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BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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remembering my mother, who they killed
The famed Mayan activist whose mother and brother were tortured and killed reflects on the family -- and village -- she lost in Guatemala.

| E X C E R P T |

CROSSING BORDERS

BY RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ

TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY ANN WRIGHT

VERSO

242 PAGES

BY RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ | The last time I had gone home to Laj Chimel, before going to other parts of Guatemala and finally into exile, was early in October 1979. I arrived without warning and I did not stay long. It was soon after my brother, Patrocinio, had been detained, tortured and killed. My mother was absolutely devastated by his death. When she saw me coming she began to weep bitterly. Not just for the joy of seeing me safe and sound, but to tell me of her terrible grief after the soldiers had killed one of her children -- by burning him alive. She was petrified, because she realised that I too was in great danger of being kidnapped. She feared she might lose another child. She was a mother, and her children were her whole life.

The situation in Chimel had become so bad that most families had begun fleeing to the mountains, to sleep in the ravines, to keep watch over the village day and night. Most families were living in terror, fearing that any minute the soldiers would come.

I was twenty years old in October 1979. A new counter-insurgency campaign had begun. Its main destructive effect was on the lives of indigenous peasants in the rural areas. The hardest things were the intimidation, the destruction of the land, the persecution of our community leaders, the use of torture, and the army's introduction of the Civil Defence Patrols (PACs) which gradually took over our communities. Soon the whole countryside was under the control of the military. My beloved father, Vicente Menchú Perez, was still alive then, though already, as a result of his thirty year struggle for our land in Chimel, he was being hounded and receiving death threats. At that time, he was in hiding in another part of Guatemala.

There is nothing worse than living under the constant threat of persecution. My mother's fears were shared by the whole community. I had so little time with her, yet those few hours in my own home made up for the years I was to spend away on the long path of experience. A strange, mysterious destiny awaited me and my mother seemed to sense it. I wanted to devote my whole life to Chimel, and I was committed to the struggle. "Find somewhere to go," my mother said. "You can't hide here." I felt powerless to ease my mother's pain. It was not possible, even by being there with her. I was so afraid of losing her.

I will never get over the trauma of having left my mother so shortly before her death. It was my last chance to feel a mother's warmth. If I had known, I would at least have paused to look at her, to gaze at her face for the last time. I would have tried, to the very last, to learn more about her. All I could think of in my misery was that I had to go away. There are no words to describe that moment.

I shall never forget Mama fetching a little jar and taking out a red necklace, a medallion of the sun and five quetzales. She dropped it all in my hands, looked towards the rising sun and closed her eyes. She wept as she prayed. Then I left. My little sister, Anita, ran after me, crying too. I did not turn back to look at her. I had a premonition I would never see my mother, my little sister or my entire community again. I was almost certain. Never again would I see the humble village where I was born and grew up, where the elders taught us the meaning of the different kinds of birdsong, the meaning of darkness, the place where I learned what it meant to be a descendant of the Mayans of Guatemala.

Some neighbours smuggled me out of Chimel and we set off towards Santa Cruz del Quiché, and walked all through the night. Going through Uspantán was difficult. The neighbours with me were afraid of the soldiers billeted in the village, and we had no choice but to head off for another village, called Cunén. It was raining, torrential rain, typical Chimel weather. It rains for nine months of the year. On some parts of the track, the mud was waist-deep. It poured all night and we were drenched. The cold was unbearable. It was hard to tell the difference between the pain of exhaustion and cold, and the pain of walking towards a wholly new destiny. It is one of the experiences engraved deepest in my memory.

Whenever I thought about my mother, and remembered that last evening together, I was filled with longing and pain. Yet at the same time I could feel the mud, the rain, the sadness. I breathed in the spirit of those thick clouds, the spirit of that wet earth, along with the ugly sensation of fear. Ever since that time, I have had a utopian vision, a determination to go home and live in that little hut in Chimel. I have seen it many times in my dreams, just as I left it. When I dream of my mother, I always have the same feeling. I can feel the fire, the wood, the atmosphere, the sense of a whole life that can never be recovered.

I wish I could have worked some kind of miracle to have my mother with me when Papa died. I felt an almost telepathic communication with her. I tried to guess whether my way of dealing with Papa's death would be the same as hers. When my father was about to die, I dreamed of a little room full of light and heat. He was wearing strange clothes. He looked sad. He told me, "Take great care of yourself because I am no longer with your mother. We are no longer together." Then, weeping with sadness, I replied "But why, Papa? I believe in you and I believe in Mama. We shall only be happy if the two of you are together."

"You must trust me," he replied. It was only a dream. Three days later he was dead.

When my mother died, I had a similar dream. I dreamed that I was coming down the hill of Cholá, the crag on the hillside near our village. I saw my mother coming up the hill. She was carrying a heavy basket on her head. Suddenly I saw that the basket was full of rotten meat. I was terrified. About five days after my dream, I heard that my mother had been abducted and was being tortured at the army barracks in Xejul. I knew then that she would not come back.

I have discovered much more about my mother over the years since her death. Gradually I have begun to realise that she was far greater than the person that I had known. She was a wonderful woman with many most admirable qualities. She was a midwife and a healer, and possessed many of the virtues of our ancestors. She had brought us up well. I understand that now that she has gone. She was right when she said that her hands were large and invisible. With those hands, she brought babies into the world, naked and confused, and dragging a great umbilical cord. We are born into empty space, and our first contact with the world is with the hands of a midwife, and the umbilical cord passes from those hands to be buried in the earth so that it takes root. This is what Mama and our elders told me.

N E X T+P A G E: Guatemala's Gypsies