This remarkable and revelatory book does rather a lot in its circa 200 pages. It is the autobiographical experience of a Spaniard working for an NGO in Central America; it is a political and folk history of the region; it is a love story. Expressly neither fiction nor memoir, though incorporating some elements of both, it is by turns shocking, tragic, inspiring and heartwarming.
After reading the first chapter, I stopped and thought “people need to know this”. This was a reaction that would be repeated at various points throughout my reading. These are stories and histories told from a base of deep affection for the ordinary people, above all, of El Salvador, where the book is largely set; however, no one is safe from criticism and no aspect of life or history is sugar-coated or idealised.
The book has fierce words for the role that Spanish colonisers and, more recently, the US government have played in the suffering and oppression of the people of Central America, the extent of which, in both cases, may not be commonly known by many. Neither does the book hide from the violence and sexism of modern life in the region. Another key and extremely relevant aspect of the book is its treatment of the theme of crossing the border to the USA and everything – in its gritty, painful reality – that that entails.
The author, Francisco Martínez Criado, is a carpenter from Andalusia who spent six years working for an NGO in Central America, mainly in El Salvador. There he developed a great bond with the region and its people and much frustration with the way NGOs operate, with all their bureaucracy and hypocrisy. This book is the fruit of his experiences, the stories he lived and was told, along with some welcome and well-researched history to provide context.
Amongst other things, Martínez taught carpentry skills to vulnerable youths, with which they could furnish their homes and community and make some money. It was a route away from the toxic cycle of gang violence that consumes so many boys and young men and shrouds communities in fear. Some of these youths would later attempt to make a new life in the United States. What one has to go through, expose oneself to and risk to even attempt reaching the border doesn’t bear thinking about…except we have to, now more than ever, for how can we hope to understand a situation if we are wilfully ignorant to a large part of the story? While not the core of the narrative, what this work has to say about border crossing is essential reading at a time when, globally, refugees and migrants are, in some quarters, being increasingly demonised.
One of the threads running through this book, and again based on reality, is the story of an unlikely couple: Violeta, a Salvadorian guerrilla fighter with the FMLN, and Ventura, a former trainee priest from Spain who volunteered in a refugee camp in Honduras in the 1980s. The Salvadorian Civil War, which lasted from 1979 to 1992, killing, disappearing or displacing over a million people, is a key part of the book and we see its far-reaching and still felt impact in a number of ways. Managing to never become too dense, the work explains the background, development and resolution of this conflict, while offering glimpses of life within it. We learn the obscene extent to which the US (when it suited them) funded the military government, whose paramilitary death squads terrorized the civilian population. Those who spoke out, notably including Saint Óscar Romero, put their lives at risk. We discover, too, that the peace treaties far from put an end to the violence.
As well as providing an overall outline of the conflict, Martínez takes us inside the lives or those involved, caught up in it or, directly or indirectly, dealing with the consequences years later. We meet guerrilla fighters from all over the world, we see a man’s journey to becoming a feared gangster, we learn how countryside families learnt to differentiate between guerrillas and government forces who would punish them for feeding guerrillas. We see people driven to violence, fleeing violence, people making the best of their situations, people who have less than nothing, people who have been abandoned and forgotten about, people trying to help and people turning their backs.
Another interesting part of this work is that, as I alluded to earlier, it is not simply about politics and history, it also seeks to convey the culture and mythology of El Salvador. The reader learns about its food, gods, myths, legends, ghosts and more. As the book insists in its opening pages, the real protagonist is the Salvadorian people. Their folklore and rituals are therefore crucial in giving the book its authentic flavour.
This book is not the work of a distanced observer, Martínez has gone deeper than that and delved into the very soul of Central America, writing not about the people but with the people. To that end, his use of language is also of note, incorporating local words and phrases into his prose, adding to that feeling of closeness to the subject matter. Indeed, I often forgot I was reading a writer from Spain.
Evidently, the genre of Las Cenizas del Comal is hard to define, but we can say that this is a book of stories: real, imagined and folkloric; a book of life, death, hopes, fears, injustice, rebellion and frustration. Above all, it as an eye-opener and a window into a world less known, although with Martínez as our guide we are not looking through the window but gathered round the fire alongside the protagonists.