Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?. Greg Grandin

to see, or to make public this living testimony that I have so that mothers don’t suffer what I have suffered seeing a tortured son.’ ”

      Also striking is how this passage contradicts the published version of Petrocinio’s death in one key detail. In the Spanish and English editions, Menchú is recorded as saying that the soldiers shouted slogans only to cover their own cowardice as they withdrew in the face of the crowd’s anger. The “people raised their weapons and rushed at the army,” the book relates. But in the above interview, Menchú says the exact opposite, emphasizing the brazenness of the soldiers and the powerlessness of onlookers who “couldn’t say anything,” or do anything save cry, imagine vengeance, bury the bodies, and stagger home dazed. Perhaps at another moment during that week of interviews Menchú narrated this event along the lines of the published version, where, as transcribed and edited, Petrocinio’s death galvanizes the family into decisive action and resolve: “when we got home Father said: ‘I’m going back to work.’” But here speaking with Taracena, Menchú’s unabridged words convey little but desolation and helplessness—disassociation, or detachment not political commitment, as if it were a dream, or a soap opera.¹²

      Though Menchú exalts Mayan life for political reasons, as well as out of genuine affection, a perceptive reader of her testimony will find a surface not so still, a struggle not only on behalf of family and community but against them. She sanctifies her father as a paragon of revolutionary virtue, for instance, yet she also reveals an emotionally conflictive relationship to a man she alternately renders as loving, determined, and nurturing but also quick to anger, prone to drink and despair, and ineffectual. And as her story unfolds and Menchú’s world expands, from Chimel to Guatemala as a whole and then to Mexico and beyond, it becomes clear that her progress—in terms of what she discusses (her political education) and what she omits (her formal education, such as it was)—is largely made possible by the turmoil and dislocation she is denouncing. The dissonance that results is irrepressible. “Papa used to be . . . well, I don’t mean foolish exactly because it’s the thieves who steal our land who are foolish . . . Well, they asked my father to sign a paper but he didn’t know what it said because he’d never learned to read or write,” she recalls, in a passage where the transcribers apparently left the ellipses in to capture a hesitant criticism and an implied superiority.¹³ It is a hint that Menchú wrestled not just with routine ambivalences of those who enjoy advantages not available to parents, but the singular fact that those advantages were part and parcel of the terror that took your parents lives and shattered your hometown.

      In the midst of social decay, Menchú as a person comes into sharper focus. “I was in love many times,” she says, and considering the inassimilable loss of her family she can be forgiven if her initial explanation for why she rejected marriage and children seems like pamphleteering. But it is soon revealed that her position is less a choice than an effort to get some control over a situation that leaves her little choice. “It puts me into a panic,” she admits, “I don’t want to be a widow, or a tortured mother.” By the end of her story, it is her mother—her body having been left to the vultures until “not a bit . . . was left, not even her bones”—who emerged as the defining parent. Menchú credited her with pointing to a strategy of emancipation not through collective action or cultural identity but an insurgency of the self, a rebellion against filial expectations. “I don’t want to make you stop feeling a woman,” Menchú recalls her saying, “but your participation in the struggle must be equal to that of your brothers. But you mustn’t join just as another number . . . A child is only given food when he demands it. A child who makes no noise gets nothing to eat.”

      The revolution was defeated. But many of the human rights, indigenous, and peasant organizations that continue today to fight to democratize Guatemalan society were founded as popular-front organizations covertly linked to one or another rebel group. One of the lasting contributions of the insurgent organizations, particularly the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres and the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas, was to provide a school for critical thinking for poor Guatemalans, many of whom continue to be politically active. As theories of how to understand and act in the world, Marxism and liberation theology gave inhabitants of one of the most subjugated regions in the Americas a way to link their local aspirations to larger national and international movements and to make sense of the kind of everyday, routine forms of violence, as well as stunning displays of terror, that are documented in Menchú’s book. It also gave them a means to insist on their consequence as human beings. What makes Menchú’s testimony so extraordinary is how far her engagement with ideas clearly outstripped whatever orientation she might have received from organizers. What she learned from her travails, she learned by her own impressive will and intelligence. Her interpretation of events broadly reflects the concerns of liberation theology, and at times it can sound mechanical. But it is clearly rooted in her personal grappling with the dilemmas of history and her own particular experience of power and powerlessness. “The world I live in is so evil, so bloodthirsty, that it can take my life away from one moment to the next,” Menchú says, “so the only road open to me is our struggle, the just war. The bible taught me that.”

      If I, Rigoberta Menchú only served as a testament of a failed revolution, a moment in history when the highest collective ideals of liberation theology crashed headlong into the most vicious distillate of Cold War anti-communism, it would be a good book, still worth reading. But what made liberation theology, along with Latin America’s New Left more broadly, so potent a threat in a place as inhumane as Guatemala in the 1970s was not just its concern with social justice but its insistence on individual human dignity. This combination of solidarity and insurgent individuality is the heart of Menchú’s memoir, and that’s what makes it a great, perhaps even immortal, book.

       Greg Grandin

       New York City

       July 2009

      1. Jennifer Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy ( Philadelphia, 2000), 44–9.

      2. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans, 127.

      3. It is often wrongly believed that Stoll accuses Menchú of fabricating the story that her brother Nicolás died of starvation. That charge in fact comes from the New York Times article, which writes that a “younger brother whom Ms. Menchú says she saw die of starvation never existed.” This is false. Menchú did have a brother named Nicolás who died of hunger.

      4. Stoll often complained, at the height of the dispute, that Menchú’s defenders accused him of being a CIA agent. I never met anyone who believed this, and always thought that the charge, if it was in fact made, grants him too much coherence. He did, though, appear to me to be another familiar US type, an innocent abroad fumbling through the wreckage of Guatemalan history, offering little more than a derivative on what is now a long established critique, discussed below, of revolutionary politics dating back at least to the French Revolution. Prevented by an historical illiteracy from fully claiming this intellectual tradition and realizing his argument, Stoll digs deeper, insisting that the narrative inconsistencies of a twenty-three-year-old semi-literate war orphan hold the key to knowledge. Over time, his sense of persecution has only deepened. In a new Afterword to the second, 2008, edition of his Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, he begins to refer to himself in the third person, less like Jorge Luis Borges than George on Seinfeld, attributing the career stall of “David Stoll” to shadowy conspiratorial forces subordinated to the “magical powers of those six syllables, Rigoberta Menchú” (297). Stoll’s obsession with Menchú is here fully displayed; he assails her for speaking at US colleges and offering little but ecological- and indigenous-rights platitudes: “Rigoberta is intelligent, she has a salty peasant humor, and she could tell Americans a lot more” (as if when Thomas Friedman or Bill Clinton collect enormous speaking fees for college speeches they customarily reveal what they know about how the world really works). In particular, Stoll believes Menchú should be honest about how “peasants are multiplying their children out of any possibility of maintaining their traditional way of life” (299).

      5. This argument echoes, in stripped-down form, what scholars call “rational-choice counterinsurgent