Testimonio Notes, Menchu

Testimonio (The Real Thing, Gugelberger)

• Canonization of the testimonio, a peripheral literature that arose on the margins of institutional power and whose ends were political change, ironically bringing about the institutionalization of its transgressive and counter-hegemonic qualities (from back of the book)
• “The issues of authenticity and salvationality, the poetics of solidarity…became critically investigated, and new social movements approached political reality differently. Furthermore, the acceptance of the icon of testimonio writing, Rigoberta Menchu’s narrative, into an expanded canon…numbed to a certain degree the counterdiscursivity of the genre. In short, a reconsideration is at hand.”
• John Beverly’s definition of testimonio: “By testimonio I mean a novel or novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is, printed as opposed to acoustic) form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the event he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’ or a significant life experience. Testimonio may include, but is not subsumed under, any of the following categories, some of which are conventionally considered literature, others not: autobiography, autobiographical novel, oral history, memoir, confession, diary, interview, eyewitness report, life history, novela-testimonio, nonfiction novel, or ‘factographic literature’…The situation of narration in testimonio has to involve an urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival and so on.”
1) Novel, short novel length
2) Written, printed form
3) First person narrator who also ‘real’ protagonist or witness to events recounted
4) Unit of narration is usually life or significant life experience
5) Not subsumed under any previously mentioned categories, although may include
6) Has to involve an urgency to communicate repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival (distress)
• George Yúdice: “an authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation (war, oppression, revolution). Emphasizing popular, oral discourse, the witness portrays his or her own experience as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity. Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history.”
• Others say “Testimonio remains undefined.”
Intersection of multiple roads:
-Oral literary
-authored/authoritarian discourse edited discourse (one or two authors?: is the text a product of Rigoberta Menchu or of her editor Elisabeth Burgos-Debray?)
-literature anthropology
-literature non-literature
-canon debate
-postmodernity postcoloniality
• Contradiction: “if we accept, that is, integrate, the outside work into the home of the canon, we violate the authenticity of the genre. Yet, if we do not integrate such genres, we are forced to continue policing the canon with the most conservative policies.


John Beverly’s article, The Margin at the Center
• Testimonio as new narrative genre coalesces in 1960s, further develops in close relation to movements for national liberation and generalized cultural radicalism
• Harlow: “Resistance literature”
• Roots of testimonio go way back
• Testimony: act of testifying or bearing witness in a legal or religious sense, connotation is important bc distinguishes testimony from simply recorded participant narrative (like oral history)
• “In testimonio…it is the intentionality of the narrator that is paramount.”
• “It is not, to begin with, fiction.” Pledge of honesty, as we are meant to experience both speaker situations events as real
• Concerned with problematic collective social situation, is representative of a social class or group
• Narrator speaks for, in name of community group, symbolic function of epic hero, without at the same time assuming his hierarchal and patriarchal status
• Another description: “A nonfictional, popular-democratic form of epic narrative.”
• “Implies a challenge to the loss of the authority of ORALITY in the context of processes of cultural modernization that privilege literacy and literature as norms of expression…represents the entry into literature of persons who would normally, in those societies where literature is a form of class privilege, be excluded from direct literary expression, who have had to be ‘represented’ by profession writers.” (difference bt Menchu telling her story and novel by Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias)
• Author has been replaced by the function of the compiler (compilador) or activator (gestante); relief from the figure of the great writer
• “Testimonio gives voice in literature to a previously ‘voiceless’, anonymous, collective popular-democratic subject, the pueblo or ‘people’, but in such a way that the intellectual or professional, usually of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois background, is interpolated as being part of, and dependent on, the ‘people’ without at the same time losing his or her identity as an intellectual. In other words, testimonio is not a form of liberal guilt. It suggests as an appropriate ethical and political response more the possibility of solidarity than of charity.”
• If not expressing the real, what’s important is “a sensation of experiencing the real”… “the testimonio is ‘a trace of the real, of that history which is, as such, inexpressible.’”
• Linguistical shift from ‘I’ as affirmation of individual subject but in connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression and struggle. If it loses this connection, it ceases to be testimonio and becomes autobiography.”
• “Testimonio…always signifies the need for a general social change in which the stability of the reader’s world must be brought into question.”
• Is an open work
• Skeptical note: “Literature, even where it is infused with a popular-democratic form and content, as in the case of testimonio, is not itself a popular-democratic cultural form, and…it is an open question as to whether it can ever be.”


Yúdice
• Performance of an act by the speaker – “The speaker does not speak for or represent a community but rather performs an act of identity-formation that is simultaneously personal and collective.”
• Contrasts this with professional writer who attempts to represent whole people…speaker for the voiceless, “there is less of a social and cultural imperative for concerned writers to heroically assume the grievances and demands of the oppressed, as in Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu” bc…the gap of consciousness and materiality “is bridged, thus providing the grounds for a universal disalienation and emancipation. In the case of testimonial writing, on the other hand, no claims are made for such a universal emancipation.” Rejects grand and master narratives
• An aesthetic and pragmatic act; the debate over the status of testimonio is important bc it indicates that a shift is taking place in the very notion of the literary
• “As regards literary production, testimonial writing provides a new means for popular sectors to wage their struggle for hegemony in the public sphere from which they were hitherto excluded or forced to represent stereotypes by the reigning elites.”
• Popular Weapons

The Real Thing
“Testimonio is both an art and a strategy of subaltern memory.”

• Testimonio as simply continuation of “the assumption, tied directly to the class interests of the creole elites and their own forms authorization, that literature and the literary intellectual are or could be adequate signifiers of the national?”
• “To celebrate the works of the oppressed…is to romanticize their suffering, to pretend that it is naturally creative, and to give it an esthetic status that is not shared or appreciated by those who actually endure the oppression.”
• “To my mind I, Rigoberta Menchú is the most interesting work of literature produced in Latin America in the last 15 years; but I would rather have it be a provocation in the academy, a radical otherness…than something smoothly integrated into a curriculum for ‘multicultural’ citizenship of an elite university. I would like…students at Stanford…to feel uncomfortable rather than virtuous when they read a text like I, Rigoberta Menchú…that the literature and the university are among the institutional practices that create and sustain subalternity.” – Rather than temporarily resolving our liberal guilt pangs, that this work causes an uncomfortable feeling, an alienation, in its elite readers, and a feeling that our own actions help to cause this situation
• “Counter-possibility of transculturation from below: in this case, for example, to worry less about how we appropriate Menchú, and to understand and appreciate more how she appropriates us for her purposes.” – Menchú uses us for her own purposes
• Questioning of historical veracity of Menchú’s having been able to witness her brother’s torture and death, based on others’ testimony (although no one questions the fact itself of his torture and murder by Guatemalan Army)
• Historical facts/truth vs. witnessing: the individual facts don’t matter as much as the discovery of knowledge, experience, its very happening, the evolution…otherwise we’re taking away their abilities to have their own voice, governed by their own notions of truth and representativity
• Performance of the subaltern?
-“Burgos’ description…of Menchú’s Indian clothing…probably tend to see this as an example of the self-interested benevolence of the hegemonic intellectual toward the subaltern.” Stoll or Burgos assume authorization to represent world for us
-Her outfit, not as proof of her indigenous authenticity subalternity, but: “It speaks rather to a kind of ‘performance’ transvestism on her part, her use of traditional Mayan women’s dress as a cultural signifier to define her own identity and her allegiance to the community she is fighting for (I am told by the Gautemalan writer Arturo Arias, who has worked with her, that Menchú prefers blue jeans and T-shirts outside the public eye).” – It is a Question of Agency
• Testimonio as a means rather than an end in itself
• “It is rather to act tactically in a way that she hopes and expects will advance the interests of the community and social groups and classes her testimonio represents: ‘poor’ Guatemalans.”
• Challenge to authority of the ‘great writer’ in Latin America who could speak for majority of Latin Americans, a new site of ‘discursive authority’