I can’t say that I enjoyed reading I, Rigoberta Menchú. This was easily the most difficult read of the class so far and the only book that was a struggle to finish. However, “enjoyability” was hardly its intent, and I can’t imagine Menchú was considering literary interest while telling these stories to Elizabeth Burgess. If anything, the greatest strength of this book is how direct it is, minimally concerned with the norms and restrictions of broader literary practices. Of course, this isn’t to say that it’s completely unmediated, as is evident in her adoption of the Spanish language and references to untellable indigenous secrets. However, for the sake of movements to decolonize literature, it’s hard to imagine a more decolonial text than one by an illiterate indigenous revolutionary from the global south.
Given this distance from “literature” as I’m used to thinking about it, I really can’t evaluate this on the same terms that I’ve approached other books in this class. The most I can say is that it is a clearly a historically, anthropologically, and politically valuable text. Of course, we could get into debates over how all literature is all of these, but this clearly addressed these themes far more explicitly than even the most historical, anthropological, and political works of fiction we’ve discussed. And, insofar as it managed to spread awareness about the Guatemalan civil war, mobilize international aid, and document indigenous life in late twentieth-century Guatemala, it seems to have been quite successful in these departments.
However, as far as my own immediate reactions go, I, Rigoberta Menchú really didn’t move me as much as it seems to move others, though I wish that it did. The descriptions of exploitation, torture, and colonial injustices were certainly harrowing, and the accounts of indigenous traditions occasionally appealed to my anthropological interests, but, for the most part, I don’t feel like I actually gained all that much from reading this book. In some respects, it reminded me of how I felt while reading Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America, another book that I respect more than enjoy: it was extremely effective at convincing me of something that I already believed. If I had read this book 5 years ago, it probably would have had a significantly stronger effect on me, yet, having read a fair amount of leftist and anthropological literature since then, it didn’t tell me much that really shocked me. Global capitalism has had disastrous effects on the third world and minority populations, with Latin America having been particularly hard struck; ideologies of racism and imperialism can destroy any semblance of morality in governing bodies and lead to horrific cruelties; collective organization of the exploited classes is the most effective tool for resistance to these economic, political, and ideological forces of oppression. I suppose the most interesting thing about this book was hearing all these familiar ideas from someone so far removed from the academic writers that I’m used to hearing them from, put into practice in such a concrete historical context. But, considering the sheer amount of controversy surrounding this text (and how obviously ideologically motivated many of its critics are) I would prefer to abstain from participation in broader discussion over a testimonial that I personally just didn’t find all that exciting, however much I may respect it.
Do others feel that this book changed their mind on any major points, or did it just reinforce or augment existing beliefs?
“this distance from “literature” as I’m used to thinking about it”
I think (as I also said in my lecture) that it’s important to think about the book’s relationship to literature… both its distance from literature, and the ways in which it even so cannot escape the literary.
And I agree that in some ways the book tells us what we expect it to tell us… If anything, this is the basis of Stoll’s critique. It’s something of a Roschach test. (Many books are, of course, but perhaps this one in particular?)
The open veins of Latin America is another example of “leftist literature” –to call it something– that became a weapon of combat. It is not uncommon for it to have been read with a key similar to that of Menchú’s testimony. It is difficult to think of a canon in which Menchú and Borges coexist. What do you think of that? Not only because of the obvious political differences, but because of the institutional weights that validate each type of literature.
Hi, good question! I agree that the exploitation and discrimination did not surprise me though their descriptions are harrowing and I believe important in continuing to assert the existence of these events and how close they are to people’s lives not just happening in an abstract way to abstract people. Where the work did change my way of thinking slightly was with the descriptions of customs and Rigoberta’s secrecy around them. her keeping some things from us made me reflect a bit more on how it makes the reader want to learn those secrets and I couldn’t decide whether it is due to a fetishisation of different cultures, especially those considered inferior to the Western tradition or whether it was out of genuine interest or academic curiosity.