The Journey

On a research trip to Central America, the Australian author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos discovered his voice as a writer.

Dominic Smith’s unforgettable stint in Central America

One of the murals Dominic Smith photographed in El Salvador in 1993 portrayed Archbishop Óscar Romero, a social justice advocate The journey Iowa to El Salvador The year 1993

In the summer of 1993, I found myself in El Salvador, a year afer the country’s civil war had ended. I’d grown up middle-class in Sydney’s Manly and Bondi and I’d lef Australia in 1989, aged 18, to spend a year in the United States studying liberal arts.

Afer a stint at a small college in Michigan – where I was the only undergraduate student wearing R.M. Williams boots – I transferred to The University of Iowa to study creative writing and anthropology. Somehow my year in the States turned into four and as I prepared to graduate, I received a research grant to investigate political resistance in El Salvador, Central America.

My project involved spending time with an organisation of cultural workers – writers, dancers, visual artists – who’d travelled the country mobilising change during and afer the war. I would live with a host family and spend my days observing, interviewing and taking photographs of their cultural activism.

Maybe I had heroic visions of Hemingway typing away in war zones or Margaret Mead conducting ethnographic interviews in Samoa but I was out of my depth immediately in El Salvador.

The atmosphere was tense, my language skills uneven. Previously, I’d spent all of two weeks in Central America – visiting a friend who was volunteering at an orphanage in a remote pocket of Guatemala – but most of what I knew about the region came only from books. What exactly did I think I was doing here with my notebook, a camera and four semesters of Spanish?

But no-one I encountered in El Salvador that summer resented my presence. As my Spanish strengthened, I interviewed former combatants and political activists and many of them thanked me for being in their tiny, troubled country. They opened up their homes and their lives to me. They brought out photograph albums and recounted tales from their darkest days.

Over pupusas and plantains, my host mother, who was a medical student, helped me comb through my notes and gave me impromptu lessons on the geopolitics of the region. I might have been suffering from imposter syndrome but the Salvadorans I encountered all saw my role very clearly: my job was to simply bear witness. It was to tell their story for an audience who barely knew they existed.

And so I became a reporter with a speckled notebook. I asked people about their acts of resistance but also their childhoods and aspirations. I wrote everything down because it was important to make a precise record of what I heard.

I sometimes think that was when my writing life began in earnest, in a country far from home, in a language that was not my own. It was the first time I listened to other people’s stories and wrote them down as if my life depended on it.

Need to know... His fifth novel, The Electric Hotel, is out now.