UC Davis

This project explores the phenomenology of martyrdom in Central America during the revolutionary period, examining the environment and circumstances that shaped the choices of a generation of poets both within and outside the boundaries of Marxist ideologies. The research presented relies heavily on oral interviews and ethnographic sources to understand how the ethos of the revolutionary movement interacted with the literature of this period. The writers that are the focus of this analysis, Otto René Castillo (1934-1967), Roque Dalton (1935-1975), and Luis de Lión (1939-1984), represent this period symbolically in that their personal histories and literary work reflect the realities of artistic expression under Central American dictatorships. I argue that utopian desire present in Marxist economic theory also characterizes Christian practices that are based on a theology of incarnation, sacrifice, and resurrection, and both the political convictions and poetic imagination of these poets were informed by these practices. The Christian notions of martyrdom and Indigenous concepts of death and rebirth shaped the poetic imagination of these authors, and their political participation reflects the syncretic expression of these traditions. Simultaneously, the assassinations, torture, and disappearance of these poets and writers reproduced multiple hagiographic narratives that became models of resistance. These models are represented in the logos—revolutionary poetry—and in the ethos—revolutionary action. The interaction between this textual realm and political action produced a generation of poets that came to understand martyrdom as an element of literary praxis. Understanding this martyrdom as a fundamental characteristic of revolutionary subjectivity, allows us to see how notions of death are recast in the necropolitical structure of the postwar period.