Towards an Active Utopia: Truth-making in Menchu, Stoll, and the Classroom
Julie Bolt
(Originally featured in The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.)
Menchu, Rigoberta. Crossing Borders. Trans Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1998.
Menchu, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchu, an Indian Woman from Guatemala. Ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. London: Verso, 1984.
Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.
I would like to dream together with you. I would like to dream about
the future because you know all of the statistics very well. You have evaluated them, you have analyzed them and I think you have tried to find the significance regarding what all of this uncertainty in the world we share is, and what it means. The most important thing is not only to have a passive hope. We cannot just say "oh, I have great hope in the future" as if this would be a utopia, a very distant utopia (Menchu: 1995).
So said Rigoberta Menchu to former Russian President Gorbachev and other world leaders during the keynote address at the 1995 State of the World Forum on Human Rights. In this passage Menchu appeals to ideals of fraternity, then subverts her appeals by challenging the powerful forces in the room to move beyond rhetoric.
Through her call to action, Menchu has compelled many teachers, such as myself, to bring the genre of Latin American testimonial literature (“testimonio”), the politics of Guatemala, and the history of U.S. imperialism into our classrooms. She arms us with a sense of struggle and, through her example, a sense of hope.
Recently, anthropologist David Stoll challenged the authenticity of Menchu’s testimony, I Rigoberta Menchu, an Indian Woman from Guatemala (IRM). Stoll claims that Menchu distorted her oral testimony for political purposes and attempts to illustrate these discrepancies in his book Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans (RMSPG). Also this past year, Menchu published Crossing Borders (CB), an account that picks up where her oral testimony leaves off. She discusses her exile in Mexico, her work lobbying for human rights at the U.N., and the complexities of the Guatemalan peace process. Considered together along with I, Rigoberta Menchu, the books fashion an intriguing matrix of truth-making --- interpretations and re-interpretations that shift based on political circumstance and personal positioning. While the resulting debate over authenticity may complicate the job of teaching Menchu’s testimony, it similarly provides the nub for critical praxis engaging the complex positionings of Menchu and Stoll, as well as the assumptions and biases we --- the students and teachers---bring to the table.
Testimony as “Breakage of the Frame of Death”
Testimony, by its very nature, is a transgression. It is a transgression against accepted norms of social hierarchies, conventional modes of literary production, and hegemonic constructions of knowledge. Testimony gives primacy to the subjective, to storytelling, and the education of experience. At once personal and political, testimony seeks to convey lived reality as perceived by those who do not have control over the official manufacturing of recorded history. By voicing justice due the living and the dead, testimony provides another interpretation for the unborn.
In Guatemala, where political resistance has so often been met with death and repression, the witness takes serious risks. The elusive act of offering one’s story to the world becomes an ultimate human act. The testifier leaps blindfolded into an unknown abyss of foreign culture and foreign scrutiny, and again risks their life -- blindfolded -- with an outstretched hand.
Theories of testimonial literature tend to focus on the politics of production, identity as constructed through representation, and testimony as activism on the part of the witness and/or interlocutor. Since testimonials often depict a context of colonial repression and resistance, the tension between precolonial cultures and colonial violence can be explicit, as in IRM. In testimony, the witness strives to convey and preserve the lifeways of a culture while documenting unspeakable violence committed against it. One of the ironies of testimony is that the witness, who is frequently illiterate in the dominant colonial language, must relay her/his story to a colonial language speaker -- usually an anthropologist or journalist who tape records and transcribes the account (Beverely: 1993). Without the relative authorial control offered by conventional biography, testimony manifests as a postcolonial discourse shared by two strangers with unequal access to power. This dialectical process---replete with questions, responses and tensions--- may not be reflected in the end product. In the case of IRM, interlocutor Elisabeth Burgos-Debray edits and organizes Menchu’s words, rendering her own participation as invisible, save for her introduction (p.ix). Therefore, there is a question as to who has authored the final product. Has Burgos-Debray usurped Menchu’s power? I agree with Foucauldian theorists who believe that power, resistance, and agency are dynamic and run both ways.
By telling her testimony to Burgos-Debray, Menchu endeavors to construct her truth as something tangible for outsiders. Before a tape-recorder, she negotiates what she believes is most urgent --- opposing a genocide whose recent victims included her mother, father, two brothers, a sister in law, and members of her community. At the time she tells her testimony, Menchu does not know if two younger sisters and another brother are also dead. (They survive.) Therefore, the “truth” Menchu depicts is real and immediate, wrapped in the reality of a country at war, manifest in mass graves and memory.
Given this urgency, the contradictions that emerge reflect the stops and starts of a living negotiation of chaos. The testifier not only confronts the weight of her/his own experience, and that of her/his community, but the weight of history -- a history of repression. Menchu’s testimony reflects what Giroux calls a “political position in history” that “is not a linear succession of events but a lived discourse in the contradictory and fractured constructions of time and space” (1992, p.213).
Given these fractures, can collective struggle be embodied within a witness’s subjectivity? How can the witness even begin to convey the enormity of the atrocities committed? Representations can never be reproductions of experience, only a shifting simulation. Because of this subjectivity, it is important to remember that when Menchu gives her testimony to Burgos-Debray, the massacres of the indigenous people of Guatemala are being intensified, are horrific, and have to stop. The shock of her experiences, and the task of attempting to convey them, must have been daunting.
While bearing witness to the outsider interlocutor, who --- as in the case of Burgos-Debray --- may be in a position to rally international support, the witness balances multiple identities and roles. The witness is a protagonist, victim, storyteller, and agent for change. Given these shifts and the vital importance of educating the public, Menchu’s testimony must bridge her cultural orientation with that of the interlocutor’s.
Through self-representation and cultural translation, identity is reconstructed and the testifier reaches for life, marking a decision to survive. The survivor feels “an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story… One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live one’s life” (Felman and Laub, 1992, p.78). Therefore, Menchu does not testify to an empirical version of events, but to “the affirmation of survival and breakage of the frame of death” (Felman and Laub, 1992, p.62). The testimony she shares with Burgos-Debray delineates a rebirth.
Similarly, testimony serves as an effort to thwart future death by disseminating information in a human and immediate way. Giroux (1992) notes that narrative stories “keep alive communities of resistance while indicting the collective destruction that mobilizes racism, sexism, and other forms of domination” (p.131) Therefore, a book like IRM serves to “rupture a politics of historical silence and theoretical erasure that serves to repress and marginalize” (Giroux, p.125). As such, Menchu’s testimony is a form of activism.
The activist nature of testimony reflects the process that Paulo Freire (New revised edition, 1995) calls “conscientization,” the process of thinking critically about identity and agency in relation to one's political circumstance. To bear witness is to transform reflection into action (p.111). Subjects/speakers come to feel "like masters of their own thinking by discussing their thinking and views of the world explicitly or implicitly manifest in their own suggestions and those of their comrades" (p.105). When conscientization occurs, testimonio denotes a resolve to take on the psychological-historical contexts of social stratification, economic alienation, and domination that have marked the physical and mental landscapes of the oppressed. By not letting atrocities dissipate into silence, Menchu is an agent of change.
Through self-authorship, Menchu ventures to represent the struggles and realities that shape her perceptions, her truths (Thorn: 1996). “Truth” in this sense --- truth through conscientization--- is living a process. By redefining her relationship to her oppressors, Menchu changes the possibilities of her world. She ceases to simply internalize oppression and begins to internalize -- and externalize -- her conscious resistance. However, the subjectivity of Menchu’s testimony has always been complicated by the suggestion within IRM that her experience is representative of Mayan experience:
This is my testimony. I did not learn it from a book
and I didn't learn it alone. I'd like to stress that it’s
not only my life, it's also the testimony of my people.
It's hard to remember everything that's happened to me
in my life since there have been many bad times but, yes,
moments of joy as well. The important thing is that what
has happened to me has happened to many other people
too:my story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My
experience is the reality of a whole people" (p.1).
When Menchu says, “my story is the story of all poor Guatemalans,” she points to the mediation of her conscientization through her relationship to her community. She does not view her transgressions as autonomous, nor as serving her individual life-purpose. The community always figures back in, or Menchu connects herself back to the community.
By asserting the communal nature of her testimony Menchu frames it as a political act serving the functions of bearing witness, speaking her people's history, and making their claim on the world. In this sense, Stoll’s book glosses over what is most significant about testimonio as a genre: its function as a response to over five hundred years of colonial repression of the original people of the Americas. The hegemony and hybridity of the ladino-mestizo-indigenious social structure creates not only a repressive hierarchy, but considerable confusion about identity --- a sweeping rejection of ladino and mestizo indigenous ancestry. Fed by a colonial discourse of racism, masses of the indigenous and poor in Latin America are denied political forums and institutional means of creating them. Therefore, as a transgression, testimonio finds a crack in the machine of colonialism and slips through to expose its workings. The importance of this context can not be stressed enough in any discussion of Menchu’s testimony.
Contestations and a Crisis of Truth
While Menchu’s testimony seeks to extract the substance of inconceivable historic events in a conceivable way, Stoll’s book seeks empirical evidence to support or refute Menchu’s claims. These are two very different kinds of truth-making. Their respective methods --- the oral narrative and the scholarly investigation --- may reflect their respective training and the relative immediacy of their goals. Still, both Menchu and Stoll piece together and negotiate their truths.
I would like to recognize the usefulness of Stoll’s version of truth-making for classroom purposes; the contrast between Menchu and Stoll’s truth-makings serve as a catalyst for important discussions about ways of constructing knowledge.
Stoll’s book serves as a critique of the academic left, and is therefore a provocative entry-point for reflection about ideology and author-intent. His account is a fascinating (and in turn infuriating) read. Ten years of fieldwork in Guatemala makes for a book rich with contextual information: Stoll historicizes guerilla warfare and the shifting alliances and goals of peasant and student organizations. He provides alternate readings of Menchu’s experiences, complicating our easy empathy with her. Most compelling are the many other voices Stoll offers us. Through highlights from interviews, we encounter people from Menchu’s village El Chimel, brother Nicolas, a follow-up with editor Burgos-Debray, and Ambassador Maxim Cujal who survives the army-induced Spanish embassy fire in which the protesters who seize the building meet a brutal death. Menchu’s father is among the martyrs.
The inclusion of new perspectives make contributions to our understanding of the turmoil and butchery that has shaped Guatemala since a U.S. supported coup in the 1950s. However, Stoll’s conversations with Menchu’s family and former neighbors, as well as officials and activists, would be more productive if presented as examples of testimonio, not as fragments pieced together for the purpose of discrediting IRM.
Stoll’s argument is three-fold: First, he challenges the postmodern notion that views “truth” as subjective, and, through a laundry list of discrepancies, aims at exposing Menchu’s truths as false. Second, he frets that teachers treat IRM as a stable, simplistic, and de-contextualized account. Most significantly, Stoll argues that in fetishizing Menchu we are not supporting the cause of “all poor Guatemalans,” but the cause of Marxist-indoctrinated guerillas. Stoll even goes so far as to assert that the Nobel Peace Prizewinner’s fame may have encouraged armed rebels in the Guatemalan highlands, therefore, prolonging “an unpopular war” (p.278).
The ironic title I, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans, lifted from the testimony’s opening paragraph, implies that Menchu cannot possibly know the story of “all” poor Guatemalans. By taking the statement “my experience is the reality of a whole people” super-literally, Stoll rejects Menchu’s reliability. He selects versions of events that emphasize any dissimilarity between Menchu and other “poor Guatemalans.” He contests family events, motives, and the means by which members of Menchu’s family are murdered. He challenges the chronology of her testimony and the relative poverty of her family. By splitting hairs, Stoll encourages the dichotomous notion that there can be only one “truth”: his findings or Menchu’s testimony.
Stoll seizes upon rumors that Menchu attended an undetermined number of years of elementary school at a convent. In a chapter devoted to fragmented interviews with Menchu’s alleged schoolmates, Stoll argues that while IRM “makes a few references to living in a convent and being taught by nuns” these references “are overshadowed by the repeated claim that she never went to school and learned to speak Spanish only recently” (p.159). Stoll resists Menchu’s ambiguity with regards to her schooling, cutting and pasting interviews in an attempt to discredit her.
RMSPG tends to break down as condemnations --- and conflations --- of Menchu and Marxism. Stoll feels that the inspiration Menchu begets is uninformed and that her testimonio is taught void of context and analytic engagement. By referring to Menchu as a celebrity (p.275) and “the cult hero herself” (p.275), Stoll suggests that academia has received Menchu with zombie-like idolization. However, in pedagogic circles, this has not been the case. Rather, IRM is employed as content for critical praxis, including contextual comparison and discourse analysis, as evidenced in essays collected in editors Carey-Webb and Benz’s recent reader, Teaching and Testimony: Rigoberta Menchu and the North American Classroom (1997).
Stoll’s particular concern is that teachers who use Menchu in the classroom have bought into a romance about the Left in general and armed rebellion in particular (p.277). However, he does not explain the reasoning behind his conviction that teachers use IRM to “prove that the guerilla movement had deep popular roots and was an inevitable response to repression” or why we “want to defend the Latin American left’s history of armed struggle” (p.276). He assumes that teachers draw conclusions as simplistic as his.
Similarly, Stoll maintains that Marxist sympathizers indoctrinate Menchu and her now deceased family. Menchu in particular is painted as an alternately shrewd and naïve puppet of the Left. Stoll would have us believe that the post-testimonio popularity of Menchu buoyed guerilla warfare in Guatemala, resulting in increased army retaliation of peasant civilians. Therefore, Stoll effectively blames the political organizer for disappearances and massacres. At once he usurps power and agency from Menchu by insisting she was unduly influenced by Marxists, and grants her disproportionate power by blaming her fame for “prolonging the war” (p.278).
The dogged construction of Menchu’s guilt is reflected on the book’s cover. Menchu stands hunkered, flanked by two men, arms crossed in front of her as if they are in handcuffs. Her face looks solemn, drawn, bitter. Above her head is a poster that repeatedly says “Guatemala, Guatemala…” and around her neck is a pendent or medal.
The inside flap of the cover tells us that the photograph is of “Rigoberta Menchu at a protest over the murder of Bishop Juan Geradi, head of the Catholic truth commission.” Therefore, we are at once beholding an image of Menchu doing her work as a human rights advocate, and an image meant to simulate Menchu being arrested. In the latter reading, the friends or body guards that are escorting her through crowds turn into policeman, the pendant becomes a symbol of the Nobel Peace Prize, the prize Stoll would have us think was awarded to an imposter.
Indeed Stoll suggests that Menchu was awarded her prize merely because she gave her oral testimony to an anthropologist. Crossing Borders, however, depicts a story Stoll opts not to tell: Menchu’s pre-Nobel political service with the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples and the Unitary Representation of the Guatemalan Opposition (RUOG) at the United Nations. For years she fought for representation of Guatemalan Indians, and Indians throughout the Americas:
We looked like oddballs and were treated as such.
Some officials were offhanded and rather suspicious,
as if we were making things up. I think they were
embarrassed for us… Others were curious to find out
what we had come to the UN for. Non-indigenous
friends were far and few between in those days. For
many people we were insignificant, though for others
we were important. People with similar causes and
similar sensitivities welcomed us… (p.124).
Menchu’s lobbying efforts led the U.N. to formally recognize indigenous peoples in the Americas for the first time. Years of relentless campaigning for indigenous rights at U.N. assemblies brought international attention to a country whose majority was underrepresented. For these reasons Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the 1980 winner, presented Menchu’s candidacy at the Nobel Institute in Norway (p.3). Even if Stoll is correct that the Quincentenary played into the decision, it is just and appropriate that the U.N. finally recognized an indigenous person’s accomplishments and the history of colonization and resistance in the Americas. That Menchu’s potent lobbying work made her a deserving candidate seems obvious. It is disingenuous to frame her as deceptive when what Menchu is actually “guilty” of is challenging hegemonic structures and trespassing rigid Western constructions of truth.
