[In the following review, Gerrard summarizes the major thematic messages in I, Rigoberta Menchú.]

We are daily faced with testimonies of appalling oppression and statistics of human rights' violations which perhaps desensitize our human and political reactions. The simple voice of Rigoberta Menchú, a young Quiché-Indian peasant who is the national leader of the Revolutionary Christian Group in her country, cuts through the distance we place between ourselves and the chorus of suffering. In her introduction to the interviews with her that make up this autobiography, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray calls her the ‘privileged witness’ who ‘refuses to let us forget.’

Rigoberta Menchú has dedicated her life to a cause, so that her personal story simultaneously unfolds the experiences of the 22 other tribes in Guatemala. In her culture, where deep religious faith and social revolt are indivisible, where ‘everything that is done today is done in the memory of those that have passed on,’ and where the individual and community are balanced in a system of generous, ordered interchange, the subjective ‘I’ can efface itself and speak in the name of the inarticulate thousands.

I … Rigoberta Menchú is a cry to all those who focus their attention on El Salvador and Nicaragua and neglect the fierce racism, injustice and murder in Guatemala.

Rigoberta Menchú was born into an Indian village in the mountains 23 years ago. She describes how ancestral values are reverently handed down and children are immediately initiated into their history of suffering but at the same time are taught ‘to love everything that exists.’ This gentleness can slide into submission. At the age of eight Rigoberta is already a full-time worker (‘we have no adolescence’) when she sees her brother slowly die of malnutrition. Her angry response contrasts with her tenth birthday message: ‘I would have my ambitions but … My life wouldn't change, it would go on the same—work, poverty, suffering.’

By 12 Rigoberta is a catechist, but one ‘who walks upon this earth, not one who thinks only of the Kingdom of God.’ Her growing anger is charted by tragedy: the deaths of family and friends and the degradation of working as a maid in the capital erodes inherited fatalism. She learns Spanish, the language of repression, as a weapon to turn against her enemies. The increasing maturity of her political vision accompanies the growth of the organised Indian resistance, and Rigoberta's achievement is that she translates complex social and political struggles into emotional, almost naive, statements. When she reports destructions of entire villages her childlike interjections force the reader to confront the basic human cruelty lying behind political injustice: ‘We love our land very much. Since those people tried to take our land away, we have grieved very much … in the past, no one person owned the land. The land belonged to everyone.’

With the coming to power of the Garcia Lucas regime in 1978 the savagery against the Indians increased. Rigoberta's own experiences bear witness to this: her younger brother is kidnapped, horrifically mangled and slaughtered in front of his family. With its deadpan description of the torture, where for 16 days stones are thrust into his eyes, his testicles are tightly tied, his flesh cut from his face and body and he is thrown into a well full of corpses, this book comes closest to a vision of hell on earth. Rigoberta's beloved father dies in the occupation of the Spanish Embassy, an event which calls forth from his daughter an appeal heartrending for how little it asks: ‘we must give our lives, I know—but not altogether. Let it be one at a time so that someone is left.’ Finally her mother is repeatedly raped, terribly tortured and left to die covered in flies and urinated on by soldiers. Rigoberta's restrained elegy for the victims, who simply refused to give up their rightful land—‘We have to keep this grief as a testimony to them’—is also a pledge of action: ‘no crying; fighting's what we want.’

Since these incidents Rigoberta has renounced marriage and motherhood and devoted herself to the struggle against injustice and exploitation. She has also renounced fatalism. In spite of a deep religious commitment, she criticises priests ‘for they have taught us to accept many things, to be passive, to be a dormant people.’ As an ‘Indianist,’ a Christian and a young vital woman, she names her struggle as one of ‘faith.’ Her cause, ‘born out of wretchedness and bitterness,’ rests on the belief that ‘happiness belongs to everyone, but that happiness has been stolen by a few.’ The basic simplicity of the message lying beneath layers of fact and ideology informs also Rigoberta's undramatic voice, wisely left by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray to speak for itself. It is a voice that in spite of past and present horrors can state, ‘Today I can say it is a struggle which cannot be stopped.’