Common Grounds

Sandra Benitez tells the truth of El Salvador

By Shannon Olson

Sandra Benitez pulls out the bottom drawer of her desk in Lind Hall, props her feet up on it, smooths the hem of the long linen dress that almost hides her shoes, and leans back into a reluctant chair. While we speak, she crosses and uncrosses her arms continually, a gesture that suggests that she would like to pronounce definitive judgment, to rest in one place, but in the end, can't.

"I'm riding the fence," she says of her narrative position in her new novel, Bitter Grounds, scheduled for release in September with Hyperion. "I've tried to be very fair about the whole thing and not judge. What I've done is to show the two sides without saying one side is bad."

Set in El Salvador, where Benitez grew up, Bitter Grounds chronicles the lives of six women in two families across three generations.

Sandra Benitez will read from her forthcoming novel, Bitter Grounds, at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum tonight at 7:30 p.m.

"It's a novel, novel, novel," Benitez says of her new work's epic proportions, "and I'll never do it again. I had no idea what I was getting myself into."

Benitez's first published novel, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, is a spare book, a novel set in stories that the Washington Post described as "profound in its simplicity and rhythm ... a quietly stunning work that leaves soft tracks in the heart." Place received the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Award and the Minnesota Book Award. It's now published in five languages.

Benitez describes Bitter Grounds as more "expansive." She sets the first generation of her characters in 1932, the year of the communist uprising in El Salvador, opening with la Matanza, the massacre of 30,000 Indians who revolted against the elite class that kept them in poverty. "A lot of them were coffee pickers, but not all," Benitez says. "They lived with low pay, no food, maybe one meal a day, no education, they had few human rights. And the picking season is very small, maybe three to four months, so the rest of the year they were virtually penniless."

One family represents El Salvador's oligarchy, a handful of families who have historically owned most of the land in El Salvador and most of its industry. The other family represents "the people" of El Salvador, those who work in the factories, fields and homes of the rich. In Benitez's story, these two families become entwined, their lives wrapped around one another like a tree's tangled roots.

The title Bitter Grounds refers, of course, to the coffee that is El Salvador's number one industry -- an exported product that the people could not even afford to drink. But it also calls up an image of the dark soil that cultivated a cultural war that would last for generations. "When you oppress people long enough, there's only one way," Benitez says. "They're going to revolt."

If Benitez is riding the fence, it's because she's lived with the oppressor. The child of a U.S. diplomat, Benitez went to school with the children of "the Big 14" -- El Salvador's richest families. "We weren't rich," Benitez says, "not millionaires like those families. But we weren't poor either, and all those people were my friends." Benitez's younger sister, Anita, married into the elite class. "So I've lived that situation, that side. I know what it's like."

In 1977, Benitez's brother-in-law -- whose family owned one of the largest coffee plantations in El Salvador -- was kidnapped by leftist guerrillas for what was called a "war tax"; they demanded a large sum of money and a published manifesto. Her brother-in-law's kidnapping was one of a string that began in 1975, and Benitez's family had already seen friends kidnapped and held for ransom with all of the demands met, only to see the friend killed and "the body dumped somewhere." Her brother-in-law was lucky, having had the strange fortune of being kidnapped by a new leftist faction; he was their first abduction, and the only to be released alive.

"That was obviously a very traumatic thing in our family, to have my brother-in-law kidnapped. And it plays heavily in my book. But that's another reason why I didn't want to write it," says Benitez, who had begun work on the manuscript once before, only to scrap it after 600 pages. She says now, "I was afraid that by investigating the truth in El Salvador I might betray my friends."

In the end, Benitez waited for her brother-in-law's blessing before continuing with the second draft of her sprawling novel. She says he kept asking her "When are you going to write that book?"

Benitez is quick to add that the story described in the book is not her brother-in-law's, although it is similar. Her sister, brother-in-law and their family left El Salvador after the kidnapping and now live in the United States. "He and my sister helped me write the book," she says. She had hoped at one time to go back to El Salvador to do research for her book, but she has not been able to. "The situation in El Salvador is still bad," Benitez says, "even though, supposedly, peace has come. I have already been warned (by my friends in El Salvador) that I should watch what I say."

But Benitez already watches very carefully what she says, if only because she is keenly aware that all vision and all memory is in some way flawed.

"You take what you remember, which is always fractured and you have to reconstruct or remember it, which means remaking it, recreating it," she says. "In doing that, nothing can be put together quite the way it was before. There's a turn to everything we remember, so that we don't quite remember it the way it actually happened."

Students in her course this quarter in the English department are exploring the fine line between memory and imagination, between the truth as it exists and the truth as we remember and recreate it. The course is called "Fictoir." "It's an invented name, a combination of fiction and memoir," Benitez says, "I could just as well have called it 'Memorelle' or something like that."

Teaching the course is helping her think about her next book, Inventos, a kind of memoir written in what she calls "verbal snapshots." Through these snapshots she shows the story of her life to the twin sister who died shortly after they were born. "I'm interested," she says, "in what might have been. Think what our lives might have been like had she been here with me."

If the truth of what might have been is as real to Benitez as the truth that exists, she still keeps an eye on the facts and a hand over her heart, a kind of quality-control measure. "To me," she says, "truth simply means, is it honest? Are you telling the whole story? Are you afraid and therefore holding back? Be brave and then you'll write truthfully."