In a previous exchange, Bill Lear raised some important criticisms of John Beverly's critical response to Stoll.
Last Friday, I heard Lewis and Clark Prof Diane Nelson discuss the book. She distributed a short statement "Rigoberta Menchu, is Truth Stranger than Testominal?" by the Guatemala Scholars Network for which she is the contact at nelson at lclark.edu
She submitted both Beverly and Stoll to criticism while emphasising that the latter does not deny that Rigoberta Menchu Tom was indeed very poor, and that her mother and father and brother were in fact killed by the Guatemalan military.
Excerpts from the statement reads:
"Since before Theodor Adorno asked how there could be poetry after Auschwitz, people have struggled with how to represent holocauss. Ms Menchu's book is such a struggle, created in colloaboration with several people including memebers of the Campesino Unity Committee (CUC), the popular organization of which she was a member. In 1982 wheh she gave the interviews which became the book the mary was massacring entire villages and a whole gernation of church workers, Mayan shamans, community leaders, development technicians, university professors and students, rural teachers, a whole human infrastructure of community. But in world opinion it was what Beatriz Manz of UC Berkeley calls a 'hidden war.' Ms Menchu, barely 20 years old, had to make these unthinkable experiences real enough for an international audience to understand why some people had taken up arms, and to mobilize to end the killings. Neither she nor CUC had many resources. And when she won the Nobel, she was living in the basement of a convent in Mexico City, without even a telephone to call her own....
"It is also probably true that Ms Menchu's family was involved in internecine struggles over land, but it is no less true...that Guatemala has one of the most unequal land distributions in the hemisphere. Does the obsessive personalising of the coverage simply obscure the larger questions of why there was not enough land to live on? It is also true that thousands of children die every year in Guatemala from pesticide inhalation and malnutrition, a 'truth' which the UN Development Program describes in detail in ints 1998 report on Guatemala. Reducing such truths to an individual issue, especially as Ms Menchu makes it clear she is trying to tell a larger story, is obscurantist and de historicizing....
"Behind the concern with 'objective facts' lies a moralising tale that situates well intentioned but naive North Americans as the victims of a pre meditated deception carried out by Ms Menchu and through here, the Guatemalan popular movement. Any guilt felt at the US government's role in the coup against Guatemala' democratically elected govt (1954) or decades of backing the counterinsurgency state are assuaged because, according to the news coverage WE are the victims, the dupes of a shrewd and unscrupulous manipulator. We now the have the true testimony to save us from Rigoberta, who in this tale becames the 'Indian giver.'"
rb