I, Rigoberta Menchu, and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll (1992) refutes elements of the taped testimony and autobiography of Rigoberta Menchu (I, Rigoberta Menchu) by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (1982). Stoll's central argument is that the Burgos account of Menchu's story served to support the guerrillas because she focused all the blame for the violence (genocide) on the government. Furthermore, Menchu put a human face on a clandestine movement (URNG), but as a Maya, she also validated the guerrilla's claim that their revolutionary movement represented the interests of the indigenous peoples who comprised nearly half of Guatemala's ten million people. So while Menchu went on to earn the Nobel Peace prize and brought international attention to the violence and political unrest in Guatemala, Stoll seems to argue that Burgos' book, in fact, misrepresented the guerrilla's actual work and the role of the indigenous peoples in the revolution.
It seems that the first place where Menchu is clearly uniting guerrillas and peasants is when the meaning of companeros shifts from villager to guerrilla in the mountains saying "once the Indian opens his heart to them, all those in the mountains will be his brothers. We didn't feel deceived as we did with the army"(204). However, for an Indian to join the guerrillas he has to perform a death ceremony with his family for the purpose of passing on traditions or 'secrets' of the culture. This clearly aligns some Indians with guerrillas, but the question is whether or not the guerrillas were, in fact,part of the unionizing efforts and land rights organizations. Was this, perhaps, just Menchu's experience of intersecting ideologies or was she exploited by the guerrillas or did she exploit indigenous peoples for the guerrillas anti- government campaign?
When Menchu talks about the development of CUC, she says, "when those student, peasant and worker's leaders died together in the embassy, we knew we had an alliance and we looked at how we would confront the policies of the government together"(231). In 1981, this became the 31st January Popular Front to honor those killed in the Spanish embassy on that day; so while she says the CUC incorporates all peasants, she goes on to say "we" used real bombs but also propaganda bombs (233). However, later she decides her role is not with the CUC but another faction of the popular front, one with a Christian foundation saying she would not take up arms: "the people, the masses, are the only ones capable of transforming society"(246). She says she will teach her people to build a people's church not the Catholic church.
Misrepresentation might be the problem of "non-fiction" and testimony -- if only one testimony is given voice, then such an experience is in danger of essentializing a people. Thus, Stoll's efforts in his book to take multiple testimonies and to refute aspects of Burgos' rendering of Menchu's testimony, THE testimony of Indios, seem to be a worthy historical project: the doing of history. In showing the rhetorical function of Menchu's story, Stoll makes visible the rhetoric of modernity. I argue, and Stoll may argue this too as I am not finished with his book, civilians had to be rhetorically aligned with the guerrillas and Rigoberta had to be the face of the revolution (not an armed, male, dressed in fatigues -- a symbol of communism/socialism that prompted the US military support in the 60s/70s) for the Western/colonial forces to take notice and to facilitate peace talks. As it was, the West was not interested in peasant land rights because the allocation of land suited the free market well (e.g., the United Fruit Company).
It seems that the first place where Menchu is clearly uniting guerrillas and peasants is when the meaning of companeros shifts from villager to guerrilla in the mountains saying "once the Indian opens his heart to them, all those in the mountains will be his brothers. We didn't feel deceived as we did with the army"(204). However, for an Indian to join the guerrillas he has to perform a death ceremony with his family for the purpose of passing on traditions or 'secrets' of the culture. This clearly aligns some Indians with guerrillas, but the question is whether or not the guerrillas were, in fact,part of the unionizing efforts and land rights organizations. Was this, perhaps, just Menchu's experience of intersecting ideologies or was she exploited by the guerrillas or did she exploit indigenous peoples for the guerrillas anti- government campaign?
When Menchu talks about the development of CUC, she says, "when those student, peasant and worker's leaders died together in the embassy, we knew we had an alliance and we looked at how we would confront the policies of the government together"(231). In 1981, this became the 31st January Popular Front to honor those killed in the Spanish embassy on that day; so while she says the CUC incorporates all peasants, she goes on to say "we" used real bombs but also propaganda bombs (233). However, later she decides her role is not with the CUC but another faction of the popular front, one with a Christian foundation saying she would not take up arms: "the people, the masses, are the only ones capable of transforming society"(246). She says she will teach her people to build a people's church not the Catholic church.
Misrepresentation might be the problem of "non-fiction" and testimony -- if only one testimony is given voice, then such an experience is in danger of essentializing a people. Thus, Stoll's efforts in his book to take multiple testimonies and to refute aspects of Burgos' rendering of Menchu's testimony, THE testimony of Indios, seem to be a worthy historical project: the doing of history. In showing the rhetorical function of Menchu's story, Stoll makes visible the rhetoric of modernity. I argue, and Stoll may argue this too as I am not finished with his book, civilians had to be rhetorically aligned with the guerrillas and Rigoberta had to be the face of the revolution (not an armed, male, dressed in fatigues -- a symbol of communism/socialism that prompted the US military support in the 60s/70s) for the Western/colonial forces to take notice and to facilitate peace talks. As it was, the West was not interested in peasant land rights because the allocation of land suited the free market well (e.g., the United Fruit Company).
Tree Girl a young adult novel written by Ben Mikaelsen (2004) complicates Menchu's account as well and seems to support Stoll's argument in that the protagonist, Gabriela Flores, and her Quiche canton do not have any affiliation with the guerrillas or the government. The plot shows how the villagers are careful not to take sides in the conflict despite the guerrillas efforts to say they were helping the canto get land rights and the government checking to see if the Quiche learned Spanish (a sign that the different ethnic Indios were now collaborating) and later outlawing machetes. The protagonist notes how she can tell the difference between the guerrillas and the soldiers (sometimes pretending to be guerrillas to get information) because of the modern weapons (American) they carried. So this story, like Stoll, want to complicate the context of the political unrest and show that the Indios were not necessarily aligned with the guerrilla movement anymore than they were content with the government land policies.I think Grandin's book, The Last Colonial Massacre, does a nice job of presenting the complexity of the Guatemala's political history including all the different revolutionary groups, their leaders, their objectives, and successes with failures -- using several testimonies but a great deal of primary sources.
Stoll clearly indicates that Menchu and Burgos' work brought international pressure for Guatemala to participation in UN sponsored peace talks. Guatemala's civilian government, army, and guerrilla movement signed a peace agreement in 1996. The international community negotiated with human rights certification and trade packages, but it was Menchu who turned a local situation into a dramatic international symbol (would Mignolo call this rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality?).
Oral testimonies like I, Rigoberta Menchu have become controversial (see my post about Zimmerman's description of testimonio). Indigenous and other marginalized groups are insisting on equality so they are less willing to have their words mediated by outsiders including anthropologists accustomed to speaking and writing on behalf their behalf. (thinking of Linda Tuhiwai Smith who advocates for Maori to write about Maori). Stoll shares his experience coming face to face with Menchu at a conference where he presented Menchu with the "real" account of the death of her brother: "Whites have been writing our history for five hundred years, and no white anthropologist is going to tell me what I experienced in my own flesh" (227). One of facts that Stoll refutes is that Menchu was, in fact, educated and did, in fact, speak Spanish. If this is the case, why, then did Menchu need Elisabeth Burgos as "the intermediary" who shaped Menchu's story for publication. Stoll argues that Menchu was sufficiently literate throughout the book and questions why Menchu neglected to tell this part of her story. The question remains of this testimonio (and for the genre more generally) as to who authored the book. If Stoll is arguing that it was Menchu, and that Menchu was indeed literature, then the question he needs to be asking why Menchu used Burgos as an intermediary -- especially if the taped testimony was not intended to become a book? And if there is a question as to Burgos' faithful rendering of the taped tesimony, that answer can be easily determined by listening to the tapes. Stoll says he listed to 2 hours of it. It seems to me that such an investigation should have been Stoll's first step. Ultimately, Stoll concludes that "contrary to the laureate's occasional statements to the contrary, there is every reason to believe that I, Rigoberta Menchu is her own account of her life" (183). Burgos who has edited more than one oral testimony says,
What Stoll could have done with this book was to take more thorough testimonies to examine the narrative process along with exploring the experience being the intermediary. Would he see the imagining that Burgos notices in her storytellers? Stoll admits that this would have been one way to do it-- the comparison of narrative (but I guess that is left for the reader). He wanted to evaluate oral testimony using documents that could set parameters (e.g., land contracts and human rights reports). But such documents are also partial narratives and such documents are not the work of testimonio nor does testimonio claim to be.Stoll talked to Beverley and George Yudice, literary scholars. Beverley defined testimonio as a story "by a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the event he or she recounts" while Yudice feints it as "an authentic narrative, told by a witness who...portrays his or her own experience as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity" (242). Stoll argues that Menchu's book was not testimonio because it fails the eye witness test, but he seems most upset by our "unfortunate tendency to idolize native voices that serve our own political and moral needs, as opposed to others that do not" (242). I think he is really referring to his refutation as something that does not serve our needs.
Indeed, readers should step back from any text and weigh reliability, but what is Stoll exactly trying to prove? I think he is trying to expose how I, Rigoberta Menchu was a work of Western rhetoric. Menchu appealed to the Western expectation of native peoples; he argues that Menchu was charming her audience to get a hearing with mythic inflation (232) -- monolingualism, illiteracy, rejection of Western technology. There is a danger of essentializing a people and distorting debates about indigenous issues. I think, based on what I have read and my own conversations with the Maya, that Stoll's secondary argument that Menchu is not necessarily speaking for ALL Guatemalans is more convincing and can at least be argued with claims and evidence. Is it fair to say that all peasants were ideologically committed to revolution? He writes, "Although some peasants acknowledge being attracted to the revolutionary vision, their moment of decision usually follows the onset of army retaliation. They face a grim choice between surrendering to army killers, escaping to coastal plantations, or casting their lot with the insurgency, if only by staying in a village over which the guerrillas are asserting control" (191-2).
What I, Rigoberta Menchu does -- and I think this is Stoll's contribution -- is that it is functions as a "symbol that resolves painful contradictions by transcending them with a healing image," and what that painful contradiction is depends on the beholder. The beholder is the white middle class and the symbol functions to bring the gap between privilege or Western values and its opposite. The symbol identifies a common enemy -- here the Guatemalan army. The privileged and the unprivileged, according to Stoll, can stand on the same side. The symbol is a unifying image. Imagine, however, if Menchu would have identified the US government who trained the Guatemalan army in her testimony. (Menchu narrated When Mountains Tremble, when this information was clearly presented; she seemed to know the US role in the genocide, yet she did not talk about the US or use the word genocide in her testimony.) Menchu was making an argument for peace in her country; she needed to get her story out there, and she seemed to know what story was going to achieve that goal. Her story is both a narrative and an argument, but Stoll wants to say that we are caught up in that argument , privileging a story, and essentializing a people which takes us further from understanding life of Guatemalans.
"Only by establishing chronologies, vantage points, and probabilities can we have any hope of evaluating the reciprocal stories of victimization that are used to justify violence, or how these claims become rationales for larger political interests, or how human beings can be induced into committing mayhem" (274).The concern I hear is how cultural studies and postmodernism can be and have been used to silence inquiry by doing what Stoll says is " reducing intellectual discourse to relations of power and dismissing opposed points of view as reactionary. Scholars have to be able to critique a text to consider the different imaginings of the "other" and to consider what's behind privileging one version of a history over another. Stoll argues that the consequence of publishing this rendering of Menchu's story with the guerrilla movement depicted as a movement for and with the peasants was a Novel peace prize that prolonged a war because it was tailored to the propaganda needs of a guerrilla movement that had lost hope and leverage; the war continued for another fourteen years even thought it did use the international human rights movement to keep pressure on the Guatemalan army and finally obtain the December 1996 peace agreement (which may have been resolved earlier had the book told a different story).
While I, Rigoberta Menchu presents a tale of the necessary guerrilla movement to resist government oppression, Stoll concludes his book by asking What gave rise to such ferocious regimes in the first place? And Greg Grandin offers an answer to this in his book The Last Colonial Massacre. Similar to Grandin's argument, Stoll explains that the US bears much of the responsibility for this progressively violent militarization of the Guatemalan government. And the guerrilla movement has to accept responsibility for positioning the peasants as military targets, specifically indigenous groups who do not share the revolutionary vision. The imagery of native insurrection spread through the rhetoric of I, Rigoberta Menchu (notice that I am careful not to say that it was Menchu, specifically) was critical to romanticizing the guerrilla movement and its legitmacy. Stoll has argued that the Menchu family was not representative of the poorest peasants and that the idea of a guerrilla insurgency actually originated in the plans of nonindigenous revolutionaries (Ladinos and ex-government agents as depicted in Tree Girl, When Mountains Tremble, and Granito). The middle class radicals seeking solidarity with the countryside is an "urban romance" that is "more likely to kill off the left than build it" (282).
Oral testimonies like I, Rigoberta Menchu have become controversial (see my post about Zimmerman's description of testimonio). Indigenous and other marginalized groups are insisting on equality so they are less willing to have their words mediated by outsiders including anthropologists accustomed to speaking and writing on behalf their behalf. (thinking of Linda Tuhiwai Smith who advocates for Maori to write about Maori). Stoll shares his experience coming face to face with Menchu at a conference where he presented Menchu with the "real" account of the death of her brother: "Whites have been writing our history for five hundred years, and no white anthropologist is going to tell me what I experienced in my own flesh" (227). One of facts that Stoll refutes is that Menchu was, in fact, educated and did, in fact, speak Spanish. If this is the case, why, then did Menchu need Elisabeth Burgos as "the intermediary" who shaped Menchu's story for publication. Stoll argues that Menchu was sufficiently literate throughout the book and questions why Menchu neglected to tell this part of her story. The question remains of this testimonio (and for the genre more generally) as to who authored the book. If Stoll is arguing that it was Menchu, and that Menchu was indeed literature, then the question he needs to be asking why Menchu used Burgos as an intermediary -- especially if the taped testimony was not intended to become a book? And if there is a question as to Burgos' faithful rendering of the taped tesimony, that answer can be easily determined by listening to the tapes. Stoll says he listed to 2 hours of it. It seems to me that such an investigation should have been Stoll's first step. Ultimately, Stoll concludes that "contrary to the laureate's occasional statements to the contrary, there is every reason to believe that I, Rigoberta Menchu is her own account of her life" (183). Burgos who has edited more than one oral testimony says,
The person feels carried away by her voice, her memory, and above all her capacity to improvise. She imagines, but in a true manner, on the basis of events that have happened, such that what is imagined has a real dimension...I have become aware that they relate, as their own experiences, what they could not have witnessed directly, what instead happened in proximity to their own histories. It is not that they act in bad faith, nor that they lie. Instead, they are moved by a feeling of belonging. This feeling of belonging, of identifying with peoples, occurs when they feel empowered to elaborate their own version of history...It is not the same as reflecting on the basis of writing. The act of telling a story orally requires recreating what happened through images , it requires setting a stage, like a theater director would, and requires what theater does -- to demonstrate. (199)
Therefore, I think that Stoll's anthropological approach to refuting Menchu's "own story" is ultimately insufficient if we are to understand history. Narratives are already incomplete with gaps and fissures -- whether it is testimonio, autobiography or even an anthropological text. A critical reader knows this and accepts this.
What Stoll could have done with this book was to take more thorough testimonies to examine the narrative process along with exploring the experience being the intermediary. Would he see the imagining that Burgos notices in her storytellers? Stoll admits that this would have been one way to do it-- the comparison of narrative (but I guess that is left for the reader). He wanted to evaluate oral testimony using documents that could set parameters (e.g., land contracts and human rights reports). But such documents are also partial narratives and such documents are not the work of testimonio nor does testimonio claim to be.Stoll talked to Beverley and George Yudice, literary scholars. Beverley defined testimonio as a story "by a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the event he or she recounts" while Yudice feints it as "an authentic narrative, told by a witness who...portrays his or her own experience as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity" (242). Stoll argues that Menchu's book was not testimonio because it fails the eye witness test, but he seems most upset by our "unfortunate tendency to idolize native voices that serve our own political and moral needs, as opposed to others that do not" (242). I think he is really referring to his refutation as something that does not serve our needs.
Indeed, readers should step back from any text and weigh reliability, but what is Stoll exactly trying to prove? I think he is trying to expose how I, Rigoberta Menchu was a work of Western rhetoric. Menchu appealed to the Western expectation of native peoples; he argues that Menchu was charming her audience to get a hearing with mythic inflation (232) -- monolingualism, illiteracy, rejection of Western technology. There is a danger of essentializing a people and distorting debates about indigenous issues. I think, based on what I have read and my own conversations with the Maya, that Stoll's secondary argument that Menchu is not necessarily speaking for ALL Guatemalans is more convincing and can at least be argued with claims and evidence. Is it fair to say that all peasants were ideologically committed to revolution? He writes, "Although some peasants acknowledge being attracted to the revolutionary vision, their moment of decision usually follows the onset of army retaliation. They face a grim choice between surrendering to army killers, escaping to coastal plantations, or casting their lot with the insurgency, if only by staying in a village over which the guerrillas are asserting control" (191-2).
What I, Rigoberta Menchu does -- and I think this is Stoll's contribution -- is that it is functions as a "symbol that resolves painful contradictions by transcending them with a healing image," and what that painful contradiction is depends on the beholder. The beholder is the white middle class and the symbol functions to bring the gap between privilege or Western values and its opposite. The symbol identifies a common enemy -- here the Guatemalan army. The privileged and the unprivileged, according to Stoll, can stand on the same side. The symbol is a unifying image. Imagine, however, if Menchu would have identified the US government who trained the Guatemalan army in her testimony. (Menchu narrated When Mountains Tremble, when this information was clearly presented; she seemed to know the US role in the genocide, yet she did not talk about the US or use the word genocide in her testimony.) Menchu was making an argument for peace in her country; she needed to get her story out there, and she seemed to know what story was going to achieve that goal. Her story is both a narrative and an argument, but Stoll wants to say that we are caught up in that argument , privileging a story, and essentializing a people which takes us further from understanding life of Guatemalans.
"Only by establishing chronologies, vantage points, and probabilities can we have any hope of evaluating the reciprocal stories of victimization that are used to justify violence, or how these claims become rationales for larger political interests, or how human beings can be induced into committing mayhem" (274).The concern I hear is how cultural studies and postmodernism can be and have been used to silence inquiry by doing what Stoll says is " reducing intellectual discourse to relations of power and dismissing opposed points of view as reactionary. Scholars have to be able to critique a text to consider the different imaginings of the "other" and to consider what's behind privileging one version of a history over another. Stoll argues that the consequence of publishing this rendering of Menchu's story with the guerrilla movement depicted as a movement for and with the peasants was a Novel peace prize that prolonged a war because it was tailored to the propaganda needs of a guerrilla movement that had lost hope and leverage; the war continued for another fourteen years even thought it did use the international human rights movement to keep pressure on the Guatemalan army and finally obtain the December 1996 peace agreement (which may have been resolved earlier had the book told a different story).
While I, Rigoberta Menchu presents a tale of the necessary guerrilla movement to resist government oppression, Stoll concludes his book by asking What gave rise to such ferocious regimes in the first place? And Greg Grandin offers an answer to this in his book The Last Colonial Massacre. Similar to Grandin's argument, Stoll explains that the US bears much of the responsibility for this progressively violent militarization of the Guatemalan government. And the guerrilla movement has to accept responsibility for positioning the peasants as military targets, specifically indigenous groups who do not share the revolutionary vision. The imagery of native insurrection spread through the rhetoric of I, Rigoberta Menchu (notice that I am careful not to say that it was Menchu, specifically) was critical to romanticizing the guerrilla movement and its legitmacy. Stoll has argued that the Menchu family was not representative of the poorest peasants and that the idea of a guerrilla insurgency actually originated in the plans of nonindigenous revolutionaries (Ladinos and ex-government agents as depicted in Tree Girl, When Mountains Tremble, and Granito). The middle class radicals seeking solidarity with the countryside is an "urban romance" that is "more likely to kill off the left than build it" (282).
- Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004. Print.
- Menchú, Rigoberta, and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984. Print.
- Menchú, Rigoberta, and Ann Wright. Crossing Borders. London: Verso, 1998. Print.
- Mikaelsen, Ben. Tree Girl: A Novel. New York: HarperTempest, 2004. Print.
- Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999. Print.
