Straddling the Volcanoes:
An Interview With Omar Castaneda

by T.L. Kelly

Published in 'Left Bank', Winter 1991, Blue Heron Publishing  

Omar Castaneda was born surrounded by active volcanoes in his native land of Guatemala. His writing tends toward magic realism with themes that include cultural conflict, the twin drives toward assimilation and confrontation, and the reformation of belief under drastic social change. All explosive issues. But he is far from an explosive character himself, though his sense of humor erupts quickly, and usually with a sting. It seemed appropriate to talk about his work, including his recent young adult novel, Among the Volcanoes, under the shadow of Mount St. Helens in Longview, Washington. Omar read selections from his new novel and also Cunuman, a 1987 adult novel about social change in Guatemala, at Lower Columbia College in Longview last Spring. During his visit, T.L. Kelly [then known as Terri Lee Grell], journalist and editor of Lynx magazine, talked with Omar about magic realism, feminism, political activism and his popular courses on shamanism and "Literature of the Unreal" at Western Washington University, where he has taught for the last three years. Omar has earned several awards for creative writing and folklore, including a Fulbright Senior Research Grant to his native Guatemala where he spent part of last summer researching the sequel to Among the Volcanoes. Extensive readings of Mayan mythology, particularly the Popol Vu, the sacred text of the Quiche Maya, also inspire his works. But it is the authenticity of writing the woman's voice--women as mothers, daughters and wives--that sets Omar apart from his contemporaries. The women are "emblems of Guatemala," Omar says, because they are caught in the conflicts between tradition and acceptance of foreign views, which is also "an issue of myself trying to do that as a writer."

KELLY: Cunuman....that's an unusual name...

CASTANEDA: One time, a reviewer spelled it 'Cuntman.'

KELLY: I can see it now, is it a bird, a plane? No it's Cuntman! We're saved!

CASTANEDA: I know another author who had characters called Ishpoosh and Ishpuk. One reviewer called them Ish-push and Ish-shove.... that's hilarious...but Cuntman?

KELLY: Maybe it's a fraudulent--oops, I mean Freudian--slip. Which leads me to ask why the heroes in your novels are always women.

CASTANEDA: I'm very concerned with women issues. My politics are founded on a lot of other issues too--problems of racism, Central American politics, classism. But I finally see gender issues as the most fundamental. I see a complex structure of power struggles. I locate the origin of certain needs and requirements of individuals to gain power and to diminish others as a way of survival. I locate that in sexual politics.

KELLY: Are you a feminist?

CASTANEDA: Oh, I think so. I see myself that way because I see the gender problems as the focal issue, or something that requires a lot of attention in order to have important effects on larger levels. I may be sort of naive, but I believe that if real progress was made in eliminating a sort of fallow centrism in the world, that a great many other problems would naturally fall. The problems of fallow centrism are directly linked to racism, classism, problems with capitalism.

KELLY: I don't think feminist politics can solve all these problems. I don't agree with the so-called "radical" premise that promotes feminism as the be-all, end-all.

CASTANEDA: I know a lot of feminists who I don't agree with in their politics, and who I think are arguing lines that are probably not very healthy for themselves and other people. But there's a certain kind of value in arguing at any time in a political movement. There are different levels of aggressiveness, of straight-line views. And these are important because at the same time, at any given moment in the movement, there are also a great variety of audiences to hear those views. One person can affect people on the same level of attitude, whereas the others may not be affected. When there's a lag time in the political movement, you always need front line, adamant people, aggressive people to break down the really difficult barriers, the first barricades in a very hostile countryside. There are other people who are perhaps more detached, less angry, less vehement, who have a wider perspective on the movement itself. It is unfortunate that less-angry people will sometimes sacrifice those very adamant front-line people. The general movement in motion with the political picture may go to a point where people say, "These vehement people are no longer helpful to the group." Maybe feminism has advanced far enough where there are people who are still so anti-male, who were extremely important at a time--and they may still be extremely important in certain places--but they've been seduced by the power or they are too straight-line in their thinking, and the movement as a whole may not be so well-served by them anymore.

KELLY: Tell me more about the women in your novels, what they stand for, and their relationship to your research into the Popol Vuh.

CASTANEDA: My main characters are women who are discovering themselves. They are emblems of Guatemala, one way or another. They have allegiance to some of the traditions they have been raised with and they realize that those same traditions are hurting them, damaging them, and they try to invent some new possibilities for themselves. They fight against the easy acceptance of foreign views. So the symbolism becomes quite easy to make. In the Popol Vuh there's a Creator Mother that figures prominently--Xmucane. She goes by various names. Sometimes it's "Great Grandmother," or "Grandmother" or "Mother" or "Woman with Children." Sometimes it's Cacau Woman. But there's a constant pairing going on so that even in a given instant you have the guise of a female force, a female like manifestation that's just one guise of a pair that also has its male counterpart. But it happens that the female side in it has greater playing. She figures prominently. In my novel Among the Volcanoes, the woman is fighting against the gender roles of her culture and trying to invent something new for herself, while battling with specific American interests. This becomes the emblem for the larger issues of Guatemala trying to do that. It also becomes an issue of myself trying to do that as a writer, in my own bi-culturality. I also see this as one of the main threads of the PoPol Vuh. There is very much an awareness of the clash of cultures. There is both sustaining the continuity of the tradition and the unavoidable fact that one must invent self anew, and that the foreign influence coming in is not necessarily a good one. The foreign influence brings something of value, but it's overall not particularly good.

KELLY: Sounds like the tragedy of the "discovery of America."

CASTANEDA: There you go. It's not the discovery of America, it's the conquest of America. The reality in Guatemala is not 500 years celebration of the discovery, it's 500 years of resistance. In October 1990, we had a Dia de la Razas celebration. I was involved in it. It was an anti-quincentennial celebration. Western Washington will have similar things, culminating in October 1992. For that time I've devised a course called "Literature of the Maya" which will look at the Popol Vuh and other literature just after the conquest. We'll discuss that right at the conquest time. I think the western states will have lots of activity connected with that. Last year, there was a Pan-Native American gathering in Quito, Ecuador. The next will take place in Guatemala. All of this is a gearing up for Pan-Native American unity. That's the focal point.

KELLY: How do you unify themes of Mayan myth and history in your work?

CASTANEDA: I use a structure and certain motifs that I see in the Popol Vuh to inform the structure and motifs in Cunuman. The Popol Vuh is a kind of myth history. It starts with the origin of the universe and ends with the Spanish conquest of the Mayan in Guatemala. But there's no clear line between what we in the West think of as "myth" and "history" or "legend." There's a clear blending, no clear demarcation.This implicates Guatemala to a large extent. A writer is like a neo-mythologizer, I think. Good fiction writing is making up lies or myths that are so believable, there is a curious blend of myth and truth, myth and legend.

KELLY: Should we say "myths" and "lies" in the same breath? Perhaps we look for something else, a kernel of truth, in myths.

CASTANEDA: We can think of myth in terms of the colloquial usage which does mean "lie" or falsehood. But we can also think of the myth in terms of what folklorists call it; "sacred belief." In fact, part of what makes a myth sacred is that it deliberately frustrates rational thought. If we go to any myth system--the Popol Vuh or the Christian Genesis--and label them as myths the way folklorists do, we see a curious thing. They share a lot of characteristics. They are ahistorical, atemporal, and they usually involve dieties or semidieties. But they all also deliberately frustrate rational thought. In that sense, that may be why the West has a more vulgar kind of thinking about myths as lies. We in the West want to have a more rational view. The myth seems beyond belief, like a lie. But a lot of work has been done to use the Popol Vuh to understand older traditions. It dates from circa 1550. Dennis Tedlock places it right at 1558. That's pretty much at the end of the Quiche Maya reign. It talks about events that happened up to 400 years before that. But for us, that's prehistory. So these texts are sometimes the only way to understand history that is lost. I think America for a long time has had either a cavalier attitude towards the lack of humanitarian practices in Guatemala or has actively condoned very malicious practices down there. Guatemala is a very unfortunate place. Amnesty International has listed many years of political horror stories there. People dissapear all the time, people get killed all the time. Investigations just don't happen. Virtually every family in Guatemala has members of its family murdered, found brutally murdered...

KELLY: But we only hear about drug trafficking between governments. Then our government justifies its threats to intervene.

CASTANEDA: Yes, exactly. Recently Guatemala was put on the list of places that were either growing certain narcotics or were part of the traffic. So there has been heavy use of defoliants on crops. But the defoliants, coincidentally, have been used in areas that were cited as spots of guerrila activity, insurgency areas. You only hear about drug trafficking because it is all a pretext. What they're really after is keeping down the insurgency. The U.S. has helped the Guatemalan government-- that is, the Guatemalan military--by training them for anti-insurgency. This is a general anti-Communist attitude that the U.S. government pushes in Central America. It sees Guatemala as one of the last "Domino Pizzas" before the horrors of Communism sweep up into the U.S., which is ludicrous. Guatemala has a very strong middle class compared to some of the other Central American countries. It also has a history of very strong military government, so it has a lot of control on the people. In the olden days there used to be a lot of big business in Guatemala, foreign business. You still find that. Going way back, you find the United Fruit Company. More recently, large plantation owners, people who claim they are doing "forestry." But what they do is they take out a lot of wooded areas by cutting down the peten (rain forest) for pasture lands for big cattle industries. Most of the land is in fact owned by foreign companies.

KELLY: So your writing has reflected some of your objective political concerns, which is ironic, since you're tagged a fablist, magic realist....

CASTANEDA: Well, magic realism is more technique than content. In the U.S. people tend to think of Gabriel Garcias Marques as one of the originators of magic realism. But he's very political. In fact, there's not very many Latin American writers who are not political. It seems like we think that only in this country can writers somehow be artists and not political. In fact, the mindset here is that you ouqht to separate the two. Most of the world--but let me just speak about Latin America--Hispanics think that is simply preposterous. Someone who can make that separation is in fact making a political statement. They are making the stance that they are absolute collaborators with the status quo. That is their political statement. To make no statement is to say "everything is fine." But in countries where there is torture going on all the time, where people are disappearing, where there are murders that are not investigated, where there are civil rights violations constantly; to say "everything is fine" is a rather strong statement. So to be a writer is to be political. To use language to somehow inform and illuminate atrocities is just part of being a writer.

KELLY: Which came first for you, the urge to be a writer or the need to make a political statement?

CASTANEDA: I came rather late to writing. I was 23, relatively late. (laughs) I always hear about these writers starting out at 16 or 17 or 9 years old...

KELLY: ...Or 2 years old, learning to talk and your first words are "pen! paper! syntax!"

CASTANEDA: I didn't think I was even going to live to be 23! I went through a very bad period of severe drug use. And disenchantment. I left home in the late 1960s. I was kind of....addicted to heroin for awhile. I was kind of, I don't know, not thinking of much of anything but self-abuse.and abuse of others.

KELLY: Is writing a form of self-abuse? I think of shamans...

CASTANEDA: Yah. Yes! And salvation. It's funny...I thought of shamans, too. I used to teach a course called "Shamanism and Literature" which looked at how the writer--particularly the poet--in literate culture has supplanted the shaman in non-literate culture. If you look at the traditional traits in shamanism-- things like transformation, vertical travel, self-curing, psychopompous ecstasy, incantations--and list all these kinds of traits, and then do surveys of poetry, particularly poetry but sometimes fiction. You pinpoint in a random impressionistic way, the best calms. You'll find higher percentages of shamanism encoded within that poetry. I always thought that the writer herself is someone who is psychically damaged in some way, and turns to writing as a way to re-harmonize the spirit. In that journey, there is the appeal of the "Great Shaman" which is the tradition of "other" poets, hearing "other" voices. Using writing as a way to reclaim self, to make self, and in that she has harmonized herself so well that others can read this thing, this poem, this piece of fiction, and harmonize themselves, too. So there is a shaman in the writer, I believe that.

KELLY: But the shaman was respected, revered by all. Not so, with contemporary writers, poets now...it's getting more exclusive, the tendency to listen to that damaged part of yourself and give it dignity is--

CASTANEDA: --an initiation. But remember, too, that when you look at shamans--think of the most famous shamans, Black Elk, Maria Serena, people like that--when they went into initiation, when they were children, they were either psychically or physically damaged. They were tagged as possibly strong shamans, some because they had epilepsy. Then they went through an initation ritual, during which they somehow get attached to a great shaman figure. Initiation also involves mutilation and rebirth, a transformation to what's called a "familiar."

KELLY: The muse.

CASTANEDA: Yes. And sometimes it is an animal that is speaking and teaching. More than simply "helping." And then there's vertical travel, going up a tree. Ascending and descending to various places. With fishing cultures there's usually a voyage into waters of some type. But there's often going up to the sky in various ways, not horizontal travel. Vertical travel is critical to the initiation. When we think of the shaman we must also think of psychical damage. If we think of them as just epileptic, it's not quite right, because it's not just about physical damage.

KELLY: Poets and writers in the U.S. don't get that much respect, or empathy, for the damage, the initiation. Is it different in Guatemala?

CASTANEDA: Yes, because poets and writers there are very involved people. The separation between politics and poetry and art does not exist there. It's not uncommon for them to be intimately involved in government. They become ambassadors, diplomats. The Sandinista government was full of poets. There is a kind of over-sanctioning and appreciation for the writers. It is less so here, in the U.S. We also have a lot of crass commercial writers that dominate the scene. But I think it's still true in the U.S. that when you say by introduction, "This is a writer" or "This is the author of this book," people tend to think, "Oh! A REAL author!" There's still a kind of admiration...

KELLY: Yah. I've done that. "This is so-and-so, the writer!" And everybody at the table has that look on their faces that says "Who the hell is so-and-so?"

CASTANEDA: Or worse, "Who cares?" Like, "Hey, this is Stephen King!" and they go "Wasn't he the one in that American Express commercial?"

KELLY: T.V. gets in the way. Pop culture gets in the way. Pop has become the measuring rod. I think that's dangerous. We're confused anymore about who are the real writers, and more devastating, who is really listening. On the other hand, I worry more that we've made the term "intelligentsia" too important, too exclusive. As if you cross over a line. As if that is the goal. I still remember being a baby writer, feeling uninitiated. When I began to feel that I had crossed over into a territory associated with the so-called "intelligentsia," I sensed a loss of an important innocence...

CASTANEDA: Hmmm. you're right. I see what you mean. The social enigma of it...the shit of it...

KELLY: Yah. And I wish more writers would just admit it. That they sense a loss. And that they didn't go into it for political, moral or aesthetic reasons, but for the big rise.

CASTANEDA: And that they don't want anyone to be political...

KELLY: ...Or to think that there's a "politics of the writing life" that dictates they must deny politics in general.

CASTANEDA: Yes! There's some writers that, if they really thought about it, they would probably realize that by saying they're not political they are actually sanctioning things they don't like. But they don't even bother. They even deny it proudly sometimes. They say, "I write to make people feel good," and they think that's noble. Without realizing that they've already entered into a contract with convention. Conventions are already a part of the system of politics, one way or another.

KELLY: I think that was the point of disillusionment for me. Whether to be "us" or "them," go backwards or forwards...

CASTANEDA: But it may be that you can't clearly mark a border or the line that you crossed. However, in time you can see, you can find yourself, locate yourself, as a person with a certain amount of knowledge and experience. And look---let's not say "backwards"---but "elsewhere." Look elsewhere and see other people who have not yet had the same experience, the same knowledge. Some of those may acquire it, some of them may never acquire it. So you have sense of broad boundaries being crossed. You can't point to the line as if it were a border between countries. When you are a person who has done a lot of reading, a lot of writing, a lot of writing, you are no longer the person you were before you set out. And if you were walking down the street and suddenly you found an equivalent of yourself fifteen years ago you might have a lot to talk about but you would also have a lot you couldn't talk about. You just couldn't say some things to that self of fifteen years ago. Your biases, your anger, your prejudices--your self fifteen years ago would probably look at you now and think all kinds of wierd things.

KELLY: Say you could do that, in a "magic realistic" way. Say your old self asks you if you'll give up writing for a million dollars.

CASTANEDA: Only a million? (laughs)

KELLY: Okay, $6 million. that's what's in the lottery this week.

CASTANEDA: I don't know. No. But it seems like it would be so easy to say "yes" and then just keep writing anyway. Usually you think of the other one--if you'd write something shitty for money. And yes, I would do that for $6 million. but to get paid NEVER to write? Maybe I would take the money and run. I don't know. I just can't imagine it. It's like trying to think about what happened before the Big Bang.

Omar Castaneda died in January 1997.