Bitter harvest

A story of rebellion and defeat resonates across centuries

by Anne Marie Donahue

THE BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS, by Rosario Castellanos. Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen. Marsilio, 400 pages, $24.

The crucifixion of a child at the hands of his own people is an atrocity almost too horrific to contemplate, let alone comprehend. In The Book of Lamentations, however, Rosario Castellanos renders the twisted spirits of the crucifiers so convincingly that the boy's ritual murder -- reported to have been committed by a Mayan mob at the height of an armed peasant rebellion in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas -- seems not only believable but inevitable. Out of historical fact and psychological insight, Castellanos's novel creates a convincing anatomy of oppression as timely and disquieting today as it was when it was first published in the Spanish 35 years ago.

Because of the 1994 peasant uprising in Chiapas (which may well have occasioned Esther Allen's fluid English translation) many readers will need little introduction to the plight of the campesinos there, descended from the proud and accomplished Mayas but now largely uneducated, desperately poor, and indignant. The Book of Lamentations is set some 60 years ago, and is based on events from the rebellions of 1712 and 1868. Although today's ongoing uprising lacks the violence of its precursors, it was triggered by similarly stark inequities.

Castellanos, who was born into a wealthy white family in 1925, writes about a period in Chiapas that she knows firsthand. She was raised on her family's ranch, primarily by Mayan servants, and came to abhor the rigid social and economic structure that enriched the landed minority and reduced the indigenous majority to abject servitude. Nevertheless, she harbored no illusions about the purity of the oppressed. From her early childhood until her teens -- when her family left Chiapas for Mexico City -- she observed up close the way oppression can warp its victims, leaving them meek, masochistic, and prone to cruelty and madness. As a consequence, her book is refreshingly free of the Dances with Wolves breed of romanticism that has marred so many portrayals of America's indigenous peoples. The parallels, too, that she draws between oppressed women and oppressed races are similarly unsentimental.

The novel begins with a Mayan girl's rape by a white man -- which stigmatizes her and forces her into the protection of an ilol, or seer, named Catalina -- and culminates in the crucifixion of the child born of that violation, whom Catalina has raised. There are dozens of compelling characters -- white, mestizo, and Mayan -- but the drama of racial and cultural clash, and, finally, madness, centers on Catalina and her husband Pedro, a village leader obsessed by the idea of justice. The seed of rebellion is planted when Pedro hears of and believes in the Mexican president's promise of land reform; but it doesn't take root in the Mayan community until after Catalina falls into a trance and tells a credulous crowd how three deities who have taken the form of rocks have assured her that the dead gods have revived and justice is at hand.

"The ilol twisted like a reptile being hacked apart with a machete," Castellanos writes.

Frozen in terror the others watched her, trembling at the imminency of a revelation. . . . None of those who stood around the ilol could understand either her evocation of past events or her prophecy. But all were infected with a wild jubilation that begged their hands to turn it into action. At last! At last! The period of silence, inertia, submission has ended. We are going to be reborn, like our gods!

When the landowners and their lackeys in the Catholic Church learn of the rocks' revelation and the fevered rebelliousness it has galvanized, they try to counter the threat on several fronts. First, a priest goes to the cave and confiscates the sacred stones, thereby undermining Catalina's credibility. Then, a cabal of wealthy rancheros attempts to buy off and intimidate the government official responsible for implementing the new land-reform policies. Finally, as their fear mounts, they muster their armed forces and request reinforcements from nearby states and from Guatemala.

In painting the political machinations of powerful men bent on protecting their privileges, Castellanos uses a palette even richer than Joseph Conrad's for Nostromo, and she wields a finer brush. But she saves her true masterstrokes for the campesinos. Hungry for power yet suspicious of it, pessimistic and blindly hopeful by turns, they undermine each other and alienate their allies. In the end, the desperation that once drove them proves their undoing. Addled and eager to propitiate any deity that might assist them, they descend into a drunken savagery even more mindless than that of their cruelest enemies.

Anne Marie Donahue is a regular contributor to the Boston Phoenix.