In one of the most controversial texts in the field, David Stoll ‘exposes’ Menchú and her experiences as constructed truths that he argues did not actually happen. He essentially posits that Menchú was dramatizing herself in a crisis in the way that a script writer would. For Stoll, it was so important to prove that Menchú wrote a piece of fiction and thus undercutting the entire value of the genre of testimonio. It is this obsession with ‘truth’ and ‘validity’ that Moreiras is responding to in his work that I find so important. Menchú is grappling with real historical violence in which humanity is torn apart and fractured. Testimonio in this case, functions as a way to be in, as Moreiras describes, a form of solidarity with the shared pain and grief.
Moreiras argues that testimonio is extratextual; that is, it “suspends the literary at the very same time that it constitutes itself as a literary act: as literature, it is a liminal event opening onto a nonrepresentational, drastically indexical order of experience” (212). It already abandons the literary as part of its nature and is more political than it is literary. Moreiras seeks to put an end to the desire to see in testimonio a recuperation of the ‘real’ in the face of fiction or the literary.
Dealing with the tropes of secrets, truths/untruths, textual/extratextual, I think about Menchú is orchestrating this movement. For Stoll, the secret is that Menchú fabricated details and experiences, which I don’t think belittles the political narrative itself. While there may be contradictions in her work, she is grappling with the contradictions in human experience in a way that builds a political testimonio that exceeds any pigeonholing. I would say there is something deeply extratextual about her work that functions on a political level. For me what makes the testimonio political in nature is not its reducibility to either the ‘real’ or the ‘literary’ (whatever those categories actually mean), but rather because testimonio is able to traverse and blend these two domains into a third space ideal—it, in every sense, produces a political communitas.
Hi Vincent, First off, I like your title. It was also nice to read a reiteration of one of the major points of Morieras text- that the testimonio goes beyond testiment or literature.
ReplyDeleteI second Jackie. Great title! It's almost as if the "textimonio" is an act in and of itself. The details' veracity are irrelevant because the act of "textimonizing" her experience is in itself political and, hence, of great historical validity.
ReplyDeleteI am interested in the idea that Menchu's text "builds a political testimonio that exceeds any pigeonholing" because I think that it is very counter-intuitive. Often I think that Menchu's text is read in very specific "testimonio" or Latin American discourse, but I think you are talking about a different kind of pidgeonholing. In what way are you suggesting that it defies pigeonholing?
ReplyDelete