Although this year’s concert was somewhat overshadowed by the Amnesty International benefit concert held in Paris the night before, which drew the world music press to its gates with a bill boasting Radiohead, Peter Gabriel and Bruce Springsteen, the Nobel Peace Prize lineup featured Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain and Phil Collins, as well as several well-known international acts.

One has to wonder if the Nobel laureates are as edified by Twain’s presence as she is by theirs. During last Friday’s three-hour event, there were many times when I eyed both Trimble, Hume and His Royal Highness, King Harald of Norway, and wondered what they were thinking. Well, I can only imagine what they were thinking about Shania Twain, who’s extreme prettiness overshadows anything else she does. But is there not an unintentional trivialization that takes place when you add pop to pomp? Though that was my initial thesis, when the concert was over I had to revise my thesis. The Nobel Prize may have dignity on its side, but pop music has a power all its own — a power that can, in certain situations, work its own kind of miracle.

The concert was a relatively intimate gathering, attended by about 2,000 extremely well-heeled Norwegians in smart black coats and boots. But with regard to eclecticism, it had Lollapalooza beat by miles — some of the world’s biggest pop acts, like India’s Pandits ShivHari and Africa’s Oumou Sangare, delivered a fitting homage to the peace process that the Nobel Institute attempts to honor and facilitate.

But make no mistake: It was corny. Cornier than Christmas, cornier than “Cats,” even. I think I cried about 17 times, the first time when Trimble and Hume came into the arena together. Then I cried for the king, because earlier in the day I bought a postcard of him as a sweet little boy on a horse — and now, it turns out, he’s bald. Then I cried for the little boys in sailor suits who sang “God Save the King” in Norwegian. And it was all downhill from there. I managed to stay dry-eyed for the Cranberries and Phil Collins, but just barely. I choked up again when poor President Clinton came on the video screen to congratulate the laureates, and the audience audibly snickered. Luckily, Clinton had learned a sentence in Norske, and when he uttered it — “thanks and God bless” — the giggles turned to cheers.

- – - – - – - – - -

Norway, it seems, is an irony-free zone, which may be why the Nobel Peace Prize is bestowed there. Few non-Norwegians could stay as straight-faced as host Ase Kleveland (apparently Norway’s homegrown version of Joan Baez) did while delivering pious platitudes like “the prize is a flickering flame of hope in the violent darkness” — especially given the failed efforts of recent Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including, sadly, Hume and Trimble. But it must be even harder to utter such platitudes while introducing dopey pop stars who sing mostly stupid songs about sex.

Possibly the worst offenders of decorum were the Cranberries, who opened the concert by unabashedly plugging their upcoming LP. The Cranberries are a surprisingly apolitical band, unless you think of the lovelorn lyrics of songs like “Dreams” and the new “Promises” as a kind of Big Picture take on the Betrayal and Unease of Being Irish. That, however, was a bigger leap of faith than I was willing to make, especially when confronted with Dolores O’Riordan in an itty-bitty gold tank top, leather pants and one of those faux fur coats à la “Velvet Goldmine.” But the lyrics to “Dreams” (“And Oh my dreams, it’s never quiet as it seems”) did remind me of Trimble’s somewhat dark and pessimistic acceptance speech, in which he pointed out that the peace process in Ireland is a long way from being enacted: “[That doesn't mean that] I don’t have dreams — I do — but I try to have them at night.”

The pragmatic Trimble, unswayed by the sappy romantic idealism of Nobelliousness, was probably not the proper audience for the pop fluffiness that followed — particularly the next act, gorgeous Norwegian boy-toy Espen Lind. He sang a song called “Pop From Hell” that was equal parts Bauhaus and Ace of Base. After him, however, the concert became increasingly sentimental. First James Galway and Phil Coultier did “Danny Boy” (which they also performed at the acceptance ceremony). They were followed by Twain, who’s ultra-glamorous version of new country music is just about as far from real country as real country is from the 17th century Irish folk music from which it evolved. I saw a review in the Norwegian paper the next day that referred to Twain as “plastikkdame,” a word that doesn’t really require translation. Nevertheless, her rendition of “You’re Still the One I Want” was pretty moving; having been worked over by Kleveland and an endless slide show of Belfast terrors, I got all choked up during lines like, “They said we’d never make it/but look how far we’ve made it.”

Enrique Iglesias, the Shania Twain of Latin America, was equally fabulous, especially the way he made the words “por favor” last for 15 syllables. Collins, accompanied by a slide show of homeless people, sang two of his “socially conscious” songs, “Both Sides of the Story” and “Another Day in Paradise” — and even that didn’t make me nauseous. Numerous Nobel laureates addressed the crowd via video. A bunch of young schoolgirls sang “O Come All Ye Faithful” directly to Hume and Trimble, who stood awkwardly in front of them with their hands clasped, looking like they hated life.

Presently, Bono came on the video screen to tell us he felt “blessed” that the Nobel Peace Prize went to Hume and Trimble, and that “for the first time in years in Ireland, it feels like the future is more vivid than the past.” A-Ha came on next and rocked my world, and finally Morissette closed the show with “Baba,” “Uninvited” and “Thank U.” As had been the case with Twain’s performance, here Morrisette’s songs were infused with deeper meaning. “How ’bout not blaming you for everything? How ’bout finally forgiving?” she sang, staring straight at Hume and Trimble. “Thank you terror. Thank you disillusionment. Thank you clarity. Thank you frailty. Thank you consequence …” In a single, pure moment, pop idiocy rose right above rhetoric, and somehow it all made sense.

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.

- – - – - – - – - -

My grandfather was from Chiquimula. In Guatemala, the Chiquimulas are like Gypsies in other parts of the world. They lost their land about 150 years ago. It was part of the province of Totonmcapan. Many of them still live in Santa Marma Chiquimula, but most of them wander around Guatemala. They speak their own language. They wear red-and-black clothes: a red-and-black huipil and a hand-woven corte with a multicoloured fringe round the middle. They wear lots of ribbons in their hair and a red necklace, like the red necklace that I have kept with me all these years, my only necklace that marks the passage of time. It’s the red necklace of the Chiquimulas.

Their faces are much darker than other peoples’. They have dark skin and prominent cheekbones, so Chiquimulas never go unnoticed. They were the most despised ethnic group. They have no land, they have no place of their own. Everywhere they are treated with contempt, and people think they are lazy. They take over a patch of land to set up a market, to sell a few things. They always stay together. They have never given up their traditional dress, even though other ethnic groups discriminate against them.

When I say ethnic groups, I mean all the ones in Guatemala, both nonindigenous and indigenous peoples. We sort of wanted to hide our identity when we were little, and even when we were teenagers, because everybody used to laugh at us. When they wanted to insult us, they called us “Chiquimulas.” It wasn’t a serious insult, not like when a ladino tells his pet dog to “stop behaving like an Indian.”

Our childhood was different from that of today’s young. We learned to enjoy nature. It still fills me with a sense of wonderment and great strength. I remember the feeling of cold and the season when there are mushrooms everywhere. We used to go from one end of the forest to the other, searching for a special kind of mushroom, the most delicious kind, the one that tastes like chicken breast. Moo was our equivalent of meat. It was a delicacy we never missed when it was in season. Along the track we used to find slip, xik’in mam and ra’q masat, all the kinds of mushroom you can make into a delicious meal. It was so cold!

I also remember the tricks my brother Patrocinio and I used to get up to. We were very close. We learned to help each other when we were little. When he was born I was still being breast-fed and we shared Mama’s milk. She would feed him first, and I would have what was left. I remember how we would steal panela from home and then go off into the hills to pick mulberries. We would spend all day eating them. Patrocinio is the one I remember most from my childhood. We were always together, we grew up together, we shared our fears.

Ancient cultures have always recognised the sources of energy from Mother Earth, sources we can never completely understand. We regard bees as sacred, because they are so fierce. They are creatures that sting, and no one could survive being stung by a hundred bees. Yet they are also as sweet as honey, for although they are fierce animals they also live together collectively, in a community.

Many myths surround bees. They say that bees that live in remote places where there are no chemicals are not domesticated, the rules of nature are unbroken, and they exist very much like a family, united, with the solidarity of a community. One day, when we were still living in Chimel, the queen bee, the one that never leaves her nest, came into our hut. My mother was scared stiff. She thought it might be a bad omen for the family. She was so worried that she prayed and burned some pom. She was trying to counteract the omen. We caught the queen bee, and Mama held her so gently as she put her back in her hive. Two days later four hives of bees flew away. Four queen bees left.

This was just a month or two before my brother Patrocinio fell into the hands of the army. My mother cried every time she went out. She went to the place where the bees had been, and she cried. Bees were very important to us during Holy Week. That was the time when we collected the honey. We always had plenty of honey at home. We got stomach ache from eating so much. We used to share it with our neighbours. We would exchange a little jar of honey for the friendship of the community. We would make a present of an eighth or a quarter of honey to people in the little villages roundabout. It was a custom. That’s why it was so sad when the bees flew away. Most of all it was because my mother was very worried, although, like all mothers, she tried not to show it. When my brother was taken away, my mother interpreted it as a message from the bees telling us that the family was about to break up.

On the morning Patrocinio left home, my mother said that first she heard the xo’ch, the bat, singing, and then the tucur, the eagle owl. It sang at dawn, at three in the morning when Patrocinio went to get his horse to ride with my mother to town. When that bird sang, my mother said, “Don’t come with me. Stay at home, son!” Mama thought he would be safer in the house. My brother wouldn’t stay, perhaps because his fate was already sealed.

“I’m telling you to stay at home,” my mother said, but Patrocinio would not listen. My mother wasn’t really sure if he would be more at risk if he stayed at home or if he was on the road. Night after night she had dreamed of the shadow of evil. She had seen the signs. You never knew whom the message was for, although Mama was most afraid for Patrocinio. She just couldn’t decide what to do. So they went to town.

There they sold all their stuff, and everything was fine until the moment they said goodbye. Patrocinio was going to see his girlfriend who lived near the town. My mother told him, “Be very careful and come home soon.” She started climbing the Chola hill, the hill I remember so well, a really steep hill that takes two and a half hours to climb. As she went up the hill, my mother said she had a very strong feeling and she remembered how afraid she had been when she heard the tucur singing at daybreak.

Patrocinio never came back. He was kidnapped by the army. During all that time Mama and the family had terrible premonitions, they had many bad or strange messages that something dreadful would happen. The dogs howled and howled, the bees flew away, and other things happened. We knew there were bad times ahead, but nobody knew what that would mean.

When my mother was alive I never managed to understand her completely. I may have admired many things about her, but I didn’t understand or imitate her. I didn’t learn from her intuitively. Maybe her wisdom was hidden. All those mysteries she told us about came from her own life and experience.

Only in the last twelve years have I realised what she was. For me, she is a constant teacher. Every time things go wrong for me, I always ask myself how she would have coped. I know she would have dealt with things calmly, realistically, simply. She wouldn’t have rushed about making a fuss. She is still my teacher today, in ways I can’t really define. I can’t explain it. I think she is my subconscious, and she solves problems I could never solve on my own.

When I dream of my mother, it’s something very special. It makes be feel young again, full of energy and enthusiasm, all peaceful inside. I always remember her saying to me “You can’t fool me, my girl. I’m your mother. I brought you into the world. You can fool your brother, your sister, your friends, but you can never fool your conscience. Your conscience knows the truth.”

Perhaps I idealise my mother, but I believe it is important to idealise mothers because they are the ones who gave us life. It makes us much humbler.

When they killed her, they didn’t just murder a woman, a mother; they also murdered a healer, a midwife, a woman of great knowledge, a carer. Whenever I think of the struggles and the history of my people, whenever I claim my physical and spiritual identity, I admire my mother more and more. I will never stop grieving for her.