Writing Off Salvador

110 the minnesota review REVIEWS WRITING OFF SALVADOR Joan Didion. Salvador. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. 108 pp. $12.95 (cloth). Joan Didion visited El Salvador for two weeks in 1982. She flew down, had lunch with Ambassador Hinton, interviewed President Magarla, and spent the rest of her time on what she herself describes ironically as a kind of tour noir of Salvadoran sights. In San Salvador she visited the Sheraton Hotel, where AIFLD worker were assassinated; the Metropolitan Cathedral, scene of two government massacres; the offices of the church-sponsored Human Rights Commission, where photos of murdered Salvadorans are displayed. Out-oftown excursions included a visit to a body-dump at Puerto del Diablo—"body dumps," Didion explains, "are seen in El Salvador as a kind of visitors' must-do, difficult but worth the detour" (p. 20)—and a disappointing day-trip to the front, which proved inaccessible. Out of these experiences, and a course of background reading, Didion fashioned the essay collected in Salvador. Unfortunately, one learns more about a particular modernist sensibility and discourse from this collection than one does about the troubled country Didion toured. Certain passages, certain perceptions, are powerfully illuminating, and the book is a sharp denunciation of U.S. policy. But Didion describes this policy in ways that the informed reader will find inaccurate, and opposes it for reasons that most leftists, indeed most humanists, will find unpalatable. What is more, she spends so much of her time describing Salvadoran atrocities and the sense of terror they evoke that she makes the country she visited so briefly seem like a giant theme park where the only theme is terror. Indeed, she "writes off El Salvador in two ways, dismissing it as a place without possibilities, condemned to suffer eternally the scourges of poverty, oppression, and violence, and exploiting its sufferings as material for a kind of highbrow horror show, yet another reductive remake of Heart of Darkness in which the Western wanderer suffers complex tortures and near spiritual extinction in the Third World. The following passages will communicate, perhaps, something of Didion's considerable rhetorical power. In the first, which might have been written by Conrad, she makes her point in a characteristically literary manner, discovering in an apparently innocuous little event relations of domination that pervade and deform an entire society. She has gone to the Feria Artezanal de Nahuizalco, an event dedicated to the encouragement of indigenous culture and haunted, for Didion at least, by the memory of Ia matanza, the massacre of 1932 in which the government forces slaughtered thousands of Indians. She describes the Queen of the Fair, who sits apart in the shady schoolyard with the local guardia. Then she describes the Indian dances: The women, awkward and uncomfortable in an approximation of native costume, moved with difficulty into the dusty street and performed a listless and unpracticed dance with baskets. Whatever men could be found (mainly little boys and old men, since those young men still alive in places like Nahuizalco try not to be noticed) had been dressed in "warrior" costume, headdresses of crinkled foil, swords of cardboard and wood. Their hair was lank, their walk furtive. Some of them wore sunglasses. The others averted their eyes. Their role in the fair involved stamping and lunging and brandishing their cardboard weapons, a display of warrior machismo, and the extent to which each of them had been unmanned—unmanned not only by history but by a factor less abstract, unmanned by the real weapons in the schoolyard, by the G-3 assault rifles with which the guardia played while they drank beer with the Queen of the Fair—rendered this display deeply obscene, (pp. 75-76) /// reviews Didion's articulate abhorrence of the situation in El Salvador is equalled only by her disgust with those who claim to have a way out of it: La solución changed with the market. Pacification, although those places pacified turned out to be in need of repeated pacification, was la solución. The use of the word 'negotiations," however abstract that use may have been, was Ia solución. The election , though it ended with the ascension of a...