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JURISDICTIONS AND TESTIMONIAL NETWORKS

 

Rigoberta Menchú

Everything that is done today, is done in memory of those who have passed on.

—RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ, I, RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: AN INDIAN WOMAN IN GUATEMALA

Rigoberta Menchú is back in the news following the verdict in January 2015 convicting the former police chief of Guatemala City of crimes against humanity for his role in the Spanish Embassy fire in which Menchú’s father died. The verdict demands a new framing of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony to counter its labeling as scandal. As the slow pace of adjudicating human rights in national courts finally overtakes the frenzy of scandal, I, Rigoberta Menchú ought to relocate from the archive of the hoax to the record of authentic testimony, and her notoriety as a tainted witness be replaced with the more accurate name of witness.¹ Offered initially to a large international audience as a testimonio, a personal account based on an interview Menchú gave rather than a book she wrote, this genre would play a key role in debates about how Menchú was subject to doubt. John Beverly defines testimonio as “a narrative…told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts.”² That it also carries assumptions about the narrator’s responsibility to offer a plural perspective on community events, and to take on the role of witness for those who might otherwise be endangered by taking that position themselves, made genre into a term of debate in the 1980s and 1990s. As interesting as these earlier debates were, the news of the verdict does not simply open a new chapter in Menchú’s career as a contested author of testimonio; instead, it prompts another look at testimonial culture in the Americas and the global jurisdiction in which testimonial practices circulate. As we trace her testimony from scandal to vindication in court, we anatomize the testimonial network in which her account was not only thwarted as scandal but also continuously mobilized through a range of media, political organizing, and community projects to bear witness to genocide in Guatemala.

To think of the testimonial network as a circulatory system within which life story and testimony encounter conflicting ideologies, politics, and judgments as they move in search of a hearing is also to engage with how the people who bear witness travel. Whether in flight or stealth, through clandestine migration, or with and without documentation, women who bear witness face judgments embedded in the original contexts of harm, which are translated to new jurisdictions in which women testify, where they also encounter new judgments. As much as there is hope that new audiences will take up their testimony, in new venues and with new witnesses, witnesses also discover that the terms through which they will be known may not be within their power to alter. Menchú’s testimony was mobilized along distinct pathways, those of scandal and testimony, and these parallel paths demonstrate how routinely repressed or ignored histories circulate within testimonial networks. When they reach adequate witnesses, responsibilities to the buried past can be awakened by contemporary trauma.

The slow pursuit of justice began in the past century. On January 31, 1980, a group of protesters including Menchú’s father Vicente occupied the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to protest the abuses committed by security forces against indigenous communities in the Guatemalan highlands. Guatemalan security forces surrounded the building, sealed the exits, and set it on fire. In the ensuing conflagration, thirty-seven protesters and hostages, including embassy staff, died. Four years later the publication of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio in English claimed the security forces were responsible for the deaths of her father and the others they locked into the embassy. In 1999 Rigoberta Menchú filed a criminal complaint in Spain accusing former government officials of responsibility for the incident. The protestors had chosen the Spanish Embassy because Spain was sympathetic to their cause, and the suit in Spain represented an effort to press a claim in a viable jurisdiction. In 2005 a Spanish judge issued an arrest warrant holding former Guatemalan Interior Minister Donaldo Álvarez responsible for the incident, but the case did not advance. On January 30, 2009, twenty-nine years after the incident, the Guatemalan government filed 3,350 criminal complaints against former soldiers and paramilitaries alleging human rights violations. Rigoberta Menchú was a party to the suit. On January 20, 2015, former police chief Pedro García Arredondo was sentenced to forty years in prison for murder and crimes against humanity stemming from the embassy massacre. He was sentenced to fifty additional years for killing two students at the funeral for the embassy fire victims. Judge Jeannette Valdés, the president of the three-judge tribunal, acknowledged the long-unresolved case and expressed the court’s hope that the judgment would be “water that will extinguish the flames.”³

TARGETING THE WITNESS

Readers already aware of Menchú’s transformation from indigenous rights activist to tainted witness may recall a different set of key events crowded into this time frame. Menchú’s testimonio was received as an authentic and powerful claim for indigenous rights and social justice on behalf of the Quiché people when it was translated into English by Ann Wright and began to circulate in college and university courses in 1984. It was adopted as a text in the revised Stanford University core curriculum in 1988 and subsequently cast in a major role in the culture wars inflamed by conservatives in the United States who saw universities as newly volatile and vulnerable sites for political activism. As the Wall Street Journal commented in late 1988, Dante’s Inferno “is out” and I, Rigoberta Menchú “is in.” Stanford’s decision to include third-world authors in its required curriculum struck conservatives in the United States as an attack on Western values and civilization, a perilous recasting of “the evolution of such ideas as faith and justice” as a legacy of “sexism, racism and the faults of its ruling classes.”⁴ Menchú’s appearance in the Wall Street Journal isolated her as a target for a conservative movement in search of an example of the excesses of the multicultural left. Promoting Menchú’s text was represented as an affront to the processes of canon formation solidified in Stanford’s original Western Civilization syllabus. “Undergraduates do not read about Rigoberta,” opined the American Enterprise Institute’s Dinesh D’Souza in 1991, “because she has written a great and immortal book, or performed a great deed, or invented something useful. She simply happened to be in the right place and the right time.”⁵ Being in the right place at the right time, we should remember, is precisely one definition of a witness.

The “right place” was Guatemala’s Western Highlands, home to almost four million people, the majority of whom were indigenous peoples living in remote villages like Menchú’s hometown of Chimel.⁶ The “right time” was the late 1970s, when the Guatemalan military government was waging a murderous pacification campaign against the population rivaling the Spanish conquest in genocidal impact. By the time the campaign ended, Menchú’s mother and father, two brothers, and 200,000 other Guatemalans had been murdered.⁷ According to D’Souza, although this campaign may have been “unfortunate for her personal happiness,” it was “indispensable for her academic reputation,” transforming Menchú into a “fetish object” onto which “minority students” could affirm their “victim status” and professors could project their “Marxist and feminist views onto South American Indian culture.”⁸ For D’Souza, Menchú’s significance as a witness to the genocide in Guatemala was less significant than the role he assigned her in the culture wars.

Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work on human and indigenous rights. David Stoll, an anthropology professor at Middlebury College, attacked the veracity of Menchú’s representation of Guatemala in his 1998 exposé of her testimonio. Stoll offered a perspective on Menchú’s involvement with the Marxist EGP (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres—the guerrilla army of the people). He thought Menchú’s self-representation as a simple, indigenous woman disguised her role as a mouthpiece for the EGP. For Stoll, also interested in Guatemalan culture and politics, though supportive of different elements, Menchú and her comrades’ political agitation prolonged the thirty-six years of brutal repression in Guatemala. Although Stoll’s account was motivated by a political stance toward resistance movements in Guatemala and not many scholars share his analysis of its politics, his views were replaced by a critique of Menchú; namely, the assertion of a binary of truth versus lies to describe some specific elements in her account rather than a wholesale disagreement with her politics within an otherwise accurate representation of the struggle of the indigenous in Guatemala.⁹ In the context of what became a one-sided ideological battle (one-sided because Menchú would lack access to the same news venues and would not be able to supply adequate context for her life), the particulars through which Stoll established his case dominated how Menchú was presented in conservative media as well as global news outlets, including the New York Times. Stoll’s most troubling claims included the following: (1) the land dispute between indigenous Quiché people and ladinos, landowners with Spanish surnames, was a family fight between her father and some relatives, (2) the Spanish Embassy fire in Guatemala City was started by those trapped inside, (3) Menchú was better educated than she admitted, (4) she falsely placed herself at the scene of the immolation of her brother, Petrocinio, by paramilitaries in Chajul, and (5) no younger brother named Nicolás Tum died of malnutrition.¹⁰ Although Menchú responded to these claims at the time and all these accusations can also now be placed in contexts in which Menchú’s choices replace the “truth versus lies” judgment with context and interpretation, many argued from within the temporality of scandal that Menchú was already herself supplying context, as were scholars, activists, and people living in Guatemala who knew the events she narrated. Dante Liano called the Times article a “classic campaign to rewrite history” that follows the strategy used to discredit survivors of the Holocaust: “but you just said you were in that camp, whereas the documents prove you were in another camp; and if that concentration camp did not exist, perhaps no concentration camps ever existed at all.”¹¹ The terms necessary to understand her testimonio, including genre, testimony about trauma, and the power imbalance between Menchú and her antagonists, were being replaced by a campaign to transform her into a tainted witness.

Well-funded conservatives like David Horowitz and D’Souza, regrouping after successes during the Reagan years and newly savvy in exploiting college curricula and the book market for their purposes, attacked Menchú and demanded that she be stripped of her Nobel Prize for lying. The New York Times swiftly picked up Stoll’s accusations and in 1998 ran a center-column, above-the-fold, front-page story by Latin American bureau chief Larry Rohter entitled “Tarnished Laureate.”¹² As with Anita Hill’s tainting, the language of dirt and shame attached to Menchú in an attack framed as whether she told the truth. The imputation was that she was both personally unscrupulous and ideologically motivated. As with Anita Hill’s testimony, a fuller context for understanding how Stoll misrepresented Menchú’s testimony was suppressed. “Tarnished Laureate” simply repeated Stoll’s accusations that Menchú had not witnessed her brother’s torture and public immolation by paramilitaries in Chajul (though Rohter confirms the factuality of the Chajul event), that a young brother died of starvation while the family worked in the coastal plantations, that the embassy fire victims were to blame for their deaths, and that Menchú had received some education. Rohter, Liano argues, “might be forgiven for confusing ‘autobiography,’ the term he uses exclusively to refer to Rigoberta’s edited statements and ‘testimonio,’” but his repetition of it nonetheless represents a “reinvention” of testimonial literature as flawed evidence.¹³ Stoll’s reinvention stuck and, combined with a defamation campaign “led by Guatemala’s oligarchy and its foreign supporters,” was recycled through a global media in such a way that Stoll’s claims were reported as truth, quoted as such, and generally lost the specificity of his method through repetition of his assertion that her testimonio was false testimony.¹⁴

Although the concerns were exaggerated as if the text were riddled with inconsistencies, and as if they had no other explanation than deception, fact checking turned up very few disputed facts. Menchú received some education from the Belgian nuns when she worked as a servant in a convent, her young brother’s death from starvation has been confirmed, the Guatemalan court disproved Stoll’s accusation of a suicide pact as the source of the embassy fire, her brother Petrocinio’s torture and immolation has been confirmed, and although Rigoberta Menchú was not an eyewitness to the murder, her mother was: “My mother saw it. And she can no longer speak about it. And how could I have possibly placed my mother as the number one witness, when they killed so many witnesses so they can’t speak?”¹⁵ Similarly, her choice to downplay her education was prompted by the need to protect those who would have been endangered had she named them. A more detailed account of the Chajul executions, including the names of witnesses, or her experience with the Belgian nuns in whose convent she was a servant would have risked their lives. All the events she recounted occurred during the brutal Guatemalan dirty war. Half of the total atrocities of that war took place during eighteen months in 1982–83 when General Riós Montt was in power; this was the time frame in which Menchú was beginning to speak out. During 1982 alone, “In the Ixil region, between 70 and 90 percent of the community were wiped out.”¹⁶ Riós Montt’s reach and punitive zeal offer a context for Menchú’s choices. Yet Menchú’s testimonio came to emblematize the concerns about the unreliability of testimony, and she was stigmatized as a tainted witness. Menchú’s own account of this tactic is crucial. By undermining her credibility on small points but endorsing her version of events overall, Stoll stuck doubt not only to Menchú but to the people in whose name she bore witness: “all poor Guatemalans.”

TESTIMONY ON THE MOVE

In light of what historian Greg Grandin calls Menchú’s “vindication” by the courts, we can return to these archives and ponder two key questions: First, questions of gender, which enable us to focus on the swiftness with which women and those in positions of relative vulnerability who challenge both illegal and legal forms of violence can be discredited as tainted witnesses, how judgments that smear and tarnish them are made to stick, and the ensuing vulnerability of testimonial discourse to charges of female lying. Second, questions of how narratives of scandal overtake testimonial narratives and displace them in the court of public opinion while testimony continues to travel to courts of law in search of an adequate witness. This case, sprawling as it is, reveals the incommensurability of the time of scandal in the court of public opinion and the time of legal processes in national courts. A new framing of I, Rigoberta Menchú can measure the slow pace of adjudicating human rights in national courts and the rapid uptake of scandal. By focusing on testimony’s movements in both cultural and legal processes, we might better understand testimonial agency as distinct from individual agency: how it moves in search of a hearing, how it bears witness to trauma, seeks justice, and engages with institutions in ways that disrupt a neoliberal framing of the individual, and, finally, how, while scandal consigns its targets and critics to the archives of tainted witness, testimony can still carve a track within networks in order to bear witness. However, when the scandal story is repeated, even after it has been discredited as false accusation, then that story, in a sense, fastens onto testimony, weighs it down, and continues to feed off the legitimacy of testimony. It takes parasitic life from the body of testimony, and old, illegitimate stories have long half-lives in testimonial networks.

Cycles of testimony continue to revive events, which emerge and recede in relation not only to the evidence that can be brought forward and the access to a public those who bear witness can claim but also to the changing interests and variable investments and attention of those who form witnessing publics. In these cycles, the defining tempo of scandal is acceleration. Judgment produced in an instant relies less on truth or an ample factual record than on the capacity to control the message. In contrast to scandal’s giddy tempo, the temporality of justice is protraction, often enacted in courts, tribunals, and trials, and even outlasts witnesses’ life spans, though it can, in their absence, give them voice. Timelines are not only chronologies. They carry and compress historical, legal, and narrative claims about social reality and human value. What counts as testimonial truth or empirical evidence in each enactment about events and persons—in history, law, and literary genres—is not stable. Testimony about mass killing in Guatemala and Rigoberta Menchú’s role in bringing this to international, public awareness form two histories: first, the history of scandal, which unfolds within a U.S. culture war over conservative ideologies and multiculturalism. Some of its key fights targeted curriculum reform and the hiring of new faculty. Second, the history of testimony about genocide in Guatemala. The histories of scandal and testimony can overlap, but scandal seizes the dominant historical narrative in order to distract, derail, discredit, and deny testimony. When the timelines run in parallel, we can see a persistent tactic of scandal: the promotion of empirical evidence over testimonial truth, the recasting of the complexities of testimony into a purposefully and often meaninglessly narrow notion of truth and lies in order to seize a legal and moral advantage, and the strategic use of lying masking as the revelation of lies, the fraudulent attribution of fraud, the assertion or imputation of a hoax where none exists, and the extent to which the script for this in the U.S. context features the gendered figure of the tainted witness. The public smearing of Anita Hill in many ways provided the playbook for how conservatives like D’Souza and Horowitz would bash Menchú. The funding was from the same sources, and the methods similar in two ways; they were enacted by Reagan supporters, supporters of a president (1981–89) who had legally and illegally provided arms and U.S. military training to dictatorships in Central America, and their targets were similarly credible women. As with Anita Hill, the binary rubric of truth and lies as evaluative criteria for life story did not simply arise from those narratives themselves. Instead, it gained traction as a critical metric, in part, through conservative-funded campaigns against women of color who brought forward accounts of harm in the public sphere.

By separating the histories of scandal and testimony, and tracking them both, we see how testimonial networks carry life story about genocide to distant publics within a globally conceived jurisdiction. But to do so requires telling multiple narratives, plotting their enactments alongside each other, and highlighting how they participate in a testimonial network. Rigoberta Menchú’s narrative, as she memorably asserted, is not her story alone but the story of a people. She was born in 1959 in Guatemala, five years after Jacobo Árbenz was deposed as president in a CIA-lead coup and well into the looting of Guatemalan resources and exploitation of land and labor by United Fruit, with the United States extending diplomacy with strings attached. President Árbenz, who had been politicized during his own participation in exploiting agrarian workers when he was in the military, advocated land reform. More comprehensively, the context broadens to include the five-hundred-year aftermath of the Spanish conquest of the Maya. Menchú evokes the Spanish conquest as well as the Guatemalan dirty war as the context of her family’s suffering. She is forced into exile in Mexico for a year, before she goes to Paris in January 1982 to meet with Venezuelan-born anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray and Arturo Taracena, a Guatemalan historian and EGP representative in Paris, to record an interview.

Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, who was working toward a doctorate in ethnopsychiatry at the time of the interview, put out a call to interview a generic “Guatemalan Mayan woman,” not Menchú in particular.¹⁷ She interviewed Menchú in Paris over the course of several days, transcribed the tapes, edited the manuscript, and published the result as Menchú’s testimonio.¹⁸ Aside from supplying the testimony, Menchú was not involved in the transcription, editing, revision, or translation of the book. The two principals responsible for those tasks, Burgos-Debray and Taracena, confirm that Menchú took control of the interview, “speaking in a strong, certain voice.”¹⁹ They suggested topics to be covered, but they had to “rethink the outline” as Menchú’s “narrative capacity” exceeded “what we had originally conceived…. There was a profound literary quality to Rigoberta Menchú’s voice.”²⁰ The editors corrected Menchú’s poor Spanish grammar and syntax and arranged her account chronologically, but the “book is a narration only by Rigoberta, with her own rhythm, with her own inventions, if there are any, with her own emotions.”²¹

When Rigoberta Menchú gave the interview that would produce I, Rigoberta Menchú, she was twenty-three years old. Her parents were dead, she had spent a year in exile in Mexico, and she was just beginning to speak out about the genocide in Guatemala. Yet with General Riós Montt assuming the presidency, an unprecedented eighteen-month intensification in repression began. Menchú arrived in Paris traumatized by what she had survived and motivated as a living representative of a people undergoing genocide to “tell a compelling story.”²² As scholars have explained, Menchú came from a society in which most information was transmitted orally but also from immediate conditions of extraordinary repression around speech, where people were tortured in order to compel them to give up the names of anyone involved in labor organizing. During the year she spent hiding in exile in Mexico, she had not been able to talk about her experience without risking the safety of those still in Guatemala or connected with the resistance. However, her “experience speaking to reporters and solidarity delegations before her Paris interviews had led her to realize the value audiences place on eyewitness accounts. [She wanted to] draw attention to Guatemala, which, compared to neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador, was being ignored by the international press.”²³

When we think of the conditions in which Menchú bore witness, the image of an apartment in Paris obscures the history she carried with her to that place. Two important contexts inform her testimony: Mayan culture and its practices around orality and disclosure and the layered histories of conquest, colonization, and genocide breaking over the Maya for five hundred years. She mobilizes her witness in the joint context of history and trauma. This context helps to clarify the two clashing histories unfolding in the contact zone the testimonial network became: the story of Menchú’s life and the story of her testimonio. Reshaped as scandal, Menchú’s tarnishing is perhaps better understood as Stoll’s story rather than hers. While the scandal story is his, Menchú continues to testify and to search for an adequate witness for her testimony outside that construction.

The story of her interview, its travels and controversies, represents a detachable aspect of Menchú’s life. How we consider the fate of this interview is shaped in part by how we think about genre. Denounced as propaganda, promoted as primary source, read as memoir, and recontextualized by scholars who defended I, Rigoberta Menchú as testimonio,²⁴ Menchú’s first-person account was propelled across multiple publics by the literary quality of her political testimony. It crossed geographical, institutional, and political frames. Taracena and Burgos-Debray expected a generic representative, but they recorded the voice of a poet. Menchú surprised her interviewers as the eloquent voice of traumatized exile poured out over several days. What publics can a literary witness mobilize to bear witness? This is a question I will take up in chapters 3 and 5 more fully, but I raise it here to identify the significance of the literary to testimony.

PARALLEL PATHS: SCANDAL OR TESTIMONY

Almost a decade after the scandal, interest in Menchú revived. Greg Grandin’s reevaluation in 2010 in a long article in the Nation, and a subsequent series of books he and others wrote that coincided with trials of Riós Montt, showed that the charges against Menchú along with the political analysis Stoll asserted about Guatemala were untrue in some cases and distortions in others. This new activity revealed more importantly that her testimony, immured as it was in scandal, had not stopped its search for an adequate witness. After Menchú’s testimonio was published, circulated and taught, and denounced, it relocated to documentary film, human rights activism, and court. More specifically, Menchú’s testimonio traveled down two parallel paths, one in which she became a tainted witness in a whipped-up scandal and another, which was more cohesive with the purposes of her testimony, in which she became a human rights activist with an international platform, a collaborator in a series of documentary films, and part of the legal prosecution of war crimes in Guatemala, including the trial of General Riós Montt, the first prosecution of a war crime in the Americas in the nation in which the crimes occurred. While the second path illuminates how documentary, human rights, and national and international courts are part of a testimonial network through which Menchú’s witness has been able to circulate, only the first path commanded front-page New York Times coverage and has all but substituted for knowledge of Menchú’s subsequent life and work for many.

Menchú collaborated with documentary filmmaker and human rights activist Pamela Yates at Skylight Productions on a documentary, When the Mountain Trembles. Yates and her team were filming in Guatemala during 1982, when Riós Montt was in power and paramilitaries were kidnapping and murdering those suspected of organizing or participating in any resistance. From Catholic priests who preached a gospel of liberation theology, to labor organizers, to journalists, to the entire civilian population, anyone could be killed with impunity. Kidnappings were commonplace, and the bodies of those tortured were dumped publicly. The footage in the documentary shows such kidnappings by groups of men who roll through city streets in military vehicles and abduct their victims in crowded public places in full daylight. Armed soldiers and police are everywhere; they patrol in search of “revolutionaries.” When Yates asks them why, the soldiers shrug and smile: this is the machinery of genocide.

The documentary uses footage gathered in both the cities and the countryside. It includes interviews with a lawyer in Guatemala who describes the persecution of the labor movement, and also with a corrupt priest who says that he is well taken care of by the government and informs to maintain his position. There are two effective reenactments to show what Yates could not film, including a scene in which Árbenz tries to persuade a U.S. government official that a democratic Guatemala is a stronger regional partner. Yates also intercuts actual footage of Riós Montt saying that peasants need to be crushed with a State of the Union speech by Ronald Reagan about the urgent need to support the governments in Central America so they might simply defend themselves against communist insurgencies. Yates juxtaposes Reagan’s speech with footage of U.S. Army personnel training Guatemalan security forces. She threads Menchú’s testimony throughout the film. In a bare studio, Menchú is seated in front of a black background, looks directly into the camera, and describes the deaths of her family members. When she describes the Spanish Embassy massacre, Yates’s footage from the event rolls. Menchú seems at first to be narrating the event in voiceover because what she says describes what the film shows. However, it becomes clear that Menchú’s testimony derives from memory, and the footage of the embassy fire is proof of her original version of the events. The footage supplies the proof that was present from the beginning, despite claims that the rebels had locked themselves into the embassy and set themselves on fire, as Stoll asserted. The film shows security forces forming a barrier around the building and preventing people from reaching it. A man in the street stares at the embassy and calls out, “They are in there.” The sequence concludes with footage of the burned bodies carried in sheets from the embassy and dumped on the ground.

In January 2015, as Pamela Yates filmed the trial of police involved in the embassy fire, she reflected on filming Menchú’s previous account of the fire:

In 1983, the now-Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú and I collaborated on the film When the Mountains Tremble. She told the story of the Spanish Embassy massacre where her father Vicente Menchú died, directly to camera…. You see a profound sadness in her eyes, but also the determination to tell the world what had happened, what the significance of the attack on the Spanish Embassy was really about, all with the hope that international pressure could help to stop the violence in Guatemala. Watching it today, I see that even that early on in her political career, Rigoberta was a strong analyst of the political situation, and prescient about the response of state and security forces that was soon to follow.²⁵

Yates’s choice to frame Menchú as the sole focus of her camera represents a visual technique that amplifies the witness position. Yates triangulated her documentarian voice, footage of the fire, and Menchú’s testimony to create an adequate witness.

Rigoberta Menchú went from Guatemala to Mexico to Paris; her testimonio went around the world and turned into a scandal. Yet after the suspension of her testimony as scandal, Menchú continued to travel and to collaborate with Yates, as her testimony was mobilized from written account to documentary films, and from films to court in the trial of Riós Montt, where Menchú also participated in developing the case against him. Following When the Mountain Trembles in 1983, Yates made another documentary film for Skylight Productions about Riós Montt, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, which premiered in 2012, and both films were submitted as forensic evidence in his trial for crimes against humanity.

Granito, as Yates describes it, “is a story of destinies joined by Guatemala’s past, and how a documentary film intertwined with a nation’s turbulent history emerges as an active player in the present. In Granito our characters sift for clues buried in archives of mind and place and historical memory, seeking to uncover a narrative that could unlock the past and settle matters of life and death in the present.” The film follows five main characters connected by Guatemala’s past and highlights 1982, the year Menchú goes to Paris, Riós Montt takes power, and Guatemala is engulfed in an armed conflict during which a genocidal “scorched earth” campaign by the military kills nearly 200,000 Maya people, including 45,000 disappeared. The documentary seeks to restore memory of the violent past, “weaving back together threads of a story unraveled by the passage of time, forgotten by most.”²⁶

In 2013 Yates followed Granito with Dictator in the Dock, an inside-the-courtroom documentary of the entire trial of Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala. This historic case marked the first time, anywhere in the world, that a former head of state was tried for genocide in a national court, in the country where the crimes were committed. Yates writes, “It is also the first time in the history of South or North America, that the genocide of indigenous peoples was tried in a court of law, significantly in a country of the Americas with a majority indigenous population.”²⁷ The camera captures testimony by victims of rape, witnesses to murder, and survivors of torture, as well as the reaction in the gallery of witnesses, and of Riós Montt and his legal team, as they sit a few steps away from those who testify.²⁸ As with the historical context of slavery and Jim Crow that haunted Clarence Thomas’s nomination hearings until Anita Hill testified and Thomas uttered the word, “lynching,” that exposed that history’s presence, the historical context of Spanish conquest, colonization, and the implication of the United States in the ongoing exploitation of Guatemala as a source of foreign capital was onstage in the war crimes trial. As Francisco Soto, legal representative of the Maya victims, said in his concluding statement at the trial, “Justice is poised to play an important role in the historical memory of our country. For the first time in five hundred years we are able to judge genocide.”²⁹ Soto insists that the relevant testimonial time frame defining the search for a hearing in this case is five hundred years. Yates echoes the time frame and references, too, and reterritorializes the colonized globe as indigenous space: “The symbolic and precedent setting nature of this trial for all indigenous peoples and all national justice systems cannot be overestimated.”³⁰ In Yates, Rigoberta Menchú finds an adequate witness who amplifies Menchú’s testimony; mobilizes it in legal networks, through various media, and to new audiences; and facilitates its renewal and return to a new generation of Guatemalans as Menchú and her testimony continue to seek new witnesses.

TESTIMONIAL CYCLES AND CROSSINGS

Perhaps it is no surprise that the discourse of judgment with the monitory categories of truth and lies infiltrates testimonial networks. The terms are both technical and vernacular. They mediate the distance between the institutional complexities of the law and “my truth,” between what one can say and what can be done with it. Testimony crosses the boundary between life and death, but it also tarries at that border and inhabits it as an extracorporeal entity. The testimonial body both is a surrogate for those who cannot testify and possesses a life of its own. It persists across jurisdictions and can travel the globe. Its future is defined by its capacity to communicate about the past. It exceeds the bodies of the dead, but it carries their voice where it cannot go. Testimony constantly traverses the boundary of the living and the dead and derives its affective charge from its disembodied and authentic location. Testimony is haunted: by the dead to whom it bears witness, as well as the living who offer and hear it. It carries histories of the past that are difficult to narrate, and it makes a claim on the present about current situations. And here we come to another paradox of testimony: testimonial cycles embed histories of violence, including slavery, conquest, and genocide, and current crises alike. No single act of testimony can fully bear the weight, but we can chart how, as Sidonie Smith and Kay Schaeffer have shown, testimony operates in humanitarian storytelling, and how it moves around the globe through creative, legal, and literary transactions, as Gillian Whitlock has described.³¹

As it moves, testimony generates affect and attracts judgment. This becomes clearer as we trace legal testimony’s imbrication with coerced confession and torture, as well as the proximity of judgment in the presence of testimony. One of the byproducts of histories of coercion in both sites is testimonial affect, a sense that the truth is present in the speech of the person, but that to destroy the truth, one can attack the body of the person. Perhaps it is this detachment of body and speech that lets us see how testimony moves beyond the individual. In The Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai calls attention to how “things-in-motion…illuminate their human and social context.”³² We are not used to calling testimony a thing, especially when that sounds like we are detaching it from the persons who give it and from the events to which it bears witness, but I want to undertake the thought experiment this locution implies in order to attribute agency to testimony and its movements, so that we may follow as it goes where a person is barred from going yet persists in carrying traces of the human with it, sometimes amplifying voices silenced by death or muting their force by conforming to rules of evidence in court. Testimony as a thing in motion illuminates the human and social contexts of war and helps us to understand how women’s testimony in particular traverses literary and legal domains, twinning narratives about atrocities and legal trials, in the complexities of transnational witness. And what testimony illuminates as it moves is both the testimonial network of courts and tribunals—international and national courts and the routes that connect them—but also the testimonial network’s shadow—the carceral network of black sites and sites of illegal detention where bodies are broken into vehicles for coerced confessions. The detachment of body and speech lets us see how testimony moves beyond the individual.

Testimonial cycles return us to cases and remind us that testimonial agency moves in search of an adequate witness beyond the speeded up life cycle and death spiral of scandal. As these cycles call us to attend again to archives from which we may have temporarily moved on, we can review our own critical histories by engaging anew with the methodologies of our previous encounters. Scandal distorts the testimonial signal. It produces an echo in which when one generates the name Menchú, one hears back the echo of a recycled story of scandal. Scandal sticks to testimony and we get stuck with the weight it imposes. Scandal represents a diversion from larger political issues. It masks the truth by making testimony seem to be about an individual rather than a people. This, I would argue, was the real hoax. Scandal distracted attention from the movement of testimony, falsely asserting that Menchú was effectively compromised and silenced, when in fact her testimony was traveling in various forms, on different platforms, and in new jurisdictions. Instead of ceasing its movements and its capacity to move witnesses, Menchú’s testimony continued to trace a path through a global testimonial network: from Guatemala to Mexico to Paris in its initial movement, and from the Spanish to the Guatemalan legal systems. As her testimony moved, it gathered new technologies—documentary film, for example—opened new archives of evidence, and coevolved with forensic methodologies designed by the International Criminal Court to hear the testimony of the victims of mass killing.

JURISDICTIONS: INTIMATE PUBLICS, PURE VICTIMS

While the haunting historical context is the Spanish conquest and colonization, the Menchú case reveals how disparate histories and contexts circulate in testimonial networks. For Anita Hill’s testimony, women’s increasing professionalization and the feminist movement’s exposure of sexual harassment provide further context. Singly and together, these historical transformations functioned as obstacles within the conservative Washington networks that propelled Clarence Thomas’s nomination process. The context for Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony is similarly layered and, in addition to the history and politics of Guatemala and U.S. imperialism, includes the surge in memoir publication that began around the time I, Rigoberta Menchú was circulating in North America. As I argue in chapter 3, personal accounts of trauma reached new, broad audiences beginning in the 1980s, and we can see how scandals like the one surrounding Menchú function as jurisdictions.³³ To historicize the Menchú scandal is to return to memoir publishing’s rise in the late 1990s, when Menchú’s text and others were caught up in scandals animated by cultural anxieties related to gender, trauma, and testimony.

Life writing (here, in the forms of memoir and testimonio) represents another jurisdiction, or forum of judgment.³⁴ Both the text itself and the public sphere it enters can be understood as jurisdictions; indeed, thinking of the public sphere in this way elucidates the mechanisms of judgment that pervade it, the contest of authorities that can arise around oppositional texts, and the levering forward of ethics, truth telling, and scandal as the language through which such extrajudicial “trials” unfold. Thinking of life narrative as a jurisdiction also helps to clarify the kind of agency a text can exert and the quasi-legal authority it possesses for its advocates and detractors. Jurisdictions share some informal characteristics with what Lauren Berlant calls “intimate publics,”³⁵ although members of a jurisdiction assemble in relation to judgment to create a shared sense of belonging and comprise dominant and nondominant members, both of whom seek to make their opinions stick but need not “feel in common” as they produce judgment. Indeed, they may feel as if they are acting alone, even righteously, on behalf of or in relation to a higher moral standard. Authorities within courts of public opinion are dispersed. Additional actants include the press and online venues for weighing in, where participants are bound more by admonitory than by affiliative energies, and membership is shifting and temporary. While a jurisdiction may contain an intimate public, it also includes agents opposed to the development of collectivity and for this reason better resembles an assemblage,³⁶ which depends on conflictual energies in order to form. The appeal of testimony to those who bear witness as well as those who taint it constitutes part of its force. Within a jurisdiction, agency attaches to testimony and the judgments that stick to it, even as testimony continues to move in search of an adequate witness.

Jurisdictional conflicts over how to represent trauma and gender, and who may do so and with what limits, may occur whenever personal accounts are introduced into the public sphere, but particularly when those accounts concern the relation between individual injury and collective politics and make a claim for the representativeness of one person’s experience of, or perspective on, violence.³⁷ When an individual who speaks of injury emerges as the subject of a testimonial practice and makes a claim on public attention through the dissemination of that practice, a jurisdiction may form. Both subject to a jurisdiction and engaged in an act of critical articulation, memoir and testimonio themselves offer a forum of judgment in which the subject may achieve a control over her story that she would not hold in court. Jurisdiction is a legal term that borrows from Michel Foucault’s notion of the juridical (here, involving the whole discursive arsenal of law, judgment, punishment, and the “regimes of truth”)³⁸ in order to point toward culture more broadly and to indicate that scandals are historically specific rather than isolated or aberrant in their functioning. Legal protocols that seek to contain antagonists, evidence, and outcomes within territorially defined jurisdictions do not strictly apply to testimonial speech or its reception; however, an examination of scandals within the public sphere will reveal the tendency to substitute a deceptively neutral line of inquiry; namely, “Who did what, to whom, and where?” for the more binding “Who has the authority to judge its meaning?”

Conceptual issues in jurisdiction are indissoluble from jurisdiction’s materiality and territoriality. Although we typically think of jurisdiction in terms of territory and the hold it has on the movements of persons and objects, we must also recognize its symbolic power to mark an inside and an outside to national affiliation and identity. The hold jurisdiction has on a person produces something less flexible and geographically mutable, and more akin to status and identity. Jurisdiction binds citizens to the laws of their home nations when they travel, for example, and therefore exceeds its geographical boundaries to become a property of persons: “Jurisdictions define the identity of the people that occupy them.”³⁹ Jurisdictions also mark temporal boundaries: we think of testimony as bounded by time and finite, and therefore as static. Its credibility is tied to its stability. Simply to suggest that someone’s story changed over time is to raise doubt, even when that change represents the addition or clarification of information that was suppressed or supplies previously absent context necessary to understanding.

When Rigoberta Menchú left Guatemala for Mexico and then France, she and her testimony were set loose in a shifting jurisdictional landscape. Borders delimit, but they also hold the promise of transformation. Dreams of crossing over, and crossing back, of carrying meaning across jurisdictional lines, or suspending some meanings altogether, apply to witness accounts as well as persons. The work of jurisdiction is to make the central practices and modes of judgment in a particular context meaningful. How do moving witnesses gain or retain credibility? Why are witnesses credible in some settings and not others? If the forum of judgment is so consequential, how can we speak of truth as the basis of judgment?

Is the bar to giving credible testimony too high to meet for those who have experienced trauma? Those who seek to represent trauma often say they feel compromised by or implicated in the degradation of the experience; few feel confident that anything like purity or innocence will emerge as they bear witness. Legal discourse requires some traumatized subjects to endure a secondary traumatization by testifying, to be sure, but also to constrain their stories of harm within the law’s protocols and thereby limit the capacity of those stories to develop new terms for understanding and addressing that harm (in its complexity) outside the law. By bringing predominantly legalistic models of testimony to bear on life narrative, and thereby importing the universalizing tendencies of law, we foreclose the alternative knowledge that emerges in dissonant narratives. When the standard of credibility for bearing witness is measured against an escalating demand for testimonial purity that virtually no one can meet when trauma is involved, those standards ought to be inspected for ideological bias rather than permitted to stand solely as an ethical norm worthy of endorsement.

Instead of viewing practices that organize painful and sometimes conflictual materials through an “I” as merely personal and therefore limited political acts or versions of historical events, consider how self-representational practices bear on history, politics, and subjectivity in my analysis of the judgments that circulate around trauma and gender in the public sphere. Life narratives, no less than jurisdiction, concern “the production of political subjectivity.”⁴⁰ While autobiographical self-representation offers a means by which to position personal history within the public sphere, any potentially disruptive performance in that location is freighted with risk. Dissident versions of personal and collective histories are in a dialectical relation to dominant notions of legitimacy and as such are more likely to elicit skepticism or condemnation than to invite sympathy or vindication, form a resistant discourse, or secure alternative meanings about contested events.⁴¹

While it is often easy to understand why any particular memoir or testimonio becomes scandalous after the scandal has flared, those retroactive constructions attribute the air of inevitability to events and the forces animating them that are often far less distinct in “real time.” To transform credible women like Anita Hill and Rigoberta Menchú, notably women to whom unsubstantiated and inaccurate accusations stuck only through bias and repetition, the seemingly ethical question “Who is telling the truth?” moves to the fore and displaces the context necessary for an adequate witness to assemble.

Both memoir and testimonio are engaged in a process through which personal history gains interpretive leverage on dominant history and are thereby laid bare to a kind of scrutiny that characterizes the politics of truth telling. Such scrutiny is central to the emergence of scandal and serves to inhibit the “I” of memoir from achieving its politicization or, equally, to short-circuit the emergence of a “we” politicized in its response to the “I.” Testimonio makes political claims insofar as those who have witnessed violence are authorized to speak truth to power. Memoir makes a claim on history even if, in the assertion of subjective privilege, it seems to align more with the fluidity of imagination and memory. Nancy K. Miller captures memoir’s dual and antigeneric position in this way: “By its roots, memoir encompasses both acts of memory and acts of recording—personal reminiscences and documentation.”⁴² We are often, and appropriately, willing to let memoir and testimonio have it both ways. That is, as long as autobiographical self-representation is neither libelous nor slanderous, it can be maintained easily within a liberal discourse in which individuals may offer various, and even conflicting, accounts of experience. Even the more explicitly resistant form of testimonio can be conscripted into a pluralistic canon of multicultural difference. When the claims of the private (or prepoliticized) person impinge on dominant cultural narratives, however, or when the witnessing “I” politicizes a “we,” then memoir and testimonio exceed the tolerance they are accorded and become something more influential, hence subject to judgment.

An accusation of lying proves especially sticky judgment within a testimonial network.⁴³ It not only taints specific witnesses but also spreads doubt and represents a form of destabilization to which the testimonial “I” is especially vulnerable. Lying is purposeful and malign. Sworn witnesses promise to tell the truth. Tainted witnesses are compromised as truth tellers: even if some aspects of their account might stand scrutiny, they don’t. Lying defines an ethical limit: legal, cultural, and intimate formations rely on trust to function. D’Souza, Horowitz, Stoll, and Rohter accused Menchú of propagandizing, which suggests willful conduct, but also of being a mouthpiece and a dupe of Marxist resistance movements, which strips her of agency and thought. They could have suggested that she misremembered some of the details they found to be inaccurate. After all, she was certainly traumatized by what she had seen and experienced. Instead, they accused her of lying, which shifted the grid of evaluation to truth versus lies and placed Menchú and Stoll into the familiar coupling of he said/she said. Within the jurisdiction that assembled to judge Menchú, scandal represented an indexical sign of gender. Gender animates scandal, in part, because critical and popular notions of truth telling are gendered. The epithet “liar” hangs in the air less as a provable accusation than as a metonymic symptom of a woman falling under public scrutiny and censure.

When Menchú was accused of lying because her text “cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be” as she describes as her own “experiences she never had herself,”⁴⁴ Stoll remobilized her testimony as a lie. As this new name traveled, her testimony’s status as scandal superseded the story of genocide in Guatemala. In Larry Rohter’s New York Times article, the scandal—whether she lied—was the story, not the crisis in Guatemala. Why was this substitution persuasive? Why didn’t Rohter tell a different story about Guatemala? Pamela Yates certainly had a different story to offer, as well as corroborating film supporting Menchú’s testimony. As the depth and diversity of scholarship assembled to contextualize Menchú’s testimonio in the aftermath of the controversy demonstrates, there were other stories to tell.

Menchú’s text offers an explicitly politicized “I” who calls for the politicization of a “we” that includes both indigenous peoples and multiple and diverse publics galvanized to bear witness. Little of her text resembles political dogma; instead, its testimonial “I” lyrically evokes life in the Guatemalan highlands of her birth. An elegiac picture of home contrasts life in Chimel with labor in the fincas where her family worked for most of the year. Her pastoral depiction of Chimel links the integrity and specificity of the Quiché to indigeneity and land rights. Memory for her is a supple, politicizable instrument through which a contemporary situation can be contextualized. When the issue is narrowed to the legalistic “Did she lie?” almost none of the complexity of representing the self in the context of representing histories of violence and contemporary trauma can be retained without seeming to sink into ethical relativism and equivocation.⁴⁵ The charge of lying reorganizes the value and authority of her account retroactively: it imposes new rules that Menchú is accused of violating instead of elaborating the context from which her testimony emerged. The jurisdiction of scandal was organized to obscure how the standard of “truth or lies” led swiftly to the charge of lying for women and stripped context from Menchú’s highly defensible and ultimately vindicated testimony.

When Menchú is asked to comment on oppression, she often answers by linking racism and sexism. Although Arturo Arias points out that “there is no simplistic leftist or feminist rhetoric” in the testimonio,⁴⁶ Menchú emphasizes the centrality of gender in her experience of trauma, memory, culture, and rights. For her, gender produces the sharpest negative reactions to her political work. Voices critical of her often link bias against indigenous activists to notions about women’s proper and subordinate roles in dominant and traditional cultures. Because various feminist commentators have spoken to the presumptive saturation of contemporary culture in an identity-based rhetoric of victimization and have noted the irony in feminists seeking redress from the state for state-sponsored violence against women,⁴⁷ notice that Menchú does not adopt the language of legal plaint in her testimony. Instead, she presses her claims through testimonial speech that welds the personal to the collective and posits an international, ethical “you” and “we” who will listen and respond. In other words, she seeks to mobilize her testimony in search of an adequate witness. As a target of tainting, her testimonio is stuck in the jurisdiction of scandal and suffers the fate of dragging forward that story with subsequent efforts to bear witness to ongoing political crises around indigenous, women’s, and human rights. Yet as a testimonial subject who was able to bear witness in the multiple jurisdictions of text, documentary film, and court, Menchú mobilized testimony through life story.

Scandal’s characteristic mode is to reject the terms in which the author casts her project and introduce hostile ones in their place. This taints her as a witness. The popular caveat that what transpired between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas at the EEOC in 1981 was unknowable and undecidable was a purposeful construction designed to render women incapable of providing credible witness about sexual harassment. The thoroughness of the public campaign to discredit Hill’s testimony showcased strategies that would be taken up in various ways over the next decades. Although these strategies were not new, they were displayed in public, in a setting with legal elements, at a new level of visibility. When conservative Washington pundits attacked Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio, their campaigns dovetailed with Stoll’s effort to discredit Menchú. In an echo of the strategy Thomas used to taint Hill, Menchú was represented as a political pawn rather than a subject in her own right. That diminishment stuck, too, so that even when new information came to light, Menchú’s new status as “vindicated” did not fully circulate within the jurisdictions that pronounced her “tarnished.” There has been no apology in response to the verdicts in Guatemala, no front-page follow-up in the New York Times, and an online search of Menchú’s name foregrounds the controversy as one in which she was implicated rather than the concerted political attack it was. The afterlife of tainting, and the persistence of its attachment to reputation, forms a microcosm of the delegitimization caused by the compounding of histories of violence and contemporary trauma.