Interview

"Do you think we've left proof? In Argentina, there are witnesses, there are books, there are films, there is proof. Here in Guatemala, there is none of that. There are no survivors," said Guatemalan army public relations chief Colonel Edgar d'Jalma Dominguez in 1984.

The story of Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war is a familiar one of exploitation, poverty and repression in pursuit of US interests.

But the "silent holocaust" of Guatemala was extraordinarily brutal, even by the standards of central America, involving CIA-trained death squads, the widespread use of torture and rape, the deliberate targeting of churches and the genocide of 200,000 indigenous peoples.

By the late 1970s, even the US government was embarrassed by the scale of the killings and Jimmy Carter halted military aid to the Guatemalan government.

The Maltese writer Abigail Zammit recently visited Guatemala with the Roman Catholic charity Mission Fund. She was there to help build the first floor of a hospital for disabled children in Jalapa.

Zammit was, she says, "touched by the people's generosity and lightness of spirit in the face of poverty and suffering." She began to discover the shocking history of the country since the US-engineered coup which overthrew the democratically elected government of President Arbenz in 1954.

"The US has done very little to relieve poverty and social problems in Latin America," she observes, "while it has always found money to fund civil war and overthrow regimes that challenged its own interests. The US public was bombarded with anti-communist propaganda to gain support for its backing of the Guatemalan army, when all that was really at stake was the interests of United Fruit."

What shocked Zammit most was the fact that so many people in Europe are still ignorant of these events.

She knew immediately that she wanted to write about what she had seen and heard in Guatemala, to contribute to the process of breaking the international silence.

"Other writers had already interviewed survivors, written documentary histories and taken pictures of the atrocities they had witnessed. I wanted to recreate individuals' speech, allow them to tell their fragmented truths and communicate with each other from their conflicting perspectives. At the same time, I was preoccupied with how to represent individual suffering without exploiting the people I was writing about."

She began writing about a family that she had met, particularly the eldest daughter. "She stands behind the washing line/the child who can't smile. She is seven chicks pecking in a yard/ten piglets on a rich man's farm/She is the child who's lost her smile."

Zammit soon found herself writing a sequence of poems about Guatemalan history, a kind of historical novel in verse.

"I never imagined I would write a long poem - I had a vague idea it was an outmoded form until I discovered the possibility of writing separate poems and forming connections between them.

"Poetry allows us to listen to human voices, personal, ambiguous, incomplete, but terribly significant.

"Historical and political truth is complex and multilayered. Guilt, suffering and oppression are shared entities, just like the word, the voice, broken up among the many, sometimes speaking alone, sometimes singing like a Greek chorus."

Her models were writers who have tried to represent historical moments from the human and subjective perspective of the individual - the radical US poet Carolyn Forche who worked as a human rights advocate in El Salvador in the early 1980s, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and Victorian novelists such as Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte, who were able to see through the "hypocrisy of their age, which I think is very akin to ours, and to represent ambiguities and contradictions without attempting to iron out ideological inconsistencies."

Voices from the Land of Trees is spoken by many different voices - mothers, missionaries, children, soldiers, guerillas, Indians, students and journalists - each struggling to be heard above the sound of gunfire and weeping, each trying to break the silence.

"Writing political poetry is a difficult task as it is terribly easy to slip into propaganda or didacticism. Though I write a lot of poetry that is not politically or socially motivated, I still believe that the artist can never escape her sociohistorical background, so it is her duty to engage with context and causes."

Voices from the Land of Trees is an extraordinary achievement. It is a book about suffering and liberation, about the mysteries of Mayan culture and the beauty of the small country known as the "Land of Trees."

Voices from the Land of Trees is available from Smokestack Books, PO Box 408, Middlesbrough TS5 6WA, priced £7.95 plus 50p postage.