This week’s book was heavy in a way I was not expecting. Though Jon warned us of the content in this book, I listened to the audiobook and it was an emotionally draining experience. To have someone (obviously not Rigoberta herself but a human voice nonetheless) read you their story with all its tragedy and terror is, to me, more powerful than just reading the words off the page. I was immediately struck with how Rigoberta presented her life and her culture so directly, but also with so much depth. It didn’t feel like an encyclopedia entry but someone recounting their life, infused with personal details and an emotional foundation that made her story more compelling.
This brings up one point mentioned in lecture. Though Rigoberta is telling so much about her culture to lay the context for the rest of her experience, she often mentions that she will not be telling us things. This really struck me. I understand that, of course, there are things people want to keep from the general public, and the strong community her people have obviously want to keep some things to themselves. But to go out of one’s way to announce the exclusion of such details was a touch… odd to me. She could have just not mentioned these things, however, after some contemplation, I am of the school of thought that announcing what she will be keeping hidden gives her a sense of power over her testimony, perhaps.
The other aspect of this testimony that surprised me was Rigoberta’s handling of such intense emotions. Several times I’d be listening to the audiobook as she recounted the most gruesome, vile, inhumane acts and she’d quickly follow it up with a comment about yes, it’s sad, but there are worse things. The strength of this woman amazed me. To lose so many people close to her, to witness mistreatment of your people and to experience such discrimination, and to keep your head up? To keep going with your fight, time and again? I was absolutely overwhelmed with her courage, her spirit. Several moments in the book felt so surreal, impossible, and yet I had no doubt that Rigoberta experienced them. (The lecture details how her accounts may not all be true, but I am choosing to believe that someone would not just make up so many gruesome memories!).
I think, perhaps, Rigoberta’s strength came from her religion and beliefs which, I will admit, surprised me a bit. I hadn’t thought that an indigenous person who was fighting suppression from colonizers could have found so much help in the Bible. I found it interesting how she and her community could find solace in something from outside their community, and use it to help them with their fight.
This book is not something I think you can ‘rate’ per se; reading about someone’s life was a harrowing way to understand my privilege in a different way, and I think many people can benefit from learning about a part of history about which many of us have never learned.
Question: was there one element of Rigoberta’s testimony that most emotionally struck you? Were you surprised by her ‘positive’ approach of such heavy topics?
Julia Moniz-Lecce
March 19, 2023 — 8:47 am
Hi Julia,
Great post, I agree it’s not something that you can rate and I had a hard time writing my post for this week because this book was hard to critique per se. I also agree about the subject matter and the way she would almost brush it off after detailing everything. I found the section about her father’s jail sentence to be particularly hard to get through. What she had to go through to try to pay for his release, also with the idea that she didn’t know when or where she would see her family again is horrible, especially at such a young age.
Nandita Parmar
March 19, 2023 — 1:52 pm
Hi,
Great post. I feel like for me, it didn’t really strike me as odd that she mentioned explicitly leaving out things. In fact, I understood that her a way to garner power, both cultural and personal, and it’s also good for us in general to take a break from always wanting to know everything about everyone – we got the things that we are supposed to know and learn!
julia gomez-coronado dominguez
March 19, 2023 — 6:31 pm
Hello Julia, I really enjoyed reading your post. Answering your question about the most emotional, strong elements of her testimony, I would say that her description of the violent death of her younger brother was what struck me the most. She explains how he was taken by by the military and brutally murdered, which obviously is an extremely painful memory for her, and it’s not easy to process as a reading either. Although I could feel her suffering in her words, I think she approached the topic in a simple, direct way. In my opinion, although I felt very sorry for her and her family and I felt furious, her storytelling method doesn’t target the reader’s pitty or empathy necessarily.
neko smart
March 19, 2023 — 11:03 pm
Beautiful post, Julia. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree that telling us she’s intentionally leaving details out of her narrative could be a means claiming her voice and power. The death of her younger brother shattered me. It was just…yeah, really really awful. I also listened to the audiobook and get what you mean about how having a human voice recount the novel to you renders it all the more visceral… I think that it’s hard to garner a full sense of how she approached these topics without being in the room with her. Body language is very telling. While she might sound one way, her physicality may say something else entirely.
Daniel Orizaga Doguim
March 20, 2023 — 6:25 pm
Thanks for your post Julia. As Menchú herself mentions, this struggle is shared with her family, with her community, with other social groups and has in common that it is life or death. It is very difficult to understand the way in which Rigoberta Menchú’s conscience acts, although the title of the book in Spanish tells us that this is the story of her birth as an activist and fighter. Hence the importance of the topic you mention, about secrets. I think there are two issues here: first, we don’t know all the details. But more important, it seems to me, is that we do not have a guide to understanding these social processes in an immediate way, and that is precisely the way the book closes. Precisely, the next job is to think collectively about it.