Hundreds of Maltese volunteers go to the missions every year across the globe – from Africa to Latin America – in their bid to undergo an experience of poverty, give a helping hand and perhaps engage in some evangelisation of sorts.
Upon their return, after weeks or months of work, they bring with them a luggage of memories and recollections that at best serves to highlight the plight of the poor in the undeveloped countries as the lucky side of the world gorges itself on riches which are taken for granted.
Abigail Zammit, 32, is not the typical missionary. Possibly she loathes the term, even though she spent weeks working with the poor in Guatemala five years ago with Mission Fund. Her work included building part of hospital for children with disabilities.
Beyond the tear-jerking imagery of poverty, and the customary resignation and piety that usually goes with it, she has used her experience and insight gained from her work in the country known as the ‘Land of Trees’ to lend a voice to the hundreds of thousands of native Indians killed, raped and tortured by US-backed death-squads in Guatemala’s 36-year-long civil war.
It is not just the brutality and the permanent scars of the “silent holocaust” to hit this country that moved Zammit to write one, long poem narrated by different characters. What has really touched her is the deadly silence, the ignorance and amnesia, and the voicelessness of the thousands of victims caught in the ruthless and cynical cold war logic of the United States.
“Where terror reigns, there is forgetting,” she writes in one of her pieces in Voices from the Land of Trees published by Smokestack Books.
It is this forgetting that Zammit, who lectures creative writing at the University of Malta, takes on to combat in her poetry, through various fragmented voices she represents in her book as they struggle to break the silence.
Mothers, missionaries, children, soldiers, guerrillas, Indians, students and journalists all have their version of events – some in denial, some describing their own atrocities in cold blood, some wanting their story to come out at all costs.
“When you’re old and dying, there’s nothing to fear,” one of her characters says.
That is possibly also a metaphor for a whole nation devastated by the CIA’s direct intervention in its affairs, driven solely by US financial interests.
It was a clear US policy, to bring a stop to democratic land reforms that would have redistributed wealth and improved the peasants’ situation but marred the prospects of their main US investor, United Fruit (Chiquita).
“I started writing, little knowing that what was once a poem about personal experience, poverty and the controversies of missionary work, would translate itself into a long poetic piece about Guatemala’s 36 years of civil war, the genocide of 200,000 Indians, the hypocritical intrusion of the United States, the mysteries of Mayan culture and the suffering brought about by repression,” Zammit says about her work.
“The poem is my way of making amends for the people’s silence, my attempt to bring into the open recent historical events that few Europeans are knowledgeable about.”
Besides her first-hand experience and recollections from the protagonists collected a decade after the war, Zammit read books related to Guatemalan political history, eye-witness accounts and poetry by people who sought refuge elsewhere or even gave themselves up for their country’s cause.
But Zammit is also extremely wary of poetry and politics, and equally guarded against hackneyed sentimentalism that goes on under the guise of poetry in the name of whatever the cause.
“I know that poetic and political territories do not always merge beautifully and that it is easy to slip into didacticism, sentimentalism or propaganda,” she says. “In order to overcome these dangers and achieve a more profound momentum, I have tried to keep to a spirit of simplicity.”
Zammit defines her work as a way of letting the people speak for themselves.
“The fact that in reality I didn’t witness anything does not make it less truthful; on the other hand, it helps me objectify the various voices so as to allow readers to listen to different and often contradictory viewpoints,” she says.
“Voices, as a literary device, reveal skepticism towards the One Truth or the belief in absolutes; nevertheless, they cannot indulge in silence or collective amnesia. If I did not believe in the people’s testimonies, I might as well not have written anything at all.”
Interspersed among the voices are the official political rhetoric, lies and diplomatic statements, direct quotes from United States reports, Amnesty International and recently released CIA documents concerning the assassination methods that had to be used in the 1954 coup.
“We all know that atrocities have taken place on an unprecedented scale in the last one hundred years,” she says. “Such monstrous acts have come to seem almost normal. It becomes easier to forget than to remember, and this forgetfulness becomes our defense against remembering – a rejection of unnecessary sentimentality, a hardheaded acceptance of ‘reality’.”