daros Momotombo, with its silva-like structure, harks backto the early nineteenth-century Romanticist poetry o ellow SpanishAmericans Jos Mara Heredia and Andrs Bello that exalted the land-scape as the oundations o national originality as well as the source osublimation o nationalist sentiments. At the same time, the incorpo-ration o modernist elements such as the alexandrine provides greaterrhythmic precision. This mixture o styles allows Daro to use his per-sonal aesthetics, with its emphasis on individual genius and the mysticalquest or the Ideal through ormal perection, with the looser theoreti-cal bounds o nationalist sentiment. In act, Momotombo is rie with

a nationalistic rhetoric o origins and emblems. In the rst lines, Darohas already marked the volcano as a beacon o identity and origins, as amemorial to his childhood in Nicaragua. The second stanza reinorcesthe paternal relationship between the national landscape and the exiledsubject, establishing a direct genealogy: Ancient ather / who duplicateshimsel in the harmonious mirror / o pearly, emerald, pale green water(Padre viejo / que se duplica en el armonioso espejo / de un agua perla,esmeralda, col). One need not belabor the Lacanian imagery, with thepaternal role in the constitution o identity suggested by duplication and

the mirror. This initiative unction is reiterated later in the poem whenDaro writes,

Father o re and stone

I asked you that day

or the secret o your fames, your arcane o harmony

the initiation that you could give;

because o you I meditated on the immensity o Ossa and Pelion,

and that there are Titans above in the constellations

and below inside the earth and the sea.13


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In this case, the initiation into (poetic) language provided by the atherleads to the ormation o a national, not solely individual, identity.

Momotombo takes on a role equivalent in Nicaraguan mythical ori-gins to that o Mounts Ossa and Pelion in Greek mythology. He becomesan indigenous Titan, epic hero, and patriarch o the nation:

And I arrived and I saw in the clouds the prodigious head

o that cone o the centuries, o that volcano ogesta

which was a revelation beore me.

Lord o the heights, emperor o waters

at his eet the divine lake o Managua,

with islands o pure light and song.

Momotombo!I exclaimedOh, epic name!14

Daro represents Momotombo as a conquering emperor rom the dawno history, and the poetic voice locates itsel as the ounder o a na-tional discourse rooted in the medieval tradition ogesta, or epic poetry.Indeed, he has already traced his intellectual genealogy to the Spanishconquerors. He admits reely his anity or the exoticized past, writing,

I was already nourished by Oviedo and Gomara

and my blossoming soul dreamed o strange stories,

ables, ctions, romances, love

o conquests, victories o erce horses,

Incas and priests, prisoners and slaves,

eathers and gold, audacity, splendor.15

In keeping with the early nineteenth-century Romantic notion that na-tional histories should be rooted in mythic origins, he weaves a visiono Nicaraguas past in which Momotombo becomes a abled hero me-morialized in the cultural landscape, a national symbol o liberty andillumination.

Daro is not known or nationalismjust the opposite. He reiteratedtirelessly throughout his poetic career his belie in a somewhat mysti-cal universalism under the banner o Western culture, in which nationaldivisions appeared almost as wounds in the organic body o humanity.Consequently, the specic emphasis on the Nicaraguan landscape andcultural history make this poem unique among Daros literary produc-tion. Building on Hugos representation o Momotombo as a symbol oindigenous resistance to the colonial imposition o identities, he under-scores Momotombos national signicance by linking him to the ounda-

tional narrative o independence, with its tropes o Enlightenment: One


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might say that you were a barrier to shadows, / ever since the white manheard your chies tongue / and its declarations o liberty (Dijrase queueses para las sombras dique, / desde que oyera el blanco la lengua delcacique / en sus discursos de libertad). Furthermore, playing o the com-mon trope o mountains as places o reuge and bulwarks against attack,Momotombo deends the nation against the specter o oreign invasion:

When the Babylons o the West

in purple catastrophes pursuing immensity

circled the august pride o your orehead,

you were like an icon o Serenity.

In your incessant urnace I saw perpetual war

in your stone, military units without end.I elt in your earthquakes the bellow o the land

and the immortality o Pan.16

Daro describes an inspirited, national nature in which the land itsel ris-es up against oreign occupation, which remained a very real threat giv-en the history o Spanish colonialism, William Walkers 1855 oray intoNicaragua, and repeated US interventions in Panama and Honduras.Indeed, the United States occupied Nicaragua as well only three yearslater, in 1910. In this nationalistic imaginary, the volcano Momotombo

becomes a virile ather, progenitor and protector o the national heritage.Furthermore, as this atherly imaginary suggests, the relationship be-

tween the land and the nation is also internalized, allowing the poet toemplace himsel within the national geography despite exile. As he pro-claims, With a volcanic soul I entered this hard lie / my heart sueredhurricane and Aquilon [the north wind] / and hurricane and Aquilonmove the burning chimera / o my mind.17 Through volcanic imagery,Daro is able to resolve the apparent contradictions between eelings osuering and alienation, the search or national origins misplaced dur-

ing the experience o exile, and his desire or wider recognition as part othe Western artistic canon and as an initiate into this mysterious Idealthat he rames as a kind o universal consciousness.

Building on imagery rom Hugos Les raisons du Momotombo,Rubn Daros poem marks Nicaraguas volcanic topography as an orig-inary site or both individual and national identity. Not coincidently, bythis time Daro himsel had come to be considered a national xture inNicaragua, despite the act that he had barely set oot in the country ornearly twenty years. The issue o his exile was immaterial, however, as

Daros poem only reinorced nationalist sentiments that were already


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commonplace, although he theorized these connections in greater depththan did his predecessors in the visual arts. Daros use o volcanic im-agery refects what Brian Graham and Peter Howard, citing LaurajaneSmith, call authorized heritage discourse (Introduction 2). The conti-nuity o Daros imagery with the national narrative o volcanoes as em-blematic landscapes serves to connect the national past with his present,reinscribing the role o volcanoes as repositories o national sentimentsand memory. And heritage is canon (Graham and Howard, Introduc-tion 6).

As any scholar o literary studies is well aware, the construction oa canon necessarily implies processes o negotiation and exclusion. AsGraham and Howard point out, The creation o any heritage activelyor potentially disinherits or excludes those who do not subscribe to, orare embraced within, the terms o meaning attending that heritage (In-troduction 3). In Central America, the canonical oundational narra-tive paradoxically rooted its concept o national territorial stability in ahighly unstable geophysical phenomenon. Perhaps the volcanoes peren-nial instability made them attractive as a symbol o permanence amidenduring crises in national identities due to political and social instabil-ity and the constant threat o oreign intervention: the only certainty wasuncertainty. Paradoxically, the volcanoes potential volatility kept their

symbolism open despite canonization as themed spaces.In the national imaginary inscribed by the elite ounding athers, vol-

canoes had been stripped o danger and overwritten with national heri-tage, becoming monuments to nationality. As Sarah McDowell pointsout, the state is the ocial arbitrator o public commemoration and,thereore, o national heritage (40), a custodian relationship that be-comes highly problematic when the state maintains a repressive rela-tionship with its citizens. For those who were excluded rom conceptso nationality and citizenship, oten the majority during the tumultuous

politics o the twentieth century, volcanoes remained a contested land-scape inscribed by conficting spatial codes and inhabited by identitieso resistance. These identities o resistance establish an alternate geneal-ogy in which the descendants o the volcanoes were not the nationalisticoligarchy but, rather, those who threatened their hegemony. In this al-ternate imaginary, the ruling class was associated with internal colonial-ism based on oreign models, while the true children o the volcanoeswere the marginalized indigenous and revolutionary ghters who tookreuge on the volcanoes fanks to escape political persecution. For the

latter, volcanic eruption entailed the uprising o the oppressed children


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o the earth, who would purge all traces o oreign infuence and localoppression in a bath o re.

Identities of Resistance: Igneous Individualsand the Volcanic Race

Guatemalan indigenous poet Luis de Lins opens the rst poem o hisPoemas del Volcn de Agua: Los poemas mos (Poems o the Volcnde Agua: Poems o Mine; 1980) with words that echo the role thatRubn Daro assigned Momotombo in the ormation o individualand collective identities in Nicaragua: he lives in the arms o the Volcnde Agua, / because he is a child o that ather (vive en los brazos delvolcn de agua, / porque es hijo de ese padre).18 The scope o Lins poemis rather more limited, however: he uses the third person here to reerexclusively to his birthplace, a Kakxikel Mayan village at the oot othe Volcn de Agua named San Juan del Obispo. The emphasis on geo-graphic specicity precludes the elaboration o a national synecdoche,which would be unavailable in any case due to the subaltern positiono Mayan identity in Guatemala at the time in which Lin was writing.Nevertheless, the landscape becomes emblematic o another identity:that o its indigenous inhabitants, marginalized rom social, political,and economic citizenship.

Lin advances the connection between the landscape, its inhabit-ants, and their organic social organization by juxtaposing consciouslythe twin meanings opueblo as site and social corpus in his poem. Hepersonies the town as dark-skinned, pacic, sweet (moreno, pac-co, dulce), semi-Indian, semiliterate, and semi-ingenuous (semiindio,semianalabeto, semiingenuo), and good at soccer and birdcalls. Withthis introduction, he puts into play the complex European trope o in-digenous innocence and proximity to nature, but with a twist: he viewshimsel and his people not as children o the earth but as children o

the volcano, adding volatility to an expression that typically communi-cates a passive relationship with the land to the detriment o the modernemphasis on development and human modication o the environment.On the other hand, his identication o the children o the volcano doesnot depend exclusively on race: they are only semiindio. O greater im-portance is the experience o lie under the volcano.

Poemas del Volcn de Agua: Los poemas mos is a meditation on theconstitution o the poets identity; and as the title indicates, it is an iden-tity constructed in relation to the lived experience o the landscape in

contrast to the abstract symbolism o volcanoes in the nationalist imag-


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inary. These are poems not on but rom the Volcn de Agua. Thesecond poem, Poema para mi cielo, recounts how the poetic voiceshorizon was shaped on one extreme by the Volcn de Agua and, on theother, by the Volcn de Fuego. He repeatedly emphasizes this connec-tion with the volcanoes as an inseparable part o his identity, even whenhis cielo (which embodies connotations o utopian social projects as wellas cultural horizons) expanded through his travels and knowledge, onthe one hand, and the cultural encroachment o neocolonialism, on theother. Indeed, the shared experience o subalternity within a globalizedeconomic ramework transorms his cielo into the international pro-longation o other skies/heavens (prolongacin de otros cielos) unitedthrough these blues o us all / the whole world (este azul de todo elmundo), thinly veiled reerences to the contestatory ideology that char-acterizes the book.

In Poema a mi nio, the volcano has been internalized, promising aviolent uture: underneath this hide / is the tender skin o a child / whobarely sleeps / who bears burdens / and trudges even while asleep: / hiseet are two peeled ruits, / his burden is a volcano, / his path is o stone(abajo de este pellejo / est la suave piel de un nio / que apenas duerme /que carga / que camina hasta en el sueo: / sus pies son dos rutas sin cs-cara, / su carga es un volcn, / su camino es de piedra). The child in this

poem becomes a polyvalent symbol used to reer alternately to Linsown childhood, the repressed Guatemalan peasantry as a whole, andthe inancy o a growing social revolution. The poem proceeds to detailthe daily hardships o lie on the volcano, as the child rises with dawn,climbing with his mother upward to their private property, their bit ovolcano (su propiedad privada, su pedazo de volcn) with its semister-ile soil, / like a mother near menopause (tierra semiestril, / como unamadre prxima a la menopausia) to gather their meager harvest or salein the markets o the city in the valley below. He describes the child al-

ternately as a warrior armed with slingshot and machete, a nascent poetequipped with the empowerment o words, and a slave bearing the marko the mecapal, the cord used to carry heavy burdens, branded into hisorehead as i he were cattle.

Although the poem ocuses on the poets own experience, the em-phasis on social inequality posits the children o the volcano as a col-lective identity o resistance, a rejection o the imposition o a uniormnational identity rom without. As the nal lines o the opening Poe-ma para el nio del Volcn de Agua (Poem or the Child o the Volcn

de Agua) make clear, Lin holds a negative view o the nationalization


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o a territory o resistant individual and group identities: he still has achunk o land in which / to stand, / but tomorrow . . . / well, soon it willall be / the color o this fag (ahora todava tiene un pedazo de tierradonde / poner el pie; / pero maana . . . / bueno, ya no tarda en ser todo/ del color de esta bandera). The emphasis on color is key: the overlayingo the white and blue stripes o the Guatemalan fag on the local physi-cal and cultural landscape evokes images o blanqueamiento, or whit-ening o indigenous populations through mestizaje, which in Guatema-la is an extremely volatile trope. Furthermore, throughout Poemas delVolcn de Agua, Lin associates the color blue with domination and themelancholy o the colonized, that azul de todo el mundo rom Poe-ma para mi cielo. This concept appears more explicitly in Los hroes,which opens with the lines, they were tall / and they bragged o thegreen / or / the blue / through which they saw us (eran altos / y pre-suman del verde / o / del azul / con que miraban), describing within theramework o imperial gaze the eyes o the well-shod, white local land-owners sons over whom the bareoot, indigenous local boys triumph ina soccer match. When Lin describes his relationship to the nation, it isalways through the prism o disenranchisement and ailure, a trope thatreaches ull orce in Poema del que pretendi ser novio (Poem aboutthe guy who tried [and ailed] to be a groom). In Lins work, the na-

tional romance can never be consummated, as the madre patria rejectsintegration with the indigenous subject despite his amorous intentions.

Tellingly, the volcanic geography represented in Poema a mi niorefects the social hierarchy in reverse: as in the favelas and shantytownsthat prolierate on the ringes o Latin Americas urban geographies,only the most destitute peasants inhabit and work the highest reaches othe volcano. The landscape shits as one descends rom the poorest eldsand villages at the highest altitudes to the political and economical ur-ban center ar below, waiting indolently, with its toothless mouth o a

master who awaits (con su boca desdentada de patrona que espera), inthe ertile valley or the boy to deliver the ruits o his labor. Tellingly,the town is described in terms o patriarchal authorityin the colonialorganization o labor, the patrn, as thepater, heads up the local so-cial and economic hierarchy. Yet here the master is toothless, the virileauthority o the patrn decayed by age and distance rom the meanso production, and it is eminine, patrona, which, as much as onewould like to read as a emale subversion o the masculine order, onlymakes sense here within the traditional, phallocentric trope o eminine

weakness.


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Returning to the poem, in a direct inversion o the metaphor oclimbing the social ladder, the poetic voice describes how the boy andhis mother will descend and leave the volcano behind, / but they willdescend as two beasts o burden (descendern y dejarn el volcn atrs,/ pero descendern como dos bestias de carga). In the shadow o the vol-cano, geographical descent implies social ascendancy, but not in thiscase: the boy and his mothers journey downward is only a temporarypass to serve the citys elite. Despite the economic abjection o those whoinhabit the upper reaches o the volcano, however, they hold the highermoral ground, or they have the unettered vision o the horizons. Har-monizing with indigenous associations o volcanoes with divine powerand the sacred, Lin repeatedly emphasizes the sublimity and sanctityo lie on the volcano, even when conronted with poverty and exploita-tion. In act, the misery that Lin describes engages the Catholic tropeo the expiation o sin through suering. Doubly sanctied by sueringand geographical proximity, the volcanos residents are only a step romheaven.

The volcanos social geography undoubtedly refects issues o vulner-ability: although the Volcn de Agua has not erupted since the sixteenthcentury, those who are closest to the cone are more exposed to the dev-astating lahars, or debris fows, that rumble periodically down its fanks,

destroying everything in their path. The geographical hierarchy is alsorelated to ease o lie and economic value; the valley foor has greaterertility and access to water and inrastructure. On the other hand, asthe Spanish seized indigenous urban centers on the valley foors duringthe conquest, the displaced were pushed up the volcanoes, whose slopesbecame simultaneously places o reuge and ocal points or rebellionagainst the Spanish overlords. The volcanoes became natural ortressesas well as repositories o cultural knowledge; they were beacons o re-sistance to the imposition o identities amid the specters o orced accul-

turation, religious conversion, and assimilation into an economy o nearenslavement. Though the indigenous were orced there by the Spanish,their continued occupation o the volcanoes led to their identicationwith volcanoes by all sides: the indigenous see themselves as childreno the volcano, while those in power view the volcanoes and the indig-enous as equal threats o eruption. In this way, the physical geographybecame a cultural landscape endowed with meanings that refected thenations social divisions.

The association o the national landscapes most prominent eatures,

the volcanoes, with threats to the nation gave rise to national histories


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rooted in the ear o disaster, both geophysical and social. There werecertainly grounds or these ears: during the sixteenth century, La Anti-gua Guatemala, the colonial capital o the Capitana General de Guate-mala, was ravaged repeatedly by Luis de Lins Kakxikel Mayan ances-tors during successive uprisings, as well as by a massive mudfow romthe Volcn de Agua in 1541 that eectively razed the city. Following aseries o devastating earthquakes in the seventeenth century, the capitalwas nally moved to its present location in Guatemala City. In any case,successive elites in Guatemala, but also in El Salvador and Nicaragua,requently exploited the trope o a national history permanently on theverge o disaster to justiy repressive measures in a manner akin to theway in which Trujillo turned the 1930 hurricane in the Dominican Re-public to his advantage. The nation lived in a permanent state o emer-gency or exception in which the rule o law was perpetually suspended.

Lins poetry engages intimately with his own childhood, but he col-lectivizes the individual experience o lie on the volcano by insertinghis personal memories into a shared history o marginalization and eco-nomic exploitation. For Lin, memory, like the landscape rom which itcannot be extricated, is a social, not an individual, space. This construc-tion o social space through personal memory does not claim embodi-ment, however. He has no pretensions o speaking or all the children

o the volcano, instead availing himsel o an ingenious strategy or side-stepping the ethical conundrum that Gayatri Spivak outlined in Canthe Subaltern Speak?

By the time Lin published his works, he had undoubtedly become aletrado; he lived in the capital, and he became a university proessor andlabor-union leader who used the high-culture genre o written poet-ry to communicate his message. He had necessarily abandoned his sub-altern status as a condition or speaking.19 He does not disown himselrom his indigenous past, however, or rom the moral authority o the

experience o subalternity. Instead, he brings into play the mechanismo memory to create a distance or schism between the lettered speakingsubject in the present and its ormer subaltern sel in the past. The use othe third person to talk about his own past is no simple parlor trick tocollectivize the child as a mythical archetype or collage o the volcanosresidents; Lins child is not gurative but rather autobiographical, asthe books subtitle, Los poemas mos, and the requent use o the rstperson in more intimate poems indicates. On the contrary, the use o thethird person is an honest recognition o the changes and empowerment

that he has undergone, as well as o the persistence o the inequalities


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and injustices that he himsel suered as a child and that his people con-tinue to endure in the present. Through narrative doubling, Lins poeticvoice is able to maintain its subaltern status in the past without extend-ing it to the present, when his own exceptional circumstances might un-dermine claims o collective representativity.

Lins meticulous literary mapping o the local geography uncovers astruggle not only or control over local identities, land distribution, andaccess to the means o production, all topics that he engages explicitly,but also or custodianship o the volcano as a collective cultural symbol.The careul descriptions o the campesinos relationship with the localenvironment validate their claims to ownership o the land but also tothe symbolic interpretation o the landscape. As his evocation o the at-tempted imposition o the Guatemalan national fag over the local cul-tural landscape made evident, volcanic symbolism is disputed territory,one that must be deended in word as much as in deed. Lins poetry un-covers the competition or cultural control o volcanic landscapes, in theprocess revealing that all spaces, whether geographical or social, are de-ned by the relationships that they mediate.

Lins Poema a mi nio, or all its volcanic allusions, concludesrather innocuously, possibly due to the threat o censorship or reprisals.He nevertheless warns that in spite o time and having learned another

proession, / inside, / in the deepest depths, / this child always accompa-nies him (a pesar del tiempo y del aprendizaje de otro ocio, / adentro,/ en lo ms hondo, / ese nio siempre va con l), and with him his memo-ries o oppression and volcanic origins. A uture eruption would seem adistinct possibility.

Tragically, Lin was kidnapped and murdered in 1984, at the heighto Guatemalas decades-long civil war (19601996). Nothing denitivewas known about his whereabouts or more than a decade, but in 1999his name and photograph suraced in the inamous Diario Militar,

a le the Guatemalan military kept on the persons that it had disap-peared. As a letist university proessor at the Universidad de San Car-los de Guatemala and a leader in the socialist Partido Guatemalteco deTrabajo (Guatemalan Workers Party), he had become a political threatto the military government headed by General scar Humberto MejasVictores. On the other hand, his cultural works disputed the nationsocial iconography o volcanoes as part o the national cultural patri-mony, and, o course, the patrimony is the legacy passed on by thepa-ter, evoking the historical confation opatria withpatrn that so many

Central American authors have decried. In any case, Lins killers evi-


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dently recognized that the war was over control o not only the nationsphysical geography but also its ideological underpinnings and the cul-tural iconography that sustains them.

There was clearly an important racial component to Lins postula-tion o the indigenous as children o the volcano; however, this tropeis not limited to the indigenous or to Guatemala. In both El Salvadorand Nicaragua, associations o indigenous identity with volcanoes con-tinue to be important, i somewhat less so than in Guatemala; however,racial considerations take the backseat to social and political divisions.The volcano maintains its role as the reuge o identities o resistance,but in cultural representations rom these two countries, the childreno the volcano are most oten revolutionaries engaged in guerrilla war-are against repressive regimes. In this twist on the metaphor, volcaniceruption comes to symbolize the potential or revolutionary change, butvolcanic imagery also appears in many texts as a trope alluding to theemotional trauma o disastered subjects living under the shadow ogovernmental repression, social alienation, and individual anxiety.

Volcanic Sociality and the Disastered Subject

Luis de Lins poetry puts a positive spin on an identity constructed roma landscape o domination and disaster. The shared individual experi-

ence o social inequality and lie on the volcano led to the ormation o acommon social identity that holds within it the potential or eruptive so-cial change: it is that boy carrying a volcano within. This social eruptionimplies a process o reverse colonization in which the volcano retakesthe valley below, annihilating the restrictive social and racial hierarchyand allowing or a new social order to appear. Not all representations ovolcanic identities are so positive, however.

Claribel Alegra and Darwin Flakolls Cenizas de Izalco (Ashes ofIzalco; 1966), considered by some critics the only Central American

novel o the Boom, also scrutinizes closely the relations between placeand identity.20 Based to a large degree on Alegras childhood in El Sal-vador, this novel combines three plotlines to examine closely concepts olocal, national, and class identity. It is ramed by the narrative o Car-men, who returns home to El Salvador rom the United States or the u-neral o her mother. While sorting her mothers things, she comes acrossthe diary o American Frank Wol, a writer who suered rom depres-sion and alcoholism. The diary recounts how Wol, in El Salvador ona desperate quest or lost innocence, alls in love with Carmens mar-

ried mother, Isabel, who in turn dreams o nothing more than leaving


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her hometown and traveling to Paris. Meanwhile, the areas indigenouspopulation, most o whom toil in miserable conditions on the coeeplantations o wealthy landowners known as coee barons, has beengrowing increasingly discontent, and open rebellion eventually explodeswhen hardliner general Maximiliano Hernndez Martnez deposes sym-pathetic president Arturo Araujo. The resulting chaos ends in the arrestand subsequent execution o local hero Agustn Farabundo Mart, oneo the ounders o the Communist Party o Central America, and in whathas come to be known as La Matanza o 1932, in which up to thirtythousand indigenous persons as well as dozens o local landowners died.Local Volcn de Izalco accompanies the increasing agitation with minoreruptions o steam and ash, nally exploding violently just as the indig-enous rebellion breaks out.

The novel uses a ragmented chronology that intersperses Carmenspresent with her childhood memories and passages rom Franks diary inorder to emphasize historical causality: she comes to grips with her ownpersonal and social identity through reconstructing that o her motheras well as the events that led to the 1932 massacre. As in Lins book,the centrality o the volcano is established in the novels title and in reer-ences throughout the work. In keeping with the novels ocus on the con-struction o multiple layers o identity, however, the volcano is not rele-

gated to mere symbol o the social explosion that unites all the narrativethreads in a single climax; it plays dierent roles in the construction oidentity by each o the novels characters. Although the indigenous resi-dents o the fanks o the Volcn de Izalco are again posited as childreno the volcano, and the eruption itsel is described as the awakening othe god Tlaloc, which constitutes yet another metaphor or the indige-nous peasants consciousness o their oppression, the volcanos symbol-ism becomes highly contested by dierent characters. In act, the socialsubtext o the novel, like the substratum that lies just under the surace,

is subsumed to the plotline ocusing on Frank and Isabel until it nallyexplodes in the dnouement.

Until this nal eruption, when the signicance and magnitude o thesocial unrest nally become patent, the volcano has distinctly individu-al meanings. For instance, upper-middle-class Carmens nostalgic remi-niscing about picnics with her ather and brother on the craters greenrim decades ater the 1932 eruption reveals a bucolic dimension to thevolcano that contrasts starkly with its earlier association with the indig-enous uprising. Nonetheless, one could make the case that her enjoy-

ment o the view while her ather recites poems by Rubn Daro relates


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directly to her position near the top o the social hierarchy; she disposeso leisure time, the means to travel to the volcano, and, more than any-thing else, the tourist eye that exoticizes natural landscapes. In act, inthe narrative order, her visit to the volcano mirrors Frank Wols exoti-cist imaginings o El Salvador a ew pages earlier, when Carmens un-cle Eduardo, at that time a young Marxist bohemian, takes him to taskor viewing poverty and underdevelopment as picturesque. As Frank iscompelled to admit, Since coming here, Ive accepted the disparitiesaround me as so many exotic elements o a pleasing picture painted ormy benet (94). Eduardo orces Frank to read the Salvadoran landscapethrough a dierent lens; unortunately, the removal o this mechanismor coping with dierence only exacerbates the American writers al-ready tenuous mental state.

Frank Wol embodies what Robert Kastenbaum has described as adisastered state o being (71). In his study on the psychology o disas-ter victims, Kastenbaum notes that many o the individuals whose in-ner state most closely conorms to our notion o a disaster victim mayhave experienced no ocial disaster at all (71). Frank suers rom asense o the wounded sel, but he is unable to trace the source o the trau-ma to a specic moment beyond a vague loss o childhood illusion andthe ailure to develop a viable sel-image despite his success as a writer.

He takes reuge in alcohol as a coping mechanism. He claims that hisalcoholism began as an act o rebellion o a pastors son against the na-tional ethos maniested in the Volstead Act, but it rapidly escaped hiscontrol and morphed into a mechanism or isolating himsel rom so-ciety (47). Notably, Franks alienation is existential rather than social.Furthermore, as an outsider in El Salvador on a whim, Frank has littleor no investment in the social order that leads to the peasant uprising.Given the explicit parallels the novel draws between the volcanic erup-tion and social rebellion, Franks association with the Volcn de Izalco

becomes particularly poignant: his psychological suering is not the re-sult o his experiencing a volcanic or even a social disaster; rather, thevolcano and its destructive potential become expressions o the traumathat he carries within.

In part, this trauma is chalked up to sexual repression: his passionor Isabel builds to a crescendo on a par with the increasing violenceo the Volcn de Izalcos eruptions. He abandons Santa Ana on a busthat is hijacked by the indigenous rebels, ater he has dictated an unan-swered ultimatum that Isabel leave her husband and join him in travel-

ing the world. The insurgents orce him to take the wheel o the bus a-


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ter decapitating the driver, ordering him to steer or the headquarters othe uprising in the town o Izalco. As the bus descends the nal hill to-ward the town, Frank puts the gear in neutral and leaps out, leaving hiskidnappers to their ate. He contemplates the eruption o Izalco as hedrags himsel toward town, nursing a broken leg and a bottle o whisky.Forced into immobile contemplation and endowed with the lucidity oacceding to his addiction, he realizes that his Isabel was only a antasyhe created so that when the inevitable rejection came, he could give in tohis alcoholism. He passes out upon attaining this epiphany, waking thenext day to stumble into Izalco, where the indigenous rebels are turningin their arms to government ocials in exchange or amnesty. Shortlyater, he witnesses them being massacred by soldiers with machine guns.This horriying spectacle provides the nal tiro de gracia to Franks longdescent into sel-pity, and his story concludes on a positive note hintingat transormation: he sends his diary to Isabel with a nal letter explain-ing what has happened and that she will never see him again.

Frank Wol represents a genre o character pioneered by British au-thor Malcolm Lowry in Under the Volcano (1947). Like Wol, Low-rys protagonist, Georey Firmin, sometime British consul in ctional(but Cuernavaca-like) Quauhnhuac, Mexico, is a traumatized individ-ual who conceives o lie in terms o disaster, who sel-medicates with

alcohol, and whose alienation is expressed in expatriation. Indeed, Ash-es of Izalco dialogues transparently with Lowrys novel: in both works,living under the volcano evokes connotations o unrelenting ear andanxiety, permanent psychological trauma, disrupted identities, and thesensation o circling precariously the rim o sel-destruction. Disaster,in its association with these characters, symbolizes a schism in identity,marked by temporal and spatial ragmentation, displacement, and dis-continuity. These individuals embody the negative, the counterpart othe Utopian whole, their identities unied only in disjunction. In them,

trauma becomes a permanent rather than a transitional state o being.The disastered sel carries out the unction that Kirby Farrel associ-

ates with trauma as a trope, that o an enabling ction, an explanatorytool or managing unquiet minds in an overwhelming world (x). Indeed,clinical psychologists such as Peter Hodgkinson and Michael Stewartemphasize the importance o constructing a narrative o traumatic expe-rience in order or patients to achieve cognitive completion, allowingthem to integrate the traumatic experience into enduring models o theworld and their relationship with it (24). Both the consuls and Wols

alcoholism become therapeutic i unsuccessul narratives, recounted in


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the consuls conversations and letters and in Wols diary, that attemptto piece together the shattered knowledge o their own lives. In Wolsdiary in particular, the chronology o his struggle with addiction servesa uniying unction in lieu o more cohesive lie meaning: the succes-sion o dates provides narrative coherence rather than plot. In this read-ing (and writing) o ones own experience, disaster becomes the uniyingnarrative o a lie disjointed by ear and ailure.

Tellingly, the disastered subject in Ashes has a social dimension dis-tinctly absent rom Lowrys novel. Although both novels associate thetrauma o colonized groups with volcanic imagery, drawing attentionto the volatility o the disastered lower classes and their potential orexplosive rebellion, the climactic uprising in the nal chapters o Un-der the Volcano is absurd, senseless. Georeys grotesque death at thehands o paradoxically dark-skinned, Mexican Nazi sympathizers doesnot resonate with the discourse o human rights or social justice: it isthe irrational, xenophobic explosion o delusional locals against a sel-destructive oreigner. Entirely without social connotations, Georeysignominious end only highlights the pathetic trajectory o his solitarylie, even i there is a feeting sense o redemption in that he sacricedhimsel in order to save his hal brother Hugh. In any case, more thansocial eruption, the novel ends in an individual implosion. As Georey

lays dying, he imagines that he is alling into the crater o Popocatptl:Now there was this noise o oisting lava in his ears, horribly, it wasin eruption, yet no, it wasnt the volcano, the world itsel was bursting,bursting into black spouts o villages catapulted into space, with himselalling through it all (391). Social concerns are given short shrit beoreindividual suering, and Georeys descent into his personal inerno hasew implications beyond himsel.

In contrast, disaster is a generalized state in Ashes of Izalco. FrankWol is by no means the only disastered subject to grace the novel. In

act, nearly all the characters bear the marks o trauma. In Isabels case,or example, her longing to escape Santa Anas suocating small-townatmosphere reveals a schism in her social identity, a sense o the alien-ated sel that she vocalizes explicitly: Sometimes when I look at mysisters, at riends Ive known all my lie, they seem to be rom anothercountry and to speak a language I dont understand (52). Her husband,Manuel, seems to be the only one who is immune to lies misortunes,although he always regrets having let Nicaragua as a child, and he los-es vitality with the tragic death o one o their children in inancy. Ed-

uardo, Isabels brother, appears equally stable emotionally, but he has


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become an ethical disaster, having renounced his youthul revolution-ary idealism or middle-age cynicism and cronyism with the repressivegovernment.

Furthermore, all o Manuel and Isabels children conceive o theirlives within the ramework o disaster in one way or another. Alredo, inparticular, comes across almost like a Salvadoran Frank Wol. An alco-holic himsel and perennial ailure, he firts repeatedly with suicide. Hisrevolutionary ramblings seem to hint at some possibility o redemptionthrough social action, but the act that he never puts them into practiceonly highlights his degradation. And though Carmen, the narrator, isnot as destructive as her brother, she is dealing with her own problemsspringing rom the experience o exile and displaced identities. She real-izes that she has become the inverted refection o her deceased mother,who always wished to escape the suocating social atmosphere o SantaAna. Carmen fed Santa Anas stagnation on the margins o history onlyto nd hersel trapped in the rigid chronometry o lie at her husbandsside in the United States, leading her to muse, Maybe Im going deadtoo, dying a little more each day with Paul (72). Adding the personaldisasters o other minor characters such as Franks evangelist riend Vir-gil and the horriying social disaster embodied in the massacre o indig-enous people, Ashes of Izalco reads like a meditation on genres o ail-

ure and trauma.The coincidence o the indigenous uprising with the eruption o the

Volcn de Izalco should not be interpreted as a case o ingenuous Ro-mantic patheticism, since it is matter o historical record and there is noblanket meaning assigned to it: the readings o the eruptions symbolismvary by character. Neither should the volcanos association with a gen-eralized state o trauma be read within the ramework o environmentaldeterminism, as the novel clearly emphasizes the particularity o eachcase o trauma as well as its roots in social rather than environmental

phenomena. It is indicative that the volcano itsel is named ater the in-digenous town at its oot: Izalco means city o obsidian in Nhuatl.The Volcn de Izalco is thus denominated in unction o its human in-habitants, rather than the inverse; yet the city is also described as volca-nic in origin, as made o obsidian. In this concatenation o volcanic iden-tities, the characters psychological trauma uses with natural disaster tocreate a national geography o disaster, a bruised, traumatized culturallandscape that extends beyond the individual to encompass the collec-tive, and beyond the collective to the nation. Indeed, Frank Wol sum-

marizes this view when he describes the nations capital as a disastered


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city: The entire city has the improvised air o a reugee camp throwntogether by survivors o some great catastrophe (79). San Salvador hasbeen laid low by a series o volcanic eruptions and earthquakes thathave let the city in ruins, but Franks description is also a commentaryon the state o the nation as a social and political entity. It is a nation opersons displaced by a series o disasters, social and political as much asgeophysical, and Izalco is the common symbol that conjoins them.21 Anddisplacement is the antithesis o citizenship.

Ashes of Izalco ends with a cut back to Isabels uneral in the pres-ent. As Carmen watches her mothers burial, she realizes that Franks di-ary has allowed her to discover another ace o her mother and o hersel(173). In another play on the ashes o Izalco, she muses that earthkeeps alling, covering her, covering us all (173), and that soil is theblack ash o the volcano. Santa Ana becomes a modern-day Pompeii:time is immobilized under the ashes, and no social change has occurred.Despite the social and natural disasters, lie continues uninterrupted.As Ramn Luis Acevedo has noted, nada ha cambiado (nothing haschanged) becomes the operative leitmotiv in Ashesthere is no resound-ing resolution to any o the novels plotlines (118). Yet consciousness othe ongoing social disaster, o orming a nation divided by class and eth-nicity, results in a schizophrenic view o the national subject as a divided

sel. El Salvador, like the oreigner Frank, has become a disastered na-tion unable to trace the roots o its trauma to its source, because thereis no sole causality. The nation is united through shared discord: all areblanketed equally with the ashes o Izalco.

Fortunately, Ashes of Izalco ends in medias res, unlike Lowrys nov-el, in which only the nal descent into the absolute abjection o death(the last lines detail how Georeys body is tossed down a ravine, a deaddog thrown ater) can bring peace and rest. Although all the charactersin Ashes have been altered irrevocably by the experience o disaster, the

novel does not rame that experience as wholly negative. In both Franksand Carmens cases, the traumatic experience brings about an epiphany,leading the reader to believe that positive lie changes may result. Theprocess o narrating their experiences has allowed them to create somesense o coherence, to draw together the shattered pieces o their lives ina meaningul manner. In this sense, disaster has the potential or posi-tive transormation.

Likewise, the volcanic and indigenous eruption o Izalco orced ElSalvadors social tensions into the open. As is oten the case with natu-

ral disasters, the indigenous rebellion resulted in the violent rupture o


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barriers between the private and the public. On the one hand, the sack-ing and raiding o private homes by both sides smashed down doors andwalls, strewing personal objects in public view, opening them to outsidereadings and interpretations. On the other hand, ormerly private citi-zens became reugees and victims, generic public gures symbolizing di-saster. The collapse o the barriers between the public and the privatereached an extreme in the abjection o the cadavers o the indigenouspeople massacred by government troops in the central plaza o Izalco.The indigenous victims insides were violently exposed to public viewthrough the bullet holes and wounds riddling the ragile barrier o theskin. Yet worse, this horriying violation o corporeal integrity was pur-poseully enacted in a public space in order to communicate a warningto uture rebels. Despite, or perhaps because o, this violent intrusiono institutional power into the private sphere, the story o the Matanzao 1932 became an enduring narrative o resistance that revolutionarygroups accessed throughout the rest o the century to legitimize theirstruggle against injustice. The centrality o the volcanic eruption to thisnarrative is key, as the national geography joins in with the human re-bellion against a tyrannical regime capable o such inhuman, unnatu-ral acts.

Under authoritarian regimes, dissenters cannot oten construct o-

cial monuments to their cause due to repression and censorship. Theycan, however, ascribe alternative meanings to ocial iconography. Siteso repression such as Tiananmen Square in China or the Plaza o theThree Cultures in Tlatelolco, Mexico, take on alternative symbolism asshrines to the memory o repressive acts, conronting the symbolic or-der inscribed by the state. The Volcn de Izalco served this unction inSalvadoran society; it became an unocial monument that evoked aninherited memory in young generations o Salvadorans who did not livethe experience o the Matanza o 1932 but who identied it with a linear

genealogy o repressive regimes.22

Volcanic Revisionism

As in the case o Luis de Lins and Claribel Alegras rooting o in-digenous identity in the volcanic landscape, the association during the1970s and 1980s o revolutionary activity with volcanoes in El Salvadorand Nicaragua depended partially on lived experience. Whether to avoidcapture or to ollow the successul model set by Fidel Castros Cubanrevolution, Central American guerrilla ghters oten hid out in rugged,

unpopulated areas on the fanks o volcanoes. At the same time, the

7/27/2019 Mark Anderson, Volcanic Identities: Explosive Nationalism and the Disastered Subject in Central America

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Mark Anderson, Volcanic Identities: Explosive Nationalism and the Disastered Subject in Central American Literature