Post-Conflict Central American Literature: Searching for Home and Longing to Belong by Yvette Aparicio (review)

As suggested by its title, Yvette Aparicio’s Post-Conflict Central American Literature: Searching for Home and Longing to Belong explores the idea of “homeland as place of origin and, most importantly, of home as belonging, a ‘feeling’ that is palpable yet indefinable; of being part of a flexible, changeable yet constant we” (7). The text offers an insightful and creative analysis of contemporary poetry and short stories written by up-and-coming authors from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, including Claudia Hernández, Susana Reyes, Marta Leonor González, Juan Sobalvarro, and Luis Chaves. Exploring these writers’ move away from protest literature and out from under the shadow of mythicized and martyred poets of the past, Aparicio’s text prompts an important discussion about the tenuous relationship between politics and poetics in a neoliberal, post-conflict Central America. Contesting the claim that globalization generates a “mode of global citizenship and globalized experiences that transcend the significance and function of local citizenship and daily life,” Aparicio highlights poetic and narrative voices whose desire to inhabit, imagine, and feel at home remains intact even when expressed through sometimes unconventional modes of attachment (15).

Throughout the text, the author goes to great lengths to capture the essence of the object of analysis: a post-conflict Central American homeland that is simultaneously definite and indefinite to outsiders and insiders due to the palpable aftermath of ideologically-driven revolutions and civil wars, hallucinatory violence, and the questionable effects of modernization projects and globalization. Carefully distancing “home” and “homeland” from the nation and ideological impositions of the past, the author approximates these terms to the feeling of patria, and most importantly, the affective sentiment of belonging: “Home is a sentimental, psychological place to inhabit, to defend, to love” (6). To that end, she adopts Benedict Anderson’s conceptualization of the “intangible attachments” and “fond imaginings” of the nation, yet maintains that in the post-conflict literature in question “home as the feeling of belonging is not a political call to nationalist sentiments” (7). Although spatial theories of cultural geography may have served to develop this affective conceptualization of home, the author attends to this task through suggestive close readings that challenge readers, who are well-versed in Central America’s politically committed literatures, to be open to new, somewhat ambivalent, yet tangible poetic attachments to an enigmatic homeland.

The five chapters of the book are thematically organized, each one exploring a different mode of attachment to home. These include what could be thought of as conventional affective links, like political ideals and nostalgia (chapters one–two), to unconventional connections transmitted through sentiments like disdain and disgust (chapter three), and ways of experiencing home through displacement, touristic detachment, and virtual spaces (chapters four–five). Each chapter offers a constructive dialogue between poetry and short prose works that share stylistic and thematic concerns. This creative organizational scheme highlights the poems’ poetic discourse at the same time as it underlines their formal movement towards prose. By framing close readings with contemporary theory as well as sociopolitical, historical, and cultural studies of Central America, Aparicio provides an interdisciplinary lens for approaching the texts and exploring the factors that have influenced the subjective turn inwards and the “waning of the dominance of politicized, militant literature” (14). The thematic organization of the text and its nuanced close readings are extremely useful for specialists and graduate students of the region as well as for generalists seeking to update their pedagogical coverage of Central American poetry and short stories.

Chapter one, “Central America in Pieces: Dismembering the Isthmus,” returns to a fragmented homeland reimagined through the politically committed poetry of Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, and Leonel Rugama. Aparicio’s deft analysis of the alternative heroes, monuments, and imagined futures in these works, which constructed a decentered, revolutionary imaginary to challenge hegemonic renderings of patria, sets the stage for her entry into the poetic voices of the post-conflict era...