Discursive Tensions and the Subject of Discourse in I, Rigoberta Menchú

Abstract

The sparse (but recently growing) criticism of testimonial narrative in Central America has acknowledged the importance of this genre in the articulation of oppositional political discourses by subjects claiming an Indian cultural identity, particularly within three national contexts during the 1980s: Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Critics categorizing these discourses as “oppositional,” “revolutionary” or “of resistance” attempt to theorize the relationship of these texts with repressive national state actions and strategies, and their difference from “Western” narrative forms. These critical positions tend to highlight the communal construction of the narrative voice (the speaking “I”) as a sign of these texts’ radical political and formal proposals. Barbara Harlow has suggested that the “personal” (in testimonials written by women) does not altogether disappear but is instead “relocated in the context of the public and historic struggle of their people.”¹ For critics like John Beverley and Maro Zimmerman,² this form of narrative not only represents new ways of articulating the subject, but is also “a means of popular-democratic cultural practice, closely bound up with the same motivations that produce insurgency at the economic and political levels.”³

So, all in all, I may indeed contradict myself now and then; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.

Michel de Montaigne