LP: Do you think literature can help deal with trauma?
HCM: Most of the indigenous victims and survivors of massacres are poor and illiterate. Literature is a privilege they don’t have access to. There is no way literature can help them to deal with their traumas. What they need is psychological and economic support, and mainly justice.
...
LP: What compels you to write?
HCM: I started to write in a country where writing didn’t give you any status or money. By that time, in that place, to be a writer was synonymous with being subversive. I guess since the beginning, I have felt the urge to write because of a necessity of expression, because of the perception that I don’t fit in any place, because I know that I’m survivor, because I want to get rid of what infects me, and for a sense of revenge.
– An interview with Horacio Castellanos Moya at Latineos,
via Now That it's Now, the New Directions blog.
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