The Guatemalan Civil War

The Guatemalan Civil War last for thirty-six years. It was a war between the Guatemalan government and various rebel groups that were largely supported by the poor population. The Guatemalan government forces committed genocide against the Maya population and violation of basic human rights against civilians. The death toll was around 200,000 people.

In the excerpt from ‘Requiem Guatemala’, ‘Three Dirges’, the author Marshall Bennett Connelly, uses visual and sound imagery frequently.

I feel Connelly use his imagery to show the character had a traumatic experience in the war and has remembered details very vividly. Connelly provides in great detail fabrics, clothing, color and sound from the Guatemalan Civil War.

The most important and reoccurring imagery is fabric and clothing. First we can see Connelly referring to a quilt in line two. He speaks about the village, San Martin Comitan, as laying draped, “like a wrinkled quilt, over the sharp ravines that scored the floor of the valley”. Here he is giving the readers a visualization of what the village of San Martin Comitan looks like. Connelly suggest the village is full of fields, like cornfields, that creates the look of patchwork on a quilt.

Later on Connelly describes in detail what the five young men were wearing. He says “five somber young men in sandals, musty jeans and second-generation western jackets, in some cases too snug and in others obviously too baggy to have been their own”. Connelly is providing imagery to show the readers that the 5 boys were poor. They had the wear what they were given, even if the clothes were too snug or too baggy. In the same paragraph, the principal religious women were following behind the boys “wearing the long, white ceremonial tunics accented with a single, central woven panel of red brocading”. The symbolism and imagery here is the poor wear dirty, musty, second hand clothes while the religious people wear white, clean, expensive woven clothes. Connelly also makes a point to represent the poor with “musty” clothes and the religious uppers in white and red clothing.