The Tortured Saints of San Juan Cotzal - Anna Blume, PhD
The Tortured Saints of San Juan Cotzal
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Professor Anna Blume, PhD
The following is an extract from Professor Blume’s previously unpublished 1997 PhD dissertation, entitled ‘The Afterlife of Images’.
In the Maya town of Cotzal in the northern highlands of Guatemala, people tell a story about the images of saints in their church, how one day in the mid-1980's a group of soldiers from the local base came into hunt “the guerillas.” They couldn't find any of the “subversives,” so in frustration the soldiers began to randomly kill members of the town. Abruptly they stopped their killing of the villagers and with no warning went into the church and there smashed altars and cut wooden limbs off the bodies of images of saints and Christ and Mary.
After the soldiers left, the Cotzaltecos gathered the images and placed them like refugees up against the wall, some with missing limbs exposed and others standing there looking out over the pews. They placed other broken saints back up by the main altar and covered them with bits of old cloth wrapped around their broken bodies. The shattered or cracked panes of glass for altar boxes were left as they were and saints with tattered limbs returned to them. It was all still that way in 1988 when I visited there, some three years after the violence.
What might have been repaired was left as it was. People of the town have not wanted to erase the marks of violence, and in a way it is precisely this arrangement of fragments which gives the images efficacy to heal something of what has been inflicted upon them. Danger looms in this church and is made present - not as a spectacle, but as a place where the Maya of Cotzal come to negotiate the loss or terror which is placed inside them. Here they have chosen images and their installation as a way to contain memories and to tell a story. In looking at and writing about such visual forms we can begin to listen.
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