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in which all I s are rational, agentive, unitary, [and] all I s are poten-
tially interesting autobiographers . . . yet, not all are I s. Where Western
eyes see Man as a unique individual rather than a member of a collectivity,
of race or nation, of sex or sexual preference, Western eyes see the colo-
nized as amorphous generalized collectivity (Smith and Watson xvii). To
produce autobiographical texts, outside or on the margins of Western cul-
ture, is itself a transgression of the genre, one wrought with conflict given
the problematic ideological assumptions embedded in the practice of auto-
biography.
Texts that transgress the limits of autobiography have been classified
by Caren Kaplan as falling under the term out-law genres. She argues
that such texts, including but not limited to testimonios, violate Derrida s
definition of The Law of Genre :
As soon as the word genre is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon
as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is
established, norms and interdictions are not far behind. . . . Thus, as
soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must
not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly
or monstrosity. (Derrida, Genre 203 4)
The status of testimonio as an out-law genre, and the problematic
reception that such a status implies, can be analyzed in the critical re-
sponses to one specific testimonio: I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian
Woman in Guatemala [Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la
consiencia] by Rigoberta Menchú with Elisabeth Burgos Debray. This par-
ticular text is taken here as exemplary, but only with a certain degree of
trepidation, since testimonio, as Beverley states in the disclaimer to his
definition, is by nature a protean and demotic form not yet subject to
legislation by a normative literary establishment (Beverley, Margin
93). To posit a certain text as exemplary is at least partially a move to-
ward standardizing or fixing the genre so as to clear the way for
Testimonio and Its Reception 45
smooth incorporation. It is, in other words, a strategy that carries the po-
tential for neutralization.
Grounding this discussion on this particular text was rather a decision
based on the existence of research, the availability of the text in English
translation, and the inclusion of the text in courses outside of Spanish and
Latin American Studies departments. I, Rigoberta Menchú is of particular
importance in debates over curricular issues, since it is included on the
reading list for one track of the humanities curriculum at Stanford Univer-
sity. It is thus exemplary, not in that it sets or enforces norms, but rather in
that it can illuminate the dynamics of reception within U.S. institutions.
This particular testimonio is also useful in this discussion due to its
more recent involvement in yet another controversy. In 1998, the U.S. an-
thropologist David Stoll published Rigoberta Menchú and the History of
All Poor Guatemalans, which challenged the veracity of Menchú s story.1
There followed a flurry of reports in the mainstream media as well as
Menchú s response defending the core truth of her account as well as her
right to tell her own story.2 While controversy has died down, and the book
continued to be taught in many university courses, Stoll s book and the
ensuing debates highlight central issues that are relevant to the study of all
testimonios.
The controversy brings to the surface questions on the very notion of
truth. Stoll s book casts doubt on certain points of Menchú s account
based on contradictory statements from others. What it comes down to is
that there are competing truths and each narrative presents its own ver-
sion. In light of this, the discussion of this particular testimonio, or any
other for that matter, goes well beyond the sorting of the true and the
false and moves toward questions of representation and the construc-
tion of historical memory. Marc Zimmerman, writing years prior to the
publication of Stoll s book, states that whatever doubts have been raised
about details of Rigoberta s story, they have failed to shake the founda-
tions: the atrocities, the losses in the context of events that many people
know of from a wide variety of printed and taped accounts (Zimmerman
112).3
Issues of representation are bound up with another issue highlighted by
the controversy surrounding Stoll s book namely the question of who
has the authority to represent truth and how. Because all events that we
do not witness firsthand are available to us solely through competing nar-
ratives, the official or accepted version is constructed by institutionally
sanctioned authorities. In this process, testimonial narrators like Rigo-
46 Latino American Literature in the Classroom
berta Menchú [are granted] only the possibility of being witnesses, but not
the power to create their own narrative authority and negotiate its condi-
tions of truth and representativity (Beverley, The Real Thing 276).
Arturo Arias, writing specifically about Stoll s accusations against
Menchú, ties together issues of truth, authenticity, and the Other s
discursive authority. He writes, We can only expect an absolute truth if
we believe in perfectly verifiable truths or if we still see or insist on seeing
authentic indigenous subjects as noble savages whose alleged primitive-
ness puts them closer to some imagined natural truth. According to this
criteria, indigenous persons who use discourse strategically either lose au-
thenticity or are being manipulated by outside forces (Arias 76).
What Arias points to is the lack of recognition of subaltern subjects as
creators of their discourse, a critical resistance that lies at the center of the
difficulty in approaching testimonios. This resistance to relinquishing our
power of interpretation, experienced and explored by Behar in Translated
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