ABSTRACT
The consumption of testimonial literatures on American campuses, and the almost reverential treatment these texts have received, have recently come under intense scrutiny with the publication of an anthropological study of the single most celebrated text of witness of the last two decades, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y asi me nació la conciencia. 1 Menchú’s account of her life as a political activist and spiritual leader altered the trajectory of history in Guatemala and beyond. On one level Menchú’s autobiographical narrative exists as a textual record of the horrors enacted against the indigenous population of Guatemala by its right-wing leadership and stands defiantly, both on a political as well as a generic level, as an artifact based exclusively on personal experience. In her testimonial, Menchú presents a personal account of the political and economic repression she, her family, and her village suffered while living and working within a fundamentally feudal land system in Guatemala during the 1970s. Menchú describes how her parents, brothers, friends, and neighbors were subjected to horrific acts of torture and humiliation, in many instances culminating in death, as a direct result of their efforts to undermine the social and economic structures supporting the system of land distribution in rural Guatemala. Within American universities, Menchú’s testimonial came to function as the definitive example of the value of testimonial literature, both as literary productions and as vehicles for informing an otherwise uninformed readership about human rights atrocities occurring around the world. A recent critique and, in places, direct refutation of Menchu’s text, David Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans raises fundamental questions, however, about the “truthfulness” of significant passages and events in Menchú’s Nobel Peace Prize generating narrative. 2 Stoll’s claims that Menchú’s text contained numerous inaccuracies, if not conscious lies and acts of manipulation, unleashed a flurry of discussion in the popular press. 3 His research, whether we are in complete agreement with it or not, forces a rereading not only of Menchú’s testimony—a product of the rhetorical stance of the witness—but also of the rhetorical constructs that underlie the primarily Western readers’ assumptions about the witness—the notion that the witness is necessarily innocent, truthful, and above conscious manipulation in the telling of his or her story.
