ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore how Maya authors have engaged with the violent legacies of the Guatemalan military dictatorships while elaborating a new poetics that dignifies their distinct cultural and linguistic identities, propose intercultural ways of coexistence, and register Maya voices and experiences in the hegemonic literary and cultural history of Guatemala. I will critically examine Maya Q’anjob’al poet Sabino Esteban Francisco’s poetry book, Gemido de huellas [The Moan of the Footprints], a poetic autobiographical account that registers the experience of Maya peoples who were displaced during the armed conflict in Guatemala (19601996), and consequently joined the Comunidades de Población en Resistencia, or Communities of Population in Resistance (CPR) in the early 1980s. By narrating experiences of violence, pain and chaos, I argue, Francisco not only discloses the operations of settler colonialism (Wolfe 1999), but also aims to “re-member” the Maya social body by confronting the past. In doing so, he rewrites or re-rights history (Smith 2012: 29) in order to inscribe into the hegemonic Guatemalan narrative the memory of the Maya peoples who joined the CPR.
