There can be little doubt that the publishers of David Stoll's book, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans are highly gratified at the readiness of the New York Times, in a front-page "special report" by Larry Rohter subtitled "Tarnished Laureate" published on December 15, to adopt so enthusiastically their thinly-veiled innuendos and allegations. The book, they wrote, was about a "living legend, a young Guatemalan orphaned by death squads who said that her odyssey from a Mayan Indian village to revolutionary exile was 'the story of all poor Guatemalans'. Published in the autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchu, her words brought the Guatemalan army's atrocities to world attention and propelled her to the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize".
But, they imply, their author had dug up another story entirely. I Rigoberta Menchu was "not the eyewitness account it purported to be" but rather a story edited by Elizabeth Burgos which the Nobel laureate has "seemed to repudiate" and which "served the ideological needs of the urban left'" Indeed, this tendentious tale is responsible for "caricaturing the complex feelings of Guatemalan Indians towards the guerrillas" and having "shaped the assumptions of human rights activists and the new multicultural orthodoxy in North American universities." The book's presence on college reading lists has pained many conservatives, such as C. Vann Woodward, who once derided I Rigoberta Minchu in the New York Review of Books as the work of "an unlettered Indian woman".
As it happens, anyone who actually reads David Stoll's book, published by Westview and allegedly based on many years' research, soon finds that these tantalising allegations are not borne out. For starters Stoll discovered that I,Rigoberta Menchu is exactly the book it claimed to be. Elizabeth Burgos, the Venezuelan writer and anthropologist who edited the book from twenty-seven hours of interviews with Rigoberta in 1982, had produced a text very faithful to the interview tapes which she allowed Stoll to listen to. Burgos encouraged Rigoberta to speak at length and without interruption. She did, however, urge her to explain her cultural background and the customs of her people. Some of this material was then spliced into the narrative at appropriate points and digressions trimmed. But the words and emphasis of the book were Rigoberta's. The New York Times's insinuation that the book was somehow scripted by the "urban left" with their romantic notions of peasants and violence is quite at odds with the actual account Stoll offers.
Both Elizabeth Burgos and Rigoberta Menchu made it clear from the outset that they had a political purpose in the book and that was to expose the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan army. Rigoberta made it perfectly clear that she was an active member of a peasant organisation and guerrilla group. Her account was not the fruit of some judicial investigation striving to be fair to the landlords and army officers. It was based on her own experiences and those of close relatives and friends.
From the New York Times it might seem that it is these very claims which have now been contradicted. Have their intrepid reporters, after several intensive days of questioning neighbours and relatives, really discovered the book to be "all lies" as they quote someone saying? Is it, perhaps, the case that half Rigoberta's family was not killed and that the army was not massacring thousands of peasants? In fact nothing of the sort emerges either from Stoll's book or from the reporter's story. Instead, what they do is query details of Rigoberta's account or claims that she personally was present at all the killings she describes. They also mount an attack on Rigoberta's transparently metaphorical claim to tell the story of "all poor Guatemalans".
Both The Times and Stoll, though the former far more blatantly than the latter, write on the implicit assumption that if Rigoberta's account does not square at all points with those of someone else then Rigoberta must be lying. For example she describes how her brother Petrocinio was captured by the army and burnt in front of other family members whereas the reporter finds another brother who says it was not like that at all; in fact Petrocinio was kidnapped, kept in a hole and shot. Two other younger brothers of the laureate had died of disease and malnutrition but a family member is quoted to the effect that Rigoberta could not have witnessed this and it had happened before she was born.
The New York Times reporter claims that Rigoberta was not as poor as she makes herself out to be and that she attended a "prestigious boarding school". Rigoberta did mention living in a convent in I Rigoberta Menchu and also her time working as a maid. Stoll's researches bear out that she worked as a maid at the convent school, being allowed to attend some classes at the same time.
It seems quite likely that Menchu, speaking in a Paris flat in 1982, edited her own account, appropriating stories she had been told by others, highlighting her own hardships and presenting an unsympathetic portrait of her enemies. In an oral culture the distinction between what has happened to oneself and what has happened to close relatives or friends may not be so clear cut. Rigoberta was not giving evidence in a court of law; she was trying to explain how bad the situation was in her country for her people and to do so as vividly as possible.
The affected naivety belongs not to those who have lauded Rigoberta's book but to those who now seek to discredit it. Did they really suppose that because she was a Guatemalan peasant she was incapable of rhetoric and metaphor? Or are Western journalists the only ones who are allowed local color? And only Western politicians the arts of spin-doctoring? At no point is evidence offered that Rigoberta invented the blood-soaked plight of her people and country, even if her account of it was a partial one.
David Stoll ventures a substantial political criticism but is equally unable to make it stick. He claims that Rigoberta was romanticising a guerrilla force whose activities had brought appalling violence to the region where she grew up, much of it intra-communal in nature. The curious aspect of this criticism is that, once again, an attentive reader of I Rigoberta Menchu would have grasped both the huge human cost of the guerrilla war and the fact that it often pitted indios against ladinos rather than peasants against landlords - these categories overlapping at points but being by no means identical.
It is alleged that Rigoberta and Elizabeth Burgos were engaged in romanticising the guerrillas. In fact, what the two women were really embarked on was an effort to change the terms of the struggle. By telling her story as effectively as possible Rigoberta was indeed doing something which the guerrilla commanders had failed to encompass. She was putting the Army's brutal regime on the defensive. The eventual decision of the government to negotiate with the guerrillas was in part fruit of this successful moral campaign. All that Stoll can offer against this are some nauseating insinuations familiar to anyone who has studied the rationalizations of US-sponsored extirmination campaigns, that it was the guerillas who are somehow responsible for the Guatemalan army's genocidal violence.
At the end of his book Stoll almost admits that: "Even if it is not the eyewitness account it claims to be, that does not detract from its significance. Her story has helped shift perceptions of indigenous people from hapless victims to men and women fighting for their rights. The recognition she has won is helping Mayas become conscious of themselves as historical actors. To many ladinos as well as Mayas, Rigoberta is a national symbol and will continue to be one, however many vicissitudes she suffers because she is a living one." If he had taken these conclusions a little more seriously Stoll might have written a work less inviting of sensationalist exploitation. And he might have dropped that unqualified phrase "not an eyewitness account" since he does not deny that Rigoberta witnessed much that she relates, nor that there are other sorts of truth to be found in her story. The last sentence of Stoll's book attempts to mimic a Maya myth: "The story Rigoberta gave her people can be chopped to pieces, like some of her neighbours were during the violence, but it will grow back together again, and maybe Guatemala will too." CP
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