Miguel Angel Asturias: A Life

Miguel Angel Asturias: A Life in Politics and Poetry

The Guatemalan poet, novelist, and essayist Miguel Angel Asturias did not seem to be born to the destiny of that of a great writer. He began his studies at university in medicine and then switched to law. But for the author, politics and poetry were fused, and the politics of his native land affected his life from an early age. Later, in his speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 1967, Asturias would rage: "If you write novels merely to entertain - then burn them!" (Gascoigne 2008).

Asturias was born in Guatemala City, the son of Ernesto Asturias, a lawyer, and Mar'a Rosales, a schoolteacher who had been forced to move to the town of Salama because of their work as political dissenters against the rule of the current dictator (Preble-Niemi 2005, p.12). Life under dictatorial rule inspired the plot and character of one of his most influential novels, El Senor Presidente (Gascoigne 2008). "Asturias has created in brilliant fashion an intense and asphyxiating conception of a total state," marveled one critic many decades after is publication in 1946, although for much of his life Asturias lived in exile, first in Paris, then in Chile, Argentina, and Italy away from the oppressive government of his birthplace and also other Latin American dictators who despised his left-learning politics (Franklin 1961, p.683).

After graduating with a law degree from San Carlos University Asturias went to the Sorbonne. But instead of studying economics as his father had intended him to do, Asturias studied anthropology and became fascinated with Mayan culture. This motivated him to begin his literary career. In 1925 he translated the sacred Mayan text Popol Vuh into Spanish (Gascoigne 2008).

Asturias embraced what he saw as the inherently dual nature of his heritage, one that was both Latino and Indian, colonizer and colonized: "From the outset he was interested in creating a transvestized alternative Otherness of an emancipatory sort; what we know today as Mulata arose from what he conceived as a totalizing masterwork in the late 1920s and first expressed in Leyendas de Guatemala (1930). In that text, a male subject has a feminine life-experience because of his ethnic nature. Symbolically, the Ladino imaginary establishes a binarism, attributing masculinity to Ladino hegemony and associating indigenous subalternity with femininity" (Arias 2006).

Even his most explicitly political works, like El Senor Presidente, make use of magical realism rather than address specific contemporary issues directly: "The society of the novel is corrupted; evil spreads downwards from the ruler. Justice is a mockery, and army officers spend their time plotting or in brothels. El Senor Presidente utilized surrealistic techniques; it reflected Asturias's idea that Indians' nonrational perception of reality is an expression of the subconscious forces, the collective dream of mankind" (Gascoigne 2008). Asturias saw the worldview of Indians as more humane, fruitful, and inspiring and another of his works, Hombres de Maiz, "depicted a rebellion by a remote tribe of Indians against desecration of their mountains and their annihilation by the army" (Gascoigne 2008).