Tag Archives: week2

09/14/21

Arturo Arias’ Funeral for a Nation

Arturo Arias’ “Guatemala 1954-Funeral for a Bird” develops under a context where Guatemala is again deprived of sovereignty and self-determination. Guatemala is a majority working-class and Indigenous nation, two continuously marginalized identities by upper-class and Western societies. But hope this marginalization would end seemed plausible with Jacobo Árbenz’s rise to power. Unlike most Guatemalan leaders before 1951, Árbenz sought to grant power to historically ignored national communities. Guatemala followed a pattern of “Caudillo” rule, defined by militant and strict governmental policies prioritizing foreign and upper-class interests at the expense of the rest of the nation. Hence, once Árbenz ambitiously began to reform inequalities in the country, Guatemalans saw political and economic representation as a growing reality. Specifically regarding land redistribution, as land ownership provided a great deal of autonomy and liberation. Yet, this working-class and Indigenous re-claim of power quickly threatened U.S. interests, and by 1954, Árbenz, a symbol of hope, was deposed, and upper class and foreign companies usurped power.

With this context in mind, Arias’ story seems to be an ode to the death of a dream that was close to realizing before foreign intervention and greed destroyed it. In the story, Maximo, the protagonist, and the other kids are holding a funeral for a bird. But I would like to believe the bird symbolizes Guatemala or Árbenz’s reforms, and in reality, they are having a funeral for Guatemala’s lost hope towards a more equitable society. The boys’ intense emotions are perhaps how Arias wanted to reflect that Guatemalan future life is again succumbed to living under the same exploitative conditions they have been living in since the institution of colonialism. Thus, the “bird’s” funeral is emotional because it represents the burial of a free Guatemala, where working-class and Indigenous sovereignty were plausible and where those who worked the land owned the land.

09/13/21

Through a Child’s Eyes

For this weeks’ blog post I want to engage with Arturo Arias’s short story, Funeral for a Bird.

What initially struck me was that in the story, the children do not seem fazed about the corpses in the streets; yet all are sad – “one of the littlest boys started to cry” (Arias 52) – about a single, tiny, seemingly insignificant creature, even amidst the rubble and remnants of human life. Arias juxtaposes Máximo’s tenderness toward this bird with his impartial, even annoyed, attitude toward the corpses – for example, when he trips over a “headless body,” and in a “fit of anger, kicked the corpse” (Arias 51). I think that Arias intended to make the reader uncomfortable with this inversion; normally, one would express more empathy and concern with the death of humans than birds. I would be interested to know if Máximo’s “disrespect” toward the corpses, and simultaneous care for the bird, made anybody else feel “discomfort” when reading. Arias also may be expressing how violence and death are seen through the eyes of a child who doesn’t yet understand the world.

On this note, I noticed right away that Arias’s writing had a “childlike” quality. He used short, quick sentences that mimic a child’s way of speaking, as well as simpler language – no words are floral or complicated. I think that Arias is allowing the reader inside Máximo’s head, to perhaps understand violence as a child with little experience of the world might. This technique reminds me of the novel Room by Emma Donoghue, in which a boy named Jack acts as the narrator of the book. At first this way of writing, to me, was scattered and slightly irritating to read but in both Donoghue and Arias’s works, it has the effect of bringing the reader into the mind and experiences of a child.