Indigenous Guatemalans burned incense and made offerings at an ancestral site to say goodbye Saturday to Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias, whose ashes were returned to his homeland from France half a century after his death.
The lawyer, writer and diplomat known for denouncing dictators and defending the Indigenous received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967.
He lived in Paris before he died in Spain aged 74 in 1974, during the last years of the Franco dictatorship.
A dark green urn with the novelist’s remains shaped like a kernel of corn arrived Thursday by his son, Miguel Angel Asturias Amado. The shape is a nod to his 1949 work entitled “Men of Maize.”
Saturday’s ceremony was held in Kaminaljuyu, a Mayan archeological site west of Guatemala City.
Surrounded by white flowers, the urn was placed on a small wooden table before a sacred round, stone altar.
Indigenous people left offerings at the altar and burned incense to honor Asturias.
“Today we are celebrating something extraordinary,” the 1992 Nobel peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu said of Asturias.
“Not just his eternal presence in Guatemala but his eternal presence in the world because he was a universal man,” she said.
Government officials and Asturias’ son attended the ceremony.
“I am choked up with the emotion of this very important moment for my family,” Asturias Amado, 85, said.
Asturias’ ashes will be interred on Sunday in a cultural center that bears his name.
Asturias Amado told AFP Thursday the family had decided that his father should come home after Bernardo Arevalo, a social democrat, became Guatemala’s president in 2024.
“It was very difficult for me, as a son, to take the decision for my father to return to his homeland,” he said, as it meant leaving France, “a country he loved so much.”
“He might be a unifying factor for Guatemala,” he added.
– Life in exile –
In 1954, a US-backed coup cut short a decade of democratic reforms in the Central American country.
Asturias went into exile after the authoritarian government stripped him of his nationality and banned his books, and apart from a brief trip in 1959, he never went back.
His best-known works include the 1946 novel “The President,” inspired by the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera from 1898 to 1920.
Fascinated by his country’s Indigenous mythology, Asturias retold some of its stories in his 1930 book “Legends of Guatemala.”
Asturias was a “social scientist,” said Guatemalan historian Artemis Torres.
“The political denunciation through his novels…above all the coffee-plantation and oligarchic dictatorships in that period in which he lived is one of his greatest contributions, not only to the social sciences, but to literature itself,” Torres said.
Asturias’ son explained on a podcast that the family opted not to bury him in Spain because it was under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship at the time.
Nor did the family want to bury him in Guatemala at the time, as it was mired in war and ruled by military officers accused of abuses.
“My father was against dictatorships,” Asturias Amado said.
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