Constructing the Mayan National Republic: Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El país de Toó

In the mid-2010s the work of UN agency CICIG (The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala) resulted in the jailing of President Otto Pérez Molina and the investigation of members of the Guatemalan oligarchy for their ties to drug-dealing and corruption. Rodrigo Rey Rosa's ambitious novel El país de Toó (2018; The Country of Toó) takes place at the height of CICIG's investigative prowess and the beginning of its decline in August 2017, when President Jimmy Morales expelled CICIG's director from the country. Rey Rosa dramatizes the increasingly widespread awareness among Guatemalans of the illegitimacy of the post-colonial Guatemalan republic —"a small republic in the process of disintegration"— and the quest for sources of legitimacy for the national project in the history, literature and mythologies of the Indigenous Maya, who form at least a plurality and arguably a majority of the country's population. This talk traces the origins of Rey Rosa's depiction of a republic potentially integrated around Mayan references in his editing work with Mayan intellectuals and the intertextual borrowings from classical Mayan literature that lend the novel its artistic form.

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Prof. Stephen Henighan’s scholarly publications on Central America include Assuming the Light. The Parisian Literary Apprenticeship of Miguel Ángel Asturias (1999), Sandino’s Nation: Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez Writing Nicaragua, 1940-2012 (2014) and, as co-editor with Candace Johnson, Human and Environmental Justice in Guatemala (2018). He is the English translator of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novel The Country of Toó (2023). His own novel set in Guatemala, The Path of the Jaguar (2016) was published in Spanish translation in Guatemala as La senda del jaguar (2022). He is the author of nine other books of fiction, as well as scholarly works on the literatures of Canada and Lusophone Africa and books of reportage on themes ranging from climate change to Eastern European politics.

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