Xibalba Be: The Dark Road
"And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods."
Hesiod, Theogony.
My research dissertation is an extended piece of fiction that tells the experiences of a fictitious World War II soldier. An unusual blend of traditional narrative, innovative forms, graphic illustration, and historic documentation, Xibalba Be questions the nature of life, death, and reality.
Xibalba roughly translates from Mayan as "Place of fear", and is the name of the underworld, ruled by the Mayan death gods. From an academic stance, Xibalba Be is an extended experiment in non-traditional narrative construction, and a form of cathartic airing of issues I hold with C. S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia.
