Cicatrices – Central American Fiction in the 21st Century

Herein is a mix of male and female authors spread across five Central American countries: Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Honduras. Thematic unity is provided by nomadism, migration and the inability to leave behind a violent past of armed conflict that bleeds into the present—scars that won't heal. An atmosphere of survival, exhaustion, dissipation and decay (in both the physical and moral sense) dominates, but also rays of hope. This vibrant literature speaks of existential crisis in a context of social precarity and lack of opportunity as people dis-embedded by civil war and its aftermath seek release and fulfillment through migration across borders into neighboring countries or north to the United States or Europe. Whether external or internal, self-imposed or forced, migration brings the problem of mal-adaptation to new worlds and struggles with memoryan aesthetics of loss and solitude.