But speaking out, as she found out, is itself problematic. Much of the testimony at UN-led truth commissions had come from oral histories. "I realized that the people collecting—and I use that word deliberately—the oral histories were changing the nature of oral history," says Sellers-García. "People were directing their oral history to a foreign, academic audience. It's not that it wasn't true, but it was becoming finessed."

So she focused on those who didn't see themselves "as appropriate sources," perhaps because they had only witnessed the horrors second-hand or were not "subaltern voices." One of them was a priest who told her the people in his town never admitted to their role in massacres but instead repeatedly confessed illnesses to him. Another source was a doctor. Sellers-García says he was one of the funniest people she had met; his sense of humor was his way of dealing with everything he had seen. But his laughter failed him the day he told her how the people in his town used to be terrified of an unused well. He couldn't understand why until he discovered that a military officer had used it as a repository for the head of someone he had killed. "When he visited the town he would pull the head out and play soccer with it in the town center," explains Sellers-García.

In her novel no one plays soccer with decapitated heads, but the silence of horrors past hangs thickly over Río Roto. Sellers-García, a Marshall Scholar, remembers how she would be in tears in the library at Oxford just reading about Guatemala. She realized that writing a thesis was not enough. "I didn't want to just do something that would be read by my three professors," she says. "I wanted to create something with emotional weight. This is not an activist book. But it’s a way to pass the word on, to name things."

Sandip Roy is an editor with New America Media. His interview with Vikram Chandra, “Gangs of Bombay,” appeared in the March/April 2007 issue of California magazine.

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