In this essay, Morieras talks about the fixed factors of testimonio and its problems. He argues that Testimonio has been a substitution of ‘(high) literature’. As he says “High literature is no longer effective, it would seem, in the fight against late – capitalist globalization: instead, other cultural possibilities must be investigated” (Pg 194). The argument then focuses on whether testimonio carries the literary, post literary or extraliterary aspects and he says that even being literary it ‘incorporates an abandonment of literary’. He further explains this as “Testimonio provides its reader with the possibility of entering what we might call a subdued sublime the twilight region where the literary breaks off into something else, which is not so much the real as it is its unguarded possibility. This unguarded possibility of the real, which is arguably the very core of the testimonial experience, is also its preeminent political claim” (Pg 195).

In the next part of his argument, as I have mentioned in the first line, he questions the characteristics which define testimonio. For example he talks about solidarity, which is one of the important factors to define testimonio and Morieras says that “solidarity, although not in any case to be excluded, no longer can be the sole motivation for us to engage testimonio as its readers and dissemination” (Pg 196). He also adds that “testimonio does not produce solidarity, but only a poetics of solidarity of a fallen and derivative kind” (Pg 198). Canonizing testimonio on the basis of poetics of solidarity can also prove to ‘reliteraturization’/reinstitutionalization of the genre against which it is fighting. Hence, there is a chance of appropriation of the genre into the (high) literature or creating another center – periphery relation as argued by Gareth Williams in Fantasies of Cultural exchange. Testimonio, also does not depend on the ‘suppressed and the subaltern’, on the expansion of disciplinary discourse and on the urgency to talk about the oppression.  However, according Moreiras the extra literary aspect of testimonio could be the secrets of Rigoberta Menchu that she denies to reveal in her testimonio. Moreiras mentions in his text that “I would claim that the secret, in Menchu’s text, stands for whatever cannot and should not be reabsorbed into the literary – representational system: the secret is the (secret) key to the real as unguarded possibility” (Pg 206).

All these arguments make me question the role of testimonio, how to define testimonio, can it be defined or is it that by defining it we are again restricting/limiting its edges? What is a testimonio then? Is it a perspective, an approach to read a text? Can then we can call any text a testimonio? As Alberto Morieras argues in his essay “If testimonio as we understood it today is a primary form of cultural manifestation for a wide variety of social movements whose politics are politics of identity, then the question ultimately affects all the disciplinary possibilities of dealing with the identitarian claims of social movements” (Pg 214).