Creative Methodologies as a Resource for Mayan Women’s Protagonism

Abstract

This chapter explores the transformative potential of creative resources and embodied practices in psychosocial and feminist accompaniment processes within two distinct multi-year projects with Mayan women survivors of gross violations of human rights committed during the 36-year Guatemalan armed conflict. One project engaged Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women in the rural town of Chajul and its surrounding villages who also suffered gross violations of human rights and sexual violence during the war. The second project worked with Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam, and Chuj women from three different regions of Guatemala, who self-identified as survivors of sexual violence. In the wake of war and in contexts of ongoing violence, the tension and stress from living in situations of “normal abnormality” (Martín-Baró, Writings for a liberation psychology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996) are carried in one’s body. The chapter explores how performances of these lived experiences offer possibilities for personal transformation through individual and small group experiences, and hold the potential for rethreading community towards social transformation. Thus dramatisation, art, massage, storytelling, theatre, photography, and Mayan cosmovision and traditions facilitated women’s self-expressions and recognition of each other’s stories of survival and protagonism. The chapter analyses drawings and dramatisations produced during creative workshops facilitated by the authors, mapping points of connection and disconnection between the two projects, and exploring whether—and, if so, how—participants experienced creative methodologies as transformative. Included is an analysis of the role of local and transnational intermediaries in these processes, and discussion of how the dialogical relationship between survivor and intermediary shapes and informs Mayan women’s protagonism. The chapter concludes by arguing that the elucidation of the significance of Mayan women’s engagement with creative methodologies in contexts of ongoing violence, impoverishment, and impunity, contributes to trauma work in post-conflict or transitional contexts.

… [I am] old, without suffering, without fear and without shame. Today I am capable of doing all that I can. I am like a bird. I can fly with large wings. (Chuj Maya woman July 2011)