How it feels to be a child of the war

History is what confuses me because even after all this “anti-communist” and the implementation of “democracy” explanations, I still do not understand how on earth brothers would rape, torture, disappear, hang, shoot, and kill their own sisters, leaving blisters in their motherly genitals and leaving scars in my generation. I feel a piercing pain as the semen enters the narrow minds of the people who still justify the 12 year civil war in my beautiful homeland, El Salvador.

Sometimes I question too much. I question why is it that we keep making the same mistakes, or at least, letting the same mistakes happen over and over again. In 1932, 30,000 indigenous mujeres y homres, niños y ancianos were killed as a response to their resistance. Their warm and deluded blood is running down my body, the echo of the gunshots hurts my eardrum, and the ignorance of my people tortures my heart because how can I make them understand our history all at the same damn time?

I feel a big responsibility to challenge the taboo stories that most Salvadoran parents won’t share. I feel motivated and yet it hurts to be a child of the war, because it is hard to ignore the many corpses on the floor. The dead body of a school teacher who failed to teach her students the sum of two plus two is four, but instead taught her students the sum of repression and war.

However, I do not always feel like a child of the war. Right now I feel like a sister connected to you all. Because what happened in my homeland affect us all. And I feel my race, because there is only one race and that is the human race. And right now, I feel like the pollen of a flower spreading my love to you through words, floating in the air and reproducing even more. And until I return to the earth that put to sleep the many voiceless souls, I won’t stop being a child of the war.