Testimonio

Zimmerman, Marc.  Literature and Resistance in Guatemala: Textual Modes and Cultural Politics from El Senor Presidente to Rigoberta Menchu. Volume Two. Ohio: Monographs, 1995.

testimonio

• reveals the hidden secrets of popular traditions in relation to questions of resistances
• provide access to situations and forms of thought unknown  or poorly understood by officially sanctioned culture
• bridges dimensions of the state, social class, and  military institutions (sociology) with , popular traditions and every day life (anthropology) 
• literary testimonio -- as an aesthetically  rich and generally linear first person narration of socially and collectively significant experiences, in which the narrative voice is that of a typical or extraordinary witness or protagonist  who metonymically represents  other individual or groups that have lived through other, similar situations or the circumstances which induce them
• collective representativeness -- intertextual dialogue of voices, reproducing but also creatively reordering historical events in a way which impresses as representative and true and which projects a vision of life and society in need of transformation (12)
• a genre marked by it status as a subaltern discourse, which came to speak from the perspective of middle or lower sectors frustrated, repressed, marginalized, or exploited under capitalism
• democratic humanism (Duchesne) -- the recuperation of those marginalized by the processes of capitalist modernization throughout the third world; the oppresses, repressed, and humiliated takes a stances against the dominant cultural forms and elaborates  its own discursive space; this process takes place with the mediation of an intelligentsia that by definition is lettered (a person who can read and write must mediate the story of the subaltern who is not lettered)
• so...is it mediated or unmediated? Can true testimonio be unmediated? Achugar says that it is inevitably mediated with the intervention of and for the benefit of the lettered; whereas, the left says it is an unmediated voice of a revolutionary-tending social subject constructed as the people.
• Zimmerman and Beverly say that it is a form that takes its place in the struggle for the middle sectors, which are so often crucial in supporting and opposing revolutionary struggles
• Beverly -- a novella-length first person narrative recounted  by the protagonist or witness to the events recounted; testifying or bearing witness and the overall narrative unit is a life or a significant life experience; defined by its conflictive relation with established literary-aesthetic norms and with the institution of literature itself
• often at the margins of literature -- representing women, the insane, the criminal, the proletarian -- excluded from authorized representation
• defined as a nonfictional , popular-democratic form of epic narrative, since the narrative "I"  has a metonymic function as part of its narrative convention and since the form implies that any life so narratwd can have a kind of representivity
• each given testimony  evokes an implicit polyphony of other possible voices, lives, and experiences, and testimonio then involves an erasure of authorial presences and intentionality which makes possible a "comradely complicity between narrator and interlocutor and/or reader" (14)
• interlocutor's function -- what if the narrator requires (which it likely does) an interlocutor with a different ethnic or class background to elicit, edit, publish, and distribute the text? The function can lead to a one-sided questioning  or editing that results in a reactionary articulation of the testimonio as a kind of costumbrismo of the subaltern or the smothering of a genuine popular voice by a well-intentioned but repressive notion of correctness; 
• the narrator-compiler relationship can stand as a figure for the possible union of a radical intelligentsia and the masses -- a combination which has been decisive in the development of third world movements for social change
• gives voices to the previously voiceless, anonymous, collective pueblo
• suggests not charity but solidarity between the intelligentsia and the masses
• audience -- the readinb public which is still class-limited in advanced capitalist  societies; the complicity the form establishes with readers involves their identification with what they may well have seen as an alien or at least distant popular cause; by breaking down distance, testimonio has been important in maintaining and developing the practice of third world solidarity movements (15)
• illusory -- the effect has been produced by a narrator and a compiler;  the direct narrator uses oral story-telling tradition and the compiler makes a text out of the material; a metonymic trace of the real
• novel -- private form; both the story and subject end with the end of the text
• testimonio - -the narrator is a real person who continues living and acting in a real social history that also continue; it cannot be analyzed as a text within itselfness
• calls into question the very institution of literature as an ideological apparatus of alienation and domination; "for the form to have become more and more popular in recent years, means that there are experiences in the world today which cannot be adequately expressed  in forms like the novel, the short story, the lyric poem, or the autobiography == in other words, which would be betrayed by literature as we know it -- Why
• extraliterary or even antiliterary discourse which is its aesthetic effect
• interlocutor -- interviewer as mediator, interviewer as creative and therefore distorting interlocutor, as censor, editor, conveyor of testimony to those whose literary, ideological, and political norms are shaped by the written word
• Zimmerman argues that given the complex play of international, regional, and national forces, testimonio cannot necessarily signify any decisive or definitive transformation.