Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio

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Can   Literature  Promote    Justice

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          Trauma Narrative   and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio

Kimberly A. Nance

Can Literature Promote Justice?

Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio

Kimberly A. Nance



Vanderbilt University Press nashville

© 2006 Vanderbilt University Press All rights reserved  First edition 2006 10  09  08  07  06  1  2  3  4  5 Printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Wendy McAnally Material from three previously published essays appears here with the permission of the copyright holders: “ ‘Let us say that there is before me a human being who is suffering’: Empathy, Exotopy and Ethics in the Reception of Latin American Collaborative Testimonio.” In Bakhtin: Ethics and Mechanics, edited by Valerie Z. Nollan, 57–74. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003. “Disarming Testimony: Speakers’ Resistance to Writers’, Critics’ and Readers’ Appropriations in Latin American Testimonio.” Biography 24, no. 3 (2001): 570–88. “From Quarto de Despejo to a Little House: Domesticity as Personal and Political Testimony in the Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus.” PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association 5 (2001): 42–49. Nance, Kimberly A. Can literature promote justice? : trauma narrative and social action in Latin American testimonio / Kimberly A. Nance. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8265-1523-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 0-8265-1524-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Latin American prose literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society—Latin America. I. Title. PQ7082.P76N36 2006 868’.6080998—dc22     2005022819

To Liam and Niall

Contents



Acknowledgments   ix Introduction:   Latin American Testimonio and Testimonial   Criticism as Project, Process, and Product   1

1. A Genre Without a Strategy?   Latin American Testimonio as a Rhetorical Project   19 2. A Genre Without an Addressee?   Readers, Rhetoric, and Resistance   48 3. A Genre Without a Chance?   Predicting the Social Effectiveness   of Testimonial Narratives   66 4. The Capacities and Constraints of Testimonio’s Speakers and Experiencing Writers   100 5. The Capacities and Constraints of Collaborating Writers, Translators, Editors, and Publishers   119 6. The Capacities and Constraints of Critics:   Celebration and Mourning   137



Conclusion:   From Poetics to Prosaics   157



Appendix:   A Brief History of Latin American   Testimonial Narrative   167



Notes   179



viii

Works Cited   193 Index   207

Acknowledgments

My work on trauma narrative owes much to conversations with my father, John Coleman Nance. When I was in high school, he was applying his experience from the military hospital in Da Nang, Viet Nam, to the emergency room of Cook County Hospital in Chicago. At dinner each night, he told the day’s stories, and explained how they would figure at upcoming legislative hearings and budget panels where he lobbied for social legislation that would reduce the incidence of trauma. Thus, early on, I was convinced that trauma required not only treatment but changes in public policy to prevent it from happening again, and I grew up amid empirical evidence that narrative could be used to promote those changes. Years later, as I presented papers and published articles on testimonio, conversations with audience members and readers made it clear that interest in the genre extended beyond the circles of Latin Americanists. When I set out to make this research accessible to those readers, Betsy Phillips at Vanderbilt University Press took me at my word and held me to it. I appreciate her faith and tenacity. Often our conversations were informed by the comments of a generous and demanding reader who was at the time anonymous. I am pleased now to be able to thank Paul John Eakin. Finally, no accounting of the conversations that shaped this book would be complete without acknowledging countless exchanges with Keith Alan Sprouse, who has always been willing to talk about literature, justice, and persuasion. ix

Can Literature Promote Justice?

Introduction Latin American Testimonio and Testimonial Criticism as Project, Process, and Product

Among Latin Americanists, the genre of testimonio is most often traced to Esteban Montejo and Miguel Barnet’s 1966 Biograf ía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave). Barnet, an anthropologist with a deep interest in Cuban history, conducted a series of interviews with Montejo, a veteran of the War of Independence. Born to parents enslaved on a sugar plantation, and separated from his mother at birth, Montejo tried repeatedly to escape. “I was,” he declares, “a cimarrón from birth” (22).1 As a young man, Montejo took to the mountains to live as a solitary fugitive, returning only after emancipation had been declared in the effort to attract broader support for Cuba’s struggle for ­ independence from Spain. After working as a free man in a ­variety of occupations, Montejo enlisted in the War of 1898. The book, a broad-ranging account of Montejo’s life and times, ends with his insistence that, at the age of 103, he is still ready to take up his machete and defend his country should the need arise. In his biography of Montejo, Barnet chose to elide his own interview questions and write in the first-person voice of his speaking subject, a man who could not read or write. This technique became a commonplace of Latin American testi- monio, as did Barnet’s assertion that the project he undertook with Montejo was more than the life story of an individual. Montejo, Barnet insisted, gave voice to an entire class of people whose history had been ignored. Barnet’s choice to end the last chapter with Montejo’s promise to join in any future battles for Cuba—and such battles were a distinct possibility in the turbu



Can Literature Promote Justice?

lent sixties—offers evidence that the goal of the book was not only to amplify and correct readers’ images of the past: both Montejo and Barnet sought to inspire readers to change the future. While not all testimonios have been collaborative, the tripartite combination of a first-person narrative of injustice, an insistence that the subject’s experience is representative of a larger class, and an intent to work toward a more just future soon came to define the genre. Despite later characterizations of testimonio as a uniquely “demotic and dynamic form, not subject to critical legislation by a normative literary establishment” (Beverley, Against Literature, 71), what began in the sixties as a genre of margins coalesced fairly quickly into a center complete with its own literary prize. Barnet began to theorize about testimonio at the same time he began to write it, and other collaborating writers soon followed his lead with articles that presented critical formulations of testimonio while chronicling the process of producing specific texts. By 1970, Havana’s Casa de las Américas publishing house had already recognized testimonio as a separate category in its annual literary prize competition, alongside novels and poetry. The rules of the contest spelled out a relatively capacious definition of the genre. Testimonies must document some aspect of Latin American or Caribbean reality from a direct source. A direct source is understood as knowledge of the facts by the author or his or her compilation of narratives or evidence obtained from the individuals involved or qualified witnesses. In both cases reliable documentation, written or graphic, is indispensable. The form is at the author’s discretion, but literary quality is also indispensable. (Beverley, Against Literature, 155n)

I would extend the founding date for testimonio back to 1960, with the publication in Brazil of Quarto de Despejo by Carolina Maria de Jesus.2 The book, whose Portuguese title translates as



Introduction



“the trash room,” is a collection of daily entries written by an Afro-Brazilian woman struggling to raise her children in a cardboard shanty in the favela, the poorest district of São Paulo. She had learned to read and write during her two years of primary school, and kept a diary that combined her accounts of day-today life with political analyses and calls for social action. After a chance encounter between the writer and a newspaper reporter, excerpts from her diary appeared in the Brazilian press, and Livraria Francisco Alves published a selection of entries as a book. Quarto de Despejo caused a sensation in Brazil, selling ninety thousand copies within the first six months, making it at that point “the most successful book in Brazilian publishing history.” Child of the Dark, the English translation (published in the same year as the original) fared equally well, with “sales of several hundred thousand copies in hardcover alone. Translated into more than a dozen languages, the diary is still in print in the United States, Canada, France, England, Japan, Germany, Cuba, and Russia” (Levine, “Afterword,” 151). Without a doubt, however, the testimonio most familiar to US readers is the one produced when Elisabeth Burgos- Debray interviewed human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú. Only twenty-four years old at the time, the organizer from rural Guatemala discussed her family’s experience of injustice in the social and cultural context of a larger indigenous community. Along with descriptions of local ritual and tradition, Menchú told Burgos of the struggle to clear and cultivate small plots of land for subsistence farming, exploitative labor practices on coffee plantations, government corruption, and massacres at the hand of a paranoid and sadistic military. An edited version of those interviews became the single most widely read testimonio in the history of Latin American literature: Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala) (1982). Circulation increased substantially when Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992;



Can Literature Promote Justice?

banners proclaiming the award were added to the cover of the already printed Siglo XXI edition. At universities, Menchú’s story found ready readers in women’s studies programs as well as among Latin Americanists. Right-wing critics further increased readers’ awareness of Menchú’s testimony. During the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, conservatives cited the presence of her book on undergraduate reading lists as evidence that tenured radicals were abandoning the disinterested study of literary masterpieces in favor of political indoctrination. It was claimed that more undergraduates read Menchú than Shakespeare, and in an address broadcast on C-SPAN, one critic went so far as to assert that Menchú’s book was the single most assigned text on college campuses in the United States. That claim was probably hyperbolic, but what is certain is that Menchú’s testimonio soon became even more contro­ versial. In Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999), anthropologist David Stoll insisted that while there was ample evidence of widespread political oppression in Guatemala, Menchú’s account contained a number of significant misrepresentations about herself and her family. In particular, Stoll alleged that Menchú had understated her formal education, fabricated the deaths of some members of her family during the war, and failed to mention the role of land disputes between her family and other community members as a primary source of regional strife. Stoll’s book sparked international debate. As chronicled in Arturo Arias’s collection of critical essays The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2001), the terms of that debate soon moved beyond issues of the validity of Stoll’s research methods and the accuracy of Menchú’s text. Some of Menchú’s defenders asserted that the details in question were not significant in the larger social context, while others declared that questions of truth were irrelevant to a work that should have been read as literature. This initial focus on a single testimonio soon encompassed the entire genre.



Introduction



In some sense, this debate was overdue. Critical reception in the early years of testimonio had been characterized by a neareuphoric celebration of a poetics of solidarity among all concerned. In the sixties, seventies, and early eighties, victory had been declared as new voices contested oppressive governments’ official stories. In the ensuing decade, that euphoria faded, and with the end of the past century came a spate of books in which critics of all political stripes expressed a general suspicion of motives and a profound pessimism regarding the genre’s social possibilities. Whether nostalgically, as of lost innocence, or righteously, as of revealed guilt, many critics have come to speak of the testimonial moment in past tense. As testimonio in Latin America reaches forty, articles lauding the genre’s radical newness have given way to suggestions that its moment has passed. Heralds of a revolutionary birth have ceded to calls for mourning. In the interim, critical reaction has consisted in the main of thirty years of celebration and ten of suspicion, all focused more on the contexts, character, and motives of testimonio’s speakers and collaborating writers than on the texts themselves, and reaching a crisis with the controversy surrounding the testimonio of Rigoberta Menchú. Both the euphoria and the pessimism have revealed more about the genre’s ability to frustrate conventional literary and cultural criticism than about testimonio itself. With rare exceptions, articles on testimonio have been marked by exclusionary definitions—declarations of what testi­ monio is not: not fiction, not autobiography, not literature. In David William Foster’s Handbook of Latin American Literature (1992), an essay by Chuck Tatum groups “testimonial/documentary literature” with “comic books and comic strips, singlepanel cartoons, photonovels, posters, pop occult texts . . . and detective fiction” in the category of “paraliterature” (687–728). Rejecting as inadequate such traditional terminology as speaker, writer, and narrator, many critics have coined and debated new



Can Literature Promote Justice?

names for the participants: compilador, gestor/gestante, co­ prologuist, and autobiolocutor.3 This study will employ the term speaker for each speaking subject in a testimonio, whether or not they wrote their own texts. When speakers who wrote their own testimonio are to be singled out in the analysis, they will be called experiencing writers, to distinguish them from the collaborating writers who have often played a part in Latin American testimonio. While I will make the case that all testimonio, including oral, is a form of representation, I will still call the speaking subject in the text by the name of the person represented (e.g., “Menchú says . . .”) to avoid repeating circumlocutions such as “the textual representation of Menchú says . . . .” As will be demonstrated, however, the distinction bears keeping in mind, even if it would soon become tedious on the page. Another complication in writing about testimonial literature is the technical designation of authorship in the case of collaborative works. Broader issues of ownership of text will be discussed later in this study. For purposes of citation, collaborative works that narrate the life of a single speaker will be alphabetized under the name of that speaker. The critical focus on role and process, already operating in René Jara and Hernán Vidal’s Testimonio y literatura (1986), broadened to interrogate the function of criticism itself in collections such as Georg Gugelberger’s The Real Thing (1996) and Allen Carey-Webb and Stephen Benz’s Teaching and Testimony (1996). Such a focus has continued in John Beverley’s Subalternity and Representation (1999), Doris Sommer’s Proceed with Caution (1999), Ileana Rodríguez’s The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (2001), and Beverley’s Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (2004). All the while, remarkably little critical attention has been devoted to the actual texts that comprise this rapidly aging novelty. In the introduction to At Face Value, her comprehensive 1991 study of autobiographical narrative in Spanish America, Sylvia Molloy explains that she has excluded



Introduction



testimonio in part because “the very rich production of testimonial literature, the conditions that govern its production, the unwritten rules that give it shape, make it a genre unto itself. As such it should be considered” (10). While volumes have been devoted to the conditions of testimonio’s production, the rhetorical rules remain unwritten. Hence, the primary goal of this study: to discern those rules and thus to begin considering the textual elements of the testimonial genre “as such.” This study will trace the development of the genre, seeking to discern those “rules that give it shape.” In the process, it will address some issues that have been conspicuously absent from discussions of the conditions under which testimonio has been produced: the capacities and constraints that speakers, writers, and critics have brought to their projects. For the purposes of this study, testimonio will be defined as the body of works in which speaking subjects who present themselves as somehow “ordinary” represent a personal experience of injustice, whether directly to the reader or through the offices of a collaborating writer, with the goal of inducing readers to participate in a project of social justice. Defining the genre primarily in terms of an end (increasing social justice) and means (representing a personal experience of injustice, whether orally, in writing, or in some other form) rejects the notion that testimonio is “spontaneous” as opposed to other realms of literature that are seen as “shaped.” No speaker or writer can actually cause the listener or reader to relive his or her experience. To be communicated—to whatever extent that communication is possible—the experience must be represented. Such a definition also means taking into account what Molloy has already noted is a “very rich production.” By the above definition, testimonio is neither limited to written forms nor to the purely verbal. Testimonial representation may include film, television, visual and plastic arts, music, and even site planning and architecture.



Can Literature Promote Justice?

In its written form, testimonio has ranged from photo­ duplicated or handcopied pages that originally circulated under­ground in samizdat form (many of which, like their producers, did not survive) through volumes from larger presses with higher production values and broader circulation. It includes testimonio produced by experiencing writers—amateur, empirically skilled, and professional—as well as the testimonios of non-writing speakers, who have spanned a similar spectrum of technical proficiency. In all cases, the production of testi­ monio has included varying degrees of editing and shaping— inevitably, as noted, by the experiencer, and often also by collaborating writers or editors, whether acknowledged or not. As a result of these processes of representation, written testimonio has taken many forms, including not only the one now familiar to the many readers of Menchú, but also diaries, stories, novels, dramas, essays, and poetry.4 While this investigation will focus on published testimonial narratives, it will also be informed by my study of the oral contexts and informal circulation that helped to shape the texts before they reached the page. Given an interest in how the largest audience reads testimonio, more attention will be devoted here to widely circulated texts, but again this cannot take place without looking at why it is these texts that have attained such currency, and why others have not. This will not be a study of how a local audience of the speakers’ communities might read their testimonios. In many cases, such a reader would be purely hypothetical, owing to issues of language, literacy, and access to books. If such readers did exist in large numbers, the world would already be a different place. The provision of English translations for all of the quotations acknowledges that testimonio has its largest circulation in this language—to the extent that some testimonios are published first in English and only later, if at all, in the language in which they began. This circulation owes much to the increasing inclusion of testimonios in English-speaking universities, in



Introduction



courses in women’s studies, anthropology, history, world literature, and other programs outside of language departments. Testimonio as a genre has not only coalesced into a center, it has spawned its own margins, with “meta-testimonios” like Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s “Alligator Park” (1992) and Rosario Sanmiguel’s “El reflejo de la luna” [The Reflection of the Moon] (1994), stories that thematize the production of testimonio.5 And, it must be noted, testimonio is now far from politically univocal, evident not only at what could be regarded as the arguable borders of the genre, in works like Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1981), but also in works of more conventionally testimonial form like Luis Llovio-Menéndez’s Insider (1988) and Ana Rodríguez’s Diary of a Survivor: Nineteen Years in a Cuban Women’s Prison (1995).6 As a result, one cannot claim to be personally in favor of testimonio’s social project without being specific about which testimonios and which project. The body of testimonial criticism is likewise politically broad. Recognizing the political breadth of testimonio and defining it as a Latin American subset of trauma narrative with social intentions will require relinquishing certain claims of uniqueness. Kalí Tal points out that such claims are common to the reception of each new genre of trauma narrative, and may well be related to the forgetting that helps afford new occasions of trauma. She cites Daniel Goleman: “On the one hand, we forget that we have done this before, and, on the other, do not quite realize what we are doing again. The self-deception is complete” (7). A broader definition of testimonio will also permit critical recupera­ tion of links with such sibling genres as Holocaust narratives and abolitionist narratives, a direction that has proven fruitful for the relatively few critics who have so far taken it.7 Close examination of the social and critical contexts of testimonio helps to explain why so little textual criticism has heretofore been attempted. One factor, certainly, is the positive attraction that testimonio’s production side has held for literary

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Can Literature Promote Justice?

and cultural critics. Small wonder here: the very novelty of the cross-cultural collaborative process has virtually demanded criti­ cal focus, especially in conjunction with the developing strains of feminist and cultural studies that have offered new tools with which to understand the nature of collaboration. But, the dearth of attention to testimonio’s texts is not only a matter of stiff competition. Critical attention to the process should not have automatically precluded analysis of the textual products. Underlying the reluctance to apply textual criticism to testimonial writing has been a vast spectrum of objections: theoretical and practical, personal and social, utopian and fatalist. At one extreme, critical reticence has taken the form of a definitive insistence on silence, on the grounds that testimonio offers no textual object on which literary critics might legitimately speak. This stance may be reverential—treating testimonios as sacred texts beyond criticism—or merely practical, assuming them to be transparent texts consisting only of unelaborated surfaces and where nothing is in need of critical explication. It may even be dismissive, arguing that testimonio does not meet the standard of literature worthy of serious study. Other critical silences have been more provisional, as in the Wittgensteinian thread that defines testimonio as texts for which traditional literary criticism lacks the appropriate analytical tools (“what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence”). This stance sometimes recommends referral to other specialists: anthropologists or investigative journalists, for instance. In all of these conceptualizations, testimonial text is assumed to lie either beneath literary critics’ notice or else beyond their ken. Finally, there is an emergent Hippocratic thread (“first, do no harm”) wherein articles are marked not so much by a sense that existing literary tools are inadequate to the task, outdated, or irrelevant, but by a nagging suspicion, not always explicit, that application of critical tools to testimonial texts could do political damage. A second goal of this study, then, will be to examine



Introduction

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this proliferation of reticences for what it says about testimonio and about criticism. In “Colonial Legacies, Multicultural Futures: Relativism, Objectivity, and the Challenge of Otherness,” Satya Mohanty calls into question the notion of respect as foreclosing critical scrutiny. It is tempting, Mohanty concedes, to forswear criticism: “What better way of ensuring the equality of cultures than to assert that, since all explanations of the other risk repeating the colonizer’s judgments, we should simply refuse to judge or explain, forsaking understanding for the sake of respect” (111). However, Mohanty insists, this stance implicitly precludes the possibility of multiculturalist projects that require learning from others, “for we can learn from others only if we take them seriously enough to imagine situations in which they may in fact be wrong about some things in ways that we can specify and understand” (113). He concludes that “both cross-cultural study and the dialogue it enables must be based on the belief that ‘getting it right’ may be important both for ‘us’ and for ‘them’ ” (114). Such study should be informed both by the acknowledgment that ideas have actual social consequences and by the conviction that some outcomes are preferable to others—that “our methodological and moral scruples refer beyond ourselves, beyond our immediate relationships; to the social world; in fact, those scruples are part of its fabric, its essential furniture” (115). In this study, I will approach the analysis of testimonio’s texts and of their critical reception in the context of precisely such a multiculturalist project: a concrete social action initiated by its speaking subjects, in which these subjects seek to enlist the cooperation of various others. Testimonio is simultaneously political and literary. The fact that the project takes place through a medium that at least has many of the hallmarks of literature cannot be ignored—hence the inadequacy of wishful forwarding of the issue of testimonio to colleagues in other disciplines—but neither can the fact that

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Can Literature Promote Justice?

literature here is instrumental. For these speakers, the goal is not only to produce books; they are after concrete social change. In his 1986 article on Chilean testimony, “Código político y código literario: El género testimonio en Chile hoy” (“The Testimonial Genre in Chile Today: Political Code and Literary Code”), Ariel Dorfman made a brilliant but abortive attempt to articulate the interlinked literary and political dimensions of testimonio. Juxtaposing the two codes and calling them “Siamese twins,” Dorfman asserted that they implied vastly and perhaps incompatibly different approaches to writing about trauma. While the political code rejected deliberate shaping of the retelling of experience in order to engage the reader, the literary code appeared to give short shrift to the political dimension. The codes were, he concluded, “competing myths” of Prometheus versus Orpheus (195). In the ensuing critical impasse, most scholars have agreed more or less politely not to criticize testimonio seriously as text, and/or to substitute either admiration for its producers or suspicion of their motives for any politically engaged textual analysis of the product. The affirmation that testimonio as project seeks to affect the world does not imply that literary criticism is currently wellequipped to discern, predict, or evaluate those effects; hence, the collective critical silence regarding testimonial text might be defended temporarily as a sort of moratorium that should be maintained until we can inform ourselves of the likely social effects of both testimonial texts and our work on them. But ultimately, if literary criticism is to be more than a parlor game whose suspension is without consequence, protestations of ignor­ance will not be sufficient, and it will be necessary to develop a socially responsible practice of testimonial criticism, including considerations of potential efficacy. Elvia Alvarado, a Honduran political organizer, puts it bluntly in Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart (1987).



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If you sit around thinking what to do and end up not doing anything, why bother even thinking about it? You’re better off going out on the town and having a good time. No, we have to think and act. That’s what we’re doing here, and that’s what you have to do. I hate to offend you, but we won’t get anywhere just by writing and reading books. (146)

This sharp admonition is, of course, double-edged. When Al­­ varado makes that statement she knows it will be commu­nicated in the form of text. Likewise, much has been made of Menchú’s insistence that her testimony did not come from a book. Before one makes the gratifyingly self-deprecating move against literature, however, it bears remembering that, in both cases, an activist with little patience for useless activity did cast a practical vote in favor of the production of written text. Neither Alvarado nor Menchú is ultimately either anti-intellectual or anti-te‑xt. The problem to which both speakers point is situated in Alvarado’s modifier, “just writing and reading books.” This is evident when she goes on: “I know that books are important, and I hope this book will be important for the people who read it” (146). In speakers’ terms, the justification for writing and reading testimonio can only be found in the genre’s outcomes in the world, in the changes in readers’ attitudes, and the actions that the texts promote. Nonetheless, keeping in mind Mohanty’s admonition that learning from others requires accepting the possibility that they can be wrong, even the best of intentions must not be mistaken for actual social effects. Accepting the intentional fallacy is as serious a shortcoming in politics as in literature, and so it remains to develop a means of determining whether and to what extent testimonial texts can be expected to further their speakers’ social projects. One obvious approach to this question would be extra­ textual: for instance, polling readers before and after they read

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Can Literature Promote Justice?

a work to try to determine its effects on them. Such a straight­ forward approach is fraught with difficulties. Aside from the inherent complications of self-reporting, many effects may be neither immediately apparent nor readily traceable to the act of reading. Another logical alternative, observation of the actions of readers, presents immense problems of scope (not to mention the ethics of such surveillance) and ignores the dimension of attitudinal change, which may be a preliminary to action. Still, one of the few critics to connect text to completed ­action did take precisely this tack: observe the world after testimonio. Testimonio’s speakers declare emphatically that their projects neither end with the production of the text nor even with its enthusiastic reception. Instead, they describe the texts as intermediate steps in a process directed toward producing change in the lifeworld. Ill-equipped to assess such effects, most critics initially responded either by reducing the project to its literary manifestation or else by settling for a rather blithe application of the intentional fallacy: that is, believing that good will could be counted upon eventually to produce good social outcomes. The more recent critical turn asserts the converse: that the absence of apparent radical social change to date must mean that something is fatally wrong with testimonio. In the early nineties, John Beverley reported reconsidering testimonio in the light of the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections in Nicaragua (Against Literature, 87), and in 1995 he summed up his evidence against the efficacy of testimonio in one word: “Chiapas” (“Real Thing,” 282). But 1995 was hardly the last word on Chiapas, and it is still too early to pronounce the last word on testimonio. While Beverley sought to broaden the focus from testimonio as literary production to testimonio as social project, in the process he seriously foreshortened the project’s timeframe. Speakers often project social effects over periods of generations. Alvarado, for instance, states that it is already too late



Introduction

15

to expect change to come for her young children, but that her grandchildren might be beneficiaries (27). With respect to many speakers’ timeframes, assessments of testimonio’s social efficacy through examination of current political realities are likely to result in premature declarations of failure. Proof of efficacy of any action for social change is often long in coming. Struggles for civil rights can make cathedralbuilding seem like a short-term endeavor. Even the more extensive evidence of continued social injustice and failed revolution is not enough to prove the impossibility of the testimonial project—certainly not on the speakers’ own terms.8 The First World expectation of immediate gratification seems to extend even to the appetite for social justice. Yet, if it is still too early to expect empirical proof of testimonio’s efficacy, how can we know whether testimonio might not be a blind alley, diverting limited resources from what might be more productive strategies for social change? For long-term projects in particular, it makes sense to use every means possible to determine whether the expenditure of time and energy is likely ever to be productive. One alternative would be to approach the problem of efficacy from a textual perspective—to compare the rhetorical strategies employed in testimonial texts with what is already known about effective rhetorical practice. Such an approach would be admittedly indirect and incomplete, yielding only an estimate of whether a given text could reasonably be expected to work rather than a guarantee that it will. Politically engaged criticism, like politics in general, is an art of the possible. A responsible empirical approach cannot be based only on general notions of what might be persuasive, or even on comparisons with strategies used in that most contemporary of rhetorics, advertising. It is not reasonable to expect a priori that the same strategies that induce readers to shop at the Gap (or even at Benetton)9 will also induce those readers to work for social justice.

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A textual approach to testimonio as a rhetorical project of persuasion will require not only the employment of conventional tools of rhetorical analysis, but also data on how readers actually respond to various textual strategies for the presentation of social injustice. Here, the literature of social psychology offers a substantial body of directly relevant research. Melvin Lerner’s analysis of a broad range of studies offers detailed experimental and theoretical bases for determining what types of textual strategies for presenting injustice are likely to influence readers to act for social justice. By comparing the strategies employed in testimonios with extrapolations from Lerner’s findings, it is possible to make educated projections regarding the probable social effects of specific texts. Since the speakers’ project is precisely such encouragement to act, and since Lerner’s subjects correspond well to readers of testimonio, his work offers a basis for a preliminary assessment of the testimonial project on its speakers’ own terms. Lerner’s findings in this connection are at once hopeful and sobering. From his experimental data, it would appear that readers do have a fundamental stake in believing that they live in a just world “so that they can go about their daily lives with a sense of trust, hope and confidence in their future”(14).10 Moreover, he finds, ordinary people value justice so highly that, under certain circumstances, they are willing to invest property, time, and even their lives in social causes (175). That is the hopeful news: under the right circumstances, textual descriptions of injustice can motivate action. The sobering news is that the qualifications for socially effective text are remarkably exigent. If they are not met, readers will maintain their belief in justice not by adjusting the world but rather by altering their own perceptions of events and persons (20). Whether people confronted with evidence of social injustice will act to change the world or to erase the problem



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from their consciousness appears to respond to a quite specific set of textual variables in the representation of suffering, of the sufferers, and of the readers themselves in the text. Lerner’s work suggests that, as human beings with limited resources to confront injustice, we apparently perform the ethical equivalent of triage (172–73). Evidence that such a powerful and widespread human response can be engaged by textual situations and even by explicitly fictional ones, as well as by real-life encounters, offers both experimental support and theoretical explanation for a link between literature and the rest of life (15). Lerner’s detailed observations regarding the effects of specific presentational strategies on witnesses’ attitudes and propensity to action provide support for a textual approach to criticism of testimonio’s social project, offering a crucial entry point to the vast and underexplored area of reader resistance.11 Armed with data regarding the connections between literature and life—specifically, which textual strategies for the representation of social injustice are most likely to result in reader action—it is possible to develop criteria for the evaluation of the practice of testimonio as a textual instrument of a larger social project. The actions of speakers, collaborating writers, critics and other participants in the production, distribution and reception of testimonio can likewise be critiqued in relation to their practice and/or support of effective rhetorical strategy. But to criticize testimonio’s rhetorical strategies from an engaged stance is not only to examine how closely the actual execution approaches the apparent limits of the possible, it also implies seeking reasons why testimonial texts have turned out as they have, so that those findings can inform future projects, all the while acknowledging that intentions are not synonymous with outcomes. The point here is not to unmask traitors in testimonio’s midst, but rather to recognize and minimize what amounts

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to “friendly fire”—unintended damage inflicted on one’s allies. Given the scope of the genre, it is not my intent to catalogue every testimonio, much less to undertake a close reading and analysis of each one, but rather to construct a literary historical, rhetorical, and critical framework that will enable a consideration of Latin American testimonio as a socioliterary genre and a reading of testimonial texts on the genre’s own terms.

1. A Genre Without a Strategy? Latin American Testimonio as a Rhetorical Project

Testimonio is not only a text. It is a project of social justice in which text is an instrument. Testimonial narratives are doubly connected to the lifeworld, in their inceptions as responses to speakers’ real-life experiences of injustice and also by their intended outcomes in social action on the part of readers. Although the genre is frequently characterized as didactic, that description fails to recognize that the goal of testimonio is not only to educate readers about injustice, but to persuade those readers to act. Given its goal of persuasion, testimonio is properly situated in the realm of rhetoric, which offers crucial analytical tools for approaching the genre on its own terms. Rhetorical analysis of testimonio demands close attention to the speaker’s goal with reference to a particular audience, as well as identification of specific strategies. Already this approach runs counter to a dominant mode in the history of testimonial criticism—a reluctance to acknowledge or assess speakers’ rhetorical strategies. In the preface to At Face Value, Sylvia Molloy explains that testimonio lies outside the scope of her study of auto­biography since she has “chosen to study texts written by writers, that is, autobiographers who, when sitting down to inscribe their selves on paper, are aware, in some form or other, of the bind of translating self into rhetorical construct; writers who, with a fair amount of literary awareness, resign themselves to the necessary mediation of textual representation.” Molloy

19

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does add that testimonial literature should be considered “a genre unto itself,” but her decision not to include testimonio’s speakers in the company of self-aware producers of mediated texts illustrates one type of critical reticence regarding testimonio (10). In her 1996 essay, “Spanish American Testimonial Novel: Some Afterthoughts,” Elzbieta Sklodowska writes of ethical reservations about criticism, of “a concern with invalidating testimony, of transposing the reality of human suffering into nothing more than text” (98). In “Political Code and Literary Code,” Ariel Dorfman initially evinces a similar reluctance. “This is,” he reminds the reader, “a literature born of urgency.” Is not this sort of communication produced by casting aside beforehand any idea of a sustained, intellectual elaboration? If such a necessity stems, as we have seen, as much from the nonprofessional character of the writers as it does from their desire to avoid, to the extent possible, any stylizing of their own voice as a means of camouflaging their individuality, are we not committing an act of methodological folly, applying traditional literary criteria to acts that do not pretend to be anything more than immediate memory and emotion, texts that present themselves as instruments to drastically influence the social flow of events? (154)

Nevertheless, Dorfman ultimately comes to terms with his own reservations and insists on the need for critical assessment of testimonio’s strategies.

Acknowledging the expertise of testimonial speakers Much has been made of the fact that most testimonial speakers are not writers. Less has been said about the fact that their local communities generally regard them as skilled orators. This



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emphasis on what speakers are not—as opposed to what they are—parallels much of the critical response to the genre itself, but the speakers’ empirical expertise at oratory should come as no surprise. People who have emerged as political organizers in their communities are generally talented speakers, and they have had frequent occasion to hone their persuasive skills. Neither the patronizing notion that ordinary people do not shape their discourse nor the romantic ideal of a transparent and nonstrategizing speaker stands up to scrutiny. Data on the expertise of folk speakers is readily available from the fields of anthropology and folklore studies, as well as from testimonial texts themselves. In her work on the personal experience tale, folklorist Linda Dégh has analyzed in detail the narrative strategies with which ordinary people portray themselves in the stories they tell to define their own identity. In the live context, speakers consciously shape their self-narratives, employing familiar types and motifs, frame sequences, and formulaic repetition (62–63). In “Why Tell Stories?” W. F. H. Nicolaisen likewise insists that skilled storytelling is by no means limited to literary writers, or to the better-known examples of myth and legend. Real life is also the stuff—and the product—of stories. “We tell stories,” Nicolaisen explains, “because, in order to cope with the present and face the future, we have to create the past, both as time and space, through narrating it” (10).1 Beginning in the oral context, long before speech becomes written testimonio, it has already been skillfully shaped. In Este es mi testimonio (Hear My Testimony) (1995), Salvadoran activist María Teresa Tula reflects on her own speaking experience. I could never take my children with me because of the cost and because they put us on a killer schedule. Sometimes we would do five or six interviews a day, each one lasting one or two hours, and we

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would speak to different groups. When it was nighttime I would fall asleep from exhaustion. Talking to different groups of people is a lot of work. If you speak to a religious group then you have to talk about religion and relate what you say to parts of the Bible. If you are talking to a group of workers, you have to talk about exploitation and the living conditions in El Salvador. If you address a group of students then you have to talk about students. Peasants, housewives, feminists—they are all different. Sometimes people agree with you and sometimes they don’t. . . . It takes a lot of personal discipline to do this work and you have to be able to adapt to a lot of different situations. We needed to take advantage of all the potential that different solidarity groups offered. (128)

Lest this virtuosity and insight be attributed to Tula’s professionalization on the European lecture circuit, collaborating writer Moema Viezzer’s comments on Bolivian organizer Domitila Barrios de Chungara (in the preface to Si me permiten hablar (Let Me Speak!) (1977)) confirm a similar degree of specialization by someone who had at that point spoken mainly in more local gatherings. Domitila adapts herself to the concrete circumstances she is in and to the public she is addressing. The way she expresses herself in personal conversations is quite different from the way she speaks in speeches and formal presentations in assemblies or in exchanges with small groups. This explains the variety of styles in this book, which might surprise some readers. (10)

Viezzer’s final observation astutely points out the expectation of artlessness even as she warns against it, but readers are not alone in ascribing such transparency to speakers. Speakers and experiencing writers may make similar claims about themselves as a trope of persuasion—the familiar promise of “plain speech”—but tropes are not to be confused with truth.



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Forensic, epideictic, and deliberative rhetoric in testimonio A first prerequisite for an engaged analysis of testimonio as project is a framework that takes into account the genre’s rhetorical strategies as well as its goals, and here the terminology of classical rhetoric offers a useful starting point. Originating in the field of oratory rather than literature, as does much of testimonio, Aristotle’s rhetorical categories of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic speech, distinguished by audience, time, and ends and means, are particularly helpful in identifying and analyzing the strategies of testimonio. Forensic speech asks decision-makers to categorize past actions as just or unjust; its means are accusation and defense. Epideictic speech is addressed to spectators, whom it asks to categorize present actions as noble or shameful; its means are praise and blame. Deliberative speech asks ­ decision-makers to determine whether or not to undertake a future action; its means are persuasion and dissuasion (­Murphy, 24). Aristotle’s basic distinctions among the means and ends of these three types of speech help to point out a fundamental dissonance between the goals and the practice of many testimonial speakers and critics. In describing their ultimate objective, testimonio’s speakers and experiencing writers demonstrate nearperfect accord: they seek a more just future. Collaborating writers and critics are equally in agreement in acknowledging that goal: the collection that contains the English translation of Dorf­ man’s 1986 essay on testimonio is titled precisely Some Write to the Future. Nevertheless, agreement on intention to change the future has not produced a similar accord in the employment of rhetorical strategies. Both speakers and writers have often taken as their means not the deliberative but rather the forensic or the epideictic. Often these modes were what came first to hand—in the case of the

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forensic, forcibly. Not only did many prisoners who had been subjected to sham trials seek later to set the record straight, but in the aftermath of repressive regimes in Latin America, local equivalents of truth and reconciliation commissions collected reams of transcribed testimony. Manuel Cabieses’s Chile: 11808 horas en campos de concentración [Chile: 11808 Hours in Concentration Camps] (1975) consists precisely of the transcription of “a deposition before the War Crimes Court held in Mexico City in February of 1975.” Dorfman observes that while the other Chilean testimonios “are not offering testimony directly, they all act as if they were doing so, presenting their authentic observations as part of a worldwide trial of the insanity of the Chilean government, with the peoples of the world, history or posterity, indistinctly, acting in the role of judges” (“Political Code,” 142). Dorfman also notes that Rolando Carrasco’s Prigué (Chile’s Prisoners of War) (1977) offers multiple examples of the epideictic, as the speaker on many occasions interrupts the march of his own account to rebuke the torturers, the heads of the concentration camps, the members of the junta, as if in the text itself he could confirm aloud all the words that he had been mulling over in his mind throughout the years of his captivity but had been forced to keep silent. In the face of “Príncipe,” the sadistic master of the Chile Stadium, who asked them not to forget what they were suffering, Carrasco replies: “We will not forget it. Several thousand Chileans saw you, Príncipe, and we will remember every one of your features. Even if you take off the uniform and let your hair and your beard grow we will recognize you. And if you hide we will recognize you and find you. You, and the others like you, will pay for every blow, every insult. Traitorous murderer of your own country, your flag and your uniform. You will have no peace to your dying day! You remember it too! (142)



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In addition to realizing long-harbored fantasies of exposing and directly addressing the torturers, the epideictic strain of testimonio takes the form of denouncing those criminals to others. Dorfman also points out that the speaker in Carlos Lira’s El alcaide preso [The Imprisoned Warden] warns, “Just like this son of a bitch, there are many that history should know” (143). Critical formulations of testimonio, including those of collaborating writers, have nearly always cast the genre into one of these same two modes: forensic or epideictic. Testimonial critics early on embraced the juridical metaphor, seizing on the contesting of official versions—of getting at the truth (and the use of the definite article here is intentional) as a central characteristic of testimonial writing. In such writing, critics asserted, the false “official stories” were being replaced with true histories. In a 1989 essay, Margarite Fernández Olmos wrote of discovering in testimonial narratives “a unique and exciting departure from traditional literary production and an alternative for written expression by women in Latin America. . . . , an ideal instrument for the reevaluation and preservation of the histories of ‘la gente sin historia’ [people without a history] and the role of women in the same” (193). In her afterword to Tula’s testimony, Lynn Stephen hails in testimonio “the voices of the poor, of indigenous women from the working class in Latin America [who] call to us from the distant corners of history where they have been abandoned, sending from the margins a new version of history—a new truth” (241). The expectation that testimonio should be equivalent to judicial testimony was honored in the alleged breach as well. Factchecking articles and books such as Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans sought to confirm or deny the specifics asserted in particular testimonios. Such critiques attest to testimonio’s perceived status, and thus perceived contestability, as documentary evidence.2 Critical preoccupation with “Rigoberta’s secrets” reflected an expectation that par-

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ticipants in testimonio would tell “the whole truth,” a notion of compact that can be traced back through the juridical metaphor to the familiar witness’s oath (Sommer, “No Secrets,” 130–57). In such a conceptual framework, the withholding of evidence was seen as a deviation that demanded explanation. The juridical metaphor soon became nearly ubiquitous in early critical writing about testimonio. René Jara ended his introduction to Testimonio y literatura with, “Before them is the judge, the next word and the sentence rest with the reader” (5). Renato Prada Oropeza noted that much of testimonio was based on challenging an official version of events in which the narrator, individually or collectively, was accused of some crime (9), so that the act of producing testimonio became a literary court of appeals. In other cases, a speaker advanced a specific or general charge against the oppressor, so that the speaker became the plaintiff and the testimonio his or her own day in court. Within this forensic model, the task of testimonio appeared to be fairly straightforward. It was necessary to find out what the truth was and then to tell it, denouncing in the process the lies that had been told before. The difficulties could be expected to reside in the investigation and in access to means of storing and disseminating information, already formidable enough obstacles duly noted by the speakers themselves. The need for collaboration with a professional writer was often conceptualized as a practical issue of access to the “court of world opinion” through print media. All of these issues can be contained within a juridical model: access to the court of law, rules of evidence, and even (though to a limited extent and somewhat problematically) representation. In “Elena Poniatowska: Witness for the People,” Elizabeth Starcevič casts the Mexican journalist and collaborating writer as a witness, doubling the writer with her speaker, but there is another role for the professional writer in this formulation: that of an attorney who arranges her client’s discourse and her own



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to engage the sympathies of the court. This latter aspect of the courtroom rarely if ever figured in the early model. To understand why not, it must be noted that the model conforms to an ideal judicial system and not to actual practice. In this perfect court, the iconic goddess who holds the scales of justice represents the theoretical equality of the two sides before the law. The promise that truth would at last prevail offered speakers compensation in textual form for what had happened—or failed to happen—in actual courtrooms. Unfortunately, a perfect courtroom metaphor that ignores or imaginatively rewrites unequal power relations between the sides may come to obscure that very inequality. Overlooking the fact that testimonio is generally produced by the side not currently in power, the metaphor simply assumes an institutional capacity to resolve the case, inscribe the truth, and do justice. In a real forensic forum, cases are built and undermined on the basis of specific names, dates, locations, and times—precisely the sorts of facts that the class in power has the power to withhold. In cases where evidentiary detail is available, testimonial speakers insist on its presentation, but more often this type of evidence is fragmentary or inaccessible, forcing speakers to rely on alternative forms of evidence (such as the accretion of judicially flawed but psychologically convincing physical detail) that things did indeed happen. In Nunca Más (Never Again) (1984), the report of CONADEP, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (charged with investigating the disappearances in Argentina’s Dirty War), Ernesto Sábato’s concluding remarks take note of the imperfect fit between the demands of the judicial process and those of justice itself: “[I]n presenting Nunca Más,” he states, “the commission assumes the ‘weighty but necessary’ responsibility for affirming that everything set out in this report did indeed happen, even if some of the details of individual cases may be open to question” (247). As noted, the idealized juridical image also obscures the is-

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sue of mediational strategies, since in the judicial system they are theoretically denied even as they are empirically validated. It is officially asserted—though rarely believed—not only that swearing the familiar oath means that people will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but also that everobedient jurors will “disregard that last statement” on instruction, and that a novice public defender will be a match for an experienced and expensive private counsel. Finally, when the reader becomes the literary analogue of judge or jury, the model assumes that judgment in itself, as opposed to intervention, will be sufficient as a reader response. Justice is carried out through separate enforcement procedures, by people quite apart from the judge and jury, and conspicuously absent from the literary metaphor. Dorfman points out that “confidence in the equanimity and probity of the verdict of history leads” testimonial speakers “to abolish the present of defeat and to conceive their work itself as a minimal and vicarious revenge for the torments they have received” (“Political Code,” 142). The time markers are significant. The future is absent, the present only imaginatively erased, and even in terms of the past, where this rhetoric is both rooted and targeted, the revenge is only “minimal and vicarious.” Natural as the juridical metaphor may seem, given the circumstances of the producers and the connotations of the term testimonio in both Spanish and English, it is an inadequate model for testimonio as a social project, and for testimonial criticism. Purely forensic models curtail testimonio’s effects on the lifeworld, and on the future. The epideictic strain of testimonio and testimonial criticism distances the reader even further from any responsibility for action. Often, epideictic testimonio is not even addressed to the reader. Directed to oppressive governments and evil others, the text becomes a means of “talking back to power.” At the closest, epideictic testimonio may address a highly generalized reader in



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the name of “history.” Like the forensic, the epideictic draws on traditional connotations of the word testimonio. Here, those are the religious and hagiographic senses: testimony is understood as affirmation of the power of the cause, the moral superiority of the speaker, or the cruelty and culpability of the oppressor. In the epideictic model, readers look on as speakers talk back. Once again, those readers become spectators. Their only proper task is to blame the oppressor and praise the speaker—or at an additional remove, to watch as others do so. Parts of George Yúdice’s and Doris Sommer’s work offer examples of a literal apotheosis of epideictic testimonial criticism. In “Testimonio in Guatemala,” Marc Zimmerman points out Yúdice’s concentration on “the sacred dimension of Rigoberta [Menchú]’s political thought,” which “confirms and deepens our contention about the communal and ceremonial nature of her testimony and enables us to see it as part of a shamanistic process whereby the group’s broken relation with a sacred space is to be restored” (117). In testimonial criticism, such extreme reverence not only edges out the deliberative goal of persuading readers to act, it also obviates the one responsibility that conventional epideictic does place on readers: judgment. The speaker’s status is now beyond question, and readers are no longer called upon even to determine praiseworthiness or blame. As a new epideictic form of testimonial criticism (or perhaps more accurately forensic redux) shifts the focus away from blaming oppressive governments for testimonio’s narrated suffering, readers themselves may become the suspects. In his introduction to The Real Thing (1996), Georg Gugelberger confronts First World readers and critics with their potential destruction of testimonio’s very “essence” (10). The conceptualization of testimonio as endangered species has prompted at least one call for the literary equivalent of an order of protection. Sommer asserts that Menchú’s declaration that there are secrets that she will not disclose to collaborating writer Elisabeth ­ Burgos-

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Debray “can help to cordon off curious and controlling readers from the vulnerable objects of their attention” (“No Secrets,” 134). In his essay “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” Yúdice draws together the forensic and the epideictic, so that, in testimonio, “truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history” (44). Once again, the passage from past and present to the implications for the future, the stuff of the deliberative mode, is conspicuously absent. This is not to say that forensic or epideictic speech can never have an effect on the future. Contestatory writing—and testimonio is clearly contestatory—consists first of looking back. Inherent in the perceived utility of this backward glance and retrospective rewriting is a sense that the shape of the past has affected the shape of the present and will affect the shape of the future. It is for this reason, and not for some fetishistic concern with correctness itself, that certain versions of the past need to be contested. Some readers may make this connection for themselves and come away from either forensic or epideictic accounts feeling compelled to do something about present or future injustice, but it must be recalled that such modes do not actually call upon their readers to do anything beyond categorizing an act as just or unjust, or assigning praise or blame. Forensic and epideictic models invite readers to conclude that they have done their part merely by evaluating the actors in testimonio. To the extent that testimonio has been restricted to these two categories, whether in practice or in criticism, the genre has been divested of much of its social potential in the lifeworld by reducing its demands upon the reader. Forensic speech seeks only judgments. Epideictic speech is satisfied with praise and blame. Deliberative speech alone extends its implications into decisions regarding the future and the realm of personal ac-



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tion. As Aristotle states, “By changing ‘is good’ to ‘should do’ we change epideictic to deliberative speech” and thereby seek to elicit audience action (quoted in Murphy, 32).3 Neither the past focus of the forensic nor the present orientation of the epideictic is sufficient. Whether forensic and epideictic tacks are followed by declarations of victory or defeat, both hold testimonio short of the writing to the future that is the goal of the project’s initiators.4

Testimonio and truth: contrasts between forensic, epideictic, and deliberative rhetoric While epideictic and forensic rhetoric can coexist in relative harmony, the deliberative often runs counter to both of them. In deliberative rhetoric, neither completeness nor correction, establishment of innocence or guilt, or praise or blame are superordinate objectives, much less categorical imperatives. Here, forensic and epideictic concerns are subordinated to the goal of inducing readers to act in favor of social justice. This is not to suggest that truth is unimportant here. The need to inspire and maintain readers’ confidence in the speaker makes being caught in a lie a costly mistake—which may be one reason why speakers in deliberative testimonio are wary of assertions of absolute truth. Nor is this to discount the efforts of speakers and experiencing writers to seek conventional justice. In Miguel Mármol (1972), the speaker and collaborating writer provide documents, names, and dates. Alicia Partnoy’s The Little School (1986), her account of imprisonment and torture by the Argentine military junta, explicitly contests official versions of history, setting forth the government’s side with an excerpt from the Final Document of the Military Junta on the War Against Subversion and Terrorism and countering it with her own evidence (23). In the introduction and appendix, she recounts the fate of friends whom

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newspaper accounts described as “killed in confrontations with the police” but who were in reality drugged and taken from the prison to the site of the alleged confrontation (123–31). In ironic reply to the interrogator’s demands to name names and give details, she sets forth in a separate appendix her own dossiers on the guards: files complete with their nicknames, physical appearances, and aliases (133–36). Facts are marshaled in these sections, so logically and legalistically organized that if a final denunciation were the only purpose of The Little School, its introduction and appendices would appear to be self-sufficient. But then Partnoy cautions the reader about to begin the stories proper, “Beware: in little schools the boundaries between story and history are so subtle that even I can hardly find them” (18). Such an admonition little suits the purposes of legalistic denunciation; any competent defense lawyer would immediately seize upon such an admission of blurred boundaries between fact and fiction. Moreover, this warning applies to the main texts of the collection—the very pieces to which narrative convention would grant primacy. Deliberative speakers and experiencing writers often detail the difficulty of obtaining and/or recalling reliable information. Alicia Partnoy confesses that she does not remember exactly the events of the day she was taken prisoner (27). In his preface to the English edition of Tejas verdes (Diary of a Chilean Concentration Camp) (1974), Hernán Valdés notes that “it is obviously a diary reconstructed after the event,” and even though he has “made every effort while writing to maintain myself in the previous emotional situation and to be strictly faithful to its day-to- day chronology,” the reconstruction is “by no means an easy task given the total absence of temporal references or measurements characteristic of such places” (5). In the Spanish version of the preface, he continues, “since then, many details escape me” (6). Deliberative comments also underscore the limits of the speakers’ own understanding. Elvia Alvarado muses, “I’ve



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thought a lot about why we have so many children, and I really don’t know why” (47). Often she points out the limits and provisionality of her own analysis. Regarding the politics of other countries, she posits possibilities that would seem to run counter to her own political choices, let alone her project, freely admitting that “maybe Nicaragua did something to the US—I don’t know” (114), “I don’t know how democratic Nicaragua is” (122), and “I don’t know enough about the Soviet Union to know if there is democracy in that country” (123). Under a forensic model, admissions of limited recall and lack of knowledge diminish the credibility of the witness, and the provisionality of judgments likewise blunts their force as epideictic calls for praise or blame. As several critics have observed recently, the concept of truth in testimonial literature is far less straightforward than had been assumed in earlier conflations of testimonio with contestation or correction. Sklodowska writes, “By establishing an explicit interplay between factual and fictional, between aesthetic aspirations to literariness and scientific claims to objectivity, testimonio has consistently defied the critics by departure from a traditional system of assumptions about truth and falsity, history and fact, science and literature” (“Afterthoughts,” 85). Santiago Colás makes a similar point regarding Argentinean historias, which were not resistant because they stridently asserted an alternative history drawn gleaming with truth from the mire of repressive pseudohistories. They resisted, rather, because they recognized and narrated—from their own painful experience of catastrophe— the process of remaking history, of reconstructing the future as an ongoing and impure process; a process involving the recognition of limits, gaps, and compromises. (Postmodernity, 172)

While the expressed provisionality of any apparent truths, ­including one’s own, might seem to undermine the potential

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­ olitical effectiveness of testimonio, it may be the very continp gency of this writing, this constancy of critique, that holds its promise for the deliberative task of shaping the future. As a practical matter, it is a truism that history is written by the victors. Critical formulations that have confused writing with concrete action in the world appear to have taken at face value forensic or epideictic speakers’ rewriting of their own history. In effect, they have assumed that the sequence is reversible—that to write one’s own history is to triumph politically. To reject this reversal is not to underestimate the importance of the not-at-all simple act of speaking or writing. Since one of the aims of torture and political repression in general is the silencing of the victim—the power of denial—the very act of speaking or writing that something happened can be in itself a form of resistance. But to speak the truth while oppressors are still in power is merely to join in the contest to shape world opinion, not to win it, and much less to guarantee social action. Historically, the victors have gotten to write the accounts because they were able to silence the losers. By all reasonable predictions, the triumph of the currently oppressed is a long way off. Neil Larsen points to the longterm expectations of a speaker in Manlio Argueta’s testimonial novel One Day in the Life (1980): “We are doing what’s necessary so that they won’t be eternal,” she declares. “For a few days the persecutions in our town and region were suspended. But they will return. But each time they will find us more powerful in our response. What with the despair of our mothers, sisters and grandparents, what we farm workers have done revives us” (51). Dorfman’s magical realist testimonio, La última canción de Manuel Sendero (The Last Song of Manuel Sendero) (1982), sets a timeframe for one peaceful scenario many thousands of years hence (426). While speakers in the realist vein of testimonio express more optimism, most still report thinking in terms that



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are at least multigenerational. During that struggle, the voice of the testimonial speaker will be just that: a voice, one voice among many contesting voices, many of those lying. If we acknowledge that justice has not yet triumphed and is not likely to do so easily or quickly, the need for a chary attitude toward asserted truths will be readily apparent, and it is just such an attitude that pervades deliberative testimonio. As a positive agenda, many speakers stress by precept and example the importance of educating oneself and of seeking information directly from as many sources as possible.5 Rather than asserting a near-transparent relationship between the testimonial speaker and the truth, as is the case in forensic and epideitic approaches, deliberative speakers frequently encourage skepticism. Alvarado offers her own experience as an example. When I was younger, I used to believe everything I heard. . . . But now I take everything with a grain of salt, especially what I hear in the news. Because I might not know about other countries, but I do know about Honduras. And when I hear the lies this old geezer tells about my country, I start wondering if what he’s saying about the rest of the world is true. We’ve never heard the sandinista side of the story, so how can we decide what the truth is? I’d love to go there and see. (122)

She advises her readers to be cautious of reports from any quarter, including those from her own side, since “sometimes they say things that are true, and sometimes they aren’t true. So you have to be careful about what you believe” (63). Readers are likewise counseled to be receptive to the possibility of good will in unusual places, because “of course, there are those who say the Peace Corps is just a front for the CIA—who knows? I suppose there must be CIA people, but there are good, sincere people as well” (103). At the same time that Alvarado makes explicit truth claims such as “I work for justice and speak the truth” (xiii), she

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also advises Medea Benjamin, her collaborating writer, to investigate those claims. “If you really want to understand what I’m saying,” she admonishes, “you’ll have to go out with me and see where I work, how I get there, where I sleep, how the people I work with live. Otherwise you’ll never know if I’m telling the truth” (xxii). In deliberative testimonio, at least as much rhetorical energy goes into inoculating readers against future credulity as into countering past lies. But what of the future? Would triumph—as opposed to triumphalism—allow for a purely contestatory role for testimonio? In her comments on María Teresa Tula’s Hear My Testimony (1994), collaborating writer Lynn Stephen writes that “through the claims they make to historical representation, testimonios become equivalent to the official and often repressive histories they are challenging” (Tula, 228). For now, any assumption of such equivalency would be dangerously illusory, but what if social change were to make that replacement of official history a real possibility? Even if the triumph of the speaker’s current political and social project could somehow be taken as a given, conversion of testimonios to new official stories would effectively foreclose the genre’s broader and more radical political projects. As Paulo Freire observes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), nonprovisional truths of the Right or the Left tend to crystallize into sectarian mythologizing (21–22). Deliberative testimonio is anti-mythic, a literature of people who do not expect soon to be able to control official versions, and who are insistent and candid in acknowledging errors, contradiction, and dissent within their own ranks. Rather than limiting themselves to establishing the culpability of the other side and the praiseworthiness of their own, many deliberative speakers insist on recounting their own errors and at times complain of lies and treachery by fellow supporters of a common cause. If such confessions and complaints were confined to past tense, they might be seen only as tropes



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of experience attesting to greater current wisdom or as proofs of candor, but the same speakers also warn of possible future errors and lies. Although often overlooked by critics in search of forensic or epideictic certainties, this rhetorical move is frequent in Menchú’s testimonio and also in such texts as Miguel Mármol; Tejas Verdes; Let Me Speak!; Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo; and The Little School. Mármol describes a striking lack of conventional solidarity. My friends avoided me: they were poor and out of work and afraid I might drop in on them at dinner time. But what really got me angry was that the comrades in the party were wondering why the government had set me free so fast. That is, they were suspicious of me. They said nothing about the communists who were freed before me, since they were all together in prison and they’d vouch for each other’s conduct. The Party harassed and isolated me and my protests weren’t worth a thing. I felt desperate and confused and wanted to hang myself from the nearest tree. (383) The amusing thing about the new outbreak of bourgeois attacks against me was that, the more the enemy fucked me over, the more the reactionary comrades fucked me over. They insisted on my being a collaborator, a coward and a lousy disrupter. (412)

Far from the passive-voice distancing common to official explanations from the Right or the Left—those grudging concessions that “errors were made”—speakers in deliberative ­testimonio take explicit responsibility for their own and their side’s errors in perception and judgment, continuing a radical tradition of self-critique. Whatever the political situation, the need for critical thinking is unlikely to diminish—thus the greater ­social utility of a literature of constant critique as opposed to immediate contestation. Alvarado advises, “I’ve learned that if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you should study as much as you can. You should read or listen to the news as much

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as you can. You should take it all in, but digest it in your own way, and judge for yourself what you think the truth is” (64). Such a constancy of critique—an insistence on the provisionality of all versions of the truth, including one’s own—is not to be confused with more ludic postmodern perspectives, the infinite play of ideas. Doubt, indiscriminately deployed, can offer a ready alibi for inaction—what Satya Mohanty has called “the debilitating skepticism of postmodernism” (Literary Theory, 23). In deliberative testimonio, the awareness that truth is not final is coupled with trust in the possibility of positive social intervention. Profound skepticism and self-criticism are paired with what might seem their opposites: dedication and faith. Despite some critics’ claims that testimonio corrects the errors in recorded history, and with them social injustice, the deliberative subgenre of this literature of trauma would appear to ask both less and more of its readers—less in terms of uncritical trust in speakers’ truth claims, and more in terms of critical thinking and action. Sans revolutionary or religious certainties, speakers in deliberative testimonio admit that they may be wrong, expect that they will not win anytime soon, and suspect at times that they may not win at all. Nonetheless, as Partnoy phrases the choice that led her to the Little School, they are still “betting their blood” that they are right (83). Both the future orientation and the focus on decision-making in Aristotle’s deliberative formulation are crucial descriptors of this testimonio. Far from transparent or simplistic propaganda, the future orientation of deliberative testimonio requires a hybrid and much more sophisticated rhetorical strategy, one that will persuade readers to think critically about the world at the same time that it confronts them with a personal obligation to combat injustice. While reminding readers that their answers must be personal and are always provisional, these testimonial speakers invite the reader to join them in a Pascalian wager on the future of this world.



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Forensic, epideictic, and deliberative accounts of torture Dorfman has observed that some of the most illuminating contrasts between what he terms “sectarian” (here, “forensic” and “epideictic”) and literary (here, “deliberative”) testimonio are found in their accounts of torture (“Political Code,” 183–95). While forensic and epideictic testimonios describe the heroic resistance of the unbreakable revolutionary, even to martyrdom, deliberative testimonio routinely reveals the “dirty secret” that, under torture, human beings do in fact break, tell what they know, name names, and finally even wish that they knew more to tell. Like much of deliberative testimonio or deliberative criticism, at first glance this revelation may appear not only counterproductive but profoundly unjust and disrespect- ful. Granting that these things sometimes happen, and having gotten over idealized notions of forensic or epideictic witnessing, could one not choose to pass over them in silence for the good of the cause? Deliberative testimonio’s speakers certainly keep other secrets—why not these? Again, as in much of deliberative testimonio, the answer requires discarding several common assumptions, the first regarding the nature of torture itself. Most of the analytical and forensic/epideictic literature on torture has rested on two premises: that torturers seek some sort of intelligence, and prisoners who fail to withhold answers are somehow betraying themselves, others, and ultimately their own cause.6 In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), Elaine Scarry explicitly rejects both premises. “World, self, and voice are lost, or nearly lost,” she argues, “through the intense pain of torture and not through the confession as is wrongly suggested by its connotations of betrayal. The prisoner’s confession,” Scarry contends, “merely objectifies the fact of their being lost” (35). By Scarry’s logic, holding

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prisoners responsible for what they say under torture displaces responsibility in precisely the direction sought by the torturers themselves: anything that happens is the victim’s own fault (51– 57). Albert Jonsen and Leonard Sagan describe torture as “the machinery for systematically demolishing a person’s humanity” (30). Scarry insists that only humans can properly be held responsible for their actions. Thus, when they report and even expect prisoners’ capacity to resist, sectarian narrative frameworks to some degree diminish the horror of torture, an effect visible in conventional hagiography. As David Morris demonstrates in The Culture of Pain (1991), all pain is not the same, particularly in the case of the religiously charged pain that he calls visionary (130). “Visionary pain,” observes Morris, “employs the body in order to free us from the body. It initiates or accompanies an experience that escapes the time-bound world of human suffering” (135). Once the resistance of the martyr has been assured, the pain can be de-realized and can take on a certain aesthetic and even erotic quality—hence, Santa Teresa “all on fire with the love of God,” St. Sebastian pierced by arrows, or St. Eulalia’s breasts on a ­platter. Such images are far removed from the prosaic realm of human suffering. Just as torture destroys humanity, so, in ­another way, does the discourse of heroic invulnerability. Deliberative testimonio explicitly resists this assurance and aestheticization. This is not to say that, in deliberative testimonio, humans do not sometimes resist the interrogations of the torturer, but rather that these works emphasize that any such resistance must be drawn from human and ultimately finite reserves rather than from superhuman strength. In addition, the deliberative ­discourse of torture explicitly contests the comforting notion that sufferers are somehow spiritually enriched or purified by their suffering. Resistance, when it is managed, comes at a terrible cost. Partnoy’s The Little School offers apt illustrations of each of



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these ethical and rhetorical principles for the representation of torture. First, there is a certain ironic distance, a near-continual presence of a second and somehow freer voice that reminds the reader, even as the narrator’s universe is being unmade by the torturers, that the sufferer still belongs to the reader’s world. As Dorfman remarks of other texts, “There is a normal universe that is prior, parallel and still somehow belongs to that narrator.” Without this presence, he suggests, readers all too quickly become inured to the representation of pain and “the horror of this process can only operate on the reader’s mind if he is constantly reminded, through the narrator’s struggle” (“Political Code,” 172). Partnoy’s stories likewise explicitly reject two of the most conventional sources of resistance associated with sectarian accounts of prison experience. The first of these is the reported experience of encounter with some superhuman power. Prison conversions of one sort or another are almost a commonplace, but Partnoy is having none of testimonial hagiography—neither Jewish nor Christian nor even secular. Convinced that “God is just a pretext . . . and I instinctively reject pretexts,” the speaker in “Religion” rejects both faiths despite acknowledgment of their possible psychological benefits. She admits to the temptation, that “sometimes when I’m very scared I wish I could believe in God: the Christian God, my family’s God, any God,” but concludes that “the truth is that I would like to believe in a God that protects and rescues me from here; I don’t want a God that makes me a martyr” (62). Secular sainthood is likewise ruled out by deliberately unheroic passages. Once, last month, I didn’t go to the latrine in the afternoon. I guess it was one of those days; I couldn’t bear the situation any more. I’d slept for eighteen hours in a row, just waking up for lunch. I wanted to continue sleeping. I couldn’t stand the guards’ hands molesting me when I walked by. . . . Well, the fact is, I didn’t go to

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the latrine; I kept sleeping. And that night—while I was dreaming of a clean light blue toilet—I woke up wetting my bed. (32)

This description owes its antiheroism not only to the choice of content but to the calculated selection of emphasis and detail. Narrated differently, the same episode might have centered on the cruelty of the captors in not permitting access to the latrine, or on the psychological importance of asserting control in prison, but the story takes neither of these instructive forms. Instead, the opportunity to go is explicit, and the narrator’s option to sleep through it is depicted as a path of least resistance rather than an act of defiance. Dorfman has noted a lack of “degrees, shades, levels of heroism” in many sectarian testimonial works (“Political Code,” 162). Partnoy’s writing offers a vivid spectrum. Occasional outright defiance is set against a background of small daily acts of resistance and nonresistance; there is a repeated denial of superhuman status. In Partnoy’s writing, as in deliberative testimonio in general, the narrator remains steadfastly human despite the temptations of epideictic or hagiographic transcendence. Scarry observes that torture depends upon the conflation of public and private (27), and here it is resisted through a series of defensive images of bodily and psychic strength and integrity. Given the tenacity with which Partnoy’s self is rooted in her body, it is fitting that the doubles constructed or conjured to shelter her spirit should be embodied rather than ethereal. At the beginning of the stories, the narrator attempts to protect body and soul together with the physical barriers of a house and a brick wall. She tries to hide, first by squatting in the bushes and then in weeds “as tall as she” (27). When she is captured, the imagery that protects the self is expressed in physical terms, as another body. Unlike its actual counterpart, this double of the self can become smaller and easier to conceal. New shields can be erected around it, as when “black humor made her shield



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thicker and more protective. Drops of water sliding down her hair dampened the blindfold on her eyes. Threats and insults sliding down her shield shattered into pieces on the kitchen floor.” If the shields fail, then the self can be made less vulner­ able, reduced to an essential core: “Her heart shrank a little more until it was as hard as a stone” (27). But psychic protection comes at a cost. The image of the heart of stone is associated with inhumanity to the point of cliché, and this form of defense eerily reiterates the dehumanization that torturers themselves are imposing on their victims: they are less than human, they do not feel pain like we do. The degree to which the narrator is forced to trade off humanity as the price of reduced vulnerability is clear when the protective image is undermined not by pain and imprisonment, but by joy and freedom remembered, and the vulnerable human self returns unbidden. She inhaled deeply and a rare memory of freedom tickled her cheekbones. The open window let some rain in. . . . A drop fell on her forehead, just above the blindfold, and slowly began to make its way to her heart. Her heart, hard as stone, after having shrunk to dodge anguish, finally softened. Like day-old bread soaking in water, her heart was swelling and dissolving, slowly but unavoidably. (67)

When the barriers placed around the self prove insufficient to resist the torturers’ conflation of public and private, and the self cannot be sufficiently hardened to withstand exposure to the ele­ ments, that self must be closed off in a separate compartment, protected but also imprisoned. Consciousness of the forced choice between full humanity and a measure of invulnerability is again clear in “A Puzzle.” A guard brings the narrator a puppy, and she begins thinking of her daughter whom she has “tried not to remember too much, to avoid crying” (78). When the contact with the animal reminds her of her daughter, she tries

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to call up an image of Ruth, but the containment of memory she has struggled to achieve turns back against her. She cannot remember her own daughter’s face: “If only I had her picture. But again, maybe it’s better this way. If I could look at a picture of her face, I would surely cry . . . and if I cry, I crumble” (79). At the point when the self cannot be kept apart from the pain, there remains one alternative, again cast in a physical meta­ phor: anesthesia. Once again, protection exacts a price. The anesthesia that blocks the pain from reaching the self cannot be shrugged off at will, and it impedes any effort at communication. At one point, Partnoy observes that “when I turned twelve or thirteen I began writing about my sorrows. Now, I can’t even do that. I comfort myself by thinking that my reason for not writing is lack of paper and pencil. But the real reason is this anesthetic inside. When the flesh of poetry is anesthetized, it is impossible to build poems” (103–4). Sometimes prisoners can throw a small wrench into the machinery of power, but the stories in The Little School permit readers no illusion that such machinery can be brought to a halt by a prisoner’s sheer ingenuity. “Ruth’s Father” explicitly renders the body under torture in the voice of Partnoy’s husband. He approaches the prospect of torture with intentions of resistance, recalling that “I told the torturers if they took me to the meeting place I would point to him, then when I saw him, I didn’t do what I had promised” (93), but finally the desire to save his own life becomes paramount. He comes to wish that he had more to tell because “when they come for me, to kill me next time . . . if I knew where he was hiding, perhaps they wouldn’t hit me any more” (94). He struggles against the loss of a world where heroism and humanity matter. “Don’t make me believe I’m an animal,” he pleads, “ . . . it’s not my scream; that’s an animal’s scream” (94). In between descriptions of pain and the means used to inflict it, he speaks to his daughter of a lullaby. Ultimately, his attempts



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to lull himself fail. “I’ve been repeating it for a day and still I can’t fall asleep” (93). Still, the lines become his mantra and his tenuous refuge while the torturers are making him an animal: “Leave my body in peace . . . I’m a froggy so my child can play with me” (94). As the pain continues, the world is reduced to the body, and the man aspires not to superhuman strength to resist but to be smaller, younger, and safer—to be his own daughter lulled to sleep with a nursery rhyme. Failing that, he would be content with even further reduction, to be the frog in that nursery rhyme. Finally, he cannot resist. By keeping present the “parallel and normal universe,” the intercalated nursery rhyme and conversation with a two-year-old daughter intensify the representation of torture through juxtaposition, causing a fresh shock to the reader each time the narrator’s pain reappears. As in much deliberative testimonio, the voices in The Little School draw intensity from an insistent and intimate attachment to the body—by a refusal to abandon it in favor of transcendence when it becomes tedious, embarrassing, and even when, in extremis, it becomes purely what Scarry terms “the locus of pain” (51). Where the sectarian strands of forensic and epideictic testimonio offer transcendence—a language of clarity, straightforwardness, certainty, purity, completion, and calm—deliberative testimonio is imperfect and human, characterized by retardations, delays, slippages, diversions, unfinished arguments, partial proposals, competing claims, jarring and strange juxtapositions, fissures, gaps, and peripeteias. Deliberative testimonio’s speakers admit to their readers what they themselves don’t know, don’t understand, bet upon, get wrong, fail to uphold, cannot hold onto, must ignore or partition off, fear, hate, and sometimes rage about. They report being tempted by individual solutions, by love and desire for men and women, and even sometimes by the taste of ice cream and the tactile qualities of soft drinks. Being human, sometimes they give in. They get tired and careless and let their guard down. They find

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good people on the other side and bad ones on their own, warn readers that good people can turn bad, and offer hope that the converse also happens. In view of the motley nature of deliberative testimonio, critics are surely to be excused to some degree for having initially assumed such testimonio to be artless, planless, and spontaneous.7

Rhetoric in testimonio: coexistence and conflict To approach the genre on its own terms, then, it will be necessary to examine the specific characteristics of all three types of testimonial rhetoric—forensic, epideictic, and deliberative. For forensic and epideictic testimonios, their respective rhetorical strategies can be seen as reflections of the corresponding lifeworld discourses of the judiciary, the sermon and the denunciation. Forensic rhetoric stages a textual trial for the perpetrators or restages the trial of the victim, and generally employs a similar organization, style, content, and vocabulary. Positive epideictic rhetoric is predictably quasi-religious, a political hagiography complete with Augustinian conversion narratives and testimonies to the power of political faith in the limit-situations of war, imprisonment, and torture. A descriptive rhetoric for this strain of testimonio can be adapted largely from the study of religious discourse. For the negative epideictic, a description of the various types of stock political invective likewise offers a promising starting point for recognizing and critiquing the strategies present in a given text. For deliberative testimonio, however, the construction of a descriptive rhetoric presents more of a challenge. Not only are many of its moves decidedly anti-heroic and anti-hagiographic, they may appear at first glance to be contradictory and even counterproductive. While it would wrap things up neatly to cast the development of testimonial rhetoric as a passage from past to present to future—a narrative of progress from forensic to epideictic



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to deliberative—that is not the way the genre has unfolded. Instead, these three forms of rhetoric appear to have coexisted or conflicted from testimonio’s very beginnings, and they still do. There are examples of thoroughgoing intercalations of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative rhetorical strategies, as well as isolated instances of opposing strategies in a text that is primarily of another type. The presence of the forensic in the primarily deliberative testimonios of Partnoy and Mármol has already been noted, and both texts have their epideictic passages as well. Such hybridity may emerge as an artifact of the method of production of testimonio, particularly in the course of collaboration. When a professional writer collects material from various contexts, as was the case in Let Me Speak! when Moema Viezzer followed Domitila Barrios de Chungara to meetings, the speaker may have been addressing local groups quite different from the eventual readers of the testimonio. When collaborative testimonio is made up of collected conversations between the writer and the speaker, the intimacy of the situation (whether real or apparent) may invite forensic and epideictic forms of discourse from the speaker, the writer, or both. And finally, it must be borne in mind that any party may simply make strategic errors in rhetoric. Testimonio, then, has never lacked for rhetorical strategies, although their effectiveness, both actual and potential, is another question. As the following chapter will demonstrate, readers are well-equipped to resist the genre’s rhetorical appeals.

2. A Genre Without an Addressee? Readers, Rhetoric, and Resistance

In the history of testimonial criticism, the appraisal of readers has moved from congratulation to condemnation, idealization to demonization. Early on, the reader was envisioned by most critics as a socially responsible co-participant in a revolutionary triumph. Later, the reader was seen as an irresponsible spectator, suspected saboteur, or at best a fellow mourner of a failed project. In each case, the characterization of the reader responded less to any examination of specific audience characteristics than to a given critic’s general assessment of the fate of the testimonial project. When that project was seen as a success, the readers were lauded along with the speakers and writers. When the project was labeled a failure, primary responsibility was assigned to the readers. In rhetorical analysis of testimonial narratives, the nature of the audience—envisioned, actual and potential—is a crucial object of investigation. In The Differend (1984), Jean-François Lyotard writes extensively about what he calls the “testimonial contract,” the relationship between reader and witness that must exist if testimony is to result in social action. Summarized concisely by Elzbieta Sklodowska, Lyotard’s conditions of possibility for effective testimony include “an addressee, someone not only willing to listen and accept the reality of the referent, but also worthy of being spoken to;” “an addressor, a witness who refuses to remain silent;” “a language capable of signifying the referent”; and “a case, or the referent itself ” (“Afterthoughts,” 87). It is no accident that the addressee is mentioned first. 48



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As demonstrated in the previous chapter, testimonio’s speakers were often keenly aware of their actual audiences, and devoted considerable attention to shaping their discourse accordingly. At the same time, few critics attempted to address more nuanced questions of audience. Some chose explicitly not to do so, reportedly out of a sense that such a focus was self- centered and perhaps self-indulgent, a distraction from what they saw as the rightful emphasis on the speaker.1 In 1980, Jacques Leenhardt went so far as to call testimonio “a genre almost without addressees.”2 Lynn Stephen’s description of the typical reader of testimonio makes it clear why analysis of audience is not compatible with an exclusive focus on the speaker’s local community: People in a day-to-day struggle for survival have neither the resources or the leisure to produce their own texts. They also don’t always have the money to purchase them, or the time or capacity to read them. By and large, testimonials are produced for a middle-class, educated audience. Sometimes published in English first . . . their audience is anglo-american. If published in Spanish, they will be read by primarily educated and middle-class Latin Americans. (Tula, 231)

Judging from the composition of this audience, the rhetorical project of testimonio might be termed a “pedagogy of the unoppressed.” Considering potential applications of Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the United States, C. H. Knoblauch observes that Freire’s own students, themselves mainly poor and disenfranchised, were motivated to learn about the social and economic structure of their own communities by their expectations of access to opportunities heretofore denied them. Given the vastly different circumstances of students in an affluent school, Knoblauch is led to ask, “What do my students (as those who benefit from oppression) have to gain? Why should they struggle with trou-

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bling self-awareness?” Similar questions related to “the problem of devising a dialogic, liberatory curriculum for students who may not see any need to be liberated” must be posed regarding many First World readers of testimonio (19). Sectarian conceptions of audience would have dismissed most such readers as unqualified and unworthy, a tendency that continues to some extent with Doris Sommer’s assertion in “No Secrets,” that “for Rigoberta Menchú there are literally no ideal readers” (147). In the case of forensic and epideictic testimonios, the lack of readers—let alone ideal ones—was often literal. Most had very small initial runs and immediately fell out of print. In contrast, the number of readers of deliberative testimonio has been relatively large, not only in comparison with other genres of Latin American literature, but sometimes in the absolute. Menchú’s was not the first testimonio to require repeated press runs. As noted, Child of the Dark was a bestseller in the US as well as Brazil. Testimonio’s readership increased substantially as the genre was incorporated into new canons of Latin American studies, women’s studies, and “non-western” studies in general, and as events such as Menchú’s Nobel Prize and debates about the “culture wars” lent further visibility to the genre. Nonetheless, in a significant sense, even those deliberative testimonios with healthy sales figures may still find themselves “without addressees.”

Refusing the testimonial pact: reading testimonio without feeling addressed How is it that testimonios that hardly lack for actual readers can at the same time lack addressees? Upon reexamination, Lyotard’s contractual requirements suggest an explanation. In this testimonial pact, the addressee is not the familiar figure of literary terminology, anyone to whom the text is directed, but rather someone “willing to listen and accept the reality of the



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referent,” and also “worthy of being spoken to.” As it turns out, both of these requirements have placed daunting demands on prospective addressees. As a socioliterary genre with a political project, testimonio carries a potential to invoke obligations and evoke actions from readers who see themselves as willing and worthy. As a result, many real readers have simply refused to be addressed (and hence answerable) in this way even as they continue to read the texts. The conditions of possibility for deliberative testimonio to provoke change—its revolutionary potential—make it threatening not only to governments but also to readers. John Beverley cites testimonio’s demand for “a general social change in which the stability of the reader’s world must be brought into question” (“Margin,” 84). René Jara writes of testimonial literature as a “naturalization of the exotic, a brutal deconstruction of tranquilizing versions” (3). Jean Franco states flatly that testimonio should make the reader’s world less attractive (514–15). While these critics describe a sense of testimonio endangering the reader, they appear to have given less thought as to why, in the face of such narrative brutality, readers should be expected to remain within range. Those critics who have noted the phenomenon of reader resistance often underestimate the strength of that resistance and overestimate the relative strength of the testimonial text to overcome it. Barbara Harlow writes optimistically: “The testimonio, then, transgressing distinctions of discipline and genre, introduces that politically conscious, strategically developed, even militant articulation into an isolationist literary arena and collapses its self-protective defenses” (73). Harlow’s is a hopeful scenario, but as it happens, those reader defenses are far more resilient than she foresaw. Reader defenses are no house of cards. In another context, Ariel Dorfman derides the reader content to consume calls for social action as if they were purely aes-

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thetic objects as the lector de sillón, the armchair reader (Imaginación y violencia, 215). Once again, testimonial criticism was initiated with a sectarian metaphor that turns out to be less than felicitous, as conceptions of resistance as mere inactivity obscured a larger array of defenses. While the armchair is no doubt a comfortable place, resistance to testimonio’s call for action is more than a matter of passivity, laziness, or inertia. Readers of testimonio are no less active than those posited by the nueva narrativa; they armor themselves within those armchairs, and they seek safer and more comfortable positions from which to read. Given that any reader who takes to heart testimonio’s call to action faces substantial risks—psychological, economic, and possibly even physical—it is no wonder that the demanding address of deliberative testimonio should provoke robust defenses. As evident in Lyotard’s qualifiers, the mere fact of being in an audience does not make one a willing or worthy addressee. The degree of resistance to testimonial address and the proliferation of defenses in themselves attest to the genre’s capacity to cause pain, but pain is not be confused with political action. Not all readers will enter into the contract and accept testimonio’s call for action as directed to them. In the reception of testimonio, one of the most common violations of Lyotard’s posited contract is a flat refusal by real readers to meet the conditions placed on the addressee. In the case of the first clause, “willingness to listen and accept the reality of the referent,” the nature of testimonio and the demands that its deliberative rhetoric places on the reader have led several groups of readers to rule themselves out. At the extreme, certain readers simply will not buy testimonios. Others will close the books before finishing them, or will skip passages that they find too intense. Still others, particularly those influenced by conservative critics or official versions of the events narrated in testi-



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monio, may continue to read but refuse to believe the narratives. These are only the most obvious forms of readerly self-defense. Lyotard’s contractual requirements of the reader specify an additional qualification: “worthiness to be addressed.” This second clause probably costs testimonio even more prospective addressees, and it draws them from among groups that are more likely to contain prospective allies than either the “more sensitive” readers who find reading about pain just too aversive, or the oppositional readers who are convinced that speakers must be either misguided or outright liars. Again, the readers will continue to read, but they will manage to avoid the tense and potentially active positions of worthy addressees. All of the definitions of worthiness offer potential alibis: readers willing to declare themselves “undeserving,” “incapable,” or simply “inappropriate” addressees can vacate the addressee position. Forwarding defines someone else as the proper addressee. Fusion with the subject allows the reader to move out of the addressee role to share the subject position. Abjection permits readers to evade responsibility by defining themselves as incompetent or undeserving of address. Readers may also absent themselves from the field of address and thus of action. All of these psychological defenses permit individuals to read testimonio as if it were not addressed to them. Related to the epideictic directions of testimonial texts and criticism, forwarding of the calls for action to someone else has figured prominently among readerly and critical responses to testimonio. In epideictic testimonio, it was the speaker who cast the addressee as an evil other—the proximate perpetrator of violence, typically an oppressive government official. Readers of the epideictic, who were typically envisioned as already committed partisans, were supposed to watch and cheer while speakers talked back to those in power. Unfortunately, some collaborating writers and critics have continued to foster that

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same spectator response to deliberative testimonio. In doing so, they offer the reader an easy and appealing substitute for social action. In removing themselves from the addressee position, another common destination for readers has been the position of the addressor. By erasing differences and concentrating on commonalities—or conjuring them up—it becomes possible for readers to see themselves not as addressees but instead as co-addressors. Again, in sectarian testimonios, this has been an invited move. Many such texts were written in the “we” form that included the narratees and addressees within a close partisan circle. This readerly move may continue even in the face of deliberative testimonios where speakers do not make such an assumption or invitation, when “we” ceases to refer to “and you too.” Fusion is accomplished through a multiplicity of uncritical identifications. Readers may define themselves as like the speaker in significant ways, frequently centering on oppression or alienation: we’re both victims in one way or another, and reading this book helped me to deal more effectively with my own oppression. Alternatively, readers may emphasize certain ways in which the speaker is like them. Collaborating writers and critics may celebrate the speaker’s new status as co-producer of a book: with my help, the speaker has now entered the realm of literature. Through various forms of essentialism, the speaker may be subsumed in a larger group in which both the speaker and the reader are already members. Feminine gender has been a frequently cited commonality in the reception of Latin American testimonio, and kinship images have served to elide differences of class by casting speakers as readers’ spiritual parents, children, or siblings.3 In contrast with the overtures of fusion, abjection claims assert that the speakers are in some measure so superior that it would be presumptuous or even blasphemous for readers to expect direct address. Abject readers are so inferior as to be in-



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capable of action. In order to feel obligated, Lyotard argues, it is not sufficient for readers to hear, “You ought to,” they must also grant the truth of another proposition, “You are able to” [emphasis in the original] (121). If all the readers really can do is watch, they can hardly be blamed for not acting. Again, this has not been a move initiated solely by readers. Sectarian testimonios were calculated to reject and distance unworthy readers. Epideictic testimonios proclaimed the superhuman status of revolutionary heroes. Some readers have continued to insist on that worshipful distance, even when the speakers do not. The related absenting assumes an incommensurable difference between speaker and reader, an uncrossable distance across which it is prohibitively difficult or even impossible to communicate. Absenting may be facilitated by critiques that emphasize the localization of speakers in their own cultural and geographic contexts, to the point of isolation. Couching the social project in a “speaker’s world” that is presented as mystical and incomprehensible to outsiders may convince readers that the whole matter is beyond their ken. Speakers, in contrast, have often framed the testimonial project much less locally—or rather, as more local to the reader. In an address at Stanford, Menchú called not for North Americans to change Guatemala (“We can do that”) but to “do something about North America” (Pratt, 71). Even such a perceptive critic as Santiago Colás appears to have become caught up in a sophisticated hybrid variation of absenting and abjection, when he concludes that the politics of testimonio “may have resonance and reach unimaginable to those of us in the First World today” (Postmodernity, 172). In Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario [From the Noble Savage to the Noble Revolutionary] (1976), Carlos Rangel describes early European views of Latin America as a site of prelapsarian innocence, and the later identification of the region as a shrine of revolutionary purity. As Neil Larsen observes, in the First World, an imaginary Latin America continues to figure as a mys-

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tic portal to leftist politics (16). While the new revolutionaries depicted by Colás are hardly so romantic as the posterized Ché, they still hold out the promise of something better and, Colás contends, “unimaginable” to First World readers. Like George Yúdice’s descriptions of testimonio as sacred, Colás’s pessimism regarding the limits of imagination permits certain readers to conclude that testimonio’s projects are beyond their own powers of comprehension. Not only is Colás self-avowedly unable to imagine testimonio’s resonance and reach; he is in particular unable to imagine its extension “to those of us in the First World today.” For testimonial criticism, this is a very serious problem, because the First World today is precisely the audience to which much deliberative testimonio is directed. To paraphrase Pogo, “We have met the audience, and they are us.”4 But why should that be so unimaginable? In his treatment of another literature of trauma, soldiers’ accounts of the two World Wars, Paul Fussell makes a convincing case that “unspeakable” really means “nasty” (170). By analogy, “unimaginable” must mean “really nasty.”

Good-faith resistance: obstacles to analyzing testimonio as persuasion What is so aversive about imagining ourselves within the reach of testimonio? Part of the reason has already been articulated: reading deliberative testimonio is painfully demanding if one reads it as an addressee. A second part of the reason may come as a lagging consequence of the early triumphalist framing of testimonio as a rebuke from the good speaker to the bad government: if the speaker is supposed to be addressing the enemy, we would prefer not to stand in the field of address. So we hasten to line up on the other side, which we conceive as testimonio’s “inside.” We approach testimonio as if we were only looking over the shoulder of those evildoers who should really be read-



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ing it. Clearly, a large part of the rhetorical energy of deliberative testimonio will need to be expended in situating its readers in the addressee position and then nudging them back there when they stray, especially when collaborating writers and critics keep helping the readers to move out. Such well-­intentioned responses may have done more to diminish progressive testimonio’s social prospects than have attacks from the Right, since openly hostile critics were unlikely to have much impact on sympathetic readers. As it turns out, those early critical responses that characterized all testimonio as talking back to those in power were in part correct. The crucial shortcoming lay then and still lies in a failure to recognize that, in the estimation of deliberative testimonial speakers, those in power include their readers. This is an audience that we know both all too well and not nearly well enough. Its analysis demands precisely the “self-interrogating positionality” that the Subaltern Studies Group, a key force in testimonial criticism, explicitly rejected early on.5 This stance has begun to change. At the end of Subalternity and Representation, John Beverley calls for work on “understanding how our own work in the academy functions actively to make or unmake subalternity” (166). For engaged critics, self-analysis will be especially complicated since existing models of critical response to persuasion from the target position are nearly all founded on notions of skeptical self-protection. The goal has been to discern the speaker’s hidden motives and persuasive strategies with an eye toward resisting them: what does this person want from me? in what subtle ways is he/she trying to manipulate me? Critics of deliberative testimonio will need to find ways to question a rhetoric that they may not want to resist. Accounts of resistance to testimonio almost invariably have situated that resistance away from any projected allies in the testimonial project. The assumption in criticism (as was the case in sectarian testimonio) has been that resistance could come only

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from such hostile sources as repressive governments and rightwing readers (or, for right-leaning testimonios, leftist readers)— or more recently, from unworthy readers and suspect critics. As a result, testimonial criticism has scarcely scratched the surface of the question of good-faith readers’ possible resistances to address and action. Coming to terms with the genre on its own socioliterary field will mean acknowledging that even sympathetic readers may resist calls to action. Admitting that all readers (ourselves included) are likely to exhibit some forms and degrees of resistance to testimonio’s address puts us in the uncomfortable position of objects of scrutiny. It may be in this sense that deliberative testimonio can offer something truly new and possibly instructive to its First World readers. These speakers have already reversed the traditional direction of the anthropological gaze; their rhetoric offers evidence of how we look when the Third World looks at us. In his treatment of the impact of testimonio on readers, Georg Gugelberger asserts that, “while not necessarily making the subaltern ‘visible,’ testimonio has helped to make ourselves visible to ourselves” (3). More accurately, it might do so when and if we dare to look; so far our most common critical response has been to look away. Testimonio has the potential to call into question its readers’ very self-concept: readers who allow themselves to be addressed by deliberative testimonios face the fact that the speakers have already evaluated them, and that (at least in the speakers’ estimation) they have not yet done enough for causes that they profess to espouse. The potential confession of a sin of omission adds another obstacle to the usual difficulties of introspection. Another difficulty in analyzing testimonio stems from speakers’ employment of the tropes of persuasion. Persuasive speech often consists of assertions that are objectively untrue (or, at best, not yet proven true), such as I know you are a good person, competent and caring, just the sort of person who is going to



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want to help work for justice. Before decrying early collaborating writers’ and critics’ presumptuousness in declaring themselves and other readers competent accomplices in the speakers’ projects, it is well to remember that it was often the speakers who told them they were in the first place. When speakers are saying such highly positive things about us, it is tempting to forget that flattering descriptions of potential collaborators are common tropes of persuasion. Whether in the persuasive arena or in criticism, neither unquestioning acceptance (Why thanks, you’re right. I am just that sort of person) nor objective denial (No, you’re wrong. Actually, I’m a rather incompetent and uncaring person) is an adequate response to such tropes. When persuasive descriptions of the reader are analyzed otherwise, as straightforward evidence or as praise, it is evident only that the speakers’ statements are at best overly optimistic and at worst obviously inaccurate. But this description of the reader is not meant as an accurate or even complimentary reflection of the real reader; it is performative speech, seeking to make something happen by declaring that it already has. The rhetorical strategy is to get readers to accept a certain definition of themselves so that they will then feel obligated to live up to it. In testimonial criticism, the prevalence of accepting or denying what amount to tropes instead of critiquing them is one index of the resistance to recognizing deliberative testimonio as persuasion. The analytical task remains to recognize the trope, to consider why a speaker is describing the reader in that way, what he or she hopes will be accomplished by such address, and to assess the reader’s likely response.6

Alternatives to analyzing testimonio as persuasion As difficult as it is to analyze testimonio as persuasion, it is even more difficult to approach the genre critically without consider-

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ing that central element. Moreover, the potential consequences of identifying testimonio as some other genre than persuasion reach beyond the realm of literary criticism, because for a socio­ literary project such as testimonio the question of genre is not only a matter of means but also of ends.7 Critics who for whatever reason do not recognize or acknowledge testimonio’s deliberative rhetoric as persuasive—and thus do not see its strategic audience descriptions as performative words designed to draw participants into a project still to be enacted—must try to account for such descriptions within less adequate frameworks. Beverley, for instance, offers “in part realistic, in part heuristic or utopian” as possible descriptions of the goals of testimonio (Against Literature, 97). As noted, conceptions of testimonio only as realistic or didactic overlook its persuasive goals. The heuristic approach is promising enough and might even lead ultimately to the analysis of testimonio as persuasion. Nonetheless, Beverley’s path seemed to be blocked early on by his—and the Subaltern Studies Group’s—choice against sustained examination of the audience, and by a negative slant on persuasion in general, as apparent in some of his descriptions of Menchú. But I had not spent a good part of my youth in left-wing organizations of one sort of another not to be able to recognize behind this image (which might well serve as an advertisement for Guatemalan embroideries or tourist agencies) the at once inspiring and intimidating figure of the organizer. . . . What, after all, was the daughter of Mayan peasants from the Guatemalan highlands doing speaking to an audience of yuppie professors and students at New York University anyway? [emphasis in the original] (Against Literature, 89–90)

Here, Beverley’s critical framework appears to have stood in the way of a more fully developed answer to his rhetorical question: Menchú is there to persuade them—and him. The critical task is to examine how. “Utopian” critical assessments hold out less



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promise for a productive analysis of testimonio. Literally “of no place,” but having come to signal a futile quest for impossible perfection, this term has long signaled dismissal from both the Right and the Left, for whom it serves as a means of discouraging participation in certain projects by declaring them naïve and unrealistic. In her keynote address at the State of the World Forum in 1995, Menchú offered her own assessment of the social utility of conceiving of her project as utopian: “The most important thing is not only to have a passive hope. We cannot just say ‘oh, I have great hope in the future’ as if this would be a utopia, a very distant utopia.” When critics employ categories better suited to the forensic or epideictic, tropes of persuasion are forced into procrustean beds. Critics who wanted to believe in the power of testimonio to effect change in the lifeworld but lacked a concept of the genre’s project as persuasion had to posit some other mechanism that would enable testimonio to work. Harlow, as noted, envisioned a sort of testimonio ex machina that could set into irresistible motion the necessary chain of events. Like a high-tech tank, the “militant” text would roll over all obstacles. Another compensatory metaphor was the fully fledged deus ex machina found in Elisabeth Burgos-Debray’s references to Menchú’s privileged spirituality, or in George Yúdice’s description of the “shamanism” of the genre. Again, necessity engendered invention: testimonio must have magical power, because how else could speakers achieve the hoped-for change in the world? The recent critical turn sadly concludes that the testimonial project is impossible—all that is left is “the work of mourning” (Gugelberger, 18). Once again, critics have tended to follow forensic and epideictic leads. In forensic and epideictic testimonio, speakers often created imaginatively the victories that they had not obtained in the lifeworld, with the fictions of superior force and divine intervention that Dorfman called the “happy ending constructed

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by the vision of the left, like a fairy tale full of witches and ogres that will be defeated in the end” (“Political Code,” 193). When asked how to get people to change the world, the three answers that most testimonial critics have been able to imagine so far appear to be force them, use magic, and that’s a trick question— it’s impossible. Deliberative speakers insist on another answer: try using sophisticated rhetorical tactics to persuade them. It is no wonder that people without power have spent a great deal of time learning about persuasion, and in the testimonial project they have put their involuntary apprenticeships to use.

Bakhtin’s model of ethical response to witnessing suffering Unlike the straightforward partisan paths envisioned for the audience of sectarian testimonios, or the capitulation to that irresistible force attributed to militant text, the trajectory of the reader in deliberative testimonio is a fraught and circuitous route best mapped by a model developed by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin for an ethical response to witnessing suffering. As a precondition for such a response, Bakhtin contends, the witness must embark on an imaginative passage beginning with identification with the sufferer but concluding with an assessment of the witness’s own inclination and capacity to help. For Bakhtin, it is only though this round-trip journey that a witness becomes “answerable” for his or her own actions in the face of injustice: Let us say that there is a human being before me who is suffering . . . . I must experience—come to see and know—what he experiences; I must put myself in his place and coincide with him, as it were . . . . But in any event my projection of myself into him must be followed by a return into myself, a return to my own place outside the suffering person, for only from this place can the other be rendered meaningful ethically, cognitively, or aesthetically. If



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this return into myself did not actually take place, the pathological phenomenon of experiencing another’s suffering as one’s own would result—an infection with the other’s suffering, and nothing more. [emphasis in the original] (“Author and Hero,” 25–26)

To accomplish this imaginative entry and return, which Bakhtin terms empathy and exotopy, readers must be induced to see the speaker’s suffering by imagining themselves in that same situation. Those readers must then return to their own place in the world and consider the unique ways in which that position enables them to assist others (23). Bakhtin grounds questions of ethics in the concrete, quotidian, and small-scale encounter, and his model of a potentially productive encounter between reader and speaker manages to avoid both the illusory fusions of early testimonial criticism and the mournful resignation of some current critical trends. The Bakhtinian model is highly consonant with the goals of deliberative speakers, who tell their experiences to others in hope that those others will contribute something of their own to the social project. Considering the apparent attractions of imaginative fusion with the suffering speaker in the light of Bakhtin’s formulation of the encounter also illustrates other potential effects of differences of class and power on the response to suffering. In the encounter described above, the reader experiences pain only through empathy, in imagining how the sufferer feels, but in the specific case of the reader of testimonio, there is also a potential source of pain in exotopy, the return to one’s own position. The reader may conclude that while the suffering human being has done nothing to deserve her fate, she herself has been culpably negligent in not having fulfilled her own social responsibility, Here, the choice is not between a painful empathy and a presumably less painful exotopy. On the contrary, both positions are now invested with a certain quantity of pain: empathy with a pain coexperienced through identification, and undeserved;

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and exotopy with another sort of pain—namely guilt. When the choice is between joining imaginatively in the suffering of the innocent or experiencing the real pangs of one’s own conscience and the risk of being called upon to do something about it, the appeal of the former position is readily apparent.

Managing readers’ pain and countering their defenses: the magnitude of testimonio’s rhetorical task The possibility that readers will adopt a defensive posture when confronted with potential guilt has not been lost on deliberative testimonio’s speakers. As an anticipatory countermove, they often employ the same trope used in the colonial period by Spanish cleric Bartolomé de Las Casas in his letters to the Catholic monarchs in Spain regarding the abuses of indigenous peoples in the New World: you must not have known about this situation, or about your capacity to remedy it, or else you would have done something about it (71). Such a trope offers a renewal of innocence as a balm to salve the potential pain of the exotopic position. It may seem ironic and even unfair that a literature born of the speaker’s personal experience of oppression, war, and even torture should exhibit such tender concern to save the reader in the armchair from arguably well-deserved psychological discomfort, but such appears to be one of the requirements for keeping the reader in the socially productive position of addressee. Such sophisticated moves on the part of speakers offer further evidence that testimonio is a set of carefully considered rhetorical strategies rather than a spontaneous cry for help. While forensic texts demand only judgments from readers, and epideictic ones are satisfied with readers’ concurrence in assigning praise or blame, deliberative testimonio must convince readers to think critically and then act on a set of propositions that at first glance appear contradictory. The reader (who has so



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far not acted) is a good person, and moreover is both competent to act and responsible for doing so. The first hurdle, explaining the reader’s lack of response to date, is generally approached with the aforementioned trope of reader ignorance: you must not have known. The extension of this logic is so obvious that it can often go unstated: now that you know, you are obligated to act. But, for the reader, many excuses remain: I’m not capable enough. I’m not well informed enough. I don’t have the right resources. Rather than reject the reader who would make such excuses as unworthy of communion (as would forensic and epideictic strains), deliberative testimonios must address these alibis with patient and painstaking thoroughness. In deliberative testimonio, readers must be carefully constructed as capable, and also disabused of their faith that the problem will somehow be solved without them. Testimonio’s social prospects rely on these same readers. Given the vast spectrum of reader resistance, do testimonio’s rhetorical strategies really stand a chance?

3. A Genre Without a Chance? Predicting the Social Effectiveness of Testimonial Narratives

The question of testimonio’s potential efficacy is central to any engaged analysis. Can testimonial texts really be expected to contribute to the achievement of social goals? If it is possible to do such a thing with words, is it possible for testimonio’s speakers to influence the First World readers that constitute the genre’s largest audience? If so, what strategies are likely to be most effective in inducing readers to act? Social psychologist Melvin Lerner’s work on the belief in a just world offers crucial theoretical and experimental underpinning for an analysis of the role of text in testimonio’s social projects. Lerner, whose own work on social psychology and ethics has been widely cited, has also conducted a meta-analysis of the findings of hundreds of researchers working independently on the effects of specific details of presentation of injustice on subjects’ attitudes and actions. Lerner’s work strongly supports a basic tenet of politically engaged writing: that certain texts about injustice do make readers more likely to take action than do others. While this observation might seem obvious, it bears articulation in light of the current pessimistic mood in testimonial criticism. If, in the celebratory phase of the sixties, seventies and early eighties writers, critics and readers were too ready to deny the difference between text and lifeworld, the moment of mourning has been marked by precisely the opposite set of responses. Not only is it now noted that reading and writing are not revolution—a useful corrective to early triumphalism—the pendulum 66



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has swung to the opposite extreme, as some critics now profess grave doubt as to whether literature might ever influence life. “In dealing with testimonio,” states John Beverley, “I have also begun to discover in myself a kind of posthumanist agnosticism about literature” (Against Literature, 99). Georg Gugelberger observes that the reception of testimonio “clearly showed once again that whatever literature is or might be, it hardly will be able to instigate action and effect deeply needed change” (10). Gugelberger went on to assert that “we may not like this outcome but we can hardly avoid its implications. In the end there is only ‘mourning,’ ‘travail du deuil’ as Jacques Derrida has called it, or the famous ‘Trauerarbeit’ of which Walter Benjamin already had spoken” (18).1 The findings that Lerner sets forth in The Belief in a Just World demonstrate that at least some forms of literature can promote social change. Belief in justice is widespread and power­ fully motivating, readers are willing to act upon it, and they can be motivated by textual depictions of injustice (15). Speaking of experimental samples representative of the majority of the population of the United States, and fairly representative of the mostly middle-class and educated First World readers of testimonio, Lerner observes that “it is clear that people value justice more than profit, and at times more than their own lives” (175). In contrast with prevailing “rational self-interest” models of altruism, Lerner found that people will do far more than they can ever predict could be repaid, and will even help when there is neither prospect of any repayment nor any witnesses whose presence might hold out a promise of enhanced prestige (172–76). Nevertheless, it is too early for renewed celebration. Lerner’s work establishes only a hypothetical possibility that testimonio might induce currently uncommitted First World readers to cooperate in the genre’s project of social action. This does not mean that the specific forms that testimonio has hereto-

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fore taken are necessarily effective; Lerner’s work also points to some formidable rhetorical requirements. To understand the specifics, it is necessary briefly to trace the operation of the “just world” belief system that Lerner posits as an explanation for his experimental findings. Believing in a just world, it appears, is an important goal of people’s everyday actions: people do justice because they desire to believe in it. At first glance, this statement might appear either simplistic or tautological. Why should the desire for justice be so widespread, let alone so powerful a motivator? Why should people take such risks and make such sacrifices to protect it? The answer, according to Lerner’s luminous synthesis, is that a basic belief in justice is adaptive in both the individual sense and the evolutionary one. People who believe in justice are apparently better prepared to cope with the routine stresses of everyday life. Belief in a just world enhances the chances of survival and reproduction for those who possess it, and parents who possess this belief tend to instill it in their children (9–15).

Belief in a just world and its effects on the actions of individuals Lerner’s just world theory makes the vexing question of whether there is such a thing as “real altruism”—as opposed to “apparent altruism,” in which the person will get some sort of payoff, even if only psychic—nearly moot. Because the just world belief appears to function as both motivation and psychic reward, all altruism can be regarded as rewarding to the doer. The most direct way for people to maintain that highly useful belief in justice is in effect to manufacture their own evidence—to do justice in the world (176). Nonetheless, Lerner points out, this straightforward response is not infinitely available: people who reflexively meet every injustice with automatic attempts to redress



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it will quickly exhaust their available resources and cease to be able to act at all. In response to this problem, Lerner found, humans have developed an elaborate set of secondary mechanisms that allow them to inhibit the action while still preserving the belief. Rather than adjusting the world, people may adjust their own perceptions (172–76). In multiple experiments, people confronted with evidence of injustice responded emotionally to suffering victims with “empathic pain, concern [and] pity,” but also at times with “revulsion, fear, and panic” (6). Faced with such discomfort, the witnesses’ first choice was to take action against injustice, but they acted on that preferred choice only if the action at hand appeared to offer a reasonable hope of success and an acceptable ratio of risk-to-benefit. (193–94). If those two conditions were not met, and the injustice persisted, witnesses sought other means to remedy their own pain and defend their belief in a just world—psychological defenses that included denial or withdrawal. They refused to credit the evidence of injustice, or simply stopped paying attention to it. They reinterpreted the event so as to believe that the victim was not actually suffering, or placed their faith in alternative compensations. Perhaps the victim would emerge somehow better for the experience, acquiring virtue in suffering (19–21). Belief in a just world was also maintained through other strategies. Witnesses temporized, calling into play an extended time frame in which justice would be done in the long run. They transferred responsibility: surely someone else would remedy the injustice. In the face of incontrovertible and nearly overwhelming evidence of injustice, some witnesses could manage only a more limited version of the just world belief. To assure themselves that they still lived in a just world, they reported conceiving of various “worlds,” usually three. In one, people were above the rules. Next, there was a just world, where wit-

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nesses and people like them belonged. Finally, there was a world where people were below the rules—a separate “third world” to which victims could be relegated (23–25). Witnesses also protected their belief in justice by re­ interpreting the cause of suffering. If victims deserved to be punished, their suffering was not unjust. Even if no bad behavior had been observed, witnesses could ascribe alternative justifications for victims’ pain: perhaps there was some inherent but invisible character flaw (21, 55). Unless justice was done, witnesses characterized victims more and more negatively as their undeserved suffering increased (61). Witnesses were less likely to derogate victims who eventually received some measure of justice, even when all other descriptions of the victim’s situation remained the same; in their search for justice, subjects employed a retrospective lens (27–28, 55). The proliferation of these defenses testifies to the centrality of the belief around which they are protectively arrayed. Lerner concludes that “it appears that the desire to see justice done in one’s environment is sufficient to elicit justice-restoring cognitive distortion among a substantial portion of reasonably bright, welleducated young adults” [emphasis in the original] (158). “And further,” he points out, “these observers will deny that they engage in such primitive processes. They are much too sophisticated and realistic to do that” (158). Lerner reminds readers that psychological defenses are not the witness’s first choice of response. Under the right circumstances, people will make enormous sacrifices for justice itself; cognitive distortions are the fallback alternatives when justice appears either impossible or too costly. Lerner is emphatic in his insistence that defenses are not limited to uncaring people. Even people of good faith engage them when necessary to protect a crucial article of that faith. In fact, people who are more invested in social justice may even be more likely to draw on such defenses when redress seems impossible



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or the cost too high, because witnessing injustice pains them more. 2 For the social prospects of testimonio, the good news is that Lerner finds readers’ defensive responses “relatively tentative or vulnerable,” and “often breached and sometimes abandoned when they are no longer functional.” He observes that “as soon as there is some sign, some hope . . . enthusiastic concern and warmth” return (6). Even more promising is Lerner’s observation that most people find their own cognitive defenses unacceptable when confronted with them directly: simply telling people what they are doing can forestall many of their defenses against acting for social justice. Lerner wryly remarks that “all we need to prevent good citizens from publicly derogating suffering victims is to have people with authority and fate control equivalent to a psychologist experimenter define in a compelling way that the victims are truly innocent and worthy of compassion. Also, as in these experiments, they must continue to remind us before we react on each occasion” (80). Lerner makes a key distinction between empathy, which he defines as the automatic arousal of emotion by seeing the pain of others, and sympathy, the compassion and concern that arise from productive identification (78).3 Empathy alone is a pre­condition for derogation, not a preventative against it (128). In fact, other things being equal, greater empathic arousal only made witnesses more likely to reject and derogate the victim. Witnesses who empathized more with the victim experienced more pain, and required more defenses (76–77, 128). In cases where the witness found redress impossible, dispassionate observation actually helped to prevent victim derogation (136, 159). Lerner’s findings suggest that Brecht may have been on to something when he insisted on the utility of critical distancing in politically effective literature.4 Generally, witnesses will not derogate those victims whom

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they believe that they can help, but potential helpers must believe that they themselves are capable, that their action will not cost them their own membership in the just world, and that they are doing no more than their own peers would (6, 27, 186). While the experiments Lerner examined did not deal explicitly with the literally cross-cultural communication that constitutes testimonio, his observations about the potential relegation of victims of injustice to a distant “third world” (in the reader’s rather than the political sense) suggest that, in some sense, any communication from victims about the experience of injustice may be cross-cultural.

Implications of the just world findings in assessing testimonial rhetoric “If it is true that a central concern in people’s lives is maintaining the belief that they live in a just world,” Lerner contends, “it is also true that this commitment remains a powerful untapped source for generating constructive social change” (193). Lerner’s work on the effect of presentational strategies in engaging just world responses makes it possible to construct a provisional rhetoric of testimonial persuasion, one that enables evaluation of the probable effect on readers. The likelihood of engaging the readers’ sense of injustice and converting their pain into action (as opposed to defense) appears to depend largely on specific textual presentations of situation, suffering, sufferer, and of readers themselves. In each area, the testimonial speakers must meet the readers’ requirements for action, close off preexisting cognitive and psychological defenses, and avoid arousing new ones. To meet the exigent requirements for the productive portrayal of situation, testimonial texts may need to state explicitly information that it seems should be taken for granted. This includes offering any available proof of the occurrence of injus-



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tice—confirmation that the events actually happened, as Alicia Partnoy does in The Little School. Testimonialistas must often clear the rhetorical ground by countering official denials or alternative versions of events, as when Partnoy opens a chapter with an excerpt from a government report on disappearances. When conventional evidence is unavailable or incomplete, as it often is, speakers must explain the lack of documentation and seek other means to establish their own authority. Specific sensory detail can make accounts of injustice appear more credible. Apparent lack of artifice also plays a role in convincing the reader that truth has not been subordinated to artistic ends. Most readers will base their judgments of credibility on internal consistency and their own sense of plausibility. Few of them will double-check facts, so verisimilitude is at least as important as veracity. To meet readers’ requirements for action, testimonio must present injustice not only as ongoing or in danger of happening again but also as potentially avoidable. Abstract causes such as “structural poverty” or “general political instability of the region” permit readers to view the sequelae of suffering as a natural disaster beyond hope of remedy: the victims’ pain is thus tragic but unavoidable. Such comforting naturalizations may be challenged directly in the text or attributed to characters who are presented as either evil or naïve. Speakers may even report that they used to believe in such explanations themselves, before they learned better. As an illustration, the necessity of countering readers’ assumptions that Bolivians are poor because Bolivia just doesn’t have any resources helps to account for Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s elaborate opening presentation of Bolivia as a rich country rather than a poor one in Let Me Speak! She insists that “our country is very rich, especially in minerals: tin, silver, gold, bismuth, zinc, iron. Oil and gas are also important sources of exploitation. In the eastern zone we also have large fields where

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livestock are raised, we have woods, fruit, and lots of agricultural products” (19). Speakers may also intercalate in narratives of suffering contrasting depictions of periods of relative good fortune. When speakers describe a normal life, either from before their political oppression or from whenever they can eke out a few moments of freedom, the scenes may be idyllic and almost prelapsarian. Menchú recalls the mountain where her parents were establishing a subsistence farm as “practically a paradise, the country is so beautiful” (2). Such portrayals of an attainable alternative help to convince readers that the speaker’s suffering is not an inevitable consequence of a lack of natural resources in the region. Care must also be taken that the injustice not appear to be self-liquidating. If the problem can solve itself, even on a longer time frame, readers can trust that their own actions are not needed. The effective presentation of the sufferer and suffering is more complex and less intuitively obvious. It must be confirmed that the victim is actually suffering in this situation, and is not somehow less sensitive than the reader. One telling experimental finding occurred when witnesses were given varying directions for watching an episode of injustice: “Picture to yourself just how you would feel. . . . You are to react as if it were you having the experience.” “Watch her. Don’t try to imagine how she feels or how you would feel in her place.” “Watch for clues as to how she is feeling.”

Only the “imagine yourself ” instruction promoted positive feelings toward the victim (74–80). To be judged worthy of reader intervention, victims must demonstrate appropriate actions as well as positive character traits such as determination, persistence, intelligence and faith, but as strict as these tests of worthiness appear, those who pass them have no guarantee that wit-



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nesses will feel compelled to help. Readers tend to be suspicious of victims who appear “too good” (45–47). Effectively presented victims will need to show some measure of benefit from their own efforts and/or from outside help, but not so much as to excuse the reader. Not surprisingly, the most persuasive models of worthiness for victims appear to be the readers themselves. Victims should respond to suffering in ways that the readers are likely to find both believable and reasonable, responding as readers imagine that they themselves might behave in the same circumstance (91). Again, this is a delicate and irreversible comparison. The converse, showing how readers are like the victim, tends merely to frighten the readers and engage their defenses. The sufferer must be identified as a temporarily misplaced member of the just world—not a citizen of one of the reader’s “other worlds” where things are simply not just, and certainly not likely to pull the reader into that other world (128–36). Excessive violence, especially early on in the text, is likely to provoke and magnify reader defenses. Instead, it must be deployed sparingly and juxtaposed with reminders of normalcy to keep the victim firmly connected to the witnesses’ just world, although the emotional ante can be upped once the reader has come to identify with the speaker. Working through persuasion rather than through force, effective testimonio must pull many of its punches.5 In general, suffering should be presented in a matter-of-fact style. Not even the fundamental fact of the victim’s suffering can be established once and for all at the outset; instead, it must be reinforced over and over as readers’ psychological defenses are constantly renewed. Readers must be reminded of the innocence of the victims, the qualities and actions that make the victim deserve better, and of the fact of the victim’s suffering. As apparent in the earlier discussion of Alicia Partnoy’s The

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Little School, deliberative treatments of torture insist that real people are suffering. Rather than comforting readers by resisting heroically, suffering aesthetically, and emerging with improved character, in deliberative testimonio people who suffer are damaged. Attempts to mythologize the speaker are strenuously resisted, as are illusions that speakers always know what to do. Menchú’s testimonio is typical in this regard: nearly all key decision points are preceded by lengthy descriptions of periods of confusion, indecision, and even near-paralyzing depression, and decisions are presented as frequently dicey and sometimes even incorrect. In deliberative testimonio, suffering must be borne and revolutions made by insistently ordinary and fallible people. Menchú spends a great deal of time on ordinary human matters, including one point that has surprised some of my students—the difficulties of couples arranging to have sex when so many people share a house. As for sex, that’s something we Indians know about because most of the family sees everything that goes on. Couples sleep together, but don’t have a separate place for themselves. Even the children realize most of the time, but sometimes they don’t, because I think married couples don’t have enough time to enjoy their life together and, anyway, we’re all in there together. (47)

Similarly, Elvia Alvarado observes that I’ve heard that there are men and women who make love in all different ways, but we campesinos don’t know anything about these different positions. We do it the same all the time—the man gets on the woman and goes up and down, up and down, and that’s it. Sometimes the woman feels pleasure and sometimes she doesn’t. We don’t have any privacy either, because our houses are usually one big room. So we have to wait until everyone is asleep and then do it very quietly. (47)



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Menchú is likewise careful to resist both elevation and de­ sexualization in setting up a context for her decision not to marry or have children yet. Lest she be suspected of super­ human immunity to temptation, Menchú takes pains to inform her readers that she has been in love plenty of times, that there had been no shortage of opportunities, and moreover that she might like to marry later (as has since come about). She presents her decision not as a heroic sacrifice but as a sign of weakness, explaining that she suspects that she lacks the ability to withstand more pain, either from being the mother of tortured children or from the prospect of leaving behind orphans. Burgos’s title for this chapter, “Women and Political Commitment. Rigoberta Renounces Marriage and Motherhood,” makes Menchú’s vows sound considerably more final than her own provisional and expressly reluctant version (220–26). Omar Cabezas’s La montaña es más que una inmensa estepa verde (Fire from the Mountain) (1982) presents another insistently human and prosaic view of revolution. “It is the detail which grips the attention,” insists a reviewer in The New Internationalist. “The incessant rain, the lack of sex, the scavenging for food, all of these dominate the foreground. And while the grander story of insurrection and political awakening eventually takes over, there are often more pressing issues like how many leaves you should use to wipe your backside (lots).”6 Deliberative speakers have rarely if ever presented themselves as the best and brightest members of their communities, nor even as the most oppressed. Instead, they establish a spectrum of suffering and situate themselves away from both extremes, such as when Barrios recalls her childhood offerings of rice and coffee to the poor. So when we saw poor people begging in the street, me and my sisters would start dreaming. We’d dream that one day we’d be big, that we would have land, that we’d plant, and that we’d give

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those poor people food. Any time we had a little sugar or coffee or something else left over, and we heard a sound, we’d say: “A poor person’s passing by. Look, here’s a little rice, a little sugar.” And we’d wrap it up in a rag and throw it out into the street for some poor person to pick up. Once we threw out some coffee when my father was coming back from work. And when he came into the house he really scolded us and said: “How can you waste the little that we have? How can you throw out what costs me so much to earn for you?” And he really beat us. But those things were things that just occurred to us, we thought that that way we could help someone, see? (54–55)

Menchú insists that it is other groups of indigenous people, not her own, who face colder climates with fewer blankets, who have less nourishing food and sicker children (164, 192–93). Speakers’ reports of the sense of the social responsibility that accompanies their own relative privilege—rice or sugar in the house, access to corn, chile, and a blanket—are clearly meant as instructive examples for their readers. The just world models, with their requirement that people have done everything possible to avoid deserving their fate, also help explain the amount of space that deliberative testimonial texts frequently devote to the following of legal and bureaucratic rules. Victims bear the burden of proof of worthiness. This rhetorical strategy harkens back to writing from the colonial period, as when Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Enriquillo traverses the distance between his home and the capital over and over, filing complaints with the Spanish authorities in hopes of legal recourse after the rape of his wife (Historia, 3:127). In Menchú’s account of the murder of Petrona Chona, all of the villagers are reluctant to disturb the scene of the crime. In accordance with the law, they wait days and days for the authorities to come before finally collecting the dismembered body (152). These texts recount in detail the efforts of victims to follow all of the rules



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to the letter, even when readers would certainly excuse and even begin to expect and sanction attempts to contravene unresponsive and unjust authorities. Readers who are ready to authorize civil disobedience or violence just ahead of its occurrence in the text will view the speaker as having done the right thing— exactly what the reader himself/herself would have done.

Returning readers to their own place: resisting defensive readings of testimonio Left here, of course, the reader is merely imaginatively fused with the speaker. If readers are to take action on their own, speakers must ultimately remind them that they have their own place and their own opportunities and responsibilities. To be effective, testimonio apparently needs to construct a model reader who is able and willing to help, but still recognizable to real readers—a kind of best plausible self. Readers must be assured that they have sufficient resources (material, physical, psychological, spiritual) to enable them to help without losing their own place in the just world, and that helping in this specific situation would not be heroic and extraordinary, but only the reasonable response of an ordinary good citizen. As Lerner discovered, many readers find their own defenses cognitively unacceptable; when a text makes those defenses explicit, readers will sometimes drop them. Segments of certain testimonios constitute a veritable instruction manual of “how to read this book and act,” complete with a troubleshooting guide on “how not to read and respond to testimonio.” Elvia Alvarado puts it succinctly in Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: But we can’t just read it and say “Those poor campesinos. What a miserable life they have.” Or others might say “What a nice book. That woman Elvia sounds like a nice woman.” I imagine there’ll be others who say “That Elvia is a foul-mouthed, uppity campesina.”

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But the important thing is not what you think of me, the important thing is for you to do something. (146)

Far from the naive and guileless speaking subject envisioned in early testimonial criticism, this speaker is obviously aware of a variety of defensive readings. Effective testimonial text must establish that the obligation to help does not more properly belong to others who are more responsible, more suited, and likely to help in the reader’s stead, and the reader must not be allowed to substitute other actions (like reading, for instance) for social action. Much has been made of Rigoberta Menchú’s emphasis on her secrets. Whatever they may or may not be, they serve to reinscribe distance and thus to defend against a continued fusion. An exchange from Let Me Speak! demonstrates another testimonialista’s resistance to her audience’s attempts at fusion. At the 1975 International Women’s Year conference in Mexico, Barrios de Chungara brings up the matter of class difference. With illconcealed impatience, an affluent attendee tries to assert gender solidarity. “Let’s speak about us, Señora,” the delegate proposes, “we’re women. Look, Señora, forget the suffering of your people. For a moment, forget the massacres, we’ve talked enough about that. We’ve heard you enough. Let’s talk about us . . . about you and me . . . well, about women.” “All right,” Barrios agrees, “let’s talk about the two of us. But if you’ll let me, I’ll begin.” Señora, I’ve known you for a week. Every morning you show up in a different outfit and on the other hand, I don’t. Every day you show up all made up and combed like someone who has time to spend in an elegant beauty parlor and who can spend money on that, and yet I don’t. I see that each afternoon you have a chauffeur in a car waiting at the door to this place to take you home, and yet I don’t. And in order to show up here like you do, I’m sure you live in a really elegant home, in an elegant neighborhood, no? And yet



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we miners’ wives only have a small house on loan to us, and when our husbands die or get sick or are fired from the company, we have ninety days to leave the house and then we’re in the street.

Barrios concludes with pointed rhetorical questions: “Now, Señora, tell me: is your situation at all similar to mine? Is my situation at all similar to yours? So what equality are we going to speak of between the two of us, if you and I are not alike, if you and I are so different we can’t, at this moment, be equal, even as women, don’t you think?” (202–3) The ringing cadence of the repeated question, “Is your situation at all similar to mine?” recalls an address to another women’s conference a century earlier, when Sojourner Truth made her now-famous speech to the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, in December of 1851. However, Barrios’s choice to distance herself from the other women at this convention stands in striking contrast to the earlier rhetorical strategy. With the refrain, “Ain’t I a woman?” Sojourner Truth turns her specific situation of oppression and exploitation as a black woman to the service of an inclusively construed women’s movement. Barrios poses the converse question, “What do we have in common, even as women?” and implies a negative answer. Rather than claiming common cause with the rest of the women at the conference, Barrios explicitly distances herself not only from women of privilege but also from other groups of women. She reports visiting sessions for lesbians, sex workers, and advocates of sexual equality, all of whom she satirizes sharply. Repeatedly Barrios insists that their interests are not her interests, and that she came only in order to exchange ideas with other women engaged in political and economic struggles similar to her own. By Barrios’s account, it is the upper- and middle-class audience members at the session who attempt to extend a definition of women that would encompass Barrios along with themselves, a gesture Barrios vehemently and sar-

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castically resists. Like Sojourner Truth, Barrios is addressing an upper- and middle-class audience that appears intellectually sympathetic but not necessarily socially active, and each woman deploys similar notions of maternal responsibility and common sense. Where her counterpart insists on inclusion, however, Barrios enacts the contrary. Why did Barrios, a deeply committed organizer and highly competent public speaker, not only reject overtures from international feminists but perform a highly public self-­exclusion from that movement? Barrios, of course, was hardly the only activist to detect upper-class and First World biases in late twentieth-century feminism, nor was Sojourner Truth alone among abolitionists in linking their cause to the contemporary women’s movement. Indeed, by some accounts, the US women’s movement largely grew out of women’s participation in the abolitionist struggle. Both women were expert organizers and skilled speakers, deeply committed to their respective causes. Crediting their apparent judgments requires both acknowledging that, where Sojourner Truth saw a strategic advantage in alliance, Barrios de Chungara’s calculations of political profit and loss led her to an equally strategic disaffiliation, and considering that each may well have been correct. As indices of the differing relationships of representatives of two social justice movements with their contemporary women’s movements, the two speeches present an evident contrast. Although it would be naive in the extreme to ignore the chronological and cultural distance between 1851 and 1975, it is clear that the relationship Barrios describes is not merely different but worse. As Frances Smith Foster demonstrates in Witnessing Slavery (1994), abolitionist narrative from early on had made artful use of contemporary notions of entitlement through highly conventional and romanticized depictions of women and mother­ hood (134–37). Appeals for resources were often prefaced by descriptions of the particular horrors that slavery held for



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women. Abolitionists advanced several claims based on “family values,” describing the special pain of women at separation from their children and the “unspeakable” treatment of women by slaveholders. In her speech, Sojourner Truth makes one of these appeals, describing the “mother’s grief ” she felt at the loss of her children. While contemporary reception of abolitionist rhetoric has often focused on issues of marginality and resistance to social convention, Foster calls attention to a very high degree of conventionality. Industriousness, virtue, and religious devotion were nearly always highly emphasized; any lapses were explicitly attributed to the pernicious effects of slavery (45–51). Abolitionist narratives were calculated appeals for funds and political support, and it was necessary to prove one’s worthiness of assistance with careful bows to social convention. Moreover, in the context of pro-slavery arguments that slaves were subhuman, laying a personal claim to even the most conventional depictions of women and family life represented a step up. Not only could abolitionism expect to gain by claiming common cause with the women’s movement, the benefits were reciprocal. The inclusion of black women (and lower-class white women) in a class of women offered both role models of women’s strength and endurance and counterexamples to the opposition’s claims that women in general already enjoyed a privileged place in society. In the 1850s, the women’s movement coupled intellectual leanings toward the marginalized with access to the financial and social resources of the center: many of those women came from wealthy families. Self-concepts that acknowledged both privilege and obligation meant that persuasive claims of entitlement could be expected to be met with some form of assistance. Of course, such felt obligation was by no means universal, nor was it without its element of condescension. As Christian charity, noblesse oblige, or some combination thereof, the sense of social obligation extended only so far, to those who were judged

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to be “deserving.” Barrios was to encounter quite a different reception from the women at the 1975 conference. As she reports, First World women were all too eager to embrace Third World women as co-members in a class of women, and were puzzled and angry when those overtures were rejected. “Betty Friedan invited us to join them,” Barrios explains. “She asked us to stop our ‘warlike activity’ and said that we were ‘being manipulated by men,’ that ‘we only thought about politics,’ and that we’d completely ignored women’s problems, ‘like the Bolivian delegation does, for example,’ she said” (201–2). By Barrios’s account, Third World women who resisted membership in a posited universal class of women were denounced as militaristic, male-­dominated, and in essence “not real women.” Where abolitionists had sought and found support for their cause in the contemporary women’s movement, Barrios and other Third World women found themselves expected to cede reference to their own social project. As Barrios presents it, not only did the women running the latter conference fail to offer any practical support, they did not even want to hear about the desperate economic and social straits of their “sisters.” The women’s movements of the two periods evidently agreed that women were entitled to more rights and resources than they currently enjoyed, and both movements advanced claims based on general notions of human rights—rights that entitled women to as much as men. The 1850s movement, however, also relied on more specific notions of women’s rights—claims nearly always based to some degree on the status of women as mothers, whether actual or potential. In the late twentieth century, the movement’s attempts to separate identity from reproduction made motherhood a problematic rallying point. Both movements agreed that white men enjoyed certain privileges, but the two parted company in the former’s specific attribution of privilege to white men rather than to men in general. The ear-



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lier movement also demonstrated a much more nuanced treatment of privilege among women. While generalizations about the unjust treatment of women in general are certainly present, writings from the nineteenth-century US women’s movement also demonstrated an explicit and elaborated set of notions regarding differences in social class and privilege, within what was conceived as the larger class of women. Privilege was not only attributed to certain men, but also, in different degrees, acknowledged among women. With it, depending of course on one’s personal ethics, could come a sense of obligation. In its discourse of human rights, the 1970s movement articulated a considerably broader notion of entitlement. The class of those seen as deserving—as possessing rights—was growing. However, at the same time, the class of women who saw themselves as privileged, and thus as morally obligated to assist others, appears to have been shrinking. In the late twentiethcentury upper class, women rarely even defined themselves as upper-class, much less wrote about their own privilege as such. On the few occasions when privilege was acknowledged, it was most often converted imaginatively into its opposite: a set of extra social constraints that made these women even more oppressed—apparent, for instance, in assertions of the stifling effect of life in suburbia. In the specific context of testimonio, a similar inversion shows up in claims that lower-class women were socially freer, even in their language, than upper-class writers. The class inversion was accompanied and intensified by a romanticized view of working-class and poor women as being somehow more in touch with their essential nature. At the same time, none of the alternatives to motherhood as a positive defining factor for women had achieved a broad enough acceptance to serve effectively in its stead. Bracketing biology meant finding a new definition for a class of women, and eventually the status of oppression itself emerged to fill that def-

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initional vacuum. Sustaining such a definition militated against nuanced treatment of privilege among either men or women. If women’s commonality was defined by their common oppression by men, suggestions that some segments of the group were less oppressed (let alone that some members might themselves be benefiting from the oppression of others) would pose a serious threat to group cohesion. The edges of this definition frayed at a predictably weak point: Third World women (and lower-class women in the United States) observed that upper-class women were relatively privileged, and not only in contrast with poor women, but also with their male compañeros. For these Third World women, a group definition based on common oppression did not encompass an all-inclusive group of women; rather, it drew a circle that excluded upper-class women and emphasized solidarity with the men of their own class. At the same time, upper-class women’s focus on their own oppression made them even less likely to see themselves as privileged and thus potentially obligated. Moreover, as the women’s movement sought to incorporate (even with good intentions) more women who did suffer serious economic oppression, that movement’s self-definition shifted even further away from any nuanced notion of privilege, and further toward a general sense of unfulfilled entitlement. For poor women, claiming membership in a broader women’s movement became at the same time easier and less potentially helpful. In the 1850s, that membership would have been a means for poor women to claim entitlements and muster resources from higher up the social scale. By the 1970s, it had become a means by which privileged women could deny their own economic privilege and thus blunt any sense of social obligation. Barrios refuses to support the claims of unity that had become an alibi. Not only does she resist assimilation into a group she deems spurious, she also names the price of its legitimate



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construction: acknowledgment of substantial obligations and actual social action. Only when economic equality is achieved, Barrios insists, can they begin to talk together “as women.” To the delegates’ demand that she earn her way into their women’s movement by relinquishing her social project, she counters with a price for their admission into what she defines as a legitimate women’s movement. Where they take the ability to “talk together as women” as a given, Barrios posits a conversation among equals in struggle as a deliberative goal: women of privilege must earn their own places at the table. Barrios’s employment of a clueless middle-class delegate as a counterexample permits a diplomatic admonition to any reader who might seek a cheap sense of solidarity. In her description of that overture at the conference, Barrios is sharply sarcastic. She had come, she insists, with high hopes: “It was my first experience and I imagined I’d hear things that would make me get ahead in life, in the struggle, in my work.” To her shock and disappointment, she reports, the first session she entered was dominated by sex workers: “At that moment a gringa went over to the microphone with her blond hair and . . . said to the assembly: ‘I’ve asked for the microphone so I can tell you about my experience. Men should give us a thousand and one medals because we, the prostitutes, have the courage to go to bed with so many men.’ ” “A lot of women shouted ‘Bravo!’ ” reported Barrios, “and applauded.” Barrios and her friend entered another room and “there were the lesbians . . . , the discussion was about how ‘they feel happy and proud to love another woman . . . that they should fight for their rights . . .’ Like that.” Barrios continues: In other rooms, some women stood up and said: men are the enemy . . . men create wars, men create nuclear weapons, men beat women . . . and so what’s the first battle to be carried out to get equal rights for women? First, you have to declare war against

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men. If a man has ten mistresses, well, the woman should have ten lovers also. If a man spends all his money at the bar, partying, the women have to do the same thing. And when we’ve reached that level, then men and women can link arms and start struggling for the liberation of their country, to improve the living conditions for their country. (198–99)

Barrios is careful to disassociate herself from all of these groups, insisting that “those weren’t my interests. And for me it was incomprehensible that so much money should be spent to discuss those things in the Tribunal . . .”(198). As a practiced organizer and public speaker, Barrios likely realized that any form of feminism was in 1978 a highly sectarian discourse, let alone the claims of rights for sex workers and lesbians. To distance herself from the political edge, Barrios chose to invoke the now familiar caveat, “I’m not a feminist but. . . .” She depicts certain conference sessions as either ludicrous or salacious in order to present herself as the voice of common sense. To heighten the contrast for readers, she drafts other conference participants as extremist character foils. In so doing, she could avoid some knee-jerk rejection and engage a broader audience for her own project. In presenting herself as the voice of adult (and specifically maternal) authority and reason, she takes care to distinguish that project from the general goals of the conference, observing “I think it was important for me to see again—and on that occasion in contact with more than five thousand women from all over—how the interests of the bourgeoisie really aren’t our interests” (204). Ironically, this passage lapses back into another sectarian discourse (at least with regard to the US audience) with the choice of the term “bourgeoisie.” The just world data have implications for style as well as substance. General readers are likely to be put off by stock expressions of political orthodoxy. While a style that appears to



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be spontaneous and oral is likely to be effective, the appearance of spontaneity is not to be confused with the real absence of editing. Readers come to the testimonial text with expectations shaped by reading literary narratives, so that verbatim transcription of interviews is likely to appear tedious and rambling. Measured doses of humor on the part of the sufferer serve to remind readers that these are human beings who are suffering, not saints or martyrs. For deliberative testimonio as social project, the goal is to reach as many readers as possible. Styles and structures that increase the difficulty of reading will interfere with this goal. On the other hand, some marketing strategies, such as cover blurbs promising heroes or self-help, are likely to diminish readers’ propensity to act. Dorfman noted that sectarian testimonios that mythologized sufferers restricted both their audience and their effectiveness, while the “writerly” works he read seemed to reach a broader audience in some important way. He recognized sectarian testimonio’s plaintive call that it could work if audiences were just a little more honorable, closer to what they should be. Through his analysis of Tejas verdes, he also came to see the unique possibilities of deliberative testimonio, the form that he termed literary. Through this other mode of testimonio, a way might be found to use the imperfect and unqualified audiences that far outnumbered the qualified readers sought by sectarian texts—a larger audience that he recognized as ourselves. The day we are willing to admit that revolutionary change cannot be brought about, dictators overthrown, without persons like those who appear in the pages of Tejas verdes, perhaps on that day we will be nearer to victory, which is also always and above all a victory over our own inner selves, over the demons that keep us from being truthful. It is a victory we must achieve by ourselves. There is, after all, no one else who can do it. (“Political Code,” 195)

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Critical resistance to a prescriptive rhetoric for testimonio As Lerner demonstrated, not only are the requirements for reaching that larger audience formidable; upon first learning about them people are likely to deny that they are necessary. While Lerner cautioned about the understandable resistance to the just world analyses, he also observed that some cognitive defenses can be overcome through explicit iteration. Thus, this is an opportune point to discuss some possible objections to such a prescriptive rhetoric. For optimum social effect, testimonial speakers apparently need to tell readers over and over that the suffering is real, it really hurts, it’s not our fault, we’re not bad people and we’re doing our best, but we still need your help— yes, yours—because you can do something about it, other people won’t do it in your stead and it won’t go away on its own, moreover it won’t cost you too much to help and it’s no more than any other reasonable person would do. And, of course, speakers cannot say all of this directly because it would insult and drive away the readers, so they are required to be subtle about it. Already, these prescriptions may seem disrespectful of speakers, patronizing of readers, overly restrictive of writers, and antithetical to creative art. While each of these reservations will be dealt with in greater depth in subsequent chapters, it bears pointing out here that in the end any prescription as to how to speak of one’s suffering may seem patently unjust. How dare anyone say how victims should speak? As a part of a social project, testimonio is not a matter of speaking of one’s suffering for therapeutic, archival, or judicial purposes, but of rather of speaking of one’s suffering in such a way that readers will be induced to act against the injustice of it. It is now clear that the multiple and often subtle means of abandoning the addressee position, as discussed in the previous chapter, are only a few of the possible defenses against hearing



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testimonio’s call to action. Effective testimonio must also constantly inscribe and reinstate persuasive versions of the sufferer and situation, all the while walking a rhetorical tightrope between unproductive extremes. Once again, it seems thoroughly unjust that suffering people should have to do such things. It is fair to protest that readers ought to be more sensitive and cooperative (which is, after all, the forensic and epideictic position on unworthy audiences) but such is the task of persuasion. In considering testimonio on its own terms as socioliterary project, there is little to be gained by lamenting resistance, and much to be lost by refusing to acknowledge it. As a function of its persuasive strategies, testimonio does treat readers (ourselves included) in some measure better and more gently than we may believe they deserve. With their tropes of persuasion, these texts may assure readers of their own competence and kindness, and protect them from excessive pain. These are among the rhetorical manifestations of injustice: those without sufficient political or economic power to coerce others have no choice but to persuade them. Lerner’s extensive analysis of the effects of presentational strategies, professional advocacy, propensities for victim derogation and other psychological defenses against calls to social action, along with his focus on outcomes as opposed to intentions, makes his work uniquely useful in the politically engaged analysis of social protest literature. It offers crucial assistance in overcoming barriers of introspective bias and personal shame to permit an appraisal of the degree to which specific testimonial texts meet the stiff rhetorical requirements to make readers more likely to act. Honest appraisal of the processes involved in maintenance of the just world hypothesis requires relinquishing a number of myths, not only about literature, but ultimately about human (and particularly our own) tendencies in social inter­action. It is to be expected that any appraisal of the effectiveness of testimonial rhetoric may trigger significant re-

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sistance. There are far more barriers to readers’ social action than testimonial criticism has heretofore recognized: these include social mythologies concerning the nature of victims, and reader-generated cognitive and psychological defenses. Lerner’s findings point as well to the ways in which socially and critically sanctioned means of speaking, writing, and reading trauma narratives may engage and even reinforce reader defenses: not only will some testimonios probably fail to persuade readers to act, they may make social action even less likely. While deliberative testimonio appears well-positioned to forestall readers’ defenses and promote action, forensic and epideictic elements of speaker presentation—evil oppressors, pure comrades, a certain cause and a force of history behind them—appear virtually guaranteed to let the general reader off the hook. For this reason, it is more than a literary problem when critical articles and collaborators’ prologues tend toward the forensic and epideictic even when addressing deliberative testimonios, directly contradicting the speakers’ strategies. Elzbieta Sklodowska explains that critics “tend to over­ compensate for the internal discord we may find in specific texts” (“Afterthoughts,” 97). Until the 1990s, few critics, especially on the Left, even mentioned the presence of any discord in testimonial texts. Unfortunately for the genre’s social possibilities, that very internal discord is a key element in the effectiveness of deliberative rhetoric: critical readings that reduce contradiction may also reduce testimonio’s social potential. Looking at critical articles alongside the testimonios they analyzed, it is easy to believe Sklodowska’s assertion that “most critics did not read testimonial texts—they read the official voices of these texts, confusing the tongues of the editor and/or his/her surrogates” (“Afterthoughts,” 98). Along with editors and collaborating writers, critics tended to simplify and smooth out the complexities of deliberative testimonio in favor of heroic speakers of single-minded dedication.



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Unlike mere mortals, the speaker constructed by many collaborating writers and critics does not experience fear and doubt. Quasi-sacred, she has been forged in the fire of revolution. Her life and thoughts are sharply focused, and it is certain that her project will succeed. The elements of confusion and hesitation that Menchú describes are conspicuously absent from Burgos’s descriptions of her, replaced with a promise of spiritual guidance and simplicity. Quietly, but proudly, she leads us into her own cultural world, a world where the sacred and the profane constantly mingle, in which worship and domestic life are one and the same, in which every gesture has a pre-established purpose and in which everything has a meaning. Within that culture, everything can be determined in advance; everything that occurs in the present can be explained in terms of the past and has to be ritualized so as to be integrated into everyday life, which is itself a ritual. As we listen to her voice, we have to look deep into our own souls for it awakens sensations and feelings which we, caught up as we are in an inhuman and artificial world, thought were lost for ever. Her story is overwhelming because what she has to say is simple and true. (xii-xiii)

This discourse of serenity, certainty, tradition, and ritual contrasts sharply with Menchú’s description of the villages’ plans for taking up arms: “It wasn’t that we had a set plan, with a theory and each role worked out. No, we were putting our ideas into practice and the whole time practicing the things we had to do together” (127–28). Deliberative testimonial speakers insist that those who act are not sure, superhuman, and saintly, but fallible, sometimes depressed, and often confused. They recount moments of discouragement and indecision as well as their convictions and hopes, and display their own ordinary desires and prosaic displeasures. The self-presentation of these speakers is often marked by a thoroughgoing sense of tension—a conflict

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that is as much personal as it is social: self versus family, community, church, and political allies; personal fears and desires versus social commitment; depression and confusion versus faith. These tensions tend to resonate with ordinary readers, 7 and stand in striking contrast to many collaborating writers’ and critics’ descriptions of speakers as possessors of spiritual and revolutionary certainties. It is not difficult to account for the apparent consonance between certain speakers’ deliberative rhetoric and the strategies that the just world data would predict as effective. Speakers have been schooled by many years of local persuasion. In likely success by just world standards, Menchú and Barrios, who first practiced in small villages in their respective countries, seem to be on a par with María Teresa Tula, who had already traveled extensively in speaking engagements in the United States before the written form of her testimonio was produced (Tula, 6). Moreover, there seems to be a high degree of transferability from oral skill at persuasion to written form. By just world measures, these three should be nearly as successful as professional writers who have written their own deliberative testimonios, such as Hernán Valdés, Alicia Partnoy, and Jácobo Timerman. As further evidence of the extent and operation of the just world belief, the correspondence between just world theory and the practice of testimonial speakers should be of as much interest to social science researchers as to analysts of testimonio. Such resemblances confirm what a recognition of empirical expertise would suggest—deliberative testimonio’s speakers seem to know what they are doing. Nonetheless, if the coincidence of speakers’ empirical skills with just world data served only to confirm the findings of social psychology and to correct some critical misconceptions that were already coming into question, we would still be in the realm of “normal criticism.” Like normal science, normal criticism proceeds by incremental changes to refine theory within the existing framework.



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However, if we grant that the speakers’ nuanced strategies are not only strategic practice but, as just world data suggests, optimum strategic practice, more troubling questions arise. How are we to account for the observation that, at the same time that deliberative speakers are employing strategies likely to induce action, many collaborating writers and critics are encouraging readings that reduce that likelihood? If critics’ remarks had simply mirrored speakers’ strategies, the situation could be incorporated neatly into a prevailing paradigm in which critics of the genre ground their analyses on the same metaphors proposed by its initiators, as had been the case with forensic and epideictic testimonios. However, writers and critics appear to be forcing deliberative testimonios into epideictic or forensic molds. Their near-universal embrace of only two of the three sets of metaphors present in the works they investigate would be an interesting enough problem in the history of reception of any literary genre, but testimonio’s socioliterary status makes that problem more pressing. Often collaborating writers and critics appear to ignore and even actively oppose the very strategies that are most likely to result in social action by readers. This last conclusion, if not the line of reasoning that led to it, would fold neatly into another tendency in testimonial criticism, one that seeks to expose collaborating writers and critics as probable traitors to the cause. This stance has been reflected in a sort of wistful wish to bypass collaborators, inter­mediaries, and indeed literature altogether, perhaps to put the speakers on video and beam them directly into living rooms worldwide (Beverley, Against Literature, 122). If writers and critics could only do harm, their best course would be a strategic and wellintentioned silence, letting the speakers speak for themselves. However, as demonstrated, speakers may also undermine their own efforts to reach and convince a broad audience. Both Dorf­ man and Margarite Fernández Olmos note what they candidly call flaws in speakers’ texts. Dorfman discusses in some detail the

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discomforts and the necessity of editing, while Fernández Olmos represents the majority position in testimonio criticism when she asserts the importance of non-intervention and allowance for speakers’ “occasional lapses into inconsistency or brilliance” (194). Were the project a purely literary or anthropological one, the latter lapses might be simply interesting to observe, but in a social project of persuasion, standing by and watching what one has identified as bad strategy could hardly be counted as good practice. Before proceeding with the appraisal of the social chances of testimonio by just world standards, it should be acknowledged that sectarian testimonio posits intended audiences that are significantly different from those of deliberative testimonio. Should not sectarian testimonio be excluded from the just world prescriptions? Deliberative testimonio seeks to convince the unconvinced or just passively well disposed to act. In contrast, sectarian testimonio might be seen as a ritual discourse of identity practiced among a tightly knit political group, and identity ritual is not the same as recruitment. One of the effects of any such ritual is to draw and redraw precisely those lines that separate insider from outsider, the sheep from the goats. It might thus be argued that the small audiences that such testimonios garnered are not to be regarded as any sort of failure to reach a broader audience; instead, they reflect a greater selectivity with regard to intended audience—a selectivity that, in turn, influenced the speakers’ choice of rhetorical modes. By this logic, it should not be surprising that the rhetorical strategies of sectarian and deliberative testimonio would be different. The just world prescriptive rhetoric, focusing as it does on the unconvinced audience, would apply only to deliberative texts. Accounts from survivors of political imprisonment who insist that only their faith in the cause kept them alive or who found sustaining inspiration in tales of revolutionary heroes suggest that at least some people find positive personal suste-



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nance in sectarian texts. Shouldn’t there be a different rhetorical critique for testimonios that a devoted audience would accept as articles of faith? Shouldn’t the identifiably distinct rhetorical strategies of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative in testimonio also imply distinct frameworks for the evaluation of these texts’ potential social effectiveness? Sectarian testimonio may increase the social activity of certain intimate audiences, but the likely negative social effect when it circulates outside that group cannot be overlooked. For those already on the borders of the inner circle, the galvanizing effect of fervent demonstrations of faith by those inside may draw them further in, but that same fervor will shut out the majority. Assuming that sectarian testimonio does have positive social value for the in-group in terms of promoting group identity and morale, and that the negative effects occur only when access is extended to outside audiences, the practical implication might be that it would be prudent to keep a group’s sectarian testimonios, like their battle plans, clandestine. But secrecy is hardly to be relied upon, especially in the situations in which most testimonio is produced, and not all revolutionary theorists are so sanguine about sectarianism’s positive effect even for those on the inside. Paulo Freire cautions readers of the risks of sectarianism and alienation (Pedagogy, 21–22), and Miguel Mármol condemns the strategic errors that he saw as resulting from narrow sectarianism (291). Sectarian movements run a decided risk of collapsing under the burden of their own quest for purity. Moreover, in keeping with the goal of evaluating testimonios in terms of the speakers’ actual social projects, it is worth bearing in mind that deliberative speakers were not the only ones who saw themselves as addressing broad audiences. Many sectarian speakers did not envision their own texts as narrowly directed identity rituals. Instead, they expressed the hope that their texts could serve not only to confirm and strengthen that committed core but also to expand it and thus cause more read-

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ers to take action. Granting that sectarian testimonios may have powerful effects on the already faithful, the just world findings indicate that for their less committed brethren, sectarian strategies may not only be less effective in eliciting reader action, but even counterproductive. Not only is sectarian testimonio that circulates outside its own target audience likely to leave nonsectarian audiences unmoved, to the extent that it provokes and shores up those readers’ defenses, it may leave them even less likely to act than had they read nothing at all. This raises yet another challenge to the production of effective testimonio: the conjunction in one individual (whether speaker, writer, critic, or reader) of good will and bad strategy. In the case of testimonio, such unproductive strategies may even be an unintended consequence of unreflective admiration, faith, or personal dedication. Discerning and writing some of the “unwritten rules” that are likely to produce socially effective testimonio is an important part of an engaged analysis of the genre, but it is equally important to articulate the other sets of unwritten rules, those that have produced texts that are unlikely to be effective. Simply noting infractions of the just world rhetoric and enjoining all concerned to follow the norms of best practice is unlikely to be effective without an understanding of the reasons that have led various participants in a testimonial project to produce texts or passages of text that would appear to be counterproductive. Satya Mohanty insists that engaged criticism cannot ignore the possibility of strategic errors—that “we can learn from others only if we take them seriously enough to imagine situations in which they may in fact be wrong about some things in ways that we can specify and understand” (113). The deployment of sectarian testimonio in efforts to reach outside its core group may have been such a mistake, but it must be acknowledged that it is not always the speaker who has chosen to employ sectarian strategies to reach a nonsectarian audience. Such disjunctures



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may be byproducts of a collaborative encounter or individual choices of the collaborating writer or critic, quite apart from the speaker’s apparent plans. Sectarian works cannot be excluded from just world rhetorical appraisals, even if such appraisals are done with reservations. Engaged textual criticism of testimonio requires assessment of all three of the rhetorics that operate in the genre, and thus of the likely social effects of existing texts. The chapters that follow will analyze the capabilities and constraints that inhere to each position—speaker, experiencing writer, collaborating writer, and critic—in producing texts that are likely to further the social prospects of testimonio.

4. The Capacities and Constraints of Testimonio’s Speakers and Experiencing Writers

The capacities and constraints of the speaker In the critical literature to date, the speaker has been by far the most frequently examined of any of the participants in the production of testimonio. Often this selective emphasis reflects a psychoanalytic approach—a focus not on the speakers’ skills but on the difficulties of narrating their traumas. Despite the wellchronicled barriers to speaking at all, let alone speaking persuasively about oppression, the previous chapters have indicated that a number of speakers appear to have overcome those obstacles. Again, these speakers’ rhetorical skills should not be surprising. By the time most testimonial speakers come to the attention of those who will help to turn their speech into text, they have already passed through a draconian selection process. As a speech act in the world and a subgenre of the literature of trauma, testimonio poses a threat to those in power, who respond with containment strategies (Tal, 6). They attempt to prevent the speakers from speaking at all, to keep the audience as small as possible, to deny or neutralize their speech, to contain it within certain forms, and even to turn it to their own advantage, to protect the rest of the population from subversion, and to minimize any action by the subverted. Speakers must be prevented from persuading anyone; if this is impossible, those who may be persuaded must be prevented from acting. While the governmental containment strategies that speakers have had to overcome in order to speak are the most visible, it is nonetheless 100



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worth cataloguing them briefly here in order to trace the context from which testimonio arises. Constraints may be immediate and physical: killing or imprisoning the speaker, for instance. Those in power may attempt to silence the speakers through threats, either personal or toward their families or communities, or they may offer the speaker some sort of reward in return for not speaking. Action may be directed toward the audience, killing or threatening those who would listen or who would act on the words. Alternatively, the government’s containment strategy may run to counter­discourse, denying or naturalizing injustice in a manner that reflects and reinforces readers’ defenses. For instance, it may be conceded that such events are rare abuses of the system and are already under investigation, that all this may have happened a long time ago, but it no longer happens, or at least that steps are already underway to address this intractable problem. Speakers may be characterized as unworthy and unreliable, and their social projects declared hopeless, utopian, or merely misguided. In more subtle forms of containment, the speaker’s very ability to speak may be cited as evidence of a new regime’s guarantees of freedom and tolerance for dissent. It is worth remembering what it has taken for speakers to survive, let alone to keep speaking. In an important sense, it is a wonder that testimonial text exists at all, but this same knowledge cannot be allowed to crystallize into reverence and become a barrier to criticism. Speakers have taken practical and textual steps to overcome these efforts at containment, to save their own lives, and to continue to speak, but as already demonstrated, an oppressive government is far from the only source of resistance. Rhetorically, governmental containment is in certain ways the most easily overcome. Usually overt and sometimes even inept, at least it comes from a known enemy. Far more difficult to combat are the resistances of well-disposed readers and critics, and even more so are speakers’ own internalized constraints on what can

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be said and to whom. People are shaped in subtle and complex ways by the culture in which they live, and coming to political consciousness does not constitute some magical purification in which previous conditioning is cast off once and for all. Acknowledgments of personal and cultural constraints must ground any analysis of testimonial rhetoric. Possible reasons why the texts produced by speakers may not be optimally engaging to readers can be traced variously to speakers’ attitudes toward the events, to the limits of available means of speaking about such events, and to their notions of audience. Each is a combination of cultural givens and personal choices: to accept a given model, to reject it, or to forge a new one. Theorists of trauma agree that, by its nature, trauma initially defies narration by being radically outside of what is seen as normal or possible—such is the American Psychiatric Association’s very definition of trauma (quoted in Caruth, Trauma, 3). Even when one does find the words to try to describe what happened, either by submitting the experience to existing models of trauma narration or by attempting to create new forms of expression, the relief and even the sense of triumph that are promised by cathartic speech are often counterbalanced by the reluctance to relive painful events by talking about them. Survivor guilt may make being alive to speak at all a matter of personal shame. In Unclaimed Experience (1996), Cathy Caruth takes note of the “impossibility” of narrating trauma, since “if traumatic experience, as Freud indicates suggestively, is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs, then these texts, each in its turn, asks what it means to transmit and theorize around a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (5). Any speech about the trauma experienced by testimonio’s speakers is in a sense a step out of that constraint, and such steps have been justly celebrated. However, like most crit-



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ics of the literature of trauma, Caruth tends to concentrate on the effects of traumatic events and their telling in the life of the individual victim. In Worlds of Hurt (1996), Kalí Tal extends critical focus to encompass the social and political effects of trauma narratives. Despite critical concentration on the difficulties of speaking, it is crucial to recognize that speakers in testimonio are not randomly selected survivors being asked to tell their stories, much less patients who have presented themselves for therapy. Rather, they are generally established public orators who have already made the decision to speak, not only for themselves but for others. Observations regarding speakers’ reluctance to speak, drawn from testimony elicited for juridical purposes or produced in the course of therapy, may indicate how much speakers have had to overcome before our encounters with them, but such observations are not particularly applicable to their current status. The long look at speakers’ own suffering has at times held back scrutiny of their discourse: awareness of the difficulty of speech makes critics reluctant to judge the rhetoric of survivors. Dwelling on the difficulties has obscured the speakers’ actual skills and accomplishments and occasioned premature declarations of victory. When the magnitude of the obstacles makes speech itself a triumph, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the project of testimonial speakers is not only speaking but speaking persuasively. Testimonial speakers have already come to terms (if only provisionally) with the psychological barriers to speech itself, and they have made studied decisions regarding the shaping of that speech. Speakers often describe the task of producing testimonio as an extension of their engagements in other public fora, as with organized use of radio and television. Just as they might approach station managers or others to gain access to those media, contact with professional writers offers them chances to

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reach broader audiences. As discussed earlier, these projected audiences do not have a single character across testimonial literature. Some of the speakers whose testimonios are primarily forensic and epideictic did report seeking a select audience of comrades, while others sought a more general audience. Barrios, whose testimonio is generally deliberative, expresses a wish that her words reach poor people and not just intellectuals and those who make a business of this kind of thing” (15), but even to express this desire is to acknowledge the likely reality of its contrary. As Rigoberta Menchú has emphasized in her speeches, the audience of testimonio is by now mostly international. As experienced orators, speakers are aware of the differences between their audiences and themselves as well as the similarities. For instance, speakers generally expect that readers will not have experienced firsthand poverty, imprisonment, or torture. Such awareness also should come as no surprise, given both the dynamic that tends to govern knowledge by the oppressed of the oppressor, and the penetration of US middle-class cultural forms into the rest of the world. Under such circumstances, it is little wonder that testimonial speakers should know their readers. It is only reasonable to assume that, to every extent possible, they have shaped their own message and manner to suit their conceptions of the audience, and there is ample textual support for such a claim. Once the oratorical skill and rhetorical intent of the speakers are accepted, along with the practical possibilities held out by the just world findings, relinquishing the myths of spontaneity and impossibility means taking into account the chance that speakers may be making considered choices that have nonetheless turned out to be counterproductive in reaching readers. It is possible that an accomplished speaker might have consciously rejected the employment of certain rhetorical strategies, either



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on the positive grounds that “truth should speak for itself ” or negative ones, such as concluding that aesthetic or rhetorical shaping is inappropriate in the face of such events. The appearance of rhetorical negligence may itself be a calculated rhetorical strategy, not only an absence, a mark of inability, or an unwillingness to do otherwise. The protestation of inability to speak or write elegantly, of not knowing Latin or rhetoric, has long been a commonplace of persuasion—a reflection of a popular distrust of eloquence and an assurance to the reader that what would follow would be the “unvarnished truth.” As previous chapters have demonstrated, counterproductive rhetoric may still indicate that a speaker is shaping the text, but not for the broadest possible audience. In the case of sectarian testimonios with a posited audience of committed insiders, there may appear to be no need to convince the reader to identify with the speaker or to close off defenses. Speakers who expect such an insider audience can economically employ what Ariel Dorfman identifies as “already consecrated formulas, which are comfortable, perhaps, for members of a group to understand each other, but which set up obstacles to the integration of the uninitiated” (“Political Code,” 158). Assumptions of intimacy may even be reinforced inadvertently by the small-scale conversational settings in which much collaborative testimonio is collected—settings in which a speaker may well feel encouraged to let his or her guard (and rhetorical strategies) down, but the same agreeable interlocutor who invites the telling of an event may become a barrier to its effective shaping. For speakers who are accustomed to addressing the already committed, the habits of speech acquired there may continue to be deployed in other circumstances. As a result, some testimonial texts have come to resemble parodies of conventional political rhetoric of the “people’s hero versus capitalist running dog” variety. Some of the epideictic, forensic, or even cathartic

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functions of denunciation, such as preservation of evidence or individual psychological adjustment, may still inhere in deliberative testimonial texts, even when the results are at odds with effective persuasion. Caruth points out that in Freud’s own early writings on trauma, the possibility of integrating the lost event into a series of associative memories, as part of the cure, was seen precisely as a way to permit the event to be forgotten. The difficulty of listening and responding to traumatic stories in a way that does not lose their impact, does not reduce them to clichés or turn them all into versions of the same story, is a problem that remains central to the task of therapists, literary critics, neurobiologists, and filmmakers alike. (Trauma, vii)

A complementary challenge faces speakers. The forms of discourse that enable the achievement of closure (whether that closure is envisioned as juridical and historical or individual and therapeutic) will often for that very reason minimize productive tension in the reader. As the just world model has indicated, readers will not feel called upon to expend precious energy on a project that is already finished. Speakers may be engaging in specific and formulaic speech acts—eulogizing or sermonizing, for instance—that comprise the socially acceptable channels for the narration of trauma. Each of these speech acts has its own proper forms, handed down from the culture at large, which dictate not only how one should speak about heroes and saints, but also how heroes and saints must have behaved. Despite some literary critics’ claims that speakers are spontaneous and planless, the constraint seems more often to be the opposite. Speakers may be all too excruciatingly aware of the socially sanctioned models of what one can say regarding their experience, and also of the social prohibitions against saying other things. Dorfman’s description of certain sectarian testimonio’s tendency toward “caricature”



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suggests an intuitive contradiction of his own assertion of the spontaneity of those texts (“Political Code,” 157): caricatures assume models.1 Narrating trauma means speaking in public of delicate matters. Accepted forms suggest writing about the buen revolucion­ ario, the saints and martyrs, the resolute prisoner who resists torture. In the process, such images become self-­sustaining, even when one’s personal experience and eyewitness is at odds with them. If there are no competing norms with which to evaluate one’s behavior and that of others, a victim is likely to conclude that he or she, and his or her comrades, must have behaved less than properly. To confess as much, in contradiction of the accepted forms, is to invite personal and communal shame and may even be seen as disservice to the cause. The writer or speaker may decide to keep silent so as not to do damage, or they may feel pressured to say that everyone behaved as they were supposed to. As a result, the inventory of socially accepted images not only resists contradiction, it is further reinforced by reiteration. In the literatures of trauma, the restrictive force of the socially sayable is extremely strong. Those who would write about contrary events are faced not only with the difficulty of finding the right words to describe them, but also with resisting the personal and social sanctions that will fall on their description. All of this is sadly ironic, since the just world data suggest that even the most well-executed eulogies or sermons are unlikely to inspire action in an as yet uncommitted reader, and moreover that such elevated discourse may even reinforce reader defenses against action. Not only do the socially accepted modes of speaking of trauma form a self-sustaining rhetorical system, they may help to assure a steady source of experiential material in the form of trauma itself. By preventing speakers from speaking of injustice in ways that will inspire action, the force of the

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socially sayable serves to preserve the social status quo that produces the trauma. One element of the socially sayable is the employment of words as a sort of sympathetic magic, as if simply saying that things were different would make it so. This occurs in the rewriting of history and of the present in the forensic and epideictic. “The real problem,” Dorfman insists, “is that leftwing political cadres attempt, in theory and in practice, to deny domination and alienation” (“Political Code,” 192). Catherine McKinnon writes in “Desire and Power: A Feminist Perspective” of the social consequences of confusion between actually making change and speaking as if things have changed. If male power makes the world as it “is” to theorize this reality requires its capture in order to subject it to critique, hence to change. Feminists say women are not individuals. To retort that we “are” will not make it so. It will obscure the need to make change so that it can be so. To the feminist charge that women “are” not equal, to retort “Oh, you think women aren’t equal to men,” is to act as though saying we “are” will make it so. What it will do, instead, what it has done and is doing, is legitimize the vision that we already “are” equal, that this, life as we live it now, is equality for us. It acts as if the purpose of speech is to say what we want reality to be like as if it already is that way, as if that will help move reality to that place. This may be true in fiction but it won’t work in theory. It suggests, instead, that if “this” is reality, nothing needs changing, that this is freedom, that we choose this. To me, this is about denial and the opposite of change. [emphasis in the original] (114)

Just world data likewise suggest that pretending that reality is other than it is will not only fail to establish the obligation to act, it will offer readers ready-made excuses for not acting. Speakers’ effectiveness may also be diminished by the transition from speech to print. The process of transcription deprives



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speakers of highly effective nonverbal techniques of audience engagement and persuasion. Direct transcription without any compensatory literary moves may tend to distance the speaker from the reader, and this constraining effect is further reinforced when collaborating writers’ reverence for the speaker or for the data leads them to report speech verbatim. When speakers do not engage the reader, the reasons can typically be traced to a failure of the speaker’s own journey of exotopy. The speaker does not manage to enter imaginatively into the readers’ point of view, failing to break through socially inscribed and strongly reinforced systems of restrictions that support the status quo by circumscribing who can speak of trauma, what one can say, and to whom one can say it. In a sort of mirror image to Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation of the response to suffering, the view from the speaker’s side might be conceptualized by substituting “reader” for “human being who is suffering”: Let us say that there is before me someone who is [not] suffering, but who might do something about suffering . . . I must experience—come to see and know—what [the reader] experiences; I must put myself in [the reader’s] place and co­incide with him or her, as it were. For speakers, the danger and the temptation is the individual solution, the failure to return to their own place, the instatement of themselves, and only themselves, in the just world. To satisfy their own just world beliefs, speakers must return to a place that they see for themselves among a suffering people in order to render their own experience “meaningful ethically, cognitively, or aesthetically.” For speakers, the pathology of lingering would result not in an “infection with the other’s suffering,” but rather in an infection with the other’s inaction, an assumption of the reader’s privilege and nothing more. The fact that so many speakers do complete Bakhtin’s cycle of empathy and exotopy successfully attests not only to their oratorical talents and skills, but also to the degree

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to which such speakers have managed to incorporate their own experiences of suffering into a social project.

The capacities and constraints of the experiencing writer Not all testimonios require a collaborator. Journalists (Jácobo Timerman), literary writers (Hernán Valdés and Alicia Partnoy), and even diary-keepers (Carolina Maria de Jesus) have all written texts that were successful not only in terms of circulation but also in terms of likely effectiveness. For the experiencing writer who is able to produce a testimonio without a collaborator, many of the same personal and social constraints may still prevail. While experiencing writers still find it difficult to write about the events of suffering, and must overcome the limitations posed by existing forms of the “writable” representations of trauma, professional writers are likely to be less susceptible to certain stylistic constraints. Dorfman observed that amateurs often lacked “a careful and attentive process of filtering words from emotions, an attempt to moderate their passion in such a way that it finds a workable and appropriate expression,” and thus were vulnerable to “the repetitions, the monotony, certain excessive verbalization, . . . frequent use of clichés and of worn out language.” Professional writers, on the other hand, were more successful in conveying “the possibility of a language lived as an adventure, the desire of reaching a broad public, and a concept of humanity that is subtle, anti-Manichaean and open to contradictions” (“Political Code,” 157, 163). Nonetheless, in Child of the Dark, a self-taught writer with only two years of elementary education managed to transform normally conservative forms of discourse into progressive testimonio. By militantly upholding values that social conservatives professed to support—education, industriousness, self-­sufficiency, temperance, patience, cleanliness, and good



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manners—she in effect converted those values into a call for action against the social injustice of the favela. In comparison with contemporary testimonial works, the diaries have been criticized as conservative and conventional, and the writer’s thoughts have been categorized condescendingly as lacking the political consciousness of testimonio. An orthodox reading of this writer’s apparent lack of solidarity with many of her neighbors would (and did) point to her limited political development. Some have seen the diaries, with their ladies’ magazine aesthetic and catty comments on the neighbors, as little more than period pieces, but beyond chronicling the writer’s personal trials and aspirations, the discourse of conventional domesticity may serve more radical political functions. Carolina Maria de Jesus’s insistence on respectability might itself be viewed as a considered political stance, and her attempt to forge a social connection between herself and her likely readers seen as more than an individualistic attempt to separate herself from her own class. Her emphatic domesticity serves to challenge readers’ comforting notions regarding poor people’s differential experience—their adaptation and inurement to their poverty. Rather than confronting the reader with “the Other,” as her work was framed in the journalistic context, she confronts readers with a set of judgments that are likely to be very similar to their own, thus supporting her contention that the people of the favela are not unfathomably different from the reader. From the beginning, she demonstrates her awareness that a fundamental rhetorical task is to convince (or, more optimistically, to remind) the reader that people who dwell in favelas experience pain, hunger, and other sensations in the same way that the reader would in similar circumstances—to bridge the comfortable gap between the readers’ world and her own. Both her painstaking recounting of the minutiae of marginal existence and her correction of terms—insisting that she lives not in a “house” but a “shack”—can be seen as efforts to

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overcome readers’ tendency either to look away from the favela or else to overlook it. She also devotes considerable text to depicting the favela itself as an agent that acts on people who come to live there, people whom she portrays as having been better before they arrived, and sometimes redeemable if they can get out. This depiction does not universalize the people of the favela as innocent victims, but rather asserts the demoralizing effect of their surroundings. Casting herself in a didactic role, she likewise offers both examples and counterexamples of proper behavior for those living outside the favela. Bit by bit, the diary entries chip away at each of the fictions that allow those outside the favela, including people of generally good will like many a potential reader, to feel less than personally obligated: it isn’t so bad, they’re used to it, they’re so warped that nothing can be done for them, besides, there are government agencies and charities that deal with such problems. From her perspective, the current forms of official intervention in the favela are hardly positive. Charitable agencies come under scrutiny and most are found ineffectual or hypocritical. Current efforts of government agencies are presented as inadequate at best. There is nothing to let the individual reader off the hook. On the contrary, the most positive episodes in Child of the Dark are of the helpful actions of ordinary people. Individualism, indeed, has been advanced as a negative criticism of the diaries. The writer was accused of thinking only of herself and her children rather than aligning herself in solidarity with the rest of the favela, and of accepting individual solutions rather than . . . ? What, exactly? Robert Levine asserts that “Carolina never understood the symbolism of her ascent from misery. Fame for her was a path to having food to eat every day and a house in which to live. She never saw herself as a role model, or as a crusader” (“Afterword,” 174). While it is true that she did not generally present her ascent as an exemplary tale for the benefit of other people in the favela, it is difficult



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to see what might have been gained, politically or socially, had she cast herself as a role model for them. She is only too keenly aware that her literacy, the product of two years of schooling, sets her apart from most people in the favela, and moreover that her own hard work and best efforts to publish her writing (for example, by showing it to Brazilian publishers and eventually sending it to Reader’s Digest) had come to nothing until a chance encounter with the reporter Audálio Dantas, whom she duly if sometimes ambivalently credited. Candidly, her hypothetical exemplum might read: “Learn to write, work very hard, but that really won’t get you out of the favela, because you still need to get yourself discovered by someone with the connections to get you published.” This is hardly practical advice. Carolina Maria de Jesus did attempt to foster a sense of solidarity, but she did so without stopping at the boundaries of the favela—rather, she extended her efforts toward her readers (and later, listeners), encouraging people who saw themselves as fair, hardworking, and decent to extend that imaginary community to include at least some of the people living in the favela, with a consequent social obligation. The critical reception of her text offers clear evidence, if only in the breach, of the operation of a restrictive set of orthodox political and stylistic expectations that she did not fulfill. Within such a framework, her work was judged insufficiently radical and thus apolitical, a conclusion that has served both to limit later critical interest in her diaries and to obscure the books’ subtler rhetorical strategies. In light of the just world findings, it is apparent that these strategies are more likely to have been successful in persuading readers to act than would have been the case with the more openly radical (and ultimately sectarian) stances that early critics obviously advocated. Once, again, critics had focused on what a testimonio was not (conventional radical rhetoric), and what the writer was not (professional), meanwhile overlooking both the diaries’ persuasive strategies and the writer’s rhetorical skills.

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Assessment of Child of the Dark by just world standards makes it clear that an amateur writer may manage to write persuasively. Nonetheless, the limitations on expression that Dorf­ man identifies are likely to be more keenly felt by the more sectarian writers, who are accustomed to employing standard political rhetoric. Writers whose politics are less sectarian may also be less constrained by restrictive models that contradict just world rhetorical strategies. Dorfman found this to be the case with writer Hernán Valdés, whose Tejas verdes is an account of his own imprisonment and torture in Chile. Valdés, he notes, “writes Tejas verdes as a diary, as if he did not know what would happen next. This is, of course, not the case since he began writing after he was freed from prison, but once the reader accepts the literary convention that what we are reading, as in so many novels, is the retrieved simultaneous version of events, he is effectively hooked” (“Political Code,” 166–67). By rejecting what Dorfman calls “the relative (and easy) omniscience that allows him to tell a story after it is closed,” and “the natural and spontaneous past of memory,” Valdés manages to “impress the reader more cruelly with the claustrophobic reclusion of prison, to create the sense of a reality whose uncertainty, fear, and limit­ ations we share, living the narrative with the same rhythms with which the author lived his arrest and degradation” (167). The reviewer for the New Internationalist notes a similar technique in Omar Cabezas’s Sandinista testimony from Nicaragua, Fire from the Mountain: the choice to write as if the outcome were as yet unknown. The achievement of this book is that it seems to have been written without the benefit of hindsight. We all know that the Sandinistas won (the first round, at least). But at this stage all is uncertainty. Danger still hangs in the air. And characters who are now celebrities receive little more prominence than schoolboys destined to die before the end of the next chapter.



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While the status of professional writer carries with it certain freedoms not available to other testimonial speakers, that position also brings its own limitations. Concepts of the self as writer, of the relative status of literature and rhetoric, and of the literary reader may assist in promoting social action or pose new barriers. One review of Dorfman’s own magical realist testimonial novel, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero takes him to task precisely for being too literary. In her 1987 essay for In These Times, Nancy Connors credits his social goals, only to conclude that the novel “is so overwrought and overwritten that Dorfman loses his reader under an avalanche of style” (20). On the other hand, writers who are accustomed to manipulating experience and experimenting with presentation may be able to use those skills to engage readers. As the just world research indicates, it is the presentation of the events rather than the events themselves that determines whether the reader will be called on to act. Like the most effective speakers, writers do not typically expect that facts will “speak for themselves.” The professional writers’ social positions may also increase their potential effectiveness. Writers have often occupied relatively privileged positions, and they may still be coming to psychological terms with their recent introduction to oppression in the form of imprisonment and torture. In these cases, the felt strangeness of the events, and the incredulity that they could happen to writers, of all people, appear to function as positive assets in the achievement of reader engagement. In writing about Valdés, a writer imprisoned by the Pinochet regime in Chile, Dorfman takes note that “for Valdés, what is strange is that this can happen to him.” An intellectual . . . presumes that, existing on the margin of that violence, he is safe from its most barbaric vicissitudes. So, the passage from one state (observer) to another (victim) is revealed with all the exaggerated sensibility and eroticism of the trauma,

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a transit which lets him contact all those unpoliticized groups of society that do not have a prior conception from which to understand, assume, and transcend that phenomenon. It is something that can touch anyone, the arbitrary elevated to norm. (“Political Code,” 188)

Here, the persuasive text can take advantage of a preestablished identification between writer and reader. Testimonio from professional writers can begin almost in medias res, since for readers the narrator’s status as fellow member of the just world is already established. Valdés, Partnoy, and Timerman all begin their narratives with few establishing scenes, while speakers who are not writers appear to need considerably more text to establish their similarity to the reader before their oppression can be effectively portrayed. The writer’s own predicament becomes prima facie proof that the readers must act to protect people like themselves, the most worthy victims of all. The sheer name recognition of the professional writer can benefit the testimonial project by offering more ready access to outlets of publication and distribution. The next work by a wellknown figure is more likely to be published, purchased, and read than a work by an unknown writer. Certain professional writers’ literary or journalistic models may also be adaptable to the task of persuasion. When they describe their experience of oppression in a somewhat ironic and distanced fashion, using models from their fiction or reportage, writers may satisfy another of the just world requirements. However, the production of testimonio differs in important ways from the business as usual of literature, and elements of writers’ common wisdom regarding themselves and their literary endeavors may also become an obstacle to reaching and engaging a broad audience. Dorfman might have been slightly too sanguine about the compatible natures of “contemporary art” and effective testimonio. As surely as sectarian assump-



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tions constrain speakers, literary assumptions restrict writers. In literary circles, explicit endeavors to acquire a broad readership tend to mark writers (and genres) as formulaic and inferior, commercial rather than artistic. The very idea of shaping the message to the audience at hand runs counter to common literary notions that the message has some essential form of its own, in which it virtually demands to be expressed, or that writing expresses some essential dimension of the writer’s psyche. In Latin America, the nueva narrativa and much of the criticism that accompanied it insisted that readers were to be the active seekers of understanding. Difficult readings were good for their intellectual and even political development. Small audiences were certainly understandable, even admirable. Large ones were cause for suspicion that the writer had sold out, evidence that the work was not demanding enough to whittle its readership down to the select few. Quality bestsellers should be happy accidents, if not oxymorons. While publishers are understood to be somewhat more crass in their attempts to sell books, peddling by writers may be viewed as literarily déclassé, even if the commodity is cultural. Commonplaces of indeterminacy in contemporary literature may also translate from a ludic postmodern sense of play of infinite possibilities to a refusal to commit to any cause, the antithesis of just world persuasion (although on a practical level this felt lack of ability to judge the actions of others is less likely to beset a writer who has been imprisoned and tortured). Professional writers who are also journalists may be accustomed to writing for broader audiences, as well as creating suspense and narrative engagement for the reader, but not all writers are accustomed to writing about themselves or to writing nonfiction. What is interesting here is the convergence on deliberative rhetorical production from these two different starting positions, skilled speaker and professional writer. Many of the narrative strategies that speakers have arrived at from a path of politi-

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cal commitment and empirical trial in oral persuasion coincide with the strategies that some professional writers derive from engagement of their literary skill in response to their own experience of oppression. Were it only a matter of the coincidence of these two forms, their convergence might be explained as merely another example of the global takeover of bourgeois cultural forms. Deliberative strategies could be seen as the effects of these forms on speakers as well as writers, but the just world findings suggest that these forms are more than fashions—they are also the techniques that are most likely to elicit social action on the part of readers.

5. The Capacities and Constraints of Collaborating Writers, Translators, Editors, and Publishers

In collaborative testimonios, the speaker is joined by a professional writer who transforms the spoken words that are the speaker’s own representation of experience into written text. Generally such speakers have had little or no formal education, and thus cannot produce their own written testimonios. Collaborating writers also offer access to the circuit of publication and distribution, contributions not to be discounted. Many writers demonstrate their support with texts of their own in the form of prologues, articles, and interviews. Readers may view the collaborating writer as a sort of guarantor, lending prestige or credibility to the testimony and verifying the events narrated, but the potential effect of the collaborating writer on testimonio extends beyond influencing the context in which the readers will encounter the book, or the attitudes with which those readers will pick it up and open it. Writers may also offer the speaker a live context for their narration, and, in the case of conversations and interviews, an engaged interlocutor. While interviews are the most common technique for the production of collaborative testimonios, not all such texts are produced with the writer as sole listener. Some writers follow speakers through a variety of speech contexts, the technique that Moema Viezzer describes in her preface to Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s Let Me Speak! While many times speakers are telling stories that they have long since shaped through repeated telling in other contexts, writers who serve as interlocutors may never119

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theless help to elicit a more conversational tone. Even when the writer is the only other person in the room, skilled speakers in collaborative testimonio demonstrate that their sense of audience is twofold from the outset. They are speaking to the writer, but also through the writer to the larger audience. The speaker’s sense of collaborating writer as conduit to others does not discount the presence and persona of the particular interviewer, however passive and transparent that person may strive to be. In political and practical terms, the speaker is of course aware that a positive impression on the writer is likely to increase that writer’s efforts to disseminate the story, and perhaps will encourage other efforts in service to the speaker’s cause. Acknowledgment of this dynamic should lend a sense of perspective and humility to writers’ and critics’ interpretations of any apparently personal interactions in such an interview. As seen in previous chapters, effective persuasion requires that the speaker look outward as well as inward, in the double role of experiencer and strategic narrator. In considering their audiences, speakers themselves have passed through a variation on the process of empathy and exotopy that Mikhail Bakhtin identified. Likewise, collaborating writers should ideally move from empathy with the speaker back through exotopy, to become answerable in their own capacity as competent and engaged allies in a social project, participating alongside speakers in the shaping of effective testimonio. Unfortunately, the full possibility of the collaborating writer’s contribution to testimonio is rarely realized. Rather than full-fledged participants, such writers have tended to envision themselves in more limited roles as transcriptionists, collectors, or archivists, or else as speakers’ personal confidants. Many writers report a deepseated reluctance to exert any further influence on the text. Like all participants in the testimonial project, writers face a unique set of constraints. Like the speakers, writers face challenges in



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transforming experience to representation, in deliberately shaping that representation, in imagining and keeping in mind an audience, and in resisting socially sanctioned forms that are inadequate to persuasion.

Sectarian conventions for narratives of social action The force of certain conventions for narratives of social action is readily apparent in the paratexts to Child of the Dark. The cover design and copy, blurbs, and prefaces evince the same sectarian expectations of political orthodoxy that would constrain criticism of the diaries. As has often been the case with Latin American testimonial writing, the apparatus of marketing was much at odds with the diary’s content. An early paperback edition offers a woodcut-style depiction of a woman and a boy silhouetted against a favela, set in vivid orange against the book’s black cover. In bright yellow type, a quote from Newsweek promises the prospective purchaser a “desperate, terrifying outcry from the slums of São Paulo” and “one of the most astonishing documents of the lower depths ever printed.” The pre-title promotional page describes the writer as a “Brazilian woman with only two years of schooling, the mother of three illegitimate children, each born of a different father.” That same copy promises “a vivid, incendiary social document,” to include “vicious fights, knifings,” and, last but certainly not least, “the sordid sex life of the favelados.” Inside, translator David St. Clair’s preface contextualizes the favela in terms of Brazilian urban development and speculates ominously on what might happen if conditions there were to go unattended: “If there should appear a Brazilian Fidel Castro, and if he should give these hungry illiterates guns . . .” (9). This was, after all, 1962. St. Clair’s descriptions of the diarist and her circumstances,

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from which the copywriters of the inside cover ad apparently took their cue, lean heavily on images of unbridled sexuality and unwed pregnancy. Carolina Maria de Jesus came to the favelƒa of Canindé in 1947. She was unemployed and pregnant. . . . “I used to slip out of the house at night and make love.” Six more jobs and six more dismissals ended with the discovery that she was pregnant. “He was a Portuguese sailor, and he got on his ship fast when I told him I was going to have a baby.” Carolina was attractive and liked men and so two years later a Spaniard “who was white and gave me love and money” went back to Europe and her second son José Carlos was born. (9–11)

In “Can Another Subaltern Speak/Write?” Else Rebeiro Pires Viera describes these prefaces as a “ransacking” of the diarist’s work, paralleling the diarist’s own daily searches of the city, but the inviting similarity leaves unexamined a key difference in selection principles. The diarist appears to put to creative use just about everything she finds among the street’s slim pickings. In contrast, the staff of the publishing house makes highly selective and largely unrepresentative choices from the much larger and more varied inventory of her writing and from interviews, with an obvious preference for the shocking and the salacious elements that actually comprise a fairly small proportion of the text. Any reader expecting the sort of tale that the preface seems to foretell, chock-full of sex and violence, could only have been disappointed by the day-to-day routines of the diaries that followed. An easy and uncharitable accounting for the disjuncture between marketing and content could point first to the vicissitudes of the market and to the profit motive that was undoubtedly a factor. Exoticism, eroticism, and violence sold then as they do now. More charitably, it might be argued that such marketing efforts allowed the book to reach a much broader public than



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it would otherwise have attained, though in that case the social costs of the portrayal should be tallied against the assumed benefits of wider dissemination. The addition of rather scholarly historical, economic, and sociological background information in this same preface suggests that the reasons for portraying the diarist in the most transgressive terms possible were not only marketing decisions. As the next chapter will indicate, critics’ responses to Child of the Dark illustrate the positive value that a sectarian community placed on transgression of such conventional social norms as marriage. Presenting the speaker as daring and outré probably was an admiring and well-intended editorial choice. The degree to which the Penguin Group’s choices of cover and paratext for Child of the Dark responded to contemporary literary fashion was made even clearer when I taught this testimonio once again in the spring of 2003. The campus bookstores had run out of used copies of the earlier Signet edition partway through the semester, and two students had bought the new paper­back. When I asked the class to compare the old and new editions, students characterized the picture on the new one as “softer and prettier,” and noticed that the dust cover and fly leaf texts had changed to emphasize the writer’s strength and dignity as a “survivor.” The predominant color on the cover was now a subdued grey-blue, and it featured a Madonna-like portrait of a mother and infant. A look at the advertising copy for the book on amazon.com, where the page on Child of the Dark features a long and glowing review from 500 Great Books by Women, confirms the book’s positioning in the women’s studies market.

Reluctance to intervene: text as artifact, evidence, or case-file The forces of sectarian convention and the marketing division are hardly the only constraints on collaborating writers. It is

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extra­ordinarily difficult to write persuasively about the suffering of another. While speakers have already effected a translation of experience to word, this preliminary does not make the collaborating writer’s task any less fraught. Writers may still equate the testimonial text with the experience of the speaker, or even with the person, a tendency that diminishes the writers’ sense of their own entitlement to modify the text. Some collaborating writers insist on the speakers’ transparency—on their naïve and spontaneous expression of the real, not as a trope of persuasion but as a fact. There has arisen a new type of sacralization—a fetishization of the real, the authentic, or the spoken—that makes writers reluctant to participate in the writing qua writers, a reluctance expressed in such images of writing as the wish that Elisabeth Burgos-Debray expressed in her preface to Rigoberta Menchú, to be a “passive” instrument (xiv), and in Barbara Harlow’s characterization of collaborating writers as speakers’ “amanuenses,” personal assistants who simply take dictation (72). Writers’ reservations are compounded when testimonio becomes a sacred artifact, something to be zealously guarded and preserved in its pristine state against possible contamination by unworthy editors or readers. Even when the words are not sacred, there may remain a sense that they are someone else’s property, with which the writer is not at liberty to tamper. While the writer’s position might be expected to offer some critical distance and expertise in textual production, those contributions tend to remain unrealized when testimonio is seen as a personal project of the speaker rather than as a social endeavor. The transcribed text may be viewed as unchangeable when regarded as a valuable anthropological or cultural artifact, a juridical document, or clinical case-note—conceptions that may consign what the speakers had envisioned as acts of persuasion to the format of the museum case, evidence vault, or patient file. Suspicion of the very practice of rhetoric and desire for the



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truth to speak for itself may also underlie writers’ reluctance to change any of the speakers’ words. As Kalí Tal asserts, sacralization can serve to keep trauma narrative safely away from real life (32). The distance between a magnified speaker and an abject writer or reader that such reverence implies offers the reader yet another excuse for inaction. Critics must share some of the responsibility for writers’ resistance to action. Widespread praise for passivity and negative characterizations of more active collaborations have supported writers’ stances of nonintervention. Critics such as Renato Prada Oropeza warned that writers might “manipulate” speakers’ vulnerable material, which “stripped of its physical context. . . .of the original act of speech, became susceptible to ambivalences of interpretation” (17). In practice, what writerly and critical intervention there was hardly added ambiguities; rather, it tended to remove them. Had the testimonial project been understood as persuasive rather than archival, the observation that something was inevitably lost in the transition from speech to paper could have led to a conclusion that writers should try to make up for the loss. Still, given that critics were insisting that any modifications to transcribed testimonio could only do damage, prudent writers should be forgiven for standing back. Writers’ perceptions of their own interactions with speakers as therapeutic, forensic, literary, or even purely personal also restrict their ability to influence the resultant texts. Tal has warned of the danger of what she terms the “medicalization” of trauma narratives—subsumption in existing medical discourse assures readers that the trauma can be remedied through treatment of the reporting individual (53). This move is apparent in Burgos’s preface, when the writer anticipates the stress that her interview will cause for Menchú. Burgos describes the expected encounter in technical jargon, noting that “such work has farreaching psychological implications, and the revival of the past

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can resuscitate affects and zones of the memory which had apparently been forgotten for ever and can lead to anxiety and stress situations” (xiv). At first, it seems clear that the writer is thinking of her subject’s response to the interview, but by the following paragraph, it is less clear whose stress is being spoken of. “As soon as we met,” Burgos reports, “I knew that we were going to get along together. The admiration her courage and dignity aroused in me did much to ease our relationship” (xiv). The writer describes her reluctance to cause pain to the speaker by eliciting this testimonio. Burgos knows that Menchú is a professional organizer who has already made a conscious decision to tell her story, but her view of the indigenous woman as a patient still constrains her. By the end of the account, the roles are reversed, such that Menchú’s responses relieve Burgos’s own stress (xiv). It is Menchú herself, finally, who must compensate for Burgos’s lack of critical distance. On her own, Menchú records and sends Burgos a tape on death and burial customs, topics that the anthropologist had failed to address for fear of causing emotional discomfort.1

Overvaluing empathy: risks of identification Still other aspects of the collaborating writer’s position can make it difficult to imagine or keep in mind an audience that needs persuading. The writer’s own passion for the speaker’s cause may preclude the effective conception of a less passionate audience who might require textual overtures: how could anyone not agree with this person? The apparent intimacy of faceto-face conversations between writer and speaker may further obscure the need for persuasion. In the early stages of collaboration, writer and speaker frequently are isolated from the world in a cozy ambit—often a kitchen, —although, in Prague, Roque Dalton had to resort to a café for his interviews for Miguel Mármol. Physical proximity and shared food often contribute to the



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impression of a friendly and even familial bond in writers’ prefaces to collaborative testimonios. It bears consideration that writers’ glowing descriptions of their own encounters with speakers might be deliberate efforts at persuasion—efforts to convince the reader through the writers’ personal attestation to the worthiness of the speaker— but such epideictic strategies are still at odds with a deliberative rhetoric. Descriptions of charismatic presence speak more to the potential value of gaining a personal audience with the speaker than to the need to read the resultant text and act on one’s own. Intense, gratifying, and uncritical personal identification on the part of the professional writer may even make other readers seem superfluous, if not intrusive. Few among us would help our beloved to seduce others, and Burgos employs precisely that verb in her account of her refusal to make further modifications to Menchú’s text. Burgos admits that “Quizá me haya equivocado si se trataba de seducir al lector,” but insists “mi respeto para Rigoberta me ha impedido obrar de otro modo” (18). Translating directly from the original Spanish, this sentence reads, “Perhaps I have made a mistake if it was a matter of seducing the reader, but my respect for Rigoberta has kept me from doing otherwise.” In the published English version, that telling reference to seduction disappears in favor of something blander: “Perhaps I was wrong, in that the reader might find it somewhat off-putting. But I could not leave it out, simply out of respect for Rigoberta” (xx). As apparent in Carol Maier’s observations on Burgos’s disabling reverence for the transcriptions of her interviews with Menchú (636–37), the sense that one is the only person who really understands an admired figure has charms of its own. As is evident from her comments regarding language errors, Burgos is not unaware of reader perceptions, but she appears to have been able to bring herself to make only the most minimal concessions to them. Writers who focus too closely on sentimental attachments

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between themselves and speakers may have difficulty moving beyond empathy, so that the assumed friendship becomes an end in itself. Benjamin Alire Sáenz takes note of the attraction of this alternative closure in his treatment of testimonio in a short story called “Alligator Park.” The main character becomes emotionally invested in the outcome of one of the cases that his wife, an immigration attorney, has taken on. When he begins to express optimism, she reminds him that not one of the fifteen asylum cases with which she has gone to court has ended successfully. He responds defensively, “That’s not the point . . . I mean, some of them did get into Canada. And most of them still write to us.” “So . . .” she concludes, “now we have pen pals” (85–86). Many writers appear to have conceptualized empathy not as a preliminary stage of a larger ethical process, but as an end in itself. Mikhail Bakhtin presents empathy as a matter of effort, insisting on the possibilities of attaining empathy with anyone, including those who are objectively quite unlike oneself. In contrast, collaborating writers often appear to view empathy as requiring actual and preexisting resemblances between themselves and their speaking subjects: empathy is naturalized as an essence to be discovered. These conceptual differences have had far-reaching social effects. When empathy is conceived as an end in itself, rather than only a preliminary to ethical action, there is no expectation of ever returning to one’s own place. As personally satisfying and genuinely desired as empathic identification with a speaker might be, it leaves neither the writer nor the reader with any compelling standpoint for action. As Bakhtin insists, one is answerable only from one’s own position—all else is alibi.2 Moreover, when empathy is understood as requiring actual resemblance, it may be necessary in effect to dismantle one’s own place in order to attain it, leaving writers without a room of their own to return to. Essentialist conceptions of empathy have led some writers to deny anything that made them different from



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the speakers. One all-too-obvious difference was that they were writers and the speakers were not, so that professional skills became a liability. “Initially,” reports Burgos, “I thought that knowing nothing about Rigoberta’s culture would be a handicap, but it soon proved to be a positive advantage. I was able to adopt the position of someone who was learning” (xix). For writers’ purposes of empathic fusion, it may be best if the writer is not only minimized but altogether merges with the speaker. “I became what I really was,” Burgos insists, “Rigoberta’s listener. I allowed her to speak and then became her instrument, her double, allowing her to make the transition from oral to written word” (xx). Another means of erasing difference has been to envision the speakers simply as frustrated fellow writers. If the testimonial project is redefined as “giving a voice” to the speaker, or “adding a new voice to the canon,” transcription and publication can signal completion. This truncation of the goal of testimonio no doubt explains some of the early declarations of triumph, as when Margarite Fernández Olmos writes that “[a] clear agenda of its proponents is the extension of the privileges of authorship and literary creativity to the flesh and blood protagonists of Latin American societies” (185). For most speakers, however, invitations to “join literary circles” or “enter the canon” were about as relevant as entrées into any other exclusive club. To equate writers with speakers, objective differences such as class and power had to be somehow erased, or at least played down. In her essay “Postmodernism, Realism and the Politics of Identity” in Reclaiming Identity (2000), Paula L. Moya calls this move “we are all marginal now!” (68). For middle- to upper-­­ class collaborative writers intent on becoming marginal, the most frequently cited commonalities have been gender and imagined kinship. Women writers often point to their common status as women as a crucial source of empathy, and describe their speaking subjects as their own mothers, daughters,

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or even as both of these at once. In her preface to Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú, Burgos takes pains to describe the juvenile appearance of her interviewee and the effect that it had on her: the words infantil (childlike), niño (child), and juventud (youth) appear five times in as many lines (xiv). In his essay collection The Flamingo’s Smile, biologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould has written at length about the social and biological preferences for neoteny, the retention of childlike appearance by adults.3 In Burgos’s preface, references to childlike facial features appear to connote candor, innocence, and lack of guile. Moreover, it might be argued, the neotenic description of Menchú intensifies the impression of injustice by visiting it specifically upon the most vulnerable member of a culture. However, by the next page of the prologue, Burgos has identified Menchú with the motherly servants who made arepas for her when she was a child in Venezuela (xv). Elena Poniatowska confers a similar plasticity on the woman who served as the model for Jesusa, at times casting her as a mother and at others converting her cinematographically into a child playing on a beach (“Jesusa,” 147–48). Ultimately, Poniatowska assimilates her subject into a continuing chain of mothers and daughters, so that “Jesusa continues to live in me, in other women, in my daughter, in other girls who will come along, in the daughters of Guayaba” (155). One possible reading of these images of maternity, neoteny, and general kinship would be as strategic attempts to reflect solidarity between the writer and the speaker as a model for the reader. After all, mothers are figures of affection and authority. However, gender and kinship claims from writers in collaborative testimonio tend to slide into other assertions. Kinship claims offer a commutative logic that permits many collaborating writers to claim or reclaim a heritage they frame as feminine, maternal, American, and lower-economic class, as opposed to masculine, paternal, European, and upper-class. In Latin America as elsewhere, the mother and child dynamic offers a ready op-



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portunity to evade issues of ethnic and class difference. Around the world, indigenous and poor women often serve as surrogate mothers to the children of the middle and upper classes, and assumption of the identity of the pre-class-conscious child affords writers a means of overlooking class boundaries. While many collaborating writers and readers of testimonio have reported a transcendent sense of bonding, such a sense is rarely reported by the speaking subject. In her account of the interviews that she undertook in preparation for the writing of Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (Here’s to You, Jesusa) (1969), her account of the life and times of a woman who had fought in the 1917 Revolution, Elena Poniatowska, who had immigrated to Mexico as a child, claims that association with the speaker has made her feel, for the first time, “Mexican.” “What was growing—or maybe what had been lying dormant there for years,” Poniatowska reports, “was my Mexican self, the forging of me as a Mexican, the feeling that Mexico, identical to Jesusa’s Mexico, lay within me, and that by the merest cracking of my shell it would emerge.”4 Writers of testimonio often chronicle the process of their own self-development and de-alienation through collaboration, but here the identity story seems in danger of shading into the other sense of forgery. For the speaker who is said to be the source of this new sense of self, national identity is clearly linked with an economic class from which she is excluded. Jesusa insists that “when all’s said and done, I don’t have a country.” “I’m like the Hungarians,” she explains, “from nowhere. I don’t feel like a Mexican, and I don’t acknowledge Mexicans. The only thing here is pure convenience and self-interest. If I had money and possessions, I’d be Mexican, but since I’m less than trash, I’m nothing” (“Jesusa,” 149, 151). In chronicles and in criticism, it is often the professional writer or the reader who is depicted as socially constrained and deprived, such that it is she, and not the speaking subject, who is in need of liberation.5 At the same time

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that the writer’s position of power is effaced, his or her privilege revealed as a lack, the converse transformation is worked on the speaker, as when John Beverley writes of Menchú’s “manipulating her interlocutor” (Against Literature, 80). The felt necessity of crossing class lines has been evident in many accounts of the production of testimonio, where verbs such as “overcome” and “share” have found rather cavalier employment. Fernández-Olmos comments that According to Poniatowska, Palancares was reluctant and even hostile at first, confirming Randall’s comments regarding the class difference that must be overcome in order to reach the trust and reciprocity required for a successful testimonio. Poniatowska’s persistence and willingness to share Palancares’s backbreaking chores gradually gained her the trust and grudging admiration of Jesusa. (188, 190)

The picture of these two women engaged in communal labor is a compelling one, but although Poniatowska does mention offering and trying to help, this critic gives more credit for common labor than the writer herself claimed. Poniatowska’s own accounts mention only intermittent and generally ineffectual participation in the speaker’s housework (“Jesusa,” 141). In the process of identifying with the speaker, writers may also come to occupy the place of figurative “fellow victim.” Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman (1993) offers prime examples of this, as she describes in detail what she views as the hardships of her own academic career. Concepts of sisterhood emphasize the unity of all women, and experience has made clear that most women have faced oppression in some form. Nonetheless, collaborating writers who dwell on their own complaints tend to obscure the social goals of the speaker. To state the obvious, job discrimination and salary inequity lie a far distance from torture and starvation. Doris Sommer observes that “to read women’s testimonials, curiously, is to mitigate the tension between First



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World ‘self ’ and Third World ‘other’. ” Sommer goes on to insist, “I do not mean this as a license to deny the differences, but as a suggestion that the testimonial subject may be a model for a respectful nontotalizing politics” (“No Secrets,” 157). Licensed or not, denial of difference in order to reduce tension has happened all too frequently in testimonial collaboration and criticism. Collaborating writers’ uncritical identification with speakers poses another risk to testimonial projects. If there is no truly significant difference between the writer and the speaker, why should it not be the writer who sets the narrative agenda? In contrast to Moema Viezzer and to Elisabeth Burgos, Poniatowska states without apology that she has taken free rein with her subject’s words, adding that she knows the speaker would not approve (“Jesusa,” 151). While many other writers report feeling obligated to represent the speakers’ lives as they believe the speakers themselves would (and often exactly as the speakers present them), “Here’s to You, Jesusa” details Poniatowska’s conscious decision to downplay her subject’s participation in the Mexican Revolution, an experience that Jesusa herself reportedly presented as the central event of her life (154–55). While it might be argued that Poniatowska’s own goal was to write a novel, and not testimonio, her insistence on the triumphant presence of the real-life narrator in the work casts doubt on potential claims of literary immunity. Poniatowska, observes Lucille Kerr, “insists that Jesusa (her ‘native informant’) and her story are fundamentally the ‘real’ thing. . . . She reaffirms the existence of an objective reality beyond the discourse that gives her text and its protagonist the appearance of truth” (48). Poniatowska’s own descriptions of the writing process often contradict any claims of triumph over class distinctions. Significant class differences are apparent throughout “Here’s to You, Jesusa,” her account of the writing of her testimonial novel, and it is apparent that those differences limit Poniatowska’s ability to comprehend some of her subject’s choices. While Poniatowska

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claims that her position as a woman gave her a natural connection with her subject, that subject does not appear to have experienced a reciprocal degree of intimacy. After admitting an earlier pleasure at seeing Jesusa as “reserved,” the writer expresses surprise and dissatisfaction that she is not more forthcoming on the subjects of men and menstruation (153–54). Even on occasions when the two women attempt to please one another, connections fail. At the beginning of her chronicle, Poniatowska appears to expect this outcome and is not surprised when her efforts at help with chores are belittled. Later on, however, the writer reports puzzlement, disappointment, and even anger at her subject’s reactions. At one interview, the writer brings out some documentary photographs of Jesusa that she has arranged to have taken. Rather than expressing pleasure, as Poniatowska clearly expected, Right in front of me she ripped into a thousand pieces some photos that Hector Garcia had taken of us one afternoon: “This shows a lack of respect! This is filth! What I wanted was one like this!” She did not like to see herself with an apron, standing in the middle of the entrance to her building. “I thought it was going to come out like this!” (153)

Jesusa explains that she wants an attractive portrait, not an ugly one, and illustrates her taste with an older photograph in which her hair is marcelled into curls arranged “according to size.” The explanation is lost on the writer, who betrays exasperation with a sarcastic question: “The size of what? Her head?” (153).6 It is apparent that Poniatowska expected a poor old woman to be somehow immune to aesthetic concerns. From time to time, the writer fairly glories in self‑abasement and guilt over her relative privilege: “I used to arrive with my spoiled pet’s burden of woe, and she would take me to task” (148). More frequently, Poniatowska concludes that Jesusa is simply “unpredictable.” Catego-



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rizing differences of class and culture as mere individual quirks poses little challenge to the writer’s narration of empathy; instead, they become proof of her own tolerance for eccentricity. Poniatowska sometimes catches herself in class-based prejudices, as when she characterizes as “foolish” her response to Jesusa’s attempts to learn to read and write. “I asked her,” the writer reports, “‘And why do you want to learn that now?’ And she answered me: ‘Because I want to die knowing how to read and write’ ” (149). Nonetheless, such insights are the exception rather than the rule. When the speaker rejects her offer of an excursion, Poniatowska concludes that the other woman is “so warped by her solitude and her poverty that the possibility of change seems like an affront to her,” and that “the hope of something better upsets her, makes her aggressive” (149). Poniatowska ultimately declares that when it came to Jesusa, “it was not up to me to analyze her character historically. To what end?” (155). When no purpose can be imagined for historicizing, nor any point in intervention, the work in the present to change the future can scarcely begin. “In Poniatowska’s case,” Bell Gale Chevigny writes, “an empty privilege is transformed into a full one—the fullest privilege is responsibility—but in the process, privilege and responsibility are stripped of their established social meanings” (219). Unfortunately for the testimonio’s social projects, stripping the notions of privilege and responsibility of their established social meanings has real, and negative, social consequences. Of course, not all collaborative writers envision empathy as an ultimate destination, deny their own role in favor of un­ critical identification with the speaker, or strip testimonio of either its literary or its social dimensions. Miguel Barnet defines writerly intervention as not only honorable but critical to the production of testimonio. While Barnet recognizes the danger of aestheticizing, of turning testimonio into “only literature,” he is severe in his criticism of collaborating writers who would re-

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fuse to exercise their skills in the testimonial collaboration. According to Barnet, the “pure-compilation” version of testimonio, in which the writer is a mere transcriptionist, “goes nowhere” (“Documentary Novel,” 19–32). Passages from Roque Dalton’s preface to Miguel Mármol’s testimonio and Moema Viezzer’s prologue to Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s offer evidence that narratives of fusion are not an inevitable outcome of contact with a speaker. 7 As in the case of effective speech and firsthand writing, they appear to have accomplished this by making a clear distinction between the speaker’s experience and their own encounter with the speaker (personally rewarding but ultimately unique and unrepeatable) on the one hand, and their common text on the other. Like the speakers, they report viewing that text as an instrument rather than as an end in itself. From this standpoint, each writer was able to look toward other readers and to write an introduction that was more consonant with the testimonial project’s persuasive goals. Still, Dalton and Viezzer have been the exception rather than the rule. Persuasion is a project in which most collaborating writers have yet to accept their own place, and in general critics have hardly encouraged them to do so.

6. The Capacities and Constraints of Critics Celebration and Mourning

The previous chapters have made clear that the ways in which testimonial speakers and writers represent their experience have profound effects on the likelihood that their texts will promote social action. Explicitly and implicitly, critics’ responses to those texts help to shape the inventory of socially acceptable models for testimonio. It is likewise clear that readers may approach testimonio in ways that are more or less likely to lead to action. Here again, critics share some responsibility: as Michel Foucault has observed, critical commentary is an effort to channel readings in certain directions (58). Any engaged critique of testimonio must take into account not only the socioliterary nature of the genre and the attitudes and actions of writers and readers; such a critique must also come to terms with its own potential effect on the testimonial project. Terry Eagleton ­insists that since “criticism is not an innocent discipline and never has been,” critics need to “inquire into the history of criticism itself ” and “pose the question of under what conditions, and for what ends, a literary criticism comes about” (17). Given the social stakes in testimonio, here those questions are especially urgent.

Critical celebration of testimonio As discussed in the introduction to this study, the period from testimonio’s birth in the early sixties well into the eighties was a time of celebration. Nearly all articles focused on the genre’s 137

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novelty and its success in providing a forum in which speakers could counter the official stories of oppressive governments. Even then, however, a few essays ran counter to the mood of uncritical celebration of radical newness. Ariel Dorfman’s seminal “Political Code and Literary Code” and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal’s early examination of common threads between testimonio and abolitionist narrative approached the genre from a standpoint that was at once critical and engaged, as both scholars resisted personal or social constraints on criticism. Dorfman, for example, overcame reservations about the right to critique a literature of trauma, and Feal contested claims of testimonio’s incommensurability. Nevertheless, these two assessments of testimonial texts represent exceptions. The introduction to this study catalogs the many factors that caused most critics to avoid direct textual critique of testimonios—reasons that ranged from the personal reticence reported by Dorfman through reverence, pragmatism, fear of doing harm, and even dismissal of the genre as unworthy of serious or sustained textual study.1 Critics sympathetic to the cause of a particular testimonio seem to have been understandably reluctant to criticize the tactics of a side with which they agreed in principle. Judging testimonio as persuasion might have been seen as doubting the word of the speakers and as being unfaithful to them. For instance, one might conclude that, in Let Me Speak! Domitila Barrios de Chungara represented lesbians and sex workers as extremist characters in an effort to highlight her own respectability and reasonableness. Such an observation would likely be seen as an attempt to impugn both Barrios’s own credibility and the authenticity of her text. Similarly, progressive editors, translators, and critics of testimonio have apparently refrained from pointing out that, in general, US readers are likely to find terms such as “bourgeois” much more strongly marked than would their Latin American counterparts, for whom burgués/burguesa is a more common



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adjective. While the scholars themselves might use the word routinely, a speaker’s project of reaching a broader audience might be better served by a term that other potential readers would find less exotic and charged. María Teresa Tula’s reflections on public speaking in Hear My Testimony make clear the studied stylistic adaptations that an empirically skilled organizer made every day in her speaking engagements, and suggest that she might have appreciated information that would have permitted her to make similarly smart choices regarding how to approach her new audience of readers. “If you speak to a religious group,” she advises, “then you have to talk about religion and relate what you say to parts of the Bible. If you are talking to a group of workers, you have to talk about exploitation and the living conditions in El Salvador. If you address a group of students then you have to talk about students. Peasants, housewives, feminists—they are all different” (128). So, of course, are readers. While collaborating writers, critics and translators seem to have resisted modifying the text in an attempt to “sell” the speakers’ ideas, speakers themselves do not appear to share those scruples. In recent years, critics have been deconstructing texts to reveal hidden and suspect messages aimed at the domination or repression of others. Accustomed as we are to decoding commercials or politicians’ speeches to reveal their concealed and baser motives, perhaps we have come to see the space of the object of rhetorical scrutiny as inherently soiled. To look at testimonio in this way not only would require admitting that the genre contains more than surface, it would place testimonio in bad company. While analyzing testimonial texts as persuasion may be taken as a sign of disrespect, such analysis is fundamental to any critique that acknowledges that those texts are not ends in themselves. For those who care about the potential social outcomes of testimonio, it makes sense to attend to the likely effectiveness of the genre’s means.

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In a retrospective essay on testimonial criticism during that celebratory period, Elzbieta Sklodowska reports that “it is likely that any reading of testimonio against the grain of its editorial voice would have been perceived as politically dangerous” (“Afterthoughts,” 98). Her concern illustrates again the persistence of the epideictic in testimonial criticism—the ideal of a univocal discourse that brooks no dissent among the ranks. Nonetheless, deliberative testimonio itself stresses the need for constant and critical reevaluation of strategies: reading (or listening) critically need not be considered unfaithful to the cause. During the interviews for Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo, Elvia Alvarado admonishes collaborating writer Medea Benjamin not just to accept her word. Instead, she insists, Benjamin needs to travel and conduct her own interviews and observations because otherwise “you’ll never know if I’m telling the truth’ ”(xxii). Objections to employing critical tools that are less than ideal are likewise at odds with an engaged approach to testimonio. If there are practical lessons in deliberative testimonio, they are not exhortations to perfectionism but rather to political and practical bricolage—making do and using the tools that one has—and improvising where existing tools prove inadequate.2 Menchú’s frequent comments on her community’s efforts to cobble together some action in the face of an unprecedented situation can serve as practical counsel to critics as well. “It wasn’t that we had a set plan, with a theory and each role worked out,” she insists. “No, we were putting new ideas into practice the whole time . . .” (127–28). Critics’ reluctance to approach testimonio has also stemmed at times from an apparent ambivalence about acknowledging their own textual and social power. Despite the enormous amount of writing on power in recent years, admission to possessing it has come to figure among the last great social taboos. Many writers and critics appear to conceive of their own power



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only in the negative, as power to manipulate, damage, or betray a text that they see as belonging to the speaker. For instance, Renato Prada Oropeza warns that “the intervention of the authoreditor, superimposed on the original text, adds more ambiguities, silences and absences to a process of selection and editing that is carried out according to literary norms and forms” (17). Power can be seen as a positive force only when exercised by the heretofore powerless, such that it is acceptable only to attribute power to the speakers and to watch their struggles admiringly. In Proceed with Caution, Doris Sommer advocates an attitude of “productive ‘incompetence’ ” (9), and “a self-doubting step too lame for conquest” (15). Unfortunately this attitude of selfabasement may also be too lame for effective alliance. Neither are passive spectators well-regarded by many testimonial speakers. Witness Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s assessment of her would-be admirers at the Women’s Conference in Let Me Speak! “Who asked for your applause? If problems could be solved that way, I would have had enough hands to applaud, and wouldn’t have had to come from Bolivia to Mexico, leaving my children behind, to speak here about our problems” (203). If damage was all that a professional writer might do to a text, his or her disappearance could be a good thing. John Beverley notes with approval that “erasure of authorial presence and nonfictional character make possible a different kind of complicity—we might call it fraternal or sororal—between narrator and reader than is possible in the novel” (Against Literature, 77). In other words, professional writers needed somehow to erase themselves so that the speakers whom they were representing could address readers directly. When writers were enjoined from shaping the text, critics drafted speakers to fulfill the now vacant role of author. Lucille Kerr calls the opening quotation from Jesusa in Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, “Some day you’ll come and you won’t find me,” an

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oddly ‘literary’ statement about the relation between the text that will be read and the tale she will be seen to have narrated, if not entirely authored. For it posits her absence as an inevitable ending for the dialogue between the invisible (but not necessarily audible) author and the protagonist, between the documentary researcher and the native informant. It prefigures the disappearance of the character, whose responsibility for the text may come to be regarded as equal to, if not greater than, the author who also authorizes her appearance. (50)

By the logic of folk rhetoric, the phrase “some day you’ll come and you won’t find me” might be heard as an old woman’s attempt to persuade a visitor to return soon and visit more often, since “I won’t be around forever, you know,” but the possibility of prosaic wheedling does not seem to have occurred to Kerr. Signs of weakness would have interfered with the depiction of the speaker as “independent and masterful,” and acknowledgment that this was a common folk phrase would have precluded the lengthy explanation of its “oddly literary” status (57). In this novel incarnation of dependency theory, the dependent party had to be the upper middle- or upper-class writer. For some critics, the very social forces that constrain speakers are seen as sources of greater liberty. For Margarite FernándezOlmos, for instance, writer Elena Poniatowska’s membership in the middle class limits her vocabulary, while Jesusa’s poverty makes the speaker “freer” (189). John Beverley insists that In the creation of testimonial text, control of information and representation does not just flow one way. . . .Someone like Rigoberta Menchú is also manipulating her metropolitan interlocutor in order to have her story reach and influence an international audience, something that, as an activist for her community, she sees in quite utilitarian terms as a political task. Moreover, editorial power does not belong to the compiler alone. (Against Literature, 80)



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Doris Maier expands on this point: “This use of Burgos may not be ‘callous,’ but neither is it naive, for [Menchú] knows that her will to survive is matched (or even surpassed) by Burgos’s determination to get her story . . . written and—not incidentally—to save herself ” (637). As a speaker, Elvia Alvarado takes ironic note of such inversions, in which the reader becomes the needy recipient of textual support, when she admonishes and reassures those who will read her testimonio: “From those of you who feel the pain of the poor, who feel the pain of the murdered, the disappeared, the tortured, we need more than sympathy. We need you to join the struggle. Don’t be afraid, gringos. Keep your spirits high. And remember, we’re right there with you” (146). When class and power differences were obscured by positing an actual equality of power between writer and speaker or even inverting that power relationship, a trace of ambivalence sometimes remained in the qualifiers (“almost literal foreign agents,” “may not be ‘callous,’ ” “the tale she [Jesusa] will be seen to have narrated if not entirely authored,” “whose responsibility for the text may come to be regarded as equal to, if not greater than, the author”). While no doubt well intentioned as a corrective against assumptions of transparency and naïveté on the part of the speaker, this insistence on the equality of power, and particularly the use of such loaded terms as “exploit,” “use,” and “masterful,” did not do justice to the actual power relations between writer and speaker. Testimonial speakers have generally manifested no illusions about differences in power between themselves and the writers. Why should critics have insisted on fictions of a power equilibrium or even on an “exploitation” of the writer by the narrator? At one level, such imaginative displacements of power might have been seen as expressions of hope, spoken as if saying it was so could make it happen, but as Catherine McKinnon points out in “Desire and Power,” claims of equality of power where that equality does not exist are less benign than other

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forms of sympathetic magic. On the contrary, she insists, such gestures “obscure the need to make change so that it can be so” [emphasis in the original] (114). Politically, obscuring power relations has tended to benefit the person already in power, either materially—or, in the case of people who would prefer not to be oppressors nor benefit from it, psychologically.3 Readers, writers, and critics continue to enjoy the pleasures of privilege even as those pleasures become guilty, and it is precisely this ambivalence that offers a rhetorical point of access for the speakers. A class-conscious analysis of the testimonial exchange would have been more skeptical of writers’ reports of bonding. It would have recognized the speakers’ possible interest in promoting writers’ pleasure in such affective bonds for purposes of persuasion, along with the possible interest of the objects of persuasion in believing that the speaker likes them. Such a skepticism would not have ruled out the possibility of actual personal affection between speakers and writers, but it would have acknowledged that the reality of affection as such was much harder to verify within a lopsided power dynamic. Power is a matter of potential as well as action. It will not be wished away or eliminated by refusing to exercise it.4 The power relation will only change when the social structure changes— another lesson of testimonio. In a project of alliance politics, critics’ reluctance to acknowledge or exercise their own power becomes a serious disadvantage. To make the case for the employment of the tools of literary criticism is not to reject the application of new approaches and terminology, but critics who endorse a given testimonio’s project of social change should be cautious of answering “no” to the central question posed by Beverley in Against Literature: whether the stories of marginalized persons can be included in literary texts. It is only by seriously considering testimonio as representation, and as literature, that we can discern the limitations of literary models as critical approaches to the testimonial project.



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Despite all of the arguments for silence, critics have scarcely been inactive in the face of testimonio. Testimonial criticism faces constraint from its own set of commonplaces. Among the most notable is the feminization of the genre, a curious outcome for a movement initially traced to a father figure in the person of Miguel Barnet, who interviewed Esteban Montejo to produce Biography of a Runaway Slave, and often identified with a second foundational male figure, Roque Dalton, who like Barnet collaborated in the production of the testimonio of another man, in Miguel Mármol. Each pair produced their testimonio in the process that has become canonical for the genre—a professional writer interviewed a person from a lower economic class, and used the material to produce a politically charged life-story. Many of the movement’s immediate precursors, the writers of guerrilla narratives, were likewise male. Nor can it be argued that Barnet and Dalton were distant ancestors—testimonialistas perhaps, but somehow avant la lettre. On the contrary, Barnet in particular theorized, lectured, and wrote early and extensively on the nature, practice, and politics of the genre. The effective eclipse of these testimonios by those produced by women cannot be traced either to a lack of adequate translations or lack of circulation. Both texts have been readily available since the inception of the genre. This early gendering of Latin American testimonio to match the word’s grammatical category (in Spanish, masculine) did not escape the notice of Latin American critics. In a 1986 essay, Dorfman commented on the dearth of women writers of testimonio among the Chilean texts he had studied, adducing what must have seemed an obvious etymological coincidence. “‘[T]estimony’ comes from ‘testes,’ ” Dorfman wrote, “testicles in Latin. . . .”5 He continued: [t]o testify, to tell the truth, was originally related to virility, to speak with the capacity to father children. It is worth mention-

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ing here, as a kind of parenthesis, a sad appendix, that there are no women among those who have written of their experience in captivity, and that this absence, from the texts, although not from the concentration camps, could be one of the keys to explore more deeply the dichotomies that we are examining and the concept of “manliness” that magnifies at the same time that it distances the combatants. (187)

But this literary if not literal absence did not apply outside of Chile, and Dorfman went on to anticipate the next critical move when he noted that descriptions of men in some of the testimonios that he had read did not follow the heroic conventions of “masculine” writing. In describing Hernán Valdés’s Tejas verdes, a testimonio that Dorfman obviously esteems, he writes, “The fact that Valdés is not a ‘man’ may in part explain why he communicated well, in his work, the nature of the national experience of repression” (187). In the decades since that essay, the most typically cited commonality in Latin American testimonial reception has indeed come to be gender; but now feminine, as apparent in titles such as Fernández-Olmos’s “Women and the Art of Listening” and in Bell Gale Chevigny’s assertion that “human gain buried in human loss, the diamond in the coal, these are the strengths granted women in general that women artists are especially gifted in releasing. For a woman writing is converting her loss into gain” (214). Over the course of time, testimonio has come to be regarded, especially by non-Latin Americanists, as a women’s genre. After several of my own presentations on testimonio at the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association, audience members from English and women’s studies have stopped me in the corridor to express their surprise to hear that men “also” wrote testimonios. As evident in the earlier comparison between the relationship of the nineteenth century women’s movement with abolitionist testimony and that of the twentieth-century



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women’s movement with testimonio, the genre’s adoption by feminists has been from the start a mixed blessing. On the one hand, that adoption unquestionably increased the readership of testimonios, especially in translation. On the other, however, some feminist critics imposed a strict standard of orthodoxy that rejected certain deliberative testimonios as insufficiently radical and prescribed highly selective readings of others so as to make them a better fit in a particular agenda. Even the earliest of proto-­testimonios was shoehorned into an established category of feminist social action writing. In his 1997 afterword to the English edition of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Casa de alvenaria (I’m Going to Have a Little House) (1961), Robert M. Levine notes that “the left rejected her from the start because she was considered insufficiently revolutionary, selfish—concerned only about herself and her children—and a believer in the work ethic, which they considered a device to keep the population docile” (173). Levine proceeds to take to task “female Brazilian intellectuals” for not recognizing the “courageous feminist act” of “resolv[ing] never to marry because of men’s treatment of her and out of fear of losing her independence” (174). Given the practical lot of mulheres sós (women on their own) in Brazil and unmarried women in general in the 1950s, such a decision might well have been courageous. The problem here is that, at least judging from the content of the diaries, the diarist’s unmarried status was not a categorical resolution that she made, but rather a contingent outcome of her life. A 1961 entry recounts her response to an impromptu proposal: “I told him ‘If I were to get married, it would have to be to a good man who was refined and educated’ ” (Little House, 111). Later, she observes, “Men who asked me to marry them were not worthwhile people” and “I think it’s beautiful when a couple commemorates their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary” (131, 137). On her visit to Chile, she is deeply wounded when she overhears someone describe her as “unmarried and with

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three children” (169). The critic’s conversion of a contingent decision not to marry into an unconditional resolve echoes Elisabeth Burgos-Debray’s treatment of Menchú’s choices regarding marriage. In both cases, the writers overstate the case, overshadowing the contrary statements of the speaker. Social action tales, it appears, impose their own romantic templates. Among the articles of faith in the celebratory phase of the testimonial moment was an insistence on the radically new character of testimonio. In fact, the frequent admiration of its unprecedented transparency and the insistence that testimonio offered readers direct and unmediated access to the real echoes the reception that Kalí Tal has chronicled for each new subgenre of the literature of trauma. Such claims have also been a hallmark of the reception of other genres from Latin America. Santiago Colás points to the common threads between reception of realismo mágico and testimonio as both were heralded as privileged points of access to authenticity (“Creole Symptoms,” 391), but the line stretches back even further to indigenismo, an early twentieth-century naturalist movement that emphasized grotesque and tragic elements in the experience of indigenous peoples of Latin America. While Aida Cometta Manzoni praised indigenistas’ courageous presentation of “naked reality” (14), Jorge Enrique Adoum insisted that the net social result of indigenismo was merely to naturalize suffering, converting the subjects into “one more element of the landscape, like a stone, a tree, or a shack” (222–23). From the time of the Encounter, Europeans saw in Latin America an opportunity for unimpeded observation; Cristobal Colón’s first comment on the people he saw was that they were “naked as their mothers bore them” (30). Motivation to learn “the real story” is by no means an ethical good in itself. In her comments on her book A Different Kind of War Story (1998), Carolyn Nordstrom describes what amounts to testimonial voyeurism.



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One question I encounter from western audiences I find particularly offensive. Phrased both delicately and not so delicately, people want to know why I do this research. Do I get some kind of thrill from it? Is there some kind of adrenaline rush from studying violence? Have I become addicted to the excitement of the frontlines? Is there some kind of inescapable perverse fascination in horror? (B9)

She responds, “I can only shake my head and assume the person has grown up on John Wayne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and B-grade literature—for no one who has studied a war close up asks those questions.” Nordstrom finds it “a sad reflection of our society that violence and thrill are all too often conjoined, and I emphasize the words ‘our society’ to point out that this is not an innate human characteristic—no Mozambican villager (or any other person I have spoken with) who has been subjected to war ever conjoins these two very different modes of experience” (B9). Nordstrom is a sensitive observer, but with the adjectives “western” and “Mozambican,” she presents the issue of who can afford to see war as an object of fantasy as a matter of essence rather than experience, and even there she may be too optimistic. Experiencing war does not always inoculate the experiencer, even the Mozambican one, against the perverse fascination of war as fantasy-object. As Tal observes in her study of war narratives, the experience of war is subject to a vast variety of codifications (7). But voyeurism is an uncharitable reading of readers. An alternative interpretation of the insistence on the reality of testimonio is that reading the real story is a good thing because knowing that story will induce people to act. This is to fall into the trap of believing to be true the comforting trope that speakers often offer to readers: if you haven’t done something up to now, it must have been because you didn’t know about the problem. Like much of persuasion in general, the apparent validity of

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this assertion evaporates as soon as it is examined. What do we know about existing injustice much closer to our own homes, and how much are we usually doing about it? Lack of knowledge is hardly the most serious barrier to our acting in favor of social justice. Other common readings of the celebratory period recast the testimonial project as literary creation or self-help: We are all oppressed in one way or another. Testimonio is a lesson for dealing with our own oppression. Reading these texts can help us reach our own human potential. Readers were authorized to approach testimonio as one might read any other narrative, appreciating the beauty of the language or power of the speaker’s style, or else testimonio could be packaged and read as more conventional biography—a testament to the amazing strength of a man or woman. Many articles (and dustcovers as well) promised readers the benefit of a vicarious experience that would make them a better person simply for having read a particular testimonio. In her preface to Menchú’s testimony, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray promises readers that the book will put them in touch with their own inner natures— “sensations and feelings which we, caught up as we are in an inhuman and artificial world, thought were lost for ever” (xii-xiii). Still other readings of testimonial texts increase the reader’s sense of privilege but without any concomitant sense of responsibility, as in a response that I have heard frequently: Reading this book made me realize even more how really, really lucky I am to live where I do. It must be terrible to be born in such a place. For these readers, their own good fortune, like the speaker’s suffering, is just the luck of the cosmic draw. Naturalization of both privilege and pain exempt the reader from any responsibility in the real world.6 To the extent that prefaces, editing, packaging, and criticism do channel readings into certain directions, critics who helped to promote such readings or allowed them to pass without comment during the moment of celebration share



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some of the responsibility for short-circuiting testimonio’s social potential. Among the literatures of trauma, testimonio is hardly alone in incurring socially unproductive responses from readers and critics. Tal asserts that critical reception of each new literature of trauma has passed through similar stages of sacred, when the texts are approached with reverence as quasi-religious artifacts; assimilated, when they become objects of historical analysis; and finally appropriated, when reading them is seen as itself a trauma, one which the reader “lives through” (59). As in the cases of other narratives of trauma, celebratory reception of testimonio tended to channel readers into an undemanding empathy rather than action. In “The Aura of Testimonio,” Alberto Moreiras writes of a “fetishization” of the genre (198). Gareth Williams’s “The Fantasies of Cultural Exchange in Latin American Subaltern Studies” takes the notion a step further when he specifies that testimonio has been incorporated into a fantasy in which merely reading certain texts is taken for social action. Like any other fantasy, this one is threatened by critical scrutiny. “Misrecognition,” Williams writes, “seems to be the positive condition upon which Latinamericanism can enjoy its selflegitimizing strategies of intervention” (230). For the chances of the testimonial project to succeed, this is hardly a harmless fantasy. However, Williams’s contention that continued enjoyment of a fantasy may be precluded by recognition that it is a fantasy and Melvin Lerner’s observation that people will drop certain psychological defenses when those defenses are made explicit both signal a means by which critics might help the testimonial project to avoid ending in the realm of fantasy. Critical recognition and discussion of readings that treat testimonio only as religious artifact, historical document, or individual therapy—channels which, as Tal points out, tend to neutralize the potential social power of trauma literature— can discourage readers from following those comfortable paths.

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Rehearsal of such readings with a view to their foreclosure already figures among the rhetorical strategies of some testimonial speakers, as when Alvarado anticipates how readers might respond to her book. “If you sit around thinking what to do and end up not doing anything,” she concludes, “why bother even thinking about it?”(146). Critics have likewise begun to iterate many of the celebratory fantasies that surround testimonio with an eye toward extinguishing them.

The moment of mourning Nonetheless, the pessimism that has characterized testimonial criticism from the 1990s to the present has gone on to generate its own set of defensive fantasies, offering the reader new means to resist action. Analysis of this latest development in testimonial criticism needs to begin with a version of Satya Mohanty’s central question for critical multiculturalism: what else can we learn from testimonio’s speakers, and what can they learn from us (113)? It has already been demonstrated that, as empirical rhetoricians, testimonial speakers often performed their own analyses of possible reader responses and their impact on the social prospects of testimonio. Thus, it is reasonable to look back to the practice of those speakers—and this time not with misplaced reverence but with respect for their demonstrated and practical knowledge of persuasion—for indications of how critics might participate more fully in the social project of testimonio. Among the factors that make testimonial criticism so complicated are first of all the ways in which current forms of criticism are inadequate to the task at hand. As has already been discussed, even progressive critics have found themselves illequipped to deal with practical questions of engagement and political efficacy, and thus have either ignored those questions or assumed that intent is equivalent to outcome. Lacking



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a background in folk rhetoric, these same critics have tended to overlook speakers’ empirical expertise and improvisational skill. While critics were looking to Latin America for trans­ parency and tradition, speakers have been putting old forms to new uses in their adaptation of personal experience tales and time-­honored tropes of persuasion, and inventing new ways to talk about political and economic repression, imprisonment, torture, and rape. Rather than demanding perfect tools for expression and giving up in despair when they do not find them, speakers have been resourceful in employing the tools they have and improvising those they need. In political practice, deliberative speakers have been self-critical and candid in admissions of confusion. They have been willing to form strategic alliances wherever and with whomever it seems potentially productive— moves overlooked by critics in search of certainty and purity. Unlike some recent critics of testimonio, speakers report that they expect to be at this work for a long time. In comparison, the response of collaborating writers and critics in the face of the testimonial project has been characterized by a good deal of impatience, and even by a certain petulance as the mood swung quickly from inflated expectations of immediate success to disillusionment and despair. Both currents have demonstrated a similar misprizing of empathy as the goal of testimonio. If one group found in that easy fusion a be-all for the genre, the next declared the impossibility of such fusion as an end-all. The celebratory critics’ conception of empathy not only obscured the need for a responsible exotopy, the resultant erosion of the writers’ or readers’ own place virtually precluded it. The critics of mourning duly noted the impossibility of such fusion, but then proceeded immediately to a fetishized version of exotopy in which writers and readers were so firmly rooted (and, in Georg Gugelberger’s metaphor, even incarcerated) in their own place that they could never participate in the speakers’ project.

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The subaltern may not write but the subaltern will undoubtedly act. May we learn to observe more critically even if the institutionalized bars behind which we work make the communication very difficult, almost impossible. Pointing to this possibility of the impossible, of realizing what we cannot do—namely, to identify with the subaltern in a gesture of solidarity—is a worthy experience of learning. (18)

When the critics’ choice is all or nothing, celebration or mourning, there is no site from which the reader might be answerable to testimonio’s social address. When critics could no longer enjoy the immediate success of uncritical celebratory fusion with triumphant testimonialistas, they declared that it was time to mourn and move on because the project was impossible, or at least passé. Several recent articles declare solemnly that while testimonio might go on as practice, its day in the critical sun is over. Some of them chalk that consequence up to the circuit of consumption, as when Beverley reports in “The Real Thing” that “testimonio’s moment, the originality and urgency or—to recall Lacan’s phrase—the ‘state of emergency’ that drove our fascination and critical engagement with it, has undoubtedly passed, if only by the logic of aesthetic familiarization” (280–81)7 At first glance, this post-mortem analysis seems uncontestable. The testimonial moment has simply passed by. Unfortunately, this formulation of testimonio is yet another naturalizing version that serves to damp potentially active responses to the genre among First World readers. The attribution of changes in objects of critical scrutiny to this sort of desiring machine casts critics as literary fashion victims, drawn inexorably to that next big thing. Such a mechanization of the position of critics obscures an alternative view that would hold critics responsible for their own choices in the cultural marketplace. Attribution of the eclipse of testimonial criticism to “the logic of aesthetic familiarization” is an apt illustration of how, in Eagleton’s words,



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“text naturalises experience,” “critical practice naturalises text,” and theories of practice in criticism in turn “legitimate the ‘naturalness’ of that criticism” so that all in turn cover their tracks (18). Paper covers more than rock. These latest critical responses hold out the attractive propositions of hardheaded political pragmatism and intense respect for difference. Nonetheless, this new current has its own (albeit abject) fantasies. By fetishizing boundaries as strongly as the celebratory current fetishized fusion, the phase of mourning offers testimonio’s readers a new set of alibis against action. This take on testimonio may arguably have an even stronger chilling effect on the likelihood of reader action than did its ingenuous antecedent. When not mistaking reading for social action, readers who naively saw themselves in solidarity with the speaker might occasionally, even if equally naively, be induced to participate in social projects. Savvy third wave readers,8 on the other hand, know better than to believe that testimonial writing, or they themselves, for that matter, can contribute to social justice. These readers have learned to keep a safe and socially respon­ sible distance, a cool remove between themselves and testimonio. Once seen as automatic allies in unquestioned solidarity, readers, writers, and critics are now potential predators who must be held apart from the vulnerable speaker. The best they can do is to step back from that rope that Sommer envisioned, a barrier that would “cordon off curious and controlling readers from the vulnerable objects of their attention” (“No Secrets,” 134). The advice that these critics proffer for socially respon­sible practice also sounds reasonable enough at the beginning. Gugelberger advises that “the first thing is to stay alert. The second is to historicize rather than to interpret.” Moreover, he insists, cultural criticism must be informed by the model of “nomadology” proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Critics must thus be ever alert to “a continuously shifting emphasis on different discourses,” and willing to “move from a once potentially

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liberating discourse to another once it becomes obvious that the integration into the institution has de-energized the former discourse” (13). Finally, however, the message of mourning is fatalist, its practical implication “just let go of testimonio and move on to a new discourse.” Extended toward testimonio’s speakers, this response boils down to a statement that we in the institution are bored with them—go make something new for us and then we might listen again for a while. Between the critical stages that hailed testimonio as “potentially liberating” and now mourn it as “de-energized,” the genre would seem to have passed straight from birth to senescence, with scarcely a moment between birth announcement and epitaph. If such is the cycle, things hardly look promising for the next big thing in political discourse, and the critical nomads had better be ready to move with dispatch. Contrary to Gugelberger’s description of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology as well suited to address the “unstructured, antisystemic and anti-hierarchical” (13), the life cycle of political discourse in the academy is starting to look like not only a structured system but a short and closed loop. Such formulations hold out their own defenses. Given the funerary and economic metaphors, refusal to accept the latest positions might be dismissed as lingering nostalgia for that celebratory moment, or as stubborn unwillingness to accept the reality that testimonio as a social project is a failure (as least in regard to expectations regarding First World readers). Were it not for the just world findings, questioning the metaphors of mourning might be seen as a matter of denial, but in light of those findings, it is impossible to sustain claims that the testimonial project was inherently futile.

Conclusion From Poetics to Prosaics

In its progress from celebration to mourning, testimonio seems well embarked on the path that Kalí Tal found in the history of critical reception of other trauma narratives, from sacralization to assimilation to appropriation—ritual to history to self-help. At the same time, Melvin Lerner’s work suggests that the speakers who have “bet their blood” at other points in the testimonial project may not be wrong in their wager on the social potential of text. Lerner’s work holds out the tantalizing possibility that, with just the right arrangement of words, testimonio might evoke action. Deliberative speakers have sought to reach uncommitted audiences, and not on naïve terms. As evident from their counter­measures, some of those speakers are fully aware of reader resistance. Nevertheless, speakers have opted to use their limited time and energy to address readers because they do not think they can carry out their project in isolation, and because they have seen a use for the skills and resources that readers possess. Until collaborating writers and critics seek equally hard and knowledgeably to minimize and counter friendly resistance, it will remain impossible to know whether socially effective testimonio is possible. By taking into account what is known about readers’ resistances and how to overcome them, and by encouraging productive readings and exposing defensive ones, critics do have a potentially engaged role in the testimonial project, and whatever their limitations, some speakers seem willing to find a place for them. 157

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This space of potential action stands in sharp contrast to both the ecstatic early poetics of solidarity and the mournful new poetics of isolation, epideictic responses that offer what Jean-François Lyotard called the “charm” of pathos without the responsibility to act (21). What is needed in testimonial criticism is a fundamental shift in expectations from both the instant gratification of the poetics of celebration and the self- abasing fantasy of the poetics of mourning— a shift from fantasy relationships with testimonio—to a harder, less glamorous, and less ideologically pure alternative. What deliberative speakers request of their allies, both in their lifeworld practice and in their appeal to readers—and what they offer in return—is not the high drama of a poetics, a shortcut to the sublime in which readers gaze in awe or despair on a landscape of wondrous heroes or desperate victims. As opposed to either sort of poetics, the solidarity asked for and offered in testimonio as a social project is most akin to what Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson have termed a prosaics, a solidarity founded not on ecstatic fusion but instead on considered, contingent, concrete, and undramatic actions in everyday life. (Creation, 15).1 A conception of the response to testimonio as a prosaic task could go a long way toward motivating writers, readers, and critics to consider their own answerability, as well as toward restoring the genre’s yet unrealized political potential. Attention to prosaics makes possible an engaged critique of deliberative testimonio on its own terms. It means being willing to critique seriously the practices of speakers as well as writers, critics, and readers, picking up the task begun early on by Ariel Dorfman. It will mean historicizing testimonio not only in terms of the speaker’s local and global social context (an exclusive focus that often promotes the defenses of forwarding, absenting or abjection), but also in terms of the local and global social context of readers, a task that Neil Larsen has begun. As a project, testimonio involves not only the community of speakers



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but the communities of writers, readers, and critics, who must also be willing to become objects of critical scrutiny. For many of us, analyzing the prosaics of the testimonio will also require a realistic acknowledgment of our own privilege.2 Such a focus on the prosaics of testimonio must not permit the critical pendulum to swing back to celebration. A politically engaged analysis has a stake in determining whether a given text is likely to be optimally persuasive. Lerner’s work has pointed to testimonio’s possibilities, but it has also pointed up the genre’s limitations. Even testimonios that are likely to be persuasive are no guarantee of social change. Narrative does not act directly on the world. It can only suggest to readers what they should do after they close the book. At its best, reading testimonio may make the reader more likely to act, but it can never make that act a certainty. For Bakhtin, observes Michael Holquist, “Literary texts are tools . . . they serve as a prosthesis of the mind. As such, they have a tutoring capacity that materially effects change by getting from one stage of development to another” (83). Understood in these terms, testimonio offers no promise to change the world directly, but it does offer readers a means of changing their minds about the world, a development that may, in turn, lead to activism. Or, it may not, and this is another area in which Bakhtin’s subtlety is a useful antidote to either euphoria or despair regarding testimonio’s social possibilities. The locus of action remains the place of the individual reader, for whom the text is only one of many sources of information to be considered when contemplating action. Certainly the notion of optimally effective socially engaged writing—the omnipotent text that would somehow automatically move readers to good social action, a hope once held out for testimonio—is a seductive one. Against such a notion, testimonio would have to be judged an abysmal failure. Upon reflection, however, it becomes apparent why the ability of any text to

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produce such an irresistible consummation may not be such an attractive possibility after all. To paraphrase a comment from Caryl Emerson’s 1994 Bakhtin seminar, to posit an ideal book that could have forestalled a Holocaust carries with it an unavoidable corollary: that another possible book could start one. Not only is the reader’s response to literature less than certain, but that is not a bad thing. If dreams that testimonio by itself could end oppression were misguided, so too are assertions of literature’s definitive inefficacy. As this study indicates, while not irresistible, a text that addresses and makes demands of a reader can under certain conditions serve to catalyze a potential for action. As Bakhtin insisted, “art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself, in the unity of my answerability” (Art and Answerability, 2). Testimonio’s speakers have shown themselves willing to wager on the reader’s potential response, and I for one am loath to contradict them, particularly since we have yet to see what might happen if collaborating writers and critics were to acknowledge and employ their own skills, endorsing and acting upon the same fundamental propositions set forth by speakers: that the speaker is in fact addressing the specific human being who is reading the text, that those readers (writers and critics included) enjoy more power and privilege than most people in the world, and that such readers have both the capacity and the concomitant responsibility to act ethically on the knowledge of injustice. Until then, the only thing that can be ascertained about the potential of testimonio is the speakers’ limited capacity unilaterally to overcome a literary and cultural apparatus that has redirected their messages away from their intended addressees, excused those addressees as incompetent or unworthy to participate in the speakers’ project, and recast that project as either already complete or probably impossible. Claims of institutionalization and impossibility are nothing



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more or less than another source of resistance to testimonio’s address. Without critical examination, these new resistances will remain naturalized and become permanent excuses for inaction. The goal of testimonio as a social project is not to teach First World readers what they cannot do, but rather to persuade them to act. With the moment of mourning, recognition and rejection of the attractions of the poetics of solidarity have led only so far as an equally passive poetics of impossibility. Both of these serve to prevent recognition of readers’ responsibility for participation in the prosaics of the genre’s socioliterary project. It remains to be seen what a fully collaborative testimonio—one in which all participants bring to bear all of the potential of their own unique positions to insist unequivocally on both the addressability and answerability of the reader—might look like, let alone what it might accomplish in the realm of social justice. As opposed to the invincible political machine that Barbara Harlow saw in testimonio, and the unstoppable desiring and consuming machine that Georg Gugelberger found in the academy, one deliberative speaker characterizes the project with a different and decidedly more contingent mechanical metaphor. In Let Me Speak! Domitila Barrios de Chungara concludes Last of all, I think it’s essential to know that we’re all important in the revolutionary struggle . . . no? We’re such a large machine and each one of us is a cog. And if one is missing the machine can’t work. So we’ve got to know how to assign each person his or her role and know how to value each one. Some are good at making pretty speeches. Others of us are good at writing well. Others of us are good for providing bulk, at least to be present and be one more in the crowd. Some of us have to suffer, play the role of martyr, others have to write our history. And that’s how all of us have to work together. . . . So nobody should think of himself or herself as useless; in one way or another, we can all help. We’re all indispensable for the revolution. We’re all going to contribute in our own way. (43–44)3

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Given that testimonial criticism has its own consequences, a responsible critical practice must take them into consideration. What is the likely social effect of considering the prosaics of testimonio, and what are the alternatives? Conservative critics such as Dinesh D’Souza have already decried (if not analyzed) the genre as leftist propaganda—further testament to the greater ease of discerning persuasion when one disagrees with the project. While the right wing has taken the rhetorical impact of the testimonio seriously, albeit as a threat, many critics on the Left report that, while they may have noticed strategizing, they have felt obliged to refrain from mentioning it. Even though testimonio’s rhetorical cat is out of the bag, progressive critics still seem to be constrained not only by their own suspicions of rhetoric but by a sense that any deconstructive criticism would be somehow presumptuous. The reverence toward speakers, an attitude promoted by many critics, does not exactly promote critical scrutiny, and the cultural distance and untranslatability posited by others offer little hope of success in any case.4 Despite the difficulties, I do not think that the examples of critical politicoliterary practice offered by some of deliberative testimonio’s speakers are impossible for First World readers to grasp. Deliberative speakers neither demand that their readers come precommitted nor that their allies be flawless. Colás has taken pains to point out testimonial speakers’ insistence that there is no pure and unproblematic good or truth to be had in their projects. These same speakers insist on a concomitant that many critics appear to have overlooked—that those currently outside the project are neither necessarily evil nor useless. As envisioned by speakers, general readers are neither committed partisans nor unredeemable oppressors. These readers are potential allies, educable and possibly of use in increasing the amount of justice in the world. From the point of view of these speakers, the audience is initially neither good nor evil but, like themselves, quite capable of both. If readers and critics opt out



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of the field of address, it can be neither on the old grounds that they are not guilty enough to be the direct audience of testimo nio nor on the new grounds that they are not good enough to listen to the speaker as addressees. The postmodernist turn against essentialism in testimonial criticism should also rule out readers’ or critics’ excusing themselves on the grounds that only the speakers are capable of action. Jean Franco has insisted that the testimonial genre renounce “the discourse of the universal and its implicit assumption of a privileged point of access to the truth which can be reached only by a limited number of subjects” (quoted in Colás, Postmodernity, 172), an admonition that should extend to readers and critics as well as speaking subjects. Such postmodernist critiques could lead in the same direction of ecumenic responsibility, potential, and participation set out in the deliberative testimonial project. Instead, so far they have spawned yet another and even more subtle new containment strategy, one in which, in the name of avoidance of “universalizing,” “we” stay out of “their” struggle because we cannot hope to imagine it, let alone understand it well enough to participate. Franco continues, “If we can learn anything from them, it is that they raise questions which may not have a single correct answer.” If those questions were only literary, that might be the end of the lesson—the familiar “answers may vary”—but when the practice of testimonio is considered as a prosaics, there is more to be learned. This is due to testimonio’s extension into the lifeworld and to its decidedly unpostmodern recognition that people who can see many possible answers, and who admit that they may be incorrect, are still called on to do something. Human life, being what it is, often channels the choices upon which any given person can act at any given moment down to one.5 While there may not be a privileged point of access to the truth, there is not only a privileged but a near-exclusive point of access into action in the world, and one of the lessons repeatedly

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thematized in testimonio is the obligation to use that point of access. This is the difference between the poetics and the prosaics. Poetics is the realm of the imagination and of multiple possibilities, while prosaics is the realm of concrete choices and of consequences. Deliberative testimonio finally does offer something to its audience: neither purity nor certainties but rather lessons in how to construct, maintain, critique, and when necessary change a set of essentially contestable foundations that help to decide what to do at each of those points of decision—a doit-yourself ethics. This sort of ethics is precisely what cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett calls for in the final essay of his collection Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (1998), in which he points out the drawbacks of a theoretical ethics that deals only in idealizations, an enterprise that finds “reality, in all its messy particularity . . . too complicated to theorize about, taken straight.” Dennett observes that It is as if there might be two disciplines, ethics proper, which under­ takes the task of calculating the principles of what one ought to do under all circumstances—and then the less interesting, “merely practical” discipline of Moral First Aid, or What to Do Until the Doctor of Philosophy Comes, which tells you, in rough and ready terms, how to make decisions under time pressure. My suspicion is that traditional theories of ethics all either depend or founder on the very sorts of friction that are ignored by the standard idealization. . . . For instance, a bench test that most ethical theories pass with flying colors is the problem: what should you do if you are walking along, minding your own business, and you hear a cry for help from a drowning man? But almost no one faces predicaments with that logical form anymore; instead we hear, every day, while desperately trying to mind our own business, a thousand cries for help, complete with volumes of information on how we might oblige. On this ubiquitous problem, traditional ethical systems are essentially reduced to silence or the most transparent hand waving. [emphasis in the original] (380–81)



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Deliberative testimonio offers a framework for ethical decisions in real time and real places. In effect, its prosaics picks up where deconstruction (a preliminary process which is itself incorporated in deliberative testimonio) leaves off. Deconstruction lays bare the essential incompleteness of the data, the aporia and contradictions in what we know of a situation. Prosaics acknowledges the ethical obligation to act even when the information is incomplete and contradictory. In comparison with approaches that offer faith in something transcendent, deliberative testimonio’s advantage—and its drawback—is that it offers no alibis for one’s actions or for their effects on the world. In an address at Stanford, Rigoberta Menchú made it clear that she saw her listeners, like the readers of testimonio, as capable, and that this very capacity obliged certain acts of responsibility (Pratt, 71). That may be what makes it so difficult to remain squarely in the field of address of deliberative testimonio: it demands ultimately that we face ourselves, our action, and our inaction—not only in the text but in the world.

Appendix A Brief History of Latin American Testimonial Narrative

Both personal experience narratives and social justice writing have a long and distinguished tradition in Latin America, beginning with such works as Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las indias (An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies) (1552), Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (Castaways) (1559), and Sor Juana’s “Respuesta a Sor ­Filotea” (“The Poet’s Answer to the Most Illustrious Sor Filotea de la Cruz”) (1691). The more proximate genealogy of testimonio is frequently traced to works of political autobiography such as Ché Guevara’s Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria Cubana (Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War) (1963) and ­Diario en Bolivia (The Bolivian Diary) (1967), a genre that Juan Duchesne-Winter has called narraciones guerrilleras (guerrilla narratives). Further antecedents can be identified in sociological or anthropological accounts such as Ricardo Pozas’s Juan Pérez Jolote (1952) and Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sánchez (1961), and in “nonfiction novels” such as Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación masacre [Operation Massacre] (1957). These texts differ from contemporary testimonio principally in their speaking subjects’ status as already relatively well-known figures, their narration of the experience of injustice from the perspective of a thirdperson observer, or their status as documentation rather than explicit calls for action. Outside Latin America, testimonio finds close sibling genres in abolitionist testimony and in testimony from the Holocaust, among other literatures of trauma. These genres share with tes167

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timonio speakers who are presented as representative of a larger collective, narratives of personal experiences of injustice, and calls for action on the part of readers. As in the case of Latin American testimonio, these genres are frequently collaborative projects between the speaker and a professional writer, but all three include as well firsthand accounts by writers themselves, both amateur and professional. The following annotated chronology offers an overview of the testimonial genre’s development in Latin America.1 The intent here is not to set forth an exhaustive catalogue of testimonios, but rather to offer readers who are not specialists in Latin American narrative some sense of the genre’s evolution and extension. As discussed in detail in the main text of this study, Latin American testimonio as such is generally considered to have begun in the 1960s with Esteban Montejo and Miguel Barnet’s Biograf ía de un cimarrón (1966). Montejo’s testimonio was initially translated by Jocasta Innes as Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1968). The more recent translation by W. Nick Hill returns to the equivalent of the Spanish title: Biography of a Runaway Slave (1994). Barnet has also been a founding theorist of the genre that he classified as socioliteratura, beginning with comments that accompanied the writing and publication of that seminal testimonio. Barnet’s second testimonial work, Canción de Rachel (Rachel’s Song) (1969), was a composite chronicle of the experience of a number of women who worked in Havana’s dance-halls. While Biography of a Runaway Slave is widely acknowledged as the foundational work of Latin American testimonio, a strong case can be made for extending that honor to Quarto de Despejo (Child of the Dark) (1960) by Brazilian writer Carolina Maria de Jesus. In the wake of her first diary’s unprecedented success, a sequel was rushed into print in 1961. In Rio de Janeiro, Editôra Paulo de Azevedo published Casa de Alvenaria [The Cinder Block House]. Dated May 1960–May 1961, this diary



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covered events from the signing of the book contract through the writer’s public appearances, book signings, and installation in the cinder-block house of the title. By this time, however, US publishers’ interests had turned elsewhere, and the English edition of this second diary appeared only in 1997, when the University of Nebraska Press released Melvin Arrington and Robert M. Levine’s scholarly edition and translation, I’m Going to Have a Little House. In 1969, Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska published Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (Here’s to You, Jesusa!), a testimonial novel based on a series of interviews with the woman she called “Jesusa,” a veteran of the Mexican revolution. In articles and interviews regarding the production of this text, Poniatowska has stated that she took free novelistic rein with the material from her interviews, but the writer has also insisted that the work draws strength from its base in lived experience (“Here’s to You,” 151). Another testimonial work by Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral (Massacre in Mexico) (1970), treated the government massacres of students in Mexico City that preceded the 1968 Olympics. By 1970, Casa de las Américas in Havana had already made testimonio a distinct category in its annual literary competition. The timing and location of the production of testimonio in Latin America is in large measure an index of sites and dates of armed struggle in the region. The numbers of published testimonios also reflect the economic situations and literacy rates of those sites, as well as the preexisting connections of their writers with the international literary marketplace, especially in the earlier years of testimonio in the 1970s. For these reasons, what is probably the largest concentration of published testimonios comes from Chile and attests to events surrounding the rise to power of Augusto Pinochet following the 1973 assassination of Salvador Allende. Among the texts focusing on imprisonment and torture during this time are Sergio Villegas’s El Estadio: once de

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septiembre en el país del Edén [The Stadium: September 11 in the Country of Eden] (1974); Raúl Silva, Birgitta Leander, and Sun Axelsson’s Evidence on the terror in Chile (1974) Hernán Valdés’s Tejas verdes, diario de un campo de concentración en Chile (Diary of a Chilean Concentration Camp) (1974); Manuel Cabieses’s Chile: 11808 horas en campos de concentración [Chile: 11808 Hours in Concentration Camps] (1975); Alejandro Witker Velásquez’s Prisión en Chile [Prison in Chile] (1975); and Aníbal Quijada Cerda’s Cerco de púas [Barbed Fence] (1977), among many others. Ariel Dorfman has discussed Valdés’s testimonio at some length as an example of “literary” as opposed to “sectarian” writing, and as one of the few Chilean testimonial texts that achieved wide circulation (“Political Code,” 159, 164). Carlos Lira’s Así vemos nuestro destierro [This is How We See our Exile] (1978) and Skármeta’s testimonial novella No pasó nada (Nothing Happens) (1980) both treated the experience of exile, the latter from the fictionalized perspective of an adolescent boy. The most famous Salvadoran testimonio, Roque Dalton’s Miguel Mármol, was first published in 1972, when the poet interviewed the revolutionary in exile in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to produce an account that spans Mármol’s life from 1905 to 1954. Another well-known collaborative testimonio from the seventies was Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s Si me permiten hablar (Let Me Speak!) (1977). Collaborating writer Moema Viezzer not only conducted her own interviews of Barrios, a local political organizer and the wife of a Bolivian tin miner, but also transcribed Barrios’s speeches in various venues, including her account of her experience as a representative at the 1975 United Nations International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City (Barrios, 9–10). “Somos millones . . .” La vida de Doris María combatiente nicaragüense (Doris Tijerino: Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution) appeared in 1977, a collaboration between Tijerino and Marga-



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ret Randall, who has written extensively on Central America. In 1981, Randall published Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle, and in 1994 she returned with Sandino’s Daughters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua. Ana Guadalupe Martínez’s Las cárceles clandestinas de El Salvador (The Secret Prisons of El Salvador), which treats both Martínez’s own experiences and those of her fellow political prisoners, dates from 1978. Another prison testimonio from El Salvador produced in 1979, Salvador Cayetano Carpio’s Secuestro y capucha en un país del “mundo libre” [Kidnapping and Torture in a Country of the “Free World”], details Cayetano Carpio’s experience as a political prisoner in the 1950s. 1979 was also the publication date of Luis Zapata’s controversial Las aventuras, desventuras y sueños de Adonis García: el vampiro de la colonia Roma (Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel). Colonia Roma is a district of Mexico City, and the speaker is a gay sex worker whose tape-recorded memoirs were transcribed to produce the book.2 Preso sin nombre, celda sin número (Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number) (1980) by Jácobo Timerman is a firsthand testimonio from a journalist imprisoned and tortured by the military junta during Argentina’s Dirty War. Because Timerman’s captors made particular reference to his status as a Jew, and saw themselves as continuing the project of extermination started by Hitler, this testimonio also has a place in the literature of the Holocaust. Also published in 1980, Manlio Argueta’s Un día en la vida (One Day in the Life) was the writer’s re-creation of the life of a peasant woman in El Salvador. Omar Cabezas’s war testimonio from Nicaragua, La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde (Fire from the Mountain, the Making of a Sandinista) was published in 1982. Cabezas offers a detailed chronicle of his passage from student leader to revolutionary. 1983, of course, marks the publication of Rigoberta Menchú’s

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testimony, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú), discussed at length in the main study. Menchú’s second book, Crossing Borders (1999), details her response to the Nobel Peace Prize, the continuation of her political work, and her return to Guatemala, as well as conflicts between herself and various other family members who now expected her financial assistance. She also discusses her marriage and the birth of a son. Also dating from 1983 is No me agarran viva: La mujer salvadoreña en la lucha (They Won’t Take Me Alive: Salvadoran Women in Struggle for National Liberation), Claribel Alegría’s account of the life of Eugenia, a revolutionary commander. Los sueños de Lucinda Nahuelhual (The Dreams of Lucinda Nahuelhual), an account of the life of an indigenous Mapuche woman, written by Sonia Montecino Aguirre, appeared in 1983. This testimonio came under fire in a 1987 essay by Kate Millet, on the grounds that the narrative did not in fact reflect Nahuelhual’s life and perspective, but rather converted her into an exemplar for the writer’s own politics (425). Alicia Partnoy’s The Little School (1986), an Argentinean testimonio, gained currency in US feminist circles. Partnoy’s account, first published in English, is a series of stories about her own imprisonment, with an afterword consisting of maps, dossiers of the information that she managed to collect on the guards, and accounts of the fate of fellow prisoners. Like Timerman, Partnoy was a writer, and like Timerman’s captors, the guards at the prison where Partnoy was held took special note of her Jewishness, threatening at one point to “make soap out of her” (61). A testimonio of guerrilla life in El Salvador, Nunca estuve sola (I Was Never Alone: A Prison Diary from El Salvador) by Nidia Díaz, was also published in 1986. As the title indicates, Elvia Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: a Honduran Woman Speaks From the Heart (1987) was explicitly addressed to a US audience. Produced in collaboration with Medea Benjamin, Alvarado’s is among the most obviously



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self-reflective testimonios, anticipating reader responses by interspersing accounts of her life in El Salvador with instructions on how to read (and how not to read) testimonio itself. During the 1980s, testimonio was also beginning to hybridize. Marta Traba’s 1981 Conversación al sur [Conversation Down South] creates a novelistic framework for testimonio from three countries of the Southern Cone— Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay— in the form of a conversation between two women. Segments of Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s collection This Bridge Called My Back (1981) are also testimonial narratives, as are parts of Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983) and Anzaldúa’s La frontera/Borderlands (1987). These collections fused testimonial narrative with other forms of writing. Ariel Dorfman combined testimonio with another Latin American genre, magical realism, to produce La última canción de Manuel Sendero (The Last Song of Manuel Sendero) (1982), in which the principal narrator is a fetus, the title character’s unborn son. In 1988, the Belgian activist Karin Lievens offered her account of everyday life in Salvadoran guerrilla camps, El quinto piso de la alegría: Tres años con la guerrilla [The Fifth Floor of Happiness: Three Years with the Guerrillas]. The segment of collective testimonios in which a number of speakers presented shorter segments was again exemplified in Roser Solà and María Pau Trayner’s Ser madre en Nicaragua: Testimonios de una historia no escrita [Being a Mother in Nicaragua: Testimonios From an Unwritten History] (1988). As Kristina Stevens explains, theirs is a collection of “forty-two testimonies of women activists, who lost their children to the Sandinista revolution and testify to the injustices wrought by US-backed Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza and his National Guard.” Also from Nicaragua is Michele Najilis’s Caminos de la Estrella Polar [Roads of the Pole Star] (1990), which Stevens calls “the everyday testimony of a Sandinista woman that walks with her battalion through rural towns, relating what she sees.”3 Luis J.

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Rodríguez’s La vida loca: el testimonio de un pandillero en Los Angeles (Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.) (1993), published first in English, extended the genre to the northern borders of Latin America. By the mid-1990s, testimonio as a genre was becoming increasingly self-referential. Hear My Testimony! María Teresa Tula, Human Rights Activist from El Salvador, edited by Lynn Stephen, was also first written and published in English in 1994, and only afterward retranslated for publication in Spanish, the language in which the interviews had been conducted. The title page to the Spanish translation, Este es mi testimonio (1995), gives credit to the translators— Marisol Alvarenga, Alejandra Cantor, and Narciso de la Cruz Mendoza—and notes that they were aided by the transcripts of the recorded interviews of María Teresa Tula by Lynn Stephen. The covers, preface, end material, and inside review excerpts of the book indicate the degree to which the testimonial genre had taken on one of the traditional hallmarks of the literary marketplace: mutual reference, recommendation, and endorsement. On the center of the back cover of the Spanish edition is a review from “Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Ganadora del Premio Nobel de la Paz, 1993 [sic].” Testimonio continued in a much less conventional vein with Claribel Alegría’s Luisa en el país de la realidad (Luisa in Realityland) (1987), in which the writer uses Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as her inspiration for an alternation of prose narration and poetry, based on a child’s memory of her family’s hiding an acquaintance sought by government forces. At the same time, two short-story writers from the United States/Mexico border were thematizing the testimonial collaboration with ironic treatments: In “Exile, El Paso Texas” and “Alligator Park,” two stories from his 1992 collection Flowers for the Broken, Benjamin Alire Sáenz calls into question the relationships and identifications that produce testimonial narratives. Rosario Sanmiguel’s 1994



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“El reflejo de la luna” (“The Reflection of the Moon”) also makes the testimonial encounter a central focus. Poised between short story and novella, this narrative from the writer’s collection Callejón Sucre y otros relatos [Sucre Alley and Other Stories] negotiates complicated intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity in connections with theoretical, ethical, personal, and political questions regarding ownership of testimonial narratives. At another margin of testimonio stands Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story (1993). This testimonio/memoir is at least as much Behar’s own story as that of the interviewee whom she calls Esperanza, as the writer discusses at length her own life experience, her perceptions of the testimonial encounter, and its effects on her own self-image. Behar’s work may be seen as a sort of post-testimonio, a bridging gesture toward the new emphasis on personal memoir that has followed the testimonial moment in such works as Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (Cuando era puertorriqueña) (1993), and Almost a Woman (Casi señorita) (1998). In these works, the emphasis on personal experience remains, but the testimonial genre’s focus on a social project and demands for reader action have been replaced by invitations to a more individualistic form of identification and reflection. For obvious reasons, most contemporaneous Latin American testimonios were initially published outside the country of occurrence, often in the location in which the writers lived in exile. Outside Latin America, these nations included France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, the Soviet Union/Russia, and the United States. In addition to the collaborating writers, various political and social organizations frequently took roles in the production and publication of testimonios. Tula’s, for instance, was supported by CO-MADRES, an association of mothers and other family members of political prisoners, disappeared persons, and assassination victims in El Salvador (Tula, Este es mi

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testimonio, v). In the 1990s, the association Feministas Unidas successfully campaigned for the publication of a second edition of Alicia Partnoy’s The Little School, which appeared in 1998. While the politics of Latin American testimonio are generally leftist, some narratives have found their support at the right of the political spectrum. A segment of Cuban testimonios, including Armando Valladares’s Contra toda esperanza (Against All Hope) (1985), José Luis Llovio-Menéndez’s Insider: My Hidden Life as a Revolutionary in Cuba (1988), José Carreño’s compilation Cincuenta testimonios urgentes: denuncias en Ginebra sobre violaciones de los derechos humanos [Fifty Urgent Testimonios: Claims in Geneva regarding Human Rights Violations] (1987), and Ana Rodríguez’s Diary of a Survivor: Nineteen Years in a Cuban Women’s Prison (1995), were written against the government of Fidel Castro. In the United States, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1981) is also at least a near-fit in the testimonial genre. In his narrative, Rodriguez makes some of the speakers’ characteristic claims of representativity and also advocates at least some political action on the part of the reader (support for the elimination of bilingual education and affirmative action programs). While, at first glance, the text would seem to lack the experience of injustice that would be necessary for its inclusion as testimonio, Rodriguez does attempt to make a case that affirmative action did him some degree of emotional harm even as it offered material advantage. In surveying the literary and cultural context in which the genre developed, it must be acknowledged that the testimonial moment initially received short shrift in contemporaneous Latin American studies programs. In the late sixties and early seventies, the move toward cultural studies had yet to make a serious impact on most courses and reading lists. At many if not most schools, literature courses with a focus on the fantastic of Borges and Cortázar and later the magical realism of García Márquez were the central features of the curriculum. Begin-



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ning in the late seventies, and certainly by the eighties, both the canon and the slate of courses in Latin American studies had broadened considerably at most schools. A critical sociocultural coincidence was the growth of the feminist movement in the mid to late seventies, and with it the advent of women’s studies courses. As noted, the United Nations had declared 1975 “International Women’s Year,” an action that helped to focus international attention on women’s issues. While the needs of Third World women were hardly fully addressed in the US and European women’s movements, First World women’s aspirations toward gender-based solidarity further bolstered interest in women’s testimonios. Nor should the significance of Rigoberta Menchú’s Nobel Peace Prize be underestimated. The attendant worldwide publicity certainly increased the visibility and circulation of that particular testimonio, and Menchú’s own lecture tours have further developed the audience for the genre. Another social contribution to US awareness of Latin American women’s testimonios has come from an unlikely source—the right-wing intellectuals like Dinesh D’Souza for whom Menchú came to embody all that was wrong with the US academic scene. People who would otherwise never have heard of the Guatemalan testimonialista have learned of her work through such vocal and highly placed opposition. The more recent push toward globalization on college campuses and “world literature” programs in English studies has also increased interest in Latin American testimonios. By the 1980s, speakers such as Alvarado could reflect extensively on their own status as testimonialistas and on a variety of possible readings of the genre itself. Evidence from that period points to a readership well acquainted with the conventions of the genre and with certain key figures. At least among Englishspeaking audiences, there had emerged a de facto canon of testimonios that tended to center on Menchú. In contrast with the reception of most literary genres, that canon generally excluded

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male writers, even to the extent of erasing them from the literary landscape of many readers. By the early nineties, the genre had undergone various hybridizations and ironic incorporations into other genres. Conventional testimonios were (and are) still being produced, but by the end of the nineties the genre was beginning to cede to a new generation of less politically charged memoirs. In brief, this has been the trajectory of the forty-odd years that have so far comprised the testimonial moment.

Notes

Introduction 1. When a published English version of a given testimonio is available, its title will be given in parentheses and all citations will be from that text. Square brackets will enclose translations of titles of works not available in English. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of titles in square brackets and quotations from texts for which no published translation is cited will be my own. 2. Nance, “From Quarto de Despejo,” 42–48. A complete version of the diaries was published as The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus. For more on this proto-testimonialista, see Levine’s The Life and Death of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Levine and Meihy’s Cinderela Negra. Unless otherwise specified, all further references to the work of Carolina Maria de Jesus will be to Child of the Dark. 3. The terms compilador and gestante/gestor come from Miguel Barnet, “La novela testimonial” and “Testimonio y comunicación” in Jara and Vidal. English versions of Barnet’s theory on testimonio are available in “The Alchemy of Memory,” published as an afterword to the Hill translation of Montejo and Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (203–8), and Barnet’s “The Documentary Novel.” Coprologuist (an unfortunate coinage since “copro-” is a productive prefix meaning “excrement”) comes from John Beverley (Against Literature, 92). Autobiolocutor is Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal’s suggestion with reference to Montejo and Menchú, each as “one who speaks one’s life to another” (“Spanish American Ethnobiography,” 102). 4. Here again, the genre has been truncated in the process of both general and critical reception. Teaching and Testimony not only

179

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5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

limited its treatment to Menchú, a reasonable matter of focus, but also limited its definition of the genre to the collaborative. CareyWebb states in his introduction, “In Latin American studies testimonio has received a good deal of critical examination and has come to mean specifically a longer oral narrative connected to a collective historical experience of oppression, marginalization, or struggle created by an individual who, because of his or her circumstance, must collaborate with a second person for transcription and editing” (7). In contrast, collaborative text was the area that Ariel Dorfman bracketed out of “Political Code” in favor of testimonios written by their experiencing subjects. Further evidence that the boundaries between oral and written testimony and between the various testimonial subgenres tend to be porous includes Menchú’s venture into poetry (see Fechter) and Brazilian testimonial diarist Carolina Maria de Jesus’s expressly and quite conventionally fictional stories, to which she refers in her diary. I am indebted to Danny Anderson for bringing to my attention Sáenz’s Flowers for the Broken and Sanmiguel’s Callejón Sucre y otros relatos. Beverley classifies Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory as “in effect auto­biography” (Against Literature, 83). Neil Larsen’s chronicle of the reception of testimonio, in the introduction to Reading North by South, offers multiple examples of the responses of progressive critics. In Public Access, Michael Berubé provides an interesting account of some of the skirmishes between the two sides. In general, for reasons to be analyzed in this study, conservative critics came to grips with the persuasive rhetoric of testimonial texts earlier and in more depth than did progressive critics. For an example, see Dinesh D’Souza, “Travels with Rigoberta,” in Illiberal Education. Two examples are Feal’s “Spanish American Ethnobiography” and Johnnie G. Guerra and Sharon Ahern Fechter’s “Rigoberta Menchú’s Testimony as a Required First Year Reading,” in Teaching and Testimony. In Proceed with Caution, Sommer also considers Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Slavoj Žižek points out that revolutionary theorist Rosa Luxemburg saw even failed movements as useful and perhaps necessary preliminaries to eventual change (59–60, 84). For more on Benetton’s combination of politics and consumption,



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see Henry Giroux’s “Consuming Social Change”and Guillermo Gómez Peña’s, “From Art-Mageddon to Gringostroika,” (57). 10. Lerner’s The Belief in a Just World (1980) is the central text here. Lerner’s work has been extended over the years in a number of coedited volumes: Lerner and Lerner’s The Justice Motive in Social Behavior (1981); Montada, Filipp, and Lerner’s Life Crises and Experiences of Loss in Adulthood (1992); Lerner and Mikula’s Entitlement and the Affectional Bond (1994); and Montada and Lerner’s Current Societal Concerns about Justice (1996) and Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just World (1998). Unless otherwise specified, subsequent references to Lerner will be to The Belief in a Just World. 11. While frequently counterintuitive, Lerner’s conclusions are consonant with the empirical knowledge and skills of some of testimonio’s producers, and provide an experimental complement to the work of several critics whose work spans the fields of literature, ethics and politics: Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on empathy, exotopy, and the ethical response to human suffering (in writings such as Art and Answerability, which are less well-known than his widely circulated work on carnival and polyphony and sometimes at odds with it); Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the differend; Dorfman’s aforementioned analysis of the literary and political ramifications of Chilean testimonio; and Tal’s exploration of the social and political implications of trauma narrative in Worlds of Hurt. For more on the reception and uneven assimilation of Bakhtin both in Russian and in English translation, see Caryl Emerson’s The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Chapter 1 1. Pierre Janet asserts similarly that “memory is an action: essentially, it is the action of telling a story” (2: 252–72). His remarks are translated in Caruth (Trauma, 175). 2. These include not only Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, timed to coincide with the publication of Menchú’s second book, but also Stoll’s earlier article, “The Land No Longer Gives.” 3. In The Differend, Lyotard makes reference to “the commonplaces of the deliberative” in relation to the discourse of ethics (149).

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4. The critical reception of the Brazilian proto-testimonio Child of the Dark is a good illustration of critics overlooking persuasive strategies because they expect to find forensic analysis. Villanueva reports, “Students enjoy the dialogue. But there seems to be no dialectic, no sustained probing into the conditions that relegate certain people to the ghettos and others to the ‘burbs in disproportionate numbers” (3). 5. Regarding Tejas verdes, Dorfman insists that “the political effect of what he is writing resides, for Valdés, more in terms of the changes that he can bring about in the way human beings look at reality than in terms of certain immediate, measurable contributions of a mere propagandistic nature” (“Political Code,” 165). 6. For example, the World Medical Association defines torture as “the deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons acting alone or on the orders of any authority to force another person to yield information, to make a confession, or for any other reason” (Jonsen and Sagan, 4). 7. Lyotard cautions that [t]he deliberative is more “fragile” than the narrative, it lets the abysses be perceived that separate genres of discourse from each other, and even phrase regimens from each other, the abysses that threaten “the social bond.” It presupposes and registers a profound dislocation of narrated worlds. Most especially . . . the unity of genres that makes up the deliberative is under the sole guarantee, if it can be said, of the answer given to the canonical phrase of the prescriptive: What ought we to be? With the narrative genre, this question is not formulated.”

“In a word,” Lyotard concludes, “narrative is a genre; deliberation is a concatenation of genres, and that suffices to let the occurrence and differends sprout up within it” (150).

Chapter 2 1. See Gareth Williams, “The Fantasies of Cultural Exchange,” and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, “Founding Statement.” The Group is on record as rejecting what Williams calls



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“the self-interrogating positionality of metropolitan historio­ graphy” (239) on the grounds that “retaining a focus on the intelligentsia and on its characteristic intellectual practices—centered on the cultivation of writing, science, and the like—leaves us in the space of historiographic prejudice and ‘not-seeing’ ” (239). 2. Leenhardt insisted that unlike denunciation, which was addressed to a preconceived interlocutor and audience, testimonio was “the immediate word, still confusingly mixed up with the body that speaks” (quoted in Dorfman, “Political Code,” 247n). As apparent in the previous chapter, while some therapeutic or legal testimony may have this apparent immediacy, the testimonio offered by seasoned speakers and experiencing writers is generally both deliberate and mediated. 3. One reflection of this strong personal identification and assumed intimacy with the testimonial speaker is the frequent employment of speakers’ first names in critical articles. This gesture might be interpreted as egalitarian were it not for its limited scope. In articles where Menchú is referred to as “Rigoberta,” Burgos is not called “Elisabeth.” Beverley comments on Stoll’s “curious insistence on referring to [Menchú] familiarly by her first name, even though the force of his book is precisely to discredit her personal authority.” Beverly goes on to concede that the first-name reference to testimonialistas is not unique to Stoll, asking “Why does it seem proper to refer, as we habitually do, to Rigoberta Menchú as Rigoberta?” The use of the first name is appropriate to address, on the one hand, a friend or a significant other, or, on the other, a servant, child or domestic animal, that is, a subaltern. But is it that we are addressing Rigoberta Menchú as a friend or familiar in the work we do on her testimonio? We would not say with such ease, for example, Fred for Fredric Jameson, or Gayatri for Gayatri Spivak, unless we wanted to signal that we wanted to have or want to claim a personal relationship with them. (Subalternity, 67)

Beverley admits that his own “inclination is also to say Rigoberta,” locating his use of the first name in the construction of a Menchú “who exists essentially for us” rather than “in her own right” (68),

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4. 5. 6.

7.

but another factor may be a certain spillover from the common use of the first name to refer to characters in novels. Pogo was a US comic strip in which the title character once stated, “We have met the enemy, and they is us.” For a history of the Subaltern Studies Group, see Ileana Rodríguez’s introduction to The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Sommer takes note of critics’ frequent failure to comprehend and respond to “unanticipated gestures” from minority literatures, gestures such as “requests for contributions to a community’s welfare.” “How telling,” Sommer concludes, “that it has taken us so long to respond” (Proceed, 4–5). Lyotard poses a rhetorical question. Do ends show up right along with genres?—They certainly do, and they take hold of phrases and the instances they present, especially ‘us.’ ‘We’ do not intend them. Our ‘intentions’ are tensions (to link in a certain way) exerted by genres upon the addressors and addressees of phrases, upon their referents, and upon their senses. We believe that we want to persuade, to seduce, to convince, to be upright, to cause to believe, or to cause to question, but this is because a genre of discourse, whether dialectical, erotic, didactic, ethical, rhetorical, or “ironic,” imposes its mode of linking onto ‘our’ phrase and onto ‘us.’ (136)

Chapter 3 1. Larsen has taken issue with such epitaphs, arguing that they do not do justice to the potential effects of realist writing (11–12). 2. Lerner puts forth the thesis that people who are highly disposed to help under the right conditions are also more likely to engage in defenses under the wrong ones, since they are made more uncomfortable when their ameliorative efforts fail, and that a common defense is to believe that for one reason or another it is impossible to help, since that is less painful than believing that their own efforts were misguided or insufficient. “They will help when the circumstances indicate that their efforts will be completely successful, and sufficient to meet the demands of justice. When the



3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

Notes 185

complete elimination of the injustice is impossible or improbable to some degree, or when they do not have sufficient assurance that justice will prevail, then they may be less likely to try to help the victim, and more likely to engage in one of the other ‘defensive’ reactions . . .” (143). Lerner’s definition of empathy differs in some respects from Bakhtin’s. For Bakhtin, empathy is a matter of imagining oneself in the place of the sufferer, and is not automatic. For Lerner, empathy is aroused automatically by witnessing pain. However, Lerner and Bakhtin concur that empathy alone does not produce constructive action. For more on the Brecht-Lukács polemics, see Mittenzwei and Leroy. In this regard, Tace Hedrick’s characterization of certain testimonial tactics as “feints of the weak” works nicely (233). The term comes from Ludmer’s essay “Tretas de débil” (47). While on one level this is another example of the imaginative inversion of power that characterizes the epideictic—“the ‘feints’—pretended blows, strategic moves to put one’s opponent off guard—of the weak imply that the ‘weak’ have their own kind of strength” (Hedrick, 233–35)—the term also points toward a compensation for the missing category of persuasion, in which one also tries to put the persuadees “off guard” but as a preparation for talking rather than striking. Unsigned review, New Internationalist 158 (April 1986). Resonance metaphors are quite common in testimonial criticism and seem to be one way that critics have taken into account, at least descriptively, the effect of the real of certain testimonios in engaging and figuratively moving the reader, in much the same way that stringed instruments will produce sympathetic vibration. Dorfman writes of oral testimonios “vibrating like conversations” (134), and others that “vibrate unforgettably” (154). Noé Jitrick distinguished between testimony and denunciation, calling the former “full of vibrations” (quoted in Dorfman, 189).

186 Can Literature Promote Justice?

Chapter 4 1. Lyotard takes note of the seductive force that a genre of discourse may exert on the addressor, long before it operates on an addressee. A genre of discourse exerts a seduction upon a phrase universe. It inclines the instances presented by this phrase toward certain linkings, or at least it steers them away from other linkings which are not suitable with regard to the end pursued by this genre. It is not the addressee who is seduced by the addressor. The addressor, the referent, and the sense are no less subject to the seduction exerted by what is at play in a genre of discourse. (84)

Chapter 5 1. On page xix of the preface, Burgos voices her own reluctance to ask questions about certain topics: “I had the feeling that if I asked them [questions about death] my questions would become a prophecy, so deeply marked by death was her life.” Menchú, in contrast, shows no such reticence about this area. As Burgos reports, “The day after she left, a mutual friend brought me a tape on which Rigoberta had recorded a description of funeral ceremonies. . . .” Menchú diplomatically sends the message “because we forgot to record this.” But the omission is immediately assimilated (and the gentle reprimand forgotten) when Burgos observes that the provision of the tape demonstrates how “death is another part of life” in Menchú’s community. 2. As Morson and Emerson observe in Mikhail Bakhtin, Bakhtin “argues that each self is unique because each aggregate of the related and the unrelated is different. There can be no formula for integrity, no substitute for each person’s project of selfhood, no escape from the ethical obligations of every situation at every moment. Or, as Bakhtin often sums up the point, ‘There is no alibi for being’ ” (31). 3. As Gould explains, neoteny is a biological term meaning “literally, holding on to youth,” the juvenile appearance of an adult organism (276). It should be noted that the perception of Menchú as



Notes 187

looking like a child depends very much on European visual expectations—Menchú’s head shape and facial features are quite normal for her own ethnic group. 4. Poniatowska, “Here’s to You, Jesusa,” 147. The very fact that Poniatowska chose to offer this chronicle attests to her good faith. Had she intended to be unfaithful to her subject, it would certainly have been a simple matter not to provide this information. The much-maligned Burgos-Debray preface, and many other attempts to come to terms with testimonio, should likewise be read with this in mind. 5. Although Sommer would later observe that Josefina Bóurquez (the model for Jesusa) was “hardly the intimate sister that some readers expect from testimonios” (Proceed with Caution, 139), other early responses to this text confirm Sklodowska’s observation that in general critics have been all too ready to accept collaborating writers’ assertions about themselves and their subjects. Margarite Fernández-Olmos reports that as the work progresses, . . . Poniatowska’s own isolation is shattered as well, the social limitations imposed upon women of the privileged classes: in the example of a woman free of middleclass conventions and with whom she increasingly identifies, Poniatowska recognizes her own potential for self-affirmation and independence. . . . Poniatowska was therefore challenged by Jesusa’s freer language to go beyond the prevailing tabus regarding the propriety of a woman’s expression and the internalized restrictions of her own class-related limitations and expectations. (188)

Bell Gale Chevigny finds that  . . . the particular force of Poniatowska’s work derives from the emptiness she found in her position as a woman of privilege and from her using that position to cultivate a readiness of imagination and spirit; when this readiness met with vivid exposure to the dispossessed, she converted equivocal privilege into real strength. Such an evolution would make her links to the dispossessed a continuing necessity. (210)

188 Can Literature Promote Justice?

Both critics applauded Poniatowska’s reported liberation and self-discovery. 6. In fact, marcelled curls are often arranged according to the graduated size of the curls themselves, which are flattened against the head—as apparent in fashion photographs of stylish twenties flappers. In light of Poniatowska’s own impeccable grooming and obvious sense of style, her expectation that her subject would like to see herself represented by a documentary shot rather than a composed portrait is further evidence of a lack of connection and comprehension, for which the subject rightly takes her to task. The episode also points up the perils for the speaking subject of being taken for transparent and uninterested in self-representation. 7. Both Dalton and Viezzer still make some of the moves that just world strategies would suggest would be counterproductive—for instance, Viezzer in effect overrode Barrios’s decision to distance herself from conventional feminism by stressing the connection in the preface. But both prefaces stand out for the degree to which they productively take into account the differences in experience, position, and privilege between writer, reader, and speaking subject.

Chapter 6 1. Beverley complains of being taken to task for his “literary” comments on Menchú, but ultimately seconds the exclusion of testimonio from traditional literary criticism (and excludes conservative narratives from the genre of testimonio), insisting that Latin American literature is fundamentally conservative or even reactionary, while testimonio is politically progressive (Against Literature, 96–99). Like many collaborative writers, critics have been reluctant to employ their professional skills in the analysis of testimonial texts: testimonial criticism offers multiple examples of the “deskilling” against which Spivak warns in The Post-Colonial Critic (57, 62–63). Freire’s longstanding views on the subject are sharply summarized in Macedo and Araújo Freire’s preface to the posthumous Teachers as Cultural Workers (xiii-xviii.) 2. Menchú reports “We chose a compañera, a very young girl, the prettiest in the village. She was risking her life, and risking getting raped as well” (136). When it appeared that an older woman



Notes 189

might have aided the soldiers, “although it hurt us, if this woman had sold herself, we would have had to execute her” (146). And in general, “at first when we hadn’t much idea of how to confront the enemy, we planned that the women should leave first with their children—all the kids—and that the men should leave last. But we found that in practice this system proved not to be very effective and we were constantly changing our ways of escaping. What happened was that the women and children were safer than the men because the enemy showed them more respect” (127). 3. Julia de Burgos articulates this attitude in verses from her poem “Ay, ay, ay de la grifa negra”: “ . . . that my grandfather was a slave is my sorrow, / had he been the master / then it would have been my shame / because in people as in nations / if to be the servant is to have no rights, /to be the master is to have no conscience” (92). 4. Lyotard cites Levinas to insist that in the realm of ethical response, as opposed to mere knowledge of a situation, “emphasis is placed on the asymmetricalness of the I/you relation . . .” [emphasis in the original] (111). 5. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989) confirms a link between testimony and testis in the legal sense (Latin ‘witness’), but not the derivation that Dorfman posits (the anatomical sense of testis as source of the legal sense). For the anatomical sense, the OED reports “[L.: etymology uncertain. An assumed identity with testis witness (quasi ‘the witness or evidence of virility’) is rejected by Walde, who suggests connexion with testa, pot, shell, etc. In 16th c. Fr., however, tesmoing ‘witness’ appears in this sense. . . . ]” The 4th edition of the World Heritage Dictionary (2000) reports that the legal sense of testis is the earlier one, and the anatomical sense a later addition, not a source. The resemblance between testimony, testify, testis, and testicle shows an etymological relationship, but linguists are not agreed on precisely how English testis came to have its current meaning. The Latin testis originally meant “witness,” and etymologically means “third (person) standing by”: the te- part comes from an older tri-, a combining form of the word for “three,” and -stis is a noun derived from the Indo-European root stā- meaning “stand.” How this also came to refer to the body part(s) is disputed. An old theory has it that the Romans placed their right hands on their testicles and swore by them

190 Can Literature Promote Justice?

before giving testimony in court. Another theory says that the sense of testicle in Latin testis is due to a calque, or loan translation, from Greek. The Greek noun parastatēs means “defender (in law), supporter” (para- “by, alongside,” as in paramilitary and -statēs from histanai, “to stand”). In the dual number, used in many languages for naturally occurring, contrasting, or complementary pairs such as hands, eyes, and ears, parastatēs had the technical medical sense “testicles,” that is “two glands side by side.” The Romans simply took this sense of parastatēs and added it to testis, the Latin word for legal supporter, witness.

6. Hitchcock takes note of the varying forms and outcomes of identification. For if the first moment of aesthetic practice is an expressive identification, either through forms of what Bakhtin calls self-experience or I-experience, then the second moment is much more formidable and has several possible outcomes. For instance, there is “returning to one’s place” as a transgredient completion (romanticism); eschewing a second voice for generic characterization (socialist realism), or perhaps supplanting identification with alienation (modernism); or even finding both identification and extralocality unstable signifiers in a vapid plot called subjectivity (shades of the postmodern). (149)

7. In this connection, it is interesting to note Lerner’s observation that the very people who are most likely to help under the right circumstances are also the most demanding of efficacy as a condition for helping at all, and more likely than average witnesses to engage in defensive moves to assuage the pain that the realization of the lack of immediate success caused to them, by virtue of their greater sensitivity to injustice. 8. In his introduction to The Real Thing, Gugelberger states At first the genre was a Latin American “thing,” originating in Cuba in the immediate years of the revolution. . . . The second stage was the critical response to testimonio by “progressive” intellectuals in the US, a majority of whom were women. . . . The third stage in the development of testimonio was the response of critics in the United States, many of whom were of Latin



Notes 191

American origin, who struggled with the issues of “lo real” and started to refute the presumed “left” “poetics of solidarity,” going “beyond” the unconditional affirmation of the genre. (5)

Later he specifies that “the genre came into existence during the Cuban Revolution, more specifically due to Miguel Barnet’s recording of the life story of Esteban Montejo . . . (1966)” (8). As noted, I would start testimonio in 1960 with the publication in Brazil of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s diaries from the 1950s.

Conclusion 1. Similar to Mohanty’s “post-positivist realism,” such a prosaic stance would replace a “dream of transcendence” with a “reasonable social hope” (Literary Theory, xii). 2. In Dialogics of the Oppressed, Hitchcock insists that “the materiality of the privilege of the Western critic (like that of the novelist over her characters) cannot be wished away, but neither can we be content to bandy this as an a priori, forever preserving it as an inevitable state of cultural apartheid” (49). Like many injunctions, Hitchcock’s has been more effective as an index of previous transgression than as a preventative; the two positions that he mentions have characterized almost all analysis of testimonio to date. 3. Barrios, 43–44. Even the Spanish and English titles of this testimonio offer evidence of an editorial shift away from persuasion and toward the epideictic. The Spanish title, Si me permiten hablar, is not a direct command (which could have been expressed as “Déjenme hablar” or “Permítanme hablar”), but rather an indirect request—more like “If you will allow me to speak . . .” or “If I might be permitted to speak . . . ” than the English title, the direct and emphatic (complete with exclamation point) Let Me Speak! 4. There are other risks to a prosaic criticism of testimonio. For the committed Left in particular, the history of practical criticism among those supposed to be allies is a mixed record. As apparent from the Cultural Revolution and elsewhere, mutual criticism can become an opportunity for the worst sorts of venality. Considering testimonio as a concrete social project in which writers and critics as well as speakers are potential participants offers openings for accusations of counter-revolutionary motives, for

192 Can Literature Promote Justice?

claims of superior revolutionary purity and for gratuitous anti­intellectualism—the entire stock-in-trade of what Mármol called “stupid proletarianism” (155–56). 5. Lyotard reminds us that The multiplicity of stakes, on a par with the multiplicity of genres, turns every linkage into a kind of “victory” of one of them over the others. These others remain neglected, forgotten, or repressed possibilities. There is no need to adduce some will or some intention to describe that. It suffices to pay attention to this: there is only one phrase “at a time” [à la fois]. There are many possible linkings (or genres), but only one actual or current “time” [une seule “fois” actuelle]. (136)

Appendix 1. One point of caution on the dates here: any list of testimonios runs the risk of omitting an early edition of a given work due to the small presses and short runs that are often associated with this genre. 2. Zapata’s is among those texts that Beverley classed, along with Argueta’s One Day in the Life, as “pseudotestimonios” (“Margin,” 84). 3. Kristina Stevens, “La mujer centroamericana y el género testi­monial.”

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193

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______. Un día en la vida. San José, Costa Rica: Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio, Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1981. Arias, Arturo, ed. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ______. “Authoring the Ethnicized Subject: Rigoberta Menchú and the Performative Production of the Subaltern Self.” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 75–88. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” In Art and Answerability, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov and translated by Vadim Liapunov, 4-256. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ______. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Texas: University of Texas Press, 1993. Barnet, Miguel. Canción de Rachel. La Habana: Instituto del Libro, 1969. ______. The Documentary Novel. Translated by Paul Bundy. Amherst, NY: Council on International Studies, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1979. ______. “The Documentary Novel.” Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos 11, no. 1 (1981): 19–32. ______. “La novela testimonial: Socioliteratura.” TL, 280–302. ______. Rachel’s Song. Translated by W. Nick Hill. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone, 1991. ______. “Testimonio y comunicación: una vía hacia la identidad.” TL, 303–14. Barrios de Chungara, Domitila. Let me speak!: Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines. Edited by Moema Viezzer. Translated by Victoria Ortiz. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978. ______. Si me permiten hablar. Edited by Moema Viezzer. México: Siglo XXI, 1977. Behar, Ruth. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Berubé, Michael. Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics. London: Verso, 1994. Beverley, John. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ______. “The Margin at the Center.” TRT, 23–41. ______. “The Real Thing.” TRT, 266–86.



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Index

Adonis García: A Picaresque Novel, 171 Adoum, Jorge Enrique, 148 Against All Hope, 176 Against Literature, 2, 14, 60, 67, 95, 132, 141–42, 144, 179, 180, 188 Almost a Woman, 175 Alvarado, Elvia, 12–14, 32, 35, 37, 76, 79, 143, 152, 172, 177 Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., 174 An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, 167 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 173 Alegría, Claribel, 172, 174 Araújo Freire, Ana María, 188 Arias, Arturo, 4 Aristotle, 23, 30, 38 Argueta, Manlio, 34, 171, 192 Arrington, Melvin, 169 Art and Answerability, 181 Así vemos nuestro destierro, 170 At Face Value, 6, 19 Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 169 Axelsson, Sun, 170 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 62–63, 109, 120, 128, 159–60, 181, 185–86, 190

Barnet, Miguel, 1–2, 135–36, 145, 168, 179, 191 Barrios de Chungara, Domitila, 22, 47, 73, 77, 80–82, 84, 86–88, 94, 104, 119, 136, 138, 141, 161, 170, 188, 191 Behar, Ruth, 132, 175 Belief in a Just World, The, 67, 181 Benjamin, Medea, 35, 140, 172 Benjamin, Walter, 67 Benz, Stephen, 6 Berubé, Michael, 180 Beverley, John, 2, 5, 14, 51, 57, 60, 67, 95, 132, 141–42, 144, 154, 179–80, 183, 188, 192 Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1, 145, 168, 179 Body in Pain, The, 39 Bolivian Diary, The, 167 Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, 182 Bóurquez, Josefina, 187 Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds, 164 Brecht, Bertolt, 71, 185 This Bridge Called My Back, 173 Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth, 3, 29, 61, 77, 93, 124–27, 129, 130, 133, 143, 148, 150, 183, 186–87, 189 Burgos, Julia de, 195

207

208 Can Literature Promote Justice?

Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nuñez, 167 Cabezas, Omar, 77, 114, 171 Cabieses, Manuel, 24, 170 Callejón Sucre y otros relatos, 174 Caminos de la Estrella Polar, 173 Carey-Webb, Allen, 6, 180 Carrasco, Rolando, 24 Carreño, José, 176 Caruth, Cathy, 102–3, 106, 181 Casa de las Américas, 2, 169 Castaways: The Narrative of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, 167 Cayetano Carpio, Salvador, 171 Cerco de púas, 170 Chevigny, Bell Gale, 135, 146, 187 Child of the Dark, 3, 50, 110, 112, 114, 121, 123, 168, 179, 182 Children of Sánchez, The, 167 Chile: 1108 Hours, 24, 170 Chile’s Prisoners of War, 24 Cincuenta testimonios urgentes, 176 Cinderela Negra: A Saga de Carolina Maria de Jesus, 179 Colás, Santiago, 33, 55–56, 148, 162–63 Colón, Cristóbal, 148 Cometta Manzoni, Aída, 148 Conversación al sur, 173 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, 167 Culture of Pain, The, 40 Current Societal Concerns about Justice, 181 Dalton, Roque, 9, 136, 145, 170, 188 Dégh, Linda, 21 Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario, 55 Deleuze, Gilles, 155 Dennett, Daniel, 164 Derrida, Jacques, 67

Dialogics of the Oppressed, 191 Diary of a Survivor, 9, 176 Díaz, Nidia, 172 Differend, The, 48, 181, 182 Different Kind of War Story, A, 148–49 Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo, 12, 37, 79, 140, 143, 172 Dorfman, Ariel, 12, 20, 23–25, 28, 34, 39, 41–42, 51, 61, 89, 95, 105–6, 108, 110, 114–16, 138, 145–46, 158, 170, 173, 180–83, 185, 189 Doris Tijerino: Inside the Nicaraguan Revolution, 170–71 Dreams of Lucinda Nahuelhual, The, 172 D’Souza, Dinesh, 162, 177, 180 Duchesne-Winter, Juan, 167 Eagleton, Terry, 137, 154 Emerson, Caryl, 158, 160, 181, 186 empathy, 63, 71, 109, 120, 126, 128–29, 135, 151, 153, 181, 185 Entitlement and the Affectional Bond: Justice in Close Relationships, 181 Estadio: Once de septiembre en el país del Edén, El, 169 Evidence on the Terror in Chile, 170 exotopy, 63–64, 109, 120, 153, 181 Feal, Rosemary Geisdorfer, 138, 179, 180 Fechter, Sharon Ahern, 180 Fernández-Olmos, Margarite, 25, 95–96, 129, 132, 142, 146, 187 Fillipp, Sigrid-Heide, 181 Final Document of the Military Junta on the War Against Subversion and Terrorism, 31



Fire from the Mountain, 77, 114, 171 First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, The, 181 Flamingo’s Smile, The, 130, 186 Flowers for the Broken, 174 Foster, David William, 5 Foster, Frances Smith, 82–83 Foucalt, Michel, 137 Franco, Jean, 51, 163 Freire, Paulo, 36, 49, 97, 188 Friedan, Betty, 84 La frontera/Borderlands, 173 Fussell, Paul, 56 Giroux, Henri, 181 Goleman, Daniel, 9 Gómez Peña, Guillermo, 181 Gould, Stephen J., 130, 186 Guattari, Felix, 155–56 Guevara, Ernesto Ché, 167 Guerra, Johnnie G., 180 guerrilla narratives, 167 Gugelberger, Georg, 6, 29, 58, 61, 67, 153, 155–56, 161, 190 Handbook of Latin American Popular Culture, 5 Harlow, Barbara, 51, 61, 124, 161 Hear My Testimony!, 21, 36, 139, 174 Hedrick, Tace, 185 Here’s to You, Jesusa, 131–35, 141–43, 169, 187 Hill, W. Nick, 169 Hitchcock, Peter, 190–91 Holquist, Michael, 159 Hunger of Memory, 9, 176, 180 Illiberal Education, 180 I’m Going to Have a Little House, 147, 169

Index 209

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 180 Innes, Jocasta, 169 Insider, 9, 176 I, Rigoberta Menchú, 3, 172, 201 I Was Never Alone: A Prison Diary from El Salvador, 172 Jacobs, Harriet, 180 Janet, Pierre, 181 Jara, René, 6, 26, 51, 179 Jesus, Carolina Maria de, 21, 110–11, 113, 122, 147, 168, 179, 180, 191 Jitrick, Noé, 185 Jonsen, Albert, 40 Juan Pérez Jolote, 167 Justice Motive in Social Behavior: Adapting to Times of Scarcity and Change, The, 181 Kerr, Lucille, 133, 141–42 Knoblauch, C.H., 49 Larsen, Neil, 34, 55, 158, 180, 184 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 64, 78, 167 Last Song of Manuel Sendero, The, 34, 115, 173 Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, The, 6, 184 Leander, Birgitta, 170 Leenhardt, Jacques, 49, 183 Lewis, Oscar, 167 Lerner, Melvin, 16–17, 66–72, 79, 90–92, 151, 157, 159, 181, 184–85, 190 Lerner, Sally C., 181 Let Me Speak!, 22, 37, 47, 73, 80, 119, 138, 141, 161, 170, 191 Levine, Robert M., 3, 112, 147, 169, 179

210 Can Literature Promote Justice?

Lievens, Karin, 173 Life Crises and Experiences of Loss in Adulthood, 181 Life and Death of Carolina Maria de Jesus, The, 179 Lira, Carlos, 25, 170 Little School, The, 31, 32, 37–38, 40, 44–45, 73, 76, 172, 176 Llovio-Menéndez, José Luis, 9, 176 Loving in the War Years, 173 Ludmer, Josefina, 185 Luisa in Realityland, 174 Luxemburg, Rosa, 180 Lyotard, Jean-François, 48, 50, 52–53, 55, 158, 181–82, 184, 186, 189, 192 Macedo, Donaldo, 188 Maier, Carol, 127, 143 Massacre in Mexico, 169 McKinnon, Catherine, 108, 143 Menchú, Rigoberta, 3–6, 8, 13, 25, 29, 37, 50, 55, 60–61, 74, 76–78, 80, 93–94, 104, 124–27, 130, 132, 140, 142–43, 148, 150, 165, 171–72, 174, 177, 179–81, 183, 188 meta-testimonio, 9 Miguel Mármol, 31, 37, 97, 126, 136, 145, 170 Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, 186 Mikula, Gerold, 181 Millet, Kate, 172 Mohanty, Satya, 11, 13, 38, 98, 152, 191 Molloy, Sylvia, 6, 7, 19 Montada, Leo, 181 Montejo, Esteban, 1, 2, 145, 168, 179, 191 Montecino Aguirre, Sonia, 172 Moraga, Cherríe, 173

Moreiras, Alberto, 151 Morris, David, 40 Morson, Gary Saul, 158, 186 Moya, Paula L., 129 Murphy, James, 23, 31 Najilis, Michele, 173 Nahuelhual, Lucinda, 172 Never Again, 27 Nicolaisen, W.F.H., 2, 21 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 148–49 Nothing Happens, 170 One Day in the Life, 34, 171, 192 Operación masacre, 167 Partnoy, Alicia, 44, 47, 73, 75, 94, 110, 116, 172, 176 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 36, 49, 97 Poniatowska, Elena, 26, 130–35, 142, 169, 187–88 Postcolonial Critic, The, 192 Postmodernity and Representation, 33, 55, 163 post-testimonio, 175 Pozas, Ricardo, 167 Prada-Oropeza, Renato, 25–26, 141 Pratt, Mary Louise, 55, 165 Prisión en Chile, 170 Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, 171 Proceed with Caution, 6, 141, 180, 184, 187 prosaics, 157–59, 161–65 Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, 180 Quijada Cerda, Aníbal, 170 Quinto piso de la alegría: Tres años con la guerrilla, El, 173



Rachel’s Song, 168 Randall, Margaret, 132, 170 Rangel, Carlos, 55 Reading North by South, 180 Real Thing, The, 6, 29, 154, 190 Reclaiming Identity, 129 Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 167 Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just World, 181 Ribeiro Pires Viera, Else, 122 Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, The, 4 Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, 4, 25, 181 Rodríguez, Ana, 9, 176 Rodríguez, Ileana, 6, 184 Rodríguez, Luis J., 174 Rodriguez, Richard, 9, 176, 180 Sábato, Ernesto, 27 Sáenz, Benjamin Alire, 9, 128, 174, 180 Sagan, Leonard, 40 St. Clair, David, 121 Sandino’s Daughters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua, 171 Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle, 171 Sanmiguel, Rosario, 9, 174, 180 Santiago, Esmeralda, 175 Scarry, Elaine, 39–40, 42, 45 Secret Prisons of El Salvador, The, 171 Secuestro y capucha en un país del “mundo libre,” 171 Ser madre en Nicaragua: Testimonios de una historia no escrita, 173 Silva, Raúl, 170 Skármeta, Antonio, 170

Index 211

Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 20, 33, 48, 92, 140, 187 Solà, Roser, 173 Some Write to the Future, 23 Sommer, Doris, 6, 26, 29, 50, 132–33, 141, 155, 180, 184, 187 Spivak, Gayatri, 188 Starcevič, Elizabeth, 26 Stephen, Lynn, 25, 36, 49, 174 Stevens, Kristina, 173 Stoll, David, 4, 25, 181, 183 Subalternity and Representation, 6, 57, 183 Tal, Kalí, 9, 100, 103, 125, 148–49, 151, 157, 181 Tatum, Chuck, 5 Teachers as Cultural Workers, 188 Teaching and Testimony, 6, 179, 180 Tejas verdes, 32, 37, 89, 114, 146, 170, 182 Testimonio y literatura, 6, 26 Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth, 6 They Won’t Take Me Alive: Salvadoran Women in Struggle for National Liberation, 171 Tijerino, Doris, 170 Timerman, Jácobo, 94, 100, 116, 171–72 torture, 24, 31, 34, 39, 40–46, 64, 76–77, 104, 107, 114–15, 117, 132, 143, 153, 169, 171, 182 Traba, Marta, 173 Translated Woman, 132, 175 trauma, 9, 12, 38, 56, 92, 100, 102–3, 106–10, 115, 125, 138, 148, 151, 157, 167, 181 Trauma: Unclaimed Experience, 102–3, 106, 181 Trayner, María Pau, 173 Truth, Sojourner, 81–83

212 Can Literature Promote Justice?

Tula, María Teresa, 21–22, 25, 36, 94, 139, 174–75 Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus, The, 179 Valdés, Hernán, 32, 94, 110, 114–16, 146, 170, 182 Valladares, Armando, 176 Vidal, Hernán, 6, 179 Viezzer, Moema, 22, 47, 99, 133, 136, 170, 188 Villanueva, Victor, 182 Villegas, Sergio, 169

Walsh, Rodolfo, 167 When I Was Puerto Rican, 175 Williams, Gareth, 151, 182 Witker Velásquez, Alejandro, 170 Witnessing Slavery, 82 World Medical Association, 182 Worlds of Hurt, 103, 181 Yúdice, George, 29, 39, 52, 56, 61 Zapata, Luis, 171 Zimmerman, Marc, 29 Žižek, Slavoj, 180