Human rights situation in Central America through the lens of literary representations of violence

The analysis of contemporary literary representations of violence, like Horacio Castellanos Moya's novel Senselessness, visualizes the human rights situation in Central America (e.g. the genocide against the Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War) and questions if sarcasm and cynicism contribute to a fruitful reworking process of the past. Literature has the power to redefine the traveling memory of a country's/region's past, which is in a perpetual process of redefinition by various actors with different (non-)democratic backgrounds and intentions. Senselessness's frictional character, its connection to historical pretexts, and its retelling of archetypal tales construct a powerful frame to (not) understand the circumstances of what Castellanos Moya describes as—from his perspective being valid for all inhabitants of Guatemala—to be “not complete in the mind” (Senselessness 3). In this sense, the author adds one perspective to the process of (never) understanding and/or forgetting the atrocious past (and present) situation of Human Rights in Central America.