culture

Meet Me Under the Ceiba is a novel that won the 2007 University of California, Irvine Chicano/Latino Literary Prize. It's more in the genre of true crime reporting than fictional novels, however, a "names changed to protect..." tale of the murder of a Nicaraguan coffee picker by a rich landowner.

But this is a tale of exploitation and de facto slavery in a banana republic, of one lesbian's and the Nicaraguan gay and lesbian community's struggle for a dignified place in society, of working class life in a Latin American rural setting, of crime and justice in a society that has been battered, shattered and twisted by atrocious conflicts and then a peace based on obnoxious compromises. All of these things lend the dramatic element of conflict into the story.

The book centers around a murder, but it's not a mystery. Bit by bit, the reader learns the details as the story progresses. Don't look here for plot twists in the end.

This is a journey through rural Nicaraguan culture, from the food to how Nicas flip the bird, from the relative merits of wire and plastic flyswatters to bigoted epithets. Along the way you meet remarkable and despicable people, but mostly people with their own particularly terrible shortcomings that are more than balanced out by an ingrained sense of decency.

Nicaraguan-American writer Silvio Sirias's first novel, Bernardo and the Virgin, was about an apparition that divided the Catholic Church and the Nicaraguan people. This, too, is a very devout, very Catholic story --- obliquely for the most part. It's not a theological polemic that people would recognize as such, but a tale of the human conditions under which nearly every one of the Ten Commandments is violated, a tale that includes perditions and redemptions, a tale of sinners come to see the errors of their ways, a tale whose mostly sidelong glances at the Catholic Church are instructive of struggles going on there, here and in many other places this very day. In another time and place it would be the sort of book that would get its author burned at the stake.

Yes, there is a conflict of interest here. Silvio Sirias is one of the reasons that many readers of The Panama News log onto this website, so in the normal mercenary quid pro quo of publishing it would behoove this writer to write gushy words of praise for his novel. But then again, were Silvio not so downright excellent, people wouldn't be coming here to read his columns. Moreover, this reviewer is slightly tardy in publishing his take on Meet Me Under the Ceiba, weighing in after much more prestigious literary critics have pronounced the book's worth.

(Need this old hippie add that the expectation of a quid pro quo or an insinuation of anything else "normal" is taken as something akin to flag desecration? One never "goes straight" --- one proceeds forward.)

So is it soon to be a major motion picture? That would be fitting, but first we'd need to get a Hollywood film industry and an American viewing public who take notice of how people live outside of the USA and see beyond the exotic to the universal human themes. But maybe now, in a prolonged economic crisis that has driven so many North Americans down toward Latin American living standards and economic expectations, the story of a coffee picker's life and death would resonate as it should.