Let Beauty Be:
a Season in the Highlands, Guatemala is a cycle of sequential poems
distilled from events and impressions Kit Pepper gained while volunteering
in the northwestern highlands of Guatemala from February to May, 2006.
There she was aligned with Alianza, a project which responded to grassroots
requests for education and health care from the local Mam-speaking women
and men of Comitancillo and surrounding, rural aldeas, altitude 7000
feet.
These poems started out as fragments and sketches in a tiny, torn notebook
in a vest pocket as she took a daily run that drew her from the highland
plateau down an impossibly steep mountain fissure to a gravel road that
meanders parallel to the Rio Chixal. The poems recount how this morning
run, which starts as an arduous almost impossible task, surprisingly
becomes an integral part of the her day; how predawn persistence gradually
takes up residency in legs and lungs. As the run and especially La Gruta,
the temple-steep crevasse of descent and ascent, wedge their way into
the narrator's inner landscape, other highland forces also begin to
disclose themselves; but hesitantly the way a sacred lake does from
its mist, faces of small children from the earth of their candle lit
adobe home, an oppressed people from their colonizers.
One reading of these poems could conclude that what we're following
is the evolution of an aspect of the narrator. And indeed, we do see
how, leaning deeply into La Gruta's belly, she makes the passage from
reluctant to resolute jogger. However, her growing physical endurance
occurs tangentially to seamless scenes of street teeming with scrappy
feral dogs, market animals and mysterious birds, Maya women and girls
dressed in their finest Market Day traje , threshold altars on doorsteps,
all night religious festivities and conveys of bright, over-packed,
zealot highway buses. Also, never removed from this restless animation
of daily life are the braided elements of Maya cosmology, Guatemala's
historical legacy and the contemporary death-nail influences of innumerable
foreign powers.
Unequivocal beauty and blunt terror, abiding forces in these Guatemalan
highlands, stand together in unsparing and exacting intimacy. This is
a landscape where, by day, a machete manifests as a broadside percussive
instrument tamping and leveling damp adobe bricks, while at night, becomes
a weapon of domestic malice, slashing to the bone the arms and skull
of a young mother. Her three children as witnesses; untold generations
of the past and future.
Structurally, these poems are laid out in a linear fashion and, like
stepping stones, sequentially move the reader from days of early spring
into clouded, clogged days of pending rain. However, this straightforward
order strains against the mutable context where concrete materiality
is only a minor aspect of reality. Rather, the brashly coloured and
intricate Maya world we read about is a world where everything is in
sway, where matter never fully congeals into its material form, preferring
to jump into and out of any number of otherworld portals. Slowly the
narrator learns to hear these petitions of ambient presence; slowly,
for instance, she begins to understand the switch back nature of time
and that birth and death, of which there are frequent instances, are
only examples of the capacity of spirit to rest a moment on earth, in
this mist-laden plateau.
Perhaps most profoundly, and despite efforts to diminish the suffering
of one particular street dog, the narrator witnesses the permanent lasso
of suffering. How, suffering changes shape before her eyes and, for
instance, bounds along beside her as yet one more wound-festering feral
dog.
