[In the following essay, Burgos discusses the negative repercussions that have resulted from classifying I, Rigoberta Menchú as a testimonio.]

I have preferred to keep out of the controversies that have arisen as a result of the publication of David Stoll's book, but I would like to add a couple of elements that might enrich the debate and clear up misunderstandings.

My first impression was that the debate was actually more revealing about a certain cultural discomfort at the center of North American society than about Latin America, where it is customary for reality to overflow into fiction. In a continent where history and literature have always lived in symbiosis, no one expects there to be just one version of events or is surprised if lived history leads to alternative ways of describing what happened. It seemed to me that those who were identified as experts in testimonial literature were limiting themselves too much to details shorn of context when what was really at stake was whose version of the causes of violence in Guatemala would be remembered.

Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding about I, Rigoberta Menchú in the United States, I believe now, comes from its having been confined within a rigid framework labeled “testimony,” which has been given a connotation closer to legal evidence than to literature. Meanwhile, the same critics also pretend that they are talking about a literary genre when nothing is farther from literature than rigidity. The origin of the misunderstanding is that the critics have mixed their scholarly calling with their political beliefs, in the process converting oral literature—the most supple of genres and the most subject to personal invention—into an almost religious canon, bordering on the absolute. By delegitimizing every attempt at critical skepticism, they have obtained a contrary result: the status of the texts, specifically in this case that of Rigoberta Menchú, has actually become fragile, vulnerable to any misstep.

As for the content of Rigoberta Menchú's narrative, it is well known that in communities with a living oral tradition—I prefer the term “oral literature” to “testimony,” which I consider belittling—the process of memorization is learned right along with language itself. But that which the memory calls back always returns with variations, products in part of individual creativity but also in part of the continual reimagining inherent in the cultural change that is always occurring in every society. In Rigoberta Menchú's case, this reimagining was also influenced by the Marxist analysis she learned as a member of the EGP, as well as the theology of liberation and, of course, the education she received in her religious secondary school.

On a political plane—which is what most interests Stoll in his book—there is another external element that also has to be considered in evaluating Rigoberta Menchú's narrative. Rigoberta Menchú was part of a political project that engaged in popular revolutionary war, and as is well known such warfare has its own specific rules and techniques. The guerrilla—the “little war”—is the kind of war waged by those of limited means. As the warfare of the poor, it depends on the arts of trickery and deception, on feint and misdirection. In the framework of this kind of war, Rigoberta Menchú played a double role: that of communicator, to be sure, but also of transmitter. The political task assigned to her was to communicate but with the purpose of eliciting immediate solidarity. She was to convey the ancient wisdom of her family, of which she became both the bearer and the trustee on the death of her parents, and in so doing to convert that loss into a “collective victory over the ephemeral.” This explains why she always spoke as “we.” That “we” signified “We transmit so that these things we live, believe, and think will not die with us.” The goal of transmission is to occupy space, to live in legendary time, to persist in order to make history. In order to transmit well, it is necessary to sanctify. Information is communicated; what is transmitted are secrets, things that require an initiation. The great secret transmitted between the lines of Rigoberta Menchú's book is that of having dared—her father, her mother, her sisters, and undoubtedly many others close to her—to engage in armed rebellion. That is the source of the “epic character of her story,” which she takes on in the name of all the indigenous people who joined the armed struggle, many of whom have not been able to assume that mantle directly because outsiders' history still sees them as passive victims (for the quoted passages see Debray, 1997).

Rigoberta Menchú's activities internationally were thus inscribed in the strategy of Guatemala's revolutionary war. And thanks to the international stage she was given by the guerrilla war, she was able to make the leap from communicator to transmitter, becoming in the process guardian of the “we”—of that which is common, symbolically, to all the indigenous people. This is undoubtedly why, in the wake of the polemic stirred up by Stoll's book, even those indigenous leaders who have had reservations about Rigoberta Menchú have come to her defense. One of the criticisms I heard, from Rosalina Tuyuc and Otilia Lux de Cojtí, among others, was that in launching her second book of testimony, La nieta de los Mayas, Rigoberta Menchú herself was campaigning against her first. The question here is that of “we” in the best sense of the term. As Rosalina Tuyuc said, “It was wrong for Rigoberta Menchú to repudiate her book. It was not even really her right to do it, because it is a book that belongs to all of us.”

Nevertheless, Stoll's book shows that even in her own community Rigoberta Menchú's version of events is questioned, and this is a fact that deserves to be analyzed carefully. Here I shall limit myself to saying that quite apart from questions of what is true and what is not, my impression is that in the same way that Rigoberta Menchú was the symbol and transmitter of a historical experience, today, as a result of the place she occupies in the collective imagination, precisely as a symbol of a particular cultural and communal configuration, she seems to be for many a perfect target to blame for a model of conduct—the guerrilla—now considered mistaken. She assumed the role of embodying a legend, and when it became necessary she has in turn been burdened with the role of countermodel.

References

Debray, Regis

1997 Transmettre. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob.