Smokestack Books: Voices From The Land Of Trees

Voices From The Land Of Trees

Voices From The Land Of Trees tells the story of Guatemala's thirty-six years of civil war. It is a familiar tale of exploitation, poverty and repression in pursuit of "US interests". But the "Silent Holocaust" of Guatemala was extraordinarily brutal even by the standards of Central America, involving CIA-trained death-squads, the widespread use of torture and rape, the deliberate targeting of churches and the genocide of 200,000 Indians.

These poems are spoken by many different voices - mothers, missionaries, children, soldiers, guerrillas, Indians, students and journalists - each struggling to be heard above the sound of gunfire and weeping, each trying to break the silence.

Voices From The Land Of Trees is a work of bold historical imagination and sympathy, a contribution to the process of recovering these terrible events from official silence and collective amnesia. It is a book about suffering and liberation, about the mysteries of Mayan culture and the beauty of the small country known as the "Land of Trees".

For more information about the background to Voices From The Land Of Trees, see Dear Kitty; Some Blog for an introduction with links to an interview with Abigail Zammit in The Morning Star and the first of a series of videos on the subject.

"Voices From The Land Of Trees is a visceral and moving poem wrenched from Guatemala's violent past: soldiers, peasants, workers, guerillas, priests, generals and journalists create a complex polyphony that discloses a brutal and unaccommodated history. Angry and compassionate, Abigail Zammit's own voice discovers an excoriating yet redemptive timbre, confronting oppression and suffering whilst remaining true to moral complexity and ambivalence."

Graham Mort

Abigail Zammit was born in Malta in 1976. She has worked as a piano-accompanist, a builder, an English teacher and a waitress. She wrote Voices From The Land Of Trees after working in Guatemala in 2003. She lives in Kent.