Some Thoughts on Being Readers

1. Some Thoughts on Being Readers I, Rigoberta MenchÚ, An Indian Woman in Quatemala

2. The Reader’s Position • Most of the time, readers are called on to empathize, to feel one with the writer or protagonist, depending on the genre. • But, one critic, Doris Sommer, points out that not all writers want our empathy, our undivided identification. • Especially, she believes, “minority” or ethnic writers may not want hegemonic readers to feel comfortable in their shoes.

3. Said said . . . • When some one at a conference asked Said “How can we avoid mistakes, get closer to the truth, and . . .” Said interrupted them and responded asked why Westerners suppose that the “Orient” wants to be understood correctly. Why did we assume that our interest in the “Orient” was reciprocated? Did we imagine that the desire was mutual or that we were irresistible? Could we consider the possibility that our interest was not returned?

4. How are we to take Menchú’s protestations of silence, even as she continues to talk? • Some readers embrace Menchú in an autobiographical reflex that presumes identification with the writer despite her reluctance to be fully comprehended. • But, probably, instead, the reader should be wary of identification with Menchú; it is possible that she doesn’t want us to identify with her, to feel one with her. • As Spikvak points out in her essay on the possibility of the subaltern speaking, there is a complicated relationship between the subaltern and the academic, the politician, the reader. • Doris Sommer, “Resisting the Heat.”

5. Silence • Maybe her identification of “secrets” is her way of marking or highlighting her refusal to share, of information she is withholding, it is a trope of refusal, to distance herself from us. While she wants us to identify with her cause, she does not want us to feel that we know or understand in any intimate way – in fact, she may be saying that we CAN’T understand. Perhaps her identification of secrets is metaphorical or stylistic, rather than actual or factual or “true.”

6. More Silence . . . • The perhaps calculated result of Menchú’s deliberate invocation of information being withheld from assumed sympathetic readers is that, paradoxically, these same readers are excluded from her circle of intimacy. • Her ideal readers would be her Quiché community – a community that can neither read nor write nor speak in Spanish or English. • She keeps control of her text by refusing us the privilege of intimacy. We cannot tell her story for her, speak for her, because she refuses to let us know her. She keeps her distance. • We must/should realize that our reading is imperfect, incomplete, and there for that we owe her and her people a certain kind of distance related to respect. • Doris Summer “Resisting the Heat”

7. Interpellating the Reader • At the same time as the “silence strategy” forces us to keep our distance and leaves Menchú in control of her text, Sommer suggests that it might be a cunning strategy for interpellating the reader as a supporter, not a leader, in her cause. (interpellating = summoning you to play a role) • Sommer posits that Menchú’s “demure posture allows us to imagine . . . A politics of coalition among differently constituted positionalities.” • She argues that this “political vision adventurous enough to imagine differences, yet modest enough to respect them, may be the most significant challenge posed by learning to read resistance.

8. Menchú’s text and genreRobin Jones – “Having to Read a Book about Opression” • Autobiography – telling one’s own story. • The process of creating a subject through writing – especially important to women because they often feel and are identified as objects in patriarchal culture. • Some subsets of this genre – apologies, exploration, exemplars, simple recordings of one’s life. • Women’s autobiographies, in particular, might contain issues about women’s health, the family, gender inequities – issues not found in men’s autobiographies.

9. Menchú’s text and genre • Ethnography – Sustained interaction with a group in order to share knowledge about that group. • Sometimes it involves separating a community into various categories in order to study separately domestic issues, religion, economics. • Raises questions of authorship – who is the author, the ethnographer or the subjects studied? Who should relate the information? Takes us back to Spivak, again, and the issue of “Can the Subaltern Speak? • Raises questions of relevance – What does the ethnographer feel it is important to study and how does s/he understand the subject and gather information.

10. Menchú’s text and genre • Testimonial – Various definitions • The genre rests on the positioning of the narrative subject as an individual, the voice of the community, the public voice of a political and moral conscious. • A doubling of . . . oral history into a public plea. • The testimony’s personal story is a shared one with the community to which the testimonialista belongs. The speaker does not speak for or represent a community, but rather performs an act of identity-formation which is simultaneously personal and collective.

11. Menchú’s text and genre • A novel or novella length narrative in book or pamphlet form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts. . . Usually involving a translator or transcriber and editing. The nature of intervention of this editorial function is one of the more hotly debated theoretical points in the discussion of the genre. • Who is Elizabeth Burgos-Debray? Why does it matter who she is? • Who is Ann Wright? Why does it matter who she is? • (Who should earn the Nobel Prize? The recorder, the transcriber, the translator?)

12. Menchú’s text and genre • Which genre do you think this text most closely represents? Why? It has been read in history classes, sociology and anthropology classes, women’s literature and women’s studies classes, political science classes. What difference does genre make in each of these contexts?

13. How could Menchú have presented her text otherwise? • This from Stoll – • She could have spliced the stories of others into her own without eliding their separate identities. • She could have used the customary way campesinos reported stories they have heard: “dicen que” or “they say that.” • Burgos says that Menchú didn’t act in bad faith or lie, she “was moved by a feeling of belonging.”

14. Rigoberta Menchú and the Politics of Lying – Daphne Patai • What damage has Rigoberta Menchú’s means of telling her story done to the cause of human rights and to the public’s willing grant of sympathy and support for those they see as oppressed? • Do symbolic stories that tell some “larger” truth provide a sound or even a possible basis for advancing human rights claims?

15. Patai –cont. • Patai says no – She says that anyone can make claims, anyone can tell horror stories. • She claims that “human rights activism cannot depend on postmodernist views of multiple narratives, on the notion of the fictive self, or on the epistemological uncertainty of all truth claims.” • Patai observes that “some North American academics consider lies irrelevant as long as the larger political purpose they serve is being served.” One professor she interviewed said “Whether [Menchú’s] book is true or not, I don’t care. We should teach our students about the brutality of the Guatemalan military and the U.S. financing of it.”

16. Patai – some more • But, Patai insists that truth matters. She writes: “There can be no human rights activism without confidence in the truth and accuracy of information. It is not enough to shift at will from Rigoberta the historical individual to Rigoberta the mythic figure, and from her story as a reliable source of data to her tale as a symbolic evocation of “larger truths.”

17. Patai – the end • Patai concludes that the destruction of trust is the real damage done by lies. “When Rigoberta Menchú, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is found to have invented, distorted, and misrepresented the key elements in the story that is responsible for her very fame and reputation, the cause of human rights everywhere is set back.”

18. One final ethical question • Jones again – asks about teaching the Holocaust “How do you discuss objectively and rationally that which is often known as one of the most unnatural, illegitimate, and foul murders of a people.” • Even if Menchú’s brother wasn’t burned alive in a public spectacle, he was tortured and shot. Hundreds of thousands of people were indeed executed, disappeared, tortured, raped by the Guatemalan military. • How do we teach the literature of atrocity, without turning them into some learning exercise that takes away from the human power and dignity of the voices and stories of the text? How do we keep these works from becoming “just texts” instead of the real (?) experiences of real (?) people.