Who Is Rigoberta Menchu? - Greg Grandin

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key point of chronology, which is ultimately the hook on which Stoll’s case dangles, the CEH documents a clear pattern of repression enacted by planters, ladinos, and security forces in the indigenous highlands well before the arrival of the guerrillas in the 1970s. In the case of Chimel, Stoll says the army showed up only after the EGP guerrillas executed two ladinos in the spring of 1979, thus laying blame for the ensuing spiral of events that claimed the life of Menchú’s brother and mother and the destruction of Chimel at the feet of her father’s allies. But CEH researchers dated the beginning of the military’s harassment of Chimel to earlier than this first EGP action.

      The CEH is concerned less with identifying who fired the first shot in any one skirmish than with understanding the larger causes of the civil war. Starting with an introduction that provides staggering statistical evidence of inequality—Guatemala’s health, education, literacy, and nutritional indicators continued to be among the most unjust in the world despite an abundance of natural wealth—the CEH’s final report offers a damning analysis of Guatemalan history:

      From independence in 1821, an event led by the country’s elite, an authoritarian state was created that excluded the majority of Guatemalans; it was racist in theory and practice and served to protect the interests of a small, privileged elite . . . State violence has been fundamentally aimed against the excluded, the poor, and the Maya, as well as those who struggled in favor of a just and more equitable society . . . Thus a vicious circle was created in which social injustice led to protest and subsequently to political instability, to which there were always only two responses: repression or military coups.

      Confronted with movements demanding reform, the commission concluded, contrary to those who would blame the insurgency on Cuba or on the romance of revolution, the “state increasingly resorted to violence and terror in order to maintain social control. Political violence was thus a direct expression of structural violence.”

      To questions concerning her schooling and her brother’s execution, Menchú has offered straightforward answers. In a 1999 interview, she said she omitted discussing her experience as a student and servant in the Colegio Belga because she hoped to protect the identities of the Catholic nuns who were involved in the kind of pastoral activism associated with liberation theology. “How I would have loved to tell of all the experiences I had,” she said, but “the last thing I would have wanted during those years was to associate the Belgian school with me.” Menchú did not study with the rest of the students, and only took classes part time a few days a week in the afternoon, working to pay for her room and board as a maid, cleaning the school in the morning and evening, earning twelve quetzals a month, about twelve dollars.7 She admits she did not witness the murder of her brother, but related an account of his killing, including the disputed fact that he was burned alive, from her mother. “And in response to whether my brothers, my father, were rich,” she said to accusations that her family was relatively well-off, “go to Chimel and you will see for yourself.”8

      Menchú would not be the first partisan or literary notable to rearrange events in his or her life. Think of Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain. The lies of Henry Kissinger, also a Nobel Peace Laureate, are legion, yet no publisher would feel the need to include a preface—such as this—setting them in their proper context before reissuing one of his many books. A more appropriate comparison would be Betty Friedan, author of The Feminist Mystique, who portrayed herself as an alienated, apolitical housewife when in fact she was a long-time activist who hailed from a family with deep roots in the Left labor movement. Few would consider using Friedan’s narrative manipulations to cast doubt on the reality of the experience she was describing.

      More than a decade after the scandal, what is notable about I, Rigoberta Menchú is not its exaggerations but its realism. Menchú had arrived in Paris emotionally brutalized, her feelings raw, her sense of urgency to tell a compelling story high. She spoke flawed Spanish and had come from a society in which most information was transmitted orally, where hearsay and rumor, not documented fact, prevailed. (Her memoir is filled with references to how paperwork was used to trick or entrap peasants, along with stories of endless days wasted by her father travelling to the capital to sign a succession of meaningless government forms. One passage in particular highlights the impotence of peasant patriarchy when set against state bureaucracy: Menchú recounts how, as a child, her father took her to the government land office, told her to remain absolutely still, and then took off his hat and bowed to a man sitting behind a typewriter. “That’s something else I used to dream about—that typewriter,” she recalled.) Added to this, she had just survived over a year of hiding in exile, a period that demanded self-censorship. At the same time, her experience speaking to reporters and solidarity delegations prior to her Paris interviews probably led her to realize the value audiences place on eyewitness accounts. The need to draw attention to Guatemala, which compared to neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador was being ignored by the international press, must have tempted her to place herself at the scene of the many crimes she describes. Menchú did not know her interviews with Burgos would produce a book, much less an international bestseller. She had no experience with the publishing industry. And she certainly could not have imagined that every one of her statements would be subject to fine-tooth scrutiny. And yet her narrative hews closely to a truthful chronology, and even her most serious embellishment—that she witnessed her brother being burned to death—“can be considered factual,” according to her principal fact-checker.

      Scholars commonly discuss I, Rigoberta Menchú as reflecting the communal nature of Mayan society, where oral storytelling blurs the line between individual and group experience. Historians Christopher Lutz and George Lovell reach deep into the past to argue that sixteenth-century indigenous accounts of the Spanish conquest were often written in the collective voice, and that when Menchú, on the first page of her memoir, cautions that her memory is poor and that the story she is about to tell is “not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people,” she means it literally. “I can’t force them to understand,” Menchú repeated in her 1999 interview. “Everything, for me, that was the story of my community is also my own story. I did not come from the air.”9

      But over the last decade, as greater light has been thrown on the process that led to the publication of I, Rigoberta Menchú, its protagonist has emerged even more as a determined, distinctive individual. Elisabeth Burgos, then working toward a doctorate in ethnopsychiatry—a new discipline used to treat Paris’s burgeoning immigrant population, many from France’s former colonies—had wanted to interview, according to one account, a generic “Guatemalan Mayan woman,” not Menchú in particular. And aside from supplying the testimony, Menchú was not involved in the transcription, editing, revising, or translation of the book.10 Yet the two principals who did carry out those tasks—Burgos and Arturo Taracena Arriola, a Guatemalan historian and EGP representative in Paris—confirm that Menchú took control of the interview, speaking in a strong, certain voice. Though Taracena and Burgos suggested topics to be covered, they, Taracena reports, had to “rethink the outline” because Menchú’s “narrative capacity” went “beyond what we had originally conceived . . . there was a profound literary quality to Rigoberta Menchú’s voice.” The editors corrected Menchú’s Spanish grammar and syntax, and arranged her account chronologically, but, Taracena remarks, the “book is a narration only by Rigoberta, with her own rhythm, with her own inventions, if there are any, with her own emotions.”

      Burgos withdrew during the interview process, applying her doctoral training in ethnopsychiatry to treat Menchú as a psychoanalyst would an analysand. That is, she gave Menchú time to talk. And considering her clandestine life in Guatemala and exile in Mexico, swinging between bouts of depression and episodes of intense political activity, Menchú needed it. “Everything was piling up together,” she remembers of hiding in Guatemala City, “it was all on top of me.” In bed for days at a time and refusing to eat, Menchú had few people to talk to. “With all the horrors that I had inside me,” she says, “it would have been comforting for me to be able to talk to all the compañeros, or people who understood me, people who were sympathetic.” But put to work as a servant in a house of nuns, her loneliness grew “worse, because as I washed the clothes, my mind was focused on the whole panorama of my past. There was no-one to tell, no-one in whom I could find some comfort.”

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