Going In WitH The Guerrillas By Robert Ellis Gordon Linocut by ]ack McLarty If youare, by any chance, considering the possibility of going, as a guest of the guerrillas, into rebel-held territory in El Salvador, and you speak to others w>.o have been there, this is what you will hear: get used to walking thirty or forty miles at a stretch. Quit smoking. Don't quit smoking because cigarettes ward off hunger and are easier to come by. in Morazan, than food. Read everything availiable on the causes of and cures for amoebic dysentery. Don't bother because there's no way to avoid it. Don't drink the water and above all avoid dehydration. Take a gun. Don't. Bring along massive doses of vitamins C and B- Stress. Forget the vitamins since you'll give them all away the day you arrive. Don't worry about making friends: everyone wants to talk to American writers, just because some of the guerrillas will hate you viciously, physically, doesn't mean you should take it personally. Go in with the RN or the ERP but not the EPL (os they're likely to slit your throat). Gel your initials straight. Don't bring a sleeping bag. a tent, or anything green to wear, because such items suggest that you are planning to do what you are planning to do which might cause the goverment soldiers might kill you. Remember: the mountains are cold during the winter. Remember: the mountains are cold during the summer. If you hear a helicopter, hit the dirt. When you return from the mountains wear a short-sleeved shirt because soldiers always check to see if elbows are scratched as a result of repeatedly hitting the dirt. If you're picked up by the soldiers hand out cigars and invite the boys for a cup of coffee. Keep your passport and credentials on .a chain around your neck. Never remove the chain. If you're picked up by the soldiers ask to see their commanding officerand tell him whatever he wants to know. Get immunized. Get your teeth fixed. Get a haircut. Obtain survival tips from former Green Berets but not from ooga-booga hippie types. (Real guerrillas don't eat snakes.) If you're picked up by the soldiers imply, through artful hints and nods, that you work for the C.I.A. When you return from the mountains go directly to the airport and stay there. If the soldiers try to drag you off a plane, cause a ruckus so as to attract the attention of nearby reporters (if any). Memorize a certain California telephone number: it may come in handy if you're in a jam. Remember: no matter how prepared you are you'll never be prepared. If. for some reason, you're hung up in San Salvador or Tegucigalpa, wear a Rolex watch and act like a rich American who's there to fuck around. Go for no more than a week. Go for no more than a month. Go for three months. Go for a year. Don't go. Go because if you don't, you'll regret it. (Besides it will look great on your resume.) Think about this: the first time you go in. you'll get five or ten people killed. The next time you'll get three or four. Maybe the third time you'll know what you are doing, but you'll never know why you're doing it. Think about this: you're not so important: one person can't save the world. Don't go because of gut wounds, ball woundsand terror. Go to embrace the terror. Go during the rainy season because most of the fighting takes place during the dry season. Go during the dry season so as to avoid the rains. Go because when Katherine said she was really thinking of you. she was actually thinking of somebody else. Go to prove a fewpoints. If youenter the heart of evil you'll transcend it. If you enter the evil you'll become it. Go to internalize the pain which, at present, is external because you're not there. Go to touch the war. Go to touch yourself. Go because if you believe in the power of words to persuade, you have no choice but to view yourself as a bloodhungry thrillseeker. Go because you're a bloodhungry thrillseeker. Figure on a one in twenty chance of getting killed. Don't figure on getting killed, because if you do, you will. You'll find that combat is addictive. You'll find that 90 percent of your time is spent waiting around. You'll know the meaning of terror within your first month/week/day. Don't bring any books, and if you must, take an airport novel or The Bible. If you study Spanish in Cuernavaca keep your politics to yourself because the place is loaded with spooks. If you go through Tegucigalpa keep your politics to yourself because the place is loaded with spooks. Also soldiers of fortune and other assorted loonies and freaks, including every would-be john Wayne who ever dreamed of getting laid in a war. (You aren't by any chance one of them?) Get used to eating tortillas and beans. Get used to eating nothing. Bring anti-fungal foot powder and don't fall in love. Trust someone, suspect everyone and pray that your unit doesn't skirmish with the Salvadoran Army's Atlacatl Bridage, because when the Atlacatl goes bananas, everything in its path dies. Robert Ellis Gordon is a writer with roots in Port Townsend who lives in Seattle. Jack McLarty is an artist whose home is Portland. I ask about the vulnerability of that inner voice to outer pressures—political aims, for instance. How does she distinguish between spirituality and ideology? She is quiet for a moment, rocking on her porch. “Well I really know now, in a way that I didn’t know before, that the spirit cannot be killed,” she says finally. “The need to worship, to express one’s gratitude for being alive in this beautiful world, isn’t going to go away. The capacity to worship whatever is wonderful in us is innate. Revolutions that don’t understand that are bound to fail in the long run. You cannot express this feeling adequately to a tank, or even to a full belly, or proper education (though heaven knows I know the value of those things). That would be like worshipping your toe. Or your toenail.” Is this, I ask, a turn toward religion? Her mother is a devout Christian whose religious attitude was no part of the baggage her daughter left home with. Have her feelings changed? “The church grows wherever it’s needed,” she replies. “If you need it, like my mother, that’s fine. But personally I don't go much for organized religion. Organized is exactly what is is: organized by someone else. If you are controlled in that way, then you are in danger of losing your spontaneity.” I put it to her that there might be a parallel between the structures of religious expression and the structures of artistic expression. I say that while she could have told The Color Purple spontaneously to a small group of people sitting round a table together, I for one am glad she organized that spontaneity into a form that could include more of us. Again she pauses, swinging back and forth in her rocking chair. “Perhaps the church tries to teach us how to feel in the same way that art tries to teach us how to see,” she says. “Some people do need art in order to see. But many of us don’t. As we grow through life, our understanding comes to fit our personal experience. I really do have confidence in that process. It’s...organic—yes, that’s the word. My faith in the organic process keeps me going." It isn’t easy to take issue with Alice Walker. After our meeting, she sent me a letter. She wanted to amend an impres sion she might have given when talking about the “rape of the earth” perpetuated by white man’s culture. “It isn’t just indigenous peoples who can offer us good things to shape the future with,” she wrote. “We must accept and use and love what is good from all of us. Each people. Each gender. Each race. Even each age....” Her rhetoric nonetheless has down-to- earth repurcussions. She’ll fly thousands of miles to host a concert for Oxfam, then give a reading in San Quentin jail. She’ll use the proceeds of The Color Purple to launch, in partnership with Robert Allen, a new publishing venture called Wild Trees Press in order to present writing that embodies the qualities they feel are missing from mainstream culture. As she shows me their first book, a collection of short stories by a local writer called J. California Cooper, she once again becomes animated and open. She describes the strong folk flavor of Cooper's style as belonging to the tradition of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. The next book will be different—a first novel by a Virginia writer named Jo Anne Brasil, about a white teenager coming of age in Boston. The aim of the press is to publish writers, of any race, age, or sex, who celebrate the human values that Walker and Allen hold dear. “The other day I read something about how diamonds come to be,” she tells me as I am leaving. “Of course I hate the way they are mined, the exploitation of the miners, and so on. But I was amazed by the description. “Diamonds start out as black coal, deep in the belly of the earth, being crushed so you'd have thought they’d be destroyed. But no. They just get harder and purer. They become the most precious thing in the world—a diamond.” Leonie Caldecott is the author of Women of our Century. This story is reprinted from New Age, Box 220, Brighton, MA 02135. Clinton St. Quarterly 25
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz