CHAPTER 22
TESTIMONIO, SUBALTERNITY, AND NARRATIVE AUTHORITY
John Beverley
In a justly famous essay, Richard Rorty (1985)
distinguishes between what he calls the "desire for solidarity" and
the "desire for objectivity" as cognitive modes:
There are two principal ways in which reflective human
beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those
lives. The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community.
This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or another
actual one, distant in time or place, or a quite imaginary one, consisting
perhaps of a dozen heroes and heroines selected from history or fiction or
both. The second way is to describe themselves as standing in an immediate
relation to a nonhuman reality. This relation is immediate in the sense that it
does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their tribe, or
their nation, or their imagined band of comrades. I shall say that stories of
the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the
latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity (p. 3)'
The question of testimonio—testimonial narrative—has come prominently onto the
agenda of the human and social sciences in recent years in part because testimonio intertwines the "desire
for objectivity" and "the desire for solidarity" in its very
situation of production, circulation, and reception.
Testimonio is by nature a demotic and heterogeneous form, so any
formal definition of it is bound to be too limiting.2 But the
following might serve provisionally: A testimonio is a novel or novella-length narrative, produced in
the form of a printed text, told in the first person by a narrator who is also
the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts. Its unit of
narration is usually a "life" or a significant life experience.
Because in many cases the direct narrator is someone who is either functionally
illiterate or, if literate, not a professional writer, the production of a testimonio generally involves the tape
recording and then the transcription and editing of an oral account by an
interlocutor who is a journalist, ethnographer, or literary author.
Although
one of the antecedents of testimonio is undoubtedly the ethnographic life liistory of the Children of Sanchez sort, testimonio is not exactly commensurable
with the category of life history (or oral history). In the life history, it is
the intention of the interlocutor-recorder (the ethnographer or journalist) that is paramount; in testimonio, by contrast, it is the
intention of the direct narrator, who uses (in a pragmatic sense) the possibility the
ethnographic interlocutor offers to bring his or her situation to the attention
of an audience— the bourgeois public sphere—to which he or she would normally
not have access because of the very conditions of subalternity to which the testimonio bears witness.1 Testimonio is not intended, in other
words, as a reenactment of the anthropological function of the native
informant In Rene fara's (1986, p. 3) phrase, it is rather a narradSn de urgencia—an "emergency"
narrative—involving a problem of repression, poverty, marginality,
exploitation, or simply survival that is implicated in the act of narration
itself. In general, testimonio could be said to coincide with the feminist slogan
"The personal is the political." The contemporary appeal of testimonio for educated, middle-class,
transnational publics is perhaps related to the importance given in various
forms of 1960s counterculture to oral testimony as a form of personal and/or
collective catharsis and liberation in (for example) the consciousness-raising
sessions of the early women's movement, the practice of "speaking
bitterness" in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or psychotherapeutic
encounter groups.
The predominant formal aspect
of the testimonio
is the
voice that speaks to the reader through the text in the form of an T that demands to be recognized,
that wants or needs to stake a daim on our attention. Eliana Rivero (19?4-I985)
notes that "the act of speaking faithfully recorded on the tape,
transcribed and then 'written,' remains ir. the testimonio punctuated by a repeated
series of interlocutive and conversational markers . . . which constantly put
the reader on the alert, so to speak: True? Are you following me? OK? So?"
(pp. 220-221, my translation). The result, she argues, is a
"snaillikc" discourse (discurso encaracolado) that keeps turning in on
itself and that in the process invokes the complicity of the reader through the
medium of his or her counterpart in the text, the direct interlocutor. This
presence of the voice, which the reader is meant to experience as the voice of
a real
rather than a fictional person, is the mark of a desire not to be
silenced or defeated, to impose oneself on an institution of power and
privilege from the position of the excluded, the marginal, the subaltern—hence
the insistence on the importance of personal name or identity evident sometimes
in tides of testimonios,
such as I, Rigoberta Menchu (even more strongly in the
Spanish: Me
Hamo Rigoberta Menchu y asi me nacio la conciencia), I'm a Juvenile Delinquent
{Soy un delincuente), and Let Me Speak (Si me permiten hablar).
This insistence suggests an affinity between testimony
and autobiography (and related forms, such as the autobiographical bildungsroman, the memoir, and the diary).
Like autobiography, testimonio is an affirmation of the authority of personal
experience, but, unlike autobiography, it cannot affirm a self-identity that is
separate from the subaltern group or dass situation that it narrates. Testimonio involves an erasure of the
function and thus also of the textual presence of the "author" that
is so powerfully present in all major forms of Western literary and academic
writing.4 By contrast, in autobiography or the autobiographical bildungsroman, the very possibility of
"writing one's life" implies necessarily that the narrator is no
longer in the situation of marginality and subalternity that his or her
narrative describes, but now has attained precisely the cultural status of an
author (and, generally speaking, middle- or upper-dass economic status). Put
another way, the transition from storyteller to author implies a parallel
transition from gemein-schaft to gesellschaft, from a culture of primary and secondary orality to
writing, from a traditional group identity to the privatized, modern identity
diat forms the subject of liberal political and economic theory.
The metonymic character of testimonial discourse—the sense that the
voice that is addressing us is a part that stands for a larger whole—is a
crucial aspect of what literary critics would call the convention of the form:
the narrative contract with the reader it establishes. Because it does not
require or establish a hierarchy of narrative authority, testimonio is a fundamentally democratic
and egalitarian narrative form. It implies that any life so narrated can have a
symbolic and cognitive value. Each individual testimonio evokes an absent polyphony of
other voices, other possible lives and experiences (one common formal variation
on the first-person singular testimonio is the polyphonic testimonio made up of accounts by
different participants in the same event).
If the novel is a closed form, in the sense that both
the story and the characters it involves end with the end of the text, in testimonio, by contrast, the distinctions
between text and history, representation and real life, public and private
spheres, objectivity and solidarity (to recall Rorty s alternatives) are
transgressed. It is, to borrow Umberto Ecos expression, an "open
work." The narrator in testimonio is an actual person who continues living and acting
in an actual social space and time, which also continue. Testimonio can never create the
illusion—fundamental to formalist methods of textual analysis—of the text as
autonomous, set against and above the practical domain of everyday life and
struggle. The emergence oi testimonies, for the form to have become
more and more popular in recent years, means that there are experiences in the
world today (there always have been) that cannot be expressed adequately in the
dominant forms of historical, ethnographic, or literary representation, that
would be betrayed or misrepresented by these forms.
Because of its reliance on voice, testimonio implies in particular a
challenge to the loss of the authority of orality in the context of processes
of cultural modernization that privilege literacy and literature as a norm of
expression. The inequalities and contradictions of gender, class, race, ethnicity,
nationality, and cultural authority that determine the "urgent"
situation of the testimo nial narrator may also reproduce themselves in the
relation of the narrator to the interlocutor, especially when (as is generally
the case) that uar -rator requires to produce the testimonio a "lettered"
interlocutor from a different ethnic and/or class background in order first to
elicit and record the narrative, and then to transform it into a printed text
and see to its publication and circulation as such. But it is equally important
to understand that the testimonial narrator is not the subaltern as such
either; rather, she or he functions as an organic intellectual (in Antonio
Gramsci's sense of this term) of the subaltern, who speaks to the hegemony by
means ofa metonymy of self in the name and in the place of the subaltern.
By the same token, the presence of subaltern voice in
the testimonio
is in part
a literary illusion—something akin to what the Russian formalists called skar. the textual simulacrum of
direct oral expression. We are dealing here, in other words, not with reality
itself but with what semioticians call a "reality effect" that has
been produced by both the testimonial narrator-using popular speech and the
devices of oral storytelling—and the interlocutor-compiler, who, according to
hegemonic norms of narrative form and expression, transcribes, edits, and makes
a story out of the narrators discourse. Elzbieta Sklodowska (1982) cautions in
this regard that it would be naive to assume a direct homology between text and
history (in testimonio).
The discourse ofa witness cannot be a reflection of
his or her experience, but rather a refraction determined by the vicissitudes
of memory, intention, ideology. The intention and die ideology of the
author-editor further superimposes the original text, creating more
ambiguities, silences, and absences in die process of selecting and editing the
materia! in a way consonant with norms of literary form. Thus, although the
testimonio uses a series of devices to gain a sense of veracity and authenticity—among
them the point of view of the first-person witness-narrator—the play between
fiction and history reappears inexorably as a problem, (p. 379, my translation;
see also Sklodowska, 19%)
The point is well-taken, but perhaps overstated. Like
the identification of testimonio with life history (which Sklodowska shares), it concedes
agency to (lie inlet luculor-edilor of the testimonial text rather than to its
direct narrator. It would be better to say that what is at stake in testimonio is the particular nature of the reality effect
it produces. Because of its character as a narrative told in the first person
to an actual interlocutor, testimonio interpellates the reader in a way that literary
fiction or third-person journalism or ethnographic writing does not The word testimonio carries the connotation in
Spanish of the act of testifying or bearing witness in a legal or religious
sense. Conversely, the situation of the reader of testimonio is akin to that of a jury
member in a courtroom. Something is asked of us by testimonio, in other words. In this sense,
testimonio
might be
seen as a kind of speech act that sets up special ethical and epistemological
demands. (When we are addressed direcdy by an actual person, in such a way as
to make a demand on our attention and capacity for judgment, we are under an
obligation to respond in some way or other; we can act or not on that
obligation, but we cannot ignore it)
What testimonio asks of its readers is in effect what Rorty means by
solidarity—that is, the capacity to identify their own identities, expectations,
and values with those of another. To understand how this happens is to
understand how testimonio works ideologically as discourse, rather than what it is.
In one of the most powerful sections of her famous testimonio I, Rigoberta Menchu
(Menchu,
1984), which has come to be something like a paradigm of the genre, Menchu
describes the torture and execution of her brother Petrocinio by elements of
the Guatemalan army in the plaza of a small highland town called Chajul, which
is the site of an annual pilgrimage by worshipers of the local saint Here is
part of that account
After he'd finished talking the officer
ordered the squad to take away those who'd been "punished," naked and
swollen as they were. They dragged them along, they could no longer walk.
Dragged them to this place, where they lined them up all together within sight
of everyone. The officer called to the worst of the criminals—the Kaibiles, who wear diffeient clothes
from other soldiers. They're the ones with the most training, the most power.
Well, he called the Kaibiles and they poured petrol over each of the tortured. The
captain said, "This isn't the last of their punishments, there's another
one yet This is what we've done with all the subversives we catch, because
they have to die by violence. And if thisdoesn't teach you a lesson, diis is
wfaat'll happen to you too. The problem is that the Indians let themselves be
led by the communists. Since no-one's told the Indians anything, they go along
with die communists." He was trying to convince the people but at the same
time he was insulting them by what he said. Anyway, they {the soldiers] lined
up the tortured and "poured petrol on them; and then the soldiers set fire
to each one of them. Many of thera begged for mercy. Some of them screamed,
many of them leapt but uttered no sound—of course, that was because their
breathing was cut oft But—and to me this was incredible—many of the people had
weapons with them, the ones who'd been on their way to work had machetes,
others had nothing in their hands, but when they saw the army setting fire to
the victims, everyone wanted to strike back, to risk their lives doing it
despite all the soldiers' arms.... Faced with its own cowardice, the army
itself realized that the whole people were prepared to fight. You could see
that even the children were enraged, but they didn't know how to express their rage
(pp. 178-179)
This passage is undoubtedly
compelling and powerful. It invites the reader into the situation it describes
through the medium of the eyewitness narrator, and it is the sharing of the
experience through the medium of Menchu's account that constitutes the
possibility of solidarity. But "what if much of Rigoberta's story is not
true?" anthropologist David Stoll (1999, p. viii) asks. On the basis of
interviews in the area where the massacre was supposed to have occurred, Stoll
concludes that the killing of Menchu's brother did not happen in exacdy this
way, that Menchu could not have been a direct witness to the event as her
account suggests, and that therefore this account, along with other details of
her testimonio,
amounts
to, in Stoll's words, a "mythic inflation" (pp. 63-70,232). it would
be more accurate to say that what Stoll is able to show is that some rather than "much"
of Menchu's story is not true. He does not contest the fact of the murder of
Menchu's brother by the army, and he stipulates that "there is no doubt
about the most important points (in her story|: that a dictatorship massacred
thousands of indigenous peasants, that the victims included half of Rigoberta's
immediate family, that she fled to Mexico to save her life, and that she joined
a revolutionary movement to liberate her country" (p. viii). But he does
argue that the inaccuracies or omissions in her narrative make her less than a
reliable spokesperson for the interests and beliefs of the people for whom she
daims to speak In response to Stoll, Menchu herself has publidy conceded that
she grafted elements of other peoples experiences and stories onto her own
account. In particular, she has admitted that she was not herself present at
the massacre of her brother and his companions in Chajul, and that the account
of the event quoted in part above came instead from her mother, who (Menchu
daims) was there. She says that this and similar interpolations were a way of
making her story a collective one, rather than a personal autobiography. But
the point remains: If the episte-mological and ethical authority of testimonial
narratives depends on the assumption that they are based on personal experience
and direct witness, then it might appear that, as Stoll puts it,"/, Rigoberta Menchu does not belong in the genre
of which it is the most famous example, because it is not the eyewitness
account it purports to be" (p. 242).
In a way, however, the argument between Menchu and
Stoll is not so much about what really happened as it is about who has the
author ity to narrate. (Stoll's quarrel with Menchu and testimonio is a political quarrel that masquerades as an
epistemological one.) That question, rather than the question of "what
really happened," is crurial to an understanding of how testimonio works. What seems to bother
Stoll above all is that Menchu has an agenda. He wants her to be in effect a native
informant who will lend herself to his purposes (of ethnographic information gathering and
evaluation), but she is instead functioning in her narrative as an organic
intellectual, concerned with producing a text of local history— that is, with
elaborating hegemony.
The basic idea of Gayatri Spivaks famous, but notoriously difficult,
essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) might be reformulated in this
way: If the subaltern could speak -that is, speak in a way that really matters to us, that we would feel
compelled to listen to—then it would not be subaltern. Spivak is trying to show
that behind the gesture of the ethnographer or solidarity activist committed to
the cause of the subaltern in allowing or enabling the subaltern to speak is
the trace of the construction of an other who is available to speak to us (with
whom we can
speak or
with whom we would fed comfortable speaking), thus neutralizing the force of
the reality of difference and antagonism to which our own relatively
privileged position in the global system might give rise. She is saying that
one of the things being subaltern means is hot mattering, not being worth listening
to, or not being understood when one is "heard."
By contrast, Stall's argument
with Rigoberta Menchu is precisely with how her testimonio comes to matter. He is
bothered by the way it was used by academics and solidarity activists to
mobilize international support for the Guatemalan armed struggle in the 1980s,
long after (in Stoll's view) that movement had lost whatever support it may
have initially enjoyed among the indigenous peasants for whom Menchu claims to
speak. That issue—"how outsiders were using Rigoberta's story to justify
continuing a war at the expense of peasants who did not support it"
(Stoll, 1999, p. 241)—is the main problem for Stoll, rather than the
inaccuracies or omissions themselves. From Stoll's viewpoint, by making
Menchu's story seem (in her own words) "the story of all poor
Guatemalans"—that is, by its participating in the very metonymic logic of testimonio—/, Rigoberta Menchu
misrepresents
a more complex and ideologically contradictory situation among the indigenous
peasants. It reflects back to the reader not the subaltern as such, but a
narcissistic image of what the subaltern should be:
Books like /, Rigoberta Menchu will be exalted because they
tell academics what they want to hear.... What makes I, Rigoberta Menchu so attractive in universities
is what makes it misleading about the struggle for survival in Guatemala
In one sense, of course, there is a coincidence
between Spivaks concern with the production in metropolitan ethnographic and
literary discourse of what she calls a "domesticated Other" and
Stoll's concern with the conversion of Menchu into an icon of academic
political correctness. But Stoll's argument is also explicitly with Spivak, as a representative of
the very kind of "postmodern scholarship" that would privilege a text
like I,
Rigoberta Menchu, even to the extent of wanting to deconstruct its metaphysics of
presence. Thus, Stoll states, for example:
Following the thinking of literary theorists sudi as
Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, anthropologists have become very interested in
problems of narrative, voice, and representation, especially the problem of
how we misrepresent voices other than our own. In reaction, some
anthropologists argue that the resulting fascination with texts threatens the
daim of anthropology to be a science, by replacing hypothesis, evidence, and
generalization with stylish forms of introspection, (p. 247)
Or this: "Under the
influence of postmodernism (which has undermined confidence in a single set of
facts) and identity politics (which demands acceptance of daims to victimhood),
scholars are increasingly hesitant to challenge certain kinds of rhetoric"
(p. 244). Or "With postmodern critiques of representation and authority,
many scholars are tempted to abandon the task of verification, espedally when
they construe the narrator as a victim worthy of "heir support" (p.
274).
Where Spivak is concerned with the way in which
hegemonic literary or scientific representation effaces the effective presence
and agency of the subaltern, Stoll's case against Menchu is precisely that: a
way of, so to speak, resubalternizing a narrative that aspired to
(and to some extent achieved) cultural authority. In the process of
constructing her narrative and articulating herself as a political icon around
its circulation, Menchu is becoming not-subaltern, in the sense that she Is
functioning as what Spivak calls a subject of history. Her testimonio is a performative rather than simply descriptive
or denotative discourse. Her narrative choices, and silences and evasions,
entail that there are versions of "what really happened" that she
does not or cannot represent without relativizing the authority of her own
account
It goes without saying that in any social situation,
indeed even within a given dass or group identity, it is always possible to
find a variety of points of view or ways of telling that reflect contradictory,
or simply differing, agendas and interests. "Obviously" Stoll (1999)
observes:
Rigoberta is a legitimate Mayan voice. So are all the
young Mayas who want to move to Los
Angeles Houston
The presence of these other voices makes Guatemalan
indigenous communities—indeed even Menchu's own immediate family—seem
irremediably driven by internal rivalries, contradictions, and disagreements.
But to insist on this is, in a way, to deny the
possibility of subaltern agency as such, because a hegemonic project by
definition points to a possibility of collective will and action that depends
precisely on the transformation of the conditions of cultural and political
disenfranchisement, alienation, and oppression that underlie these rivalries
and contradictions. The appeal to diversity ("any of these people")
leaves intact the authority of the outside observer (the ethnographer or
social scientist) who is alone in the position of being able to both hear and
sort through all the various conflicting testimonies.
The concern about the connection between testimonio and identity politics that
Stoll evinces is predicated on the fact that multicultural rights daims carry
with them what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1994) has called a
"presump -tion of equal worth" (and /, Rigoberta Menchu is, among other things, a
strong argument for seeing the nature of American societies as irrevocably
multicultural and ethnically heterogeneous). That presumption in turn implies
an epistemological relativism that coincides with the postmodernist critique of
the Enlightenment paradigm of scientific objectivity. If there is no one
universal standard for truth, then claims about truth are contextual: They
have to do with how people construct different understandings of the world and
historical memory from the same sets of facts in situations of gender, ethnic,
and dass inequality, exploitation, and repression. The truth daims for a
testimonial narrative like I, Rigoberta Menchu depend on conferring on the
form a spedal kind of epistemological authority as embodying subaltern voice
and experience. Against the authority of that voice—and, in particular, against
the assumption that it can represent adequatdy a collective subject ("all
poor Guatemalans")—Stoll wants to affirm the authority of the
fact-gathering and -testing procedures of anthropology and journalism, in which
accounts like Menchu's will be treated simply as ethnographic data that must be
processed by more objective techniques of assessment, which, by definition, are
not available to the direct narrator. In the final analysis, what Stoll is able
to present as evidence against the validity of Menchu's account are, precisely,
other
testimonios: other
voices, narratives, points of view, in which, it will come as no surprise, he
can find something he wants to hear.
We know something about the nature of this problem.
There is not, outside the realm of human discourse itself, a levd of factidty
that can guarantee the truth of this or that representation, given, that
society itself is not an essence prior to representation, but rather the
consequence of struggles to represent and over-representation. That is the
deeper meaning of Walter Benjamin's aphorism "Even the dead are not
safe": Even the historical memory of the past is conjectural, relative,
perishable, Testimonio
is both an
art and a strategy of subaltern memory.
We would create yet another version of the native informant of dassical
anthropology if we were to grant testimonial narrators like Rigoberta Menchu
only the possibility of being witnesses, and not the power to create (heir own
narrative authority and negotiate its conditions of truth and representativity.
This would amount to saying that the subaltern can of course speak, but only
through us,
through
our institutionally sanctioned authority and pretended objectivity as
intellectuals, which give-us the power to decide what counts in the narrator's
raw material. But it is precisely that institutionally sanctioned authority
and objectivity that, in a less benevolent form, but still claiming to speak
from the place of truth, the subaltern must confront every day in the forms of
war, economic exploitation, devdopraent schemes, obligatory acculturation,
police and military repression, destruction of habitat, forced sterilization,
and the like.5
There is a question of agency
here. What testimonio
obliges us
to confront is not only the subaltern as a (self-)represented victim, but also
as the agent—in that very act of representation—of a transformative project
that aspires to become hegemonic in its own right In terms of this project,
which is not our own in any immediate sense and which may in fact imply
structurally a contradiction with our own position of relative privilege and
authority in the global system, the testimonial text is a means rather than an end in itself.
Menchu and the persons who collaborated with her in the creation of /, Rigoberta Menchu certainly were aware that the
text would be an important tool in human rights and solidarity work that might
have a positive effect on the genocidal conditions the text itself describes.
But her interest in the text is not to
have it become an object for us, our means of getting the "whole
truth"—toda
la realidad—of
her experience. It is rather to act tactically in a way she hopes and expects
will advance the interests of the community and social groups and classes her testimonio represents: "poor"
(in her own description) Guatemalans. That is as it should be, however, because
it is not only our desires
and purposes that count in relation to testimonio.
This seems obvious enough, but it is a hard lesson to
absorb fully, because it forces us to, in Spivak's phrase, "unlearn
privilege." Unlearning privilege means recognizing thatit is not the intention
of subaltern cultural practice simply to signify its subalternity to us. If
that is what testimonio
does, then
critics like Sklodowska are right in seeing it as a form of the status quo, a
kind of postmodernist costumbrismo. The force ofa testimonio such as /, Rigoberta Menchu is to displace the centrality of
intellectuals and what they recognize as culture—including history,
literature, journalism, and ethnographic writing. Like any testimonial narrator
(like anybody), Menchu is of course also an intellectual, but in a sense she is
clearly different from what Gramsci meant by a traditional intellectual—that
is, someone who meets the standards and carries the authority of humanistic
and/or scientific high culture. The concern with the question of subaltern
agency and authority in testimonio depends, rather, on the suspicion that intellectuals
and writing practices are themselves complicit in maintaining relations of
domination and subalternity.
The question is relevant to the daim made by Dinesh
D'Souza (1991) in the debate over the Stanford Western Culture undergraduate
requirement (which centered on the adoption of /, Rigoberta Menchu as a text in one of the course
sections) that I, Rigoberta Menchu is not good or great literature. D'Souza writes,
"To celebrate the works of the oppressed, apart from the standard of merit
by which other art and history and literature is judged, is to romanticize
their suffering, to pretend that it is naturally creative, and to give it an
aesthetic status that is not shared or appreciated by those who actually
endure the oppression" (p. 87). It could be argued that /, Rigoberta Menchu is one of the most powerful
works of literature
produced
in Latin America in the past several decades, but there is also some point in
seeing it as a provocation in the academy, as D'Souza feels it to be. The
subaltern, by definition, is a social position that is not, and cannot be, adequately
represented in the human sciences or the university, if only because the human
sciences and the university are among the institutional constellations of
power/knowledge that create and sustain subalternity. This is not, however, to
draw a line between the world of the academy and the subaltern, because the
point of testimonio
is, in the
first place, to intervene in that world—that
is, in a place where the subaltern is not In its very situation of
enundation, which juxtaposes radically the subject positions of the narrator
and interlocutor, testimonio is involved in and constructed out of the opposing
terms of a master/ slave dialectic: metropolis/periphery, nation/ region,
European/indigenous, creole/mestizo, elite/popular, urban/rural,
intellectual/manual, male/female, "lettered"/illiterate or
semiliterate Testimonio
is no more
capable of transcending these oppositions than are more purdy literary or
scientific forms of writing or narrative; that would require something like a
cultural revolution that would abolish or invert the conditions that produce
rdations of subordination, exploitation, and inequality in the first place. But
testimonio
does
involve a new way of articulating these oppositions and a new, collaborative
model for the relationship between the intelligentsia and the popular dasses.
To return to Rorty's point about
the "desire for solidarityr a good part of the appeal of testimonio must lie in the fact that it
both represents symbolically and enacts in its production and reception a
relation of solidarity between ourselves—as members of the professional middle
dass and practitioners of the human sciences—and subaltern sodal subjects. Testimonio gives voice to a previously
anonymous and voicdess popular-democratic subject, but in such a way that the
intellectual or professional is interpellated, in his or her function as interlocutor/reader
of the testimonial account, as being in alliance with (and to some extent
dependent on) this subject, without at the same time losing his or her identity
as an intellectuaL
If first-generation testimonios such as /, Rigoberta Menchu effaced textuaily in the
manner of the ethnographic life story (except in their introductory
presentations) the presence of the interlocutor, it is becoming increasingly
common in what is sometimes called the "new ethnography" to put the
interlocutor into the account, to make the dynamic of interaction and
negotiation between interlocutor and narrator part of what testimonio testifies to. Ruth Behar's Translated Woman: Crossing the
Border with Esperanza's Story (1993), for example, is often mentioned as a model for
the sort of ethnographic text in which the authority (and identity) of the
ethnographer is counterpointed against the voice and authority of the subject
whose life history the ethnographer is concerned with ehciting. In a simdar
vein, Philippe Bourgois's innovative ethnography of Puerto Rican crack dealers
in East Harlem, In Search of Respect (1995), often pits the values of the
investigator—Bourgois—against those of the dealers he befriends and whose
stories and conversations he transcribes and reproduces in his text. In Event, Metaphor, Memory:
Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992 (1995), the subaltern studies historian Shahid Amin is
concerned with retrieving the "local memory" of an uprising in 1922
in a small town in northern India in the course of which peasants surrounded
and burned down a police station, leading to the deaths of 23 policemen. But
he is also concerned with finding ways to incorporate formally the narratives
that embody that memory into his own history of the event, thus abandoning the
usual stance of the historian as omniscient narrator and making the
heterogeneous voices of the community itself the historian(s).
These ways of constructing testimonial material
(obviously, the examples could be multiplied many times over) make visible that
what happens in testimonio is not only the textual staging of a
"domesticated Other," to recall Spivak's telling objection, but the
confrontation through the text of one person (the reader and/or immediate interlocutor)
with another (the direct narrator or narrators) at the level of a possible solidarity. In this sense, testimonio also embodies a new
possibility of political agency (it is essentially that possibility to which
Stoll objects). But that possibility—a postmodernist form of Popular
Front-style alliance politics, if you will—is necessarily built on the
recognition of and respect for the radical incommensurability of the situation
of the parties involved. More than erftpathic liberal guilt or political
correctness, what testimonio seeks to elicit is coalition. As Doris Sommer (1996) puts it
succinctly, testimonio
"is
an invitation to a tete-a-tete, not to a heart to heart" (p. 143).
Bibliographic Note
Margaret Randall, who has organized testimonial
workshops in Cuba and Nicaragua (and who has herself edited a number of testimonios on the roles of women in the
Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions), is the author of a very good, albeit hard
to find, handbook on how to prepare a testimonio tided Testimonios: A Guide to Oral History (1985). The first significant
academic discussion of testimonio that I am aware of was published in the 1986
collection Testimonio
y literatura, edited by Reni Jara
and Hernan Vidal at the University
of Minnesota Union . On the academic incorporation
of testimonio
and its
consequences for pedagogy, see Carey-Webb and Benz (1996). fara and Vidal's
(1986) collection happened to coincide with the famous collection on
ethnographic authority and writing practices edited by James Clifford and
George Marcus, Writing Culture (1986), which exercised a wide influence in the fields
of anthropology and history. One should note also In this respect the
pertinence of the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group (see, e.g.,
Guha, 1997; Guha 8c Spivak, 1988) and of the Latin American Subaltern Studies
Group (see Rabasa, Sanjines, & Carr, 1994/1996). For both social scientists
and literary critics, a touchstone for conceptualizing testimonio should be Walter Benjamins
great essays, "The Storyteller" and "Theses on the Philosophy of
History" (see Benjamin, 1969).
Notes
1. Rorty's (1985) distinction may
recall for some readers Marvin Harris's well-known distinction between emic and eric accounts (where the former are
personal or collective "stories" and the latter are representations
given by a supposedly objective observer based on empirical evidence).
2. Widely different sorts of
narrative texts could in given circumstances function as testimonios: confession, court testimony,
oral history, memoir, autobiography, autobiographical novel, chronide,
confession, life story, novela-testimonio, "nonfiction novel"
(Truman Capote), or "literature of fact"(Roque Dalton).
3. Mary Louise Pratt (1986)
describes the testimonio usefully in this respect as
"autoethnography"
4. In Miguel Barnet's (1986)
phrase, the author has been replaced in testimonio by the function of a "compiler" (compilador) or "activator" (gestante), somewhat on the model of the
film producer.
5. Lacan( 1977, pp. 310-311)
writes:
Any statement of authority has no other guarantee
than its very enunciation, and it is poindess for it to seek another signifier,
which could not appear outside this locus in any way. Which is what I mean when
I say that no metalanguage can be spoken, or, more aphoi isticaUy, that there
is no Other of the Other And when the Legislator (he who daims to lay down the
Law) presents himself to fill the gap, he does so as an impostor.
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