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?