“There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.”
Raymond Carver (“Gazebo”)
December 2012
6 posts
“David Foster Wallace, Algo supuestamente divertido que nunca volveré a hacer”
—“…me sentí desesperar. La palabra se ha banalizado ahora por el exceso de uso, desesperar, pero es una palabra seria, y ahora la estoy usando en serio. Para mí denota una adición simple: un extraño deseo de muerte combinado con una sensación apabullante de mi propia pequeñez y futilidad que se presenta como miedo a la muerte. Tal vez se parezca a lo que la gente llama terror o angustia. Pero no acaba de ser como esas cosas. Se parece más a querer morirse a fin de evitar la sensación insoportable de darse cuenta de que uno es pequeño, débil, egoísta y de que, sin ninguna duda posible, se va a morir. Es querer tirarse por la borda.”
September 2012
1 post
July 2012
1 post
“…I think with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath…”
Samuel Beckett (Molly)
June 2012
1 post
“…the second or third week in June, at the moment that is to say most painful of all when over what is called our hemisphere the sun is at its pitilessmost and the arctic radiance comes pissing on our midnights.”
Samuel Beckett (Molloy)
May 2012
2 posts
“The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are being barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan (Pulphead—“The Final Comeback of Axl Rose”)
April 2012
5 posts
“Tal vez fue la locura la que me impulsó a viajar. Puede que fuera la locura. Yo decía que había sido la cultura. Claro que la cultura a veces es la locura, o comprende la locura. Tal vez fue el desamor el que me impulsó a viajar. Tal vez fue un amor excesivo y desbordante. Tal vez fue la locura.”
Roberto Bolaño (Amuleto)
“Our holidays always end the same way, with the two of us up late drinking and trying out our ‘tunes’ on each other. There’s something biologically satisfying about harmonizing with a sibling.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan (Pulphead—“Feet in Smoke”)
March 2012
7 posts
Letter from Guatemala
AARON SHULMAN
on the problem of femicide.
Image Courtesy of Fundacion Sobravivientes
On a sunny April morning in 2009, Norma Cruz sat at the prosecution’s table in a courtroom on the 15th floor of the Tower of Tribunals in Guatemala City. A petite, almost mousy woman of 47, she didn’t give the impression of someone accustomed to death threats or hunger strikes, yet as the director of La Fundación Sobrevivientes (the Survivors Foundation), a leading force in the fight against gender-based violence in Guatemala, she is no stranger to either.
Dressed in a sharp gray suit, Cruz waited patiently with her hands folded over a legal notepad while observers trickled into the courtroom, among them U.S. ambassador Stephen McFarland. It was the opening day of the trial for a triple murder that had left Guatemala aghast the previous spring: three sisters, Heidy, Diana, and Wendy Suruy, ages 7, 8, and 11, respectively, found dead with their throats slit in the woods of their small town in the municipality of San Lucas Sacatepéquez. Wendy showed signs of rape. Under Cruz’s oversight, the prosecution team had spent the last 11 months meticulously assembling a case against the three young men charged with the crime, Moroni Silva, Luis Socoreque, and Áxel Cho. With conclusive DNA evidence, over 60 supporting witnesses, and the murder weapon itself — a machete — Cruz hoped to rack up swift, definitive convictions.
These auspicious factors in the case of the Suruy killers are the exception, not the norm, in Guatemala. A victory for the prosecution would only highlight the tremendous obstacles that need to be overcome in a country where justice for crimes against women is nearly impossible to obtain. Since the turn of the millennium, over 5,000 women have been murdered in Guatemala. To give a better idea of what this figure means, consider that if Guatemala, with its population of 14 million, were the size of the United States, this would add up to 110,000 women murdered in a decade. And conditions are only worsening with the passage of time. In 2000, 213 women met violent deaths in Guatemala, compared to 720 in 2009 and 675 in 2010. Worse still, only an estimated 2 percent of these cases have received legal action. The victims are mostly the “nobodies” of society, poor women, in many cases indigenous, from families lacking resources and education. Their bodies are often found mutilated, with indications of rape. Investigations are routinely botched, if they’re even pursued. “She was a prostitute,” a police investigator might say if the victim has a belly-button ring or is wearing a miniskirt. The investigation is closed before being opened.
