Living and writing now in London, I guess I'm more keenly aware than ever that when you mention Guatemala here to my fellow Londinenses, the image they hold is either one of dazzling touristic colour or of chilling darkness*. In short, the image of Guatemala here in the UK is too simplistic. Guatemala's portrayal by the media is generally to shock or to enchant. And that, all too often leaves too little room for the real Guatemala to shine through and reach us outsiders so far removed from the Guatemalan reality.

When I stumbled upon this article in Albedrio, 'Un documental sobre Guatemala nominado al Oscar', I was struck by how rarely this issue of how Guatemala is portrayed abroad is discussed by us outsiders. This article was part of a call to action by the Frente Nacional de Lucha por la Defensa de los Servicios Públicos y los Recursos Naturales. It remarks on the fact that many films (La Hija del Puma, El Silencio de Neto, Las Estrellas de la Línea, Las Cruces, Poblado Próximo and Vida Reciclada) that have had a certain amount of critical success outside of Guatemala, share one thing in common: their exposure of the sad, tragic and bitter side of Guatemala.

There was one line in particular though that took me back to an experience I had several years ago during a presentation about Guatemala I was part of in Paris.

Those words, 'brillamos afuera por nuestras desgracias adentro' ('we shine abroad as a result of our misfortune at home'), took me straight back in time to a moment of insight into this issue. The team I was part of that worked in Guatemala had been asked to do a presentation of our work (in the field of education) in Guatemala at an international conference in Paris. In particular, we'd been asked to explain and introduce the Guatemalan context of that work.

My colleagues were a mixture of Guatemalans and Europeans and as soon as we'd embarked on writing this presentation we realised what different approaches we had. What I found hard to understand was the reluctance on the part of my Guatemalan colleagues to enter into any detail about the civil conflict. The plight of many of the families we worked with to gain access to education had in some way been affected by the civil conflict, and rooted in my outsiders' logic it seemed imperative to explain this link in our presentation. My Guatemalan colleagues disagreed and thought that the civil war did not need to be explained in any depth.

It wasn't until the day of the presentation in Paris that I finally understood. When the talk turned to the reasons why some families found themselves excluded from the world of education, my Guatemalan colleague slowed. As she spoke the carefully thought out words that explained the legacy of those days of violence and insecurity, her whole manner changed, her voice slowed and became charged the emotion. The room hang on every word my colleague said. But the most important thing I learnt that day was that when it comes to the rawest of human experiences, the power and the importance is not in what you say, it is in what you don't say.

Sometimes so raw is the experience, so dramatic the misfortune, so grave the injustice that it can blind the outsider to the actual people who've had the experience, misfortune and injustice happen to them. We see only the misfortune, not the people living with the misfortune.

This brings me back to the simplistic image many of us outsiders have of Guatemala. If we want to break this bi-focal vision of Guatemala (of shock or enchantment) on the outside, it's time that we understood that silence is not always a space to be filled- it's a space that, given a chance to grow, can develop our mutual respect and understanding.

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Examples

To demonstrate this bi-focal vision of Guatemala- it's sufficient to do a Google Image search to find the 'enchanting'. While for the images offering 'shock', the photo on feminicide by Argentinian, Walter Astrada, that's just won first prize in 'Contemporary Issues' in this year's World Press Photo competition is a good example.