Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?. Greg Grandin

      

      WHO IS RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ?

      GREG GRANDIN

      This edition first published by Verso 2011

      © Greg Grandin 2011

      Chapter 1 originally appeared in The American Historical Review, Vol. 110, Issue 1; Chapter 2 originally appeared in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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      Contents

       Preface

       Introduction: A Victory Described in Detail

       1. CLARIFYING HISTORY: ON THE GUATEMALAN TRUTH COMMISSION

       2. JUDGING GENOCIDE: THE REASONING BEHIND THE TRUTH COMMISSION’S RULING

       Appendix: The Findings of the UN Commission for Historical Clarification—A State Racist in Theory and Practice

       Suggestions for Further Reading

       Index

      Preface

      I reread I, Rigoberta Menchú last year, after Verso asked me to write an introduction for a new edition, having not taught or turned to the book for quite awhile. The controversy that had engulfed the memoir in the late 1990s, which included charges that Menchú misrepresented some aspects of her life, had increased the class time needed to teach it and there were other good, quick illustrations of Cold War terror in Central America one could assign, such as Marc Danner’s Massacre at El Mozote, for instance. The intensity of the accusations and questions asked about Menchú’s story––What was true? What wasn’t? Who wrote it? Who, really, was Rigoberta Menchú and what did she want?––seems specific to the fixations of a time that was, in the US at least, more innocent: the last skirmish in the pre-9/11 culture wars. Today, students and scholars who have time to work through the always vexed relationship between history and memory continue to find the book useful. But the tribunes of culture and opinion can breezily dismiss it as a hoax, or as an example of “social or political witness stories that turns out to be works of fiction,” as the New Yorker recently did, along with James Frey’s discredited A Million Little Pieces. This is regrettable, for subsequent research––by individual scholars (see the suggestions for further reading) as well as sprawling, multi-year investigations by two truth commissions, one run by the Catholic Church and the other by the United Nations––has largely vindicated Menchú’s version of events.

      When I returned to the book, I half expected to find in Menchú a left-wing John Galt, a character with no inner life, a pure propagandist. That’s not the case. Throughout the narrative, but especially toward its end as Menchú moves toward exile and retrospection, her testimony reveals dissonant impulses, pleasure in the middle of terror and currents of despair running under surface triumphalism. Menchú, a semi-literate twenty-three-year-old with a few years of basic education, one of the few survivors of a slaughtered peasant family, conjures a battleground where her political battles seem almost slight compared to her own psychic ones. Listen to the recordings of the interviews that led to the book, done in Paris in 1982––they are available at the Hoover Institution Archives, in Stanford, California––and you will hear a disembodied tumble of words made substantial by anger and defiance, muted, perhaps numbed, by repetition, from having already told her story so many times to sympathizers, strangers, and reporters in an effort to raise awareness about what was happening in Guatemala. In one interview she did in the Montparnasse apartment of Arturo Taracena, a member of the insurgent Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) then working on his doctorate in history, Menchú recounts what she called la vida mala of peasants: “we are machines of production . . . always producing, never receiving.” “This isn’t just my pain,” she says, with the bells of the Église Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge tolling faintly in the background, “but the pain of a whole people.”

      The introduction I wrote was not published in the new edition. Neither I nor Verso were aware that Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, the anthropologist and journalist who conducted most of the interview with Menchú, had the power, based on the original 1982 contract she signed with the French publisher, Éditions Gallimard, to approve or reject future editions and additional material that might be added to the English version of the book published by Verso. It is public knowledge that Burgos and Menchú, since the early 1990s, have been on bad terms and that in September 1993 Burgos asked Gallimard to stop sending Menchú her share of the royalties. Burgos told David Stoll, the US anthropologist who spent nearly a decade researching the veracity of Menchú’s memoir, that the reason she did so was because the two women began to diverge politically over her criticism of Cuba, an account Burgos repeats in her preface to a second edition of Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, the book that led to Menchú’s discrediting. Stoll, though, notes a second reason: around this time Menchú began to question the fact that she was not considered the book’s legal author. “What is effectively a gap in the book is the question of the right of the author, right?” Menchú remarked in a 1991 interview. “Because the authorship of the book really should be more precise, shared, right?” Then in February 1993, Menchú asked Burgos to sign over the author’s rights, “so that she could make her own contracts.” This request was denied, and Stoll, whose book Burgos strongly endorses in her preface, suggests that Burgos “stopped the remittances” because of Menchú’s complaints.¹

      All of the above occurred in the early 1990s, a full half decade before Stoll’s exposé kicked off a firestorm of criticism against Menchú. In all of the ink spilt about that controversy, all of the accusations leveled against Menchú, not one reporter, as far as I know, thought it worth mentioning that the book, whatever its intellectual and political provenance, did not legally belong to Menchú. I’m not especially politically correct, and have always thought that defenses of Menchú’s memoir based on her position––that is, as an indigenous woman with claims to ways of knowing or speaking distinct from colonial knowledge––came up short. Yet this particular arrangement, whereby Menchú got the opprobrium but not the royalties her book generated, does seem unjust. And it perhaps accounts for her conflictive