Abstract
This article compares the textual production of legal testimony with that of literary testimonio. Using the controversy sparked by David Stoll’s exposé of Rigoberta Menchú’s less than “factual” account of her life lived amidst the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the analysis asks why Menchú should be indicted or acquitted based on cultural notions of legal testimony. I use the concept of language ideologies to explore how listeners hold narrators to standards of truth. By suggesting that there are interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function at work, the argument is made that any detractor can find a way to discredit narrative truth. I show this by examining how Latina women and state actors create legal testimony about domestic abuse. While these narratives share much with the Menchú testimonio, in particular the risks they present to their narrators, I conclude that the everyday victim in the U.S. adversarial system has much more to lose, and inevitably has far less discursive power, than Menchú. I examine these topics and themes from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspectives.
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Notes
Menchú, a Guatemalan indigenous woman who, through her work as a human rights activist and through the publication of her testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian Woman in Guatemala, became a significant force in bringing the world’s attention to the military’s calculated killings of the indigenous in her country.
Menchú identifies as a Mayan woman from Guatemala. In the early 1980s, she was put in contact with a Venezuelan ethnologist in Paris, named Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. As the story goes, Menchú could not read or write in Spanish, and it was only at the age of 23 that she had enough fluency in Spanish to be able to tell her story to a global audience. Burgos-Debray engaged Menchú in an interview where the two talked about the oppression of the indigenous in Guatemala. Burgos-Debray, then published the first edition of the book that resulted from their conversations in French in 1983. Shortly thereafter, the book was published in Spanish with the title: Me llamó Rigoberta Menchú, y así me nació la consciencia (Translated literally to English as: My Name is Rigoberta Menchú, and that is How my Consciousness was Born). The English title is given in the text above. In 1990, Menchú was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in recognition of the international work she was doing for human rights.
Nine years later, anthropologist David Stoll published Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Though his purpose remains unclear to me (see Smith 2001 and Warran’s 2001 discussions of his purpose), his means to that end entail pointing out a series of factual problems that his research on Menchú’s testimonial narrative uncovered.
Beverley and Sommer have been writing about Menchú for more than a decade. While both have been attacked and lauded for their readings of I, Rigoberta, each has also been critical of his/her own as well as responsive to others’ thoughts on this text.
Beverley (1993) seeks to define testimonio as a literary genre that is, well, non-literary. Always clear about his solidarity with Menchú, Beverley has analyzed the text as complicated and complex, “sincere” yet, embellished, crafty, if not necessarily poetic, and always ideological. Focusing mostly on what Menchú says and how she says it, Beverley’s study (1993, 1999, 2001) emphasizes the text as an agent of social change.
Patai (2001) accuses Beverley of considering Menchú to be a “sophisticated narrator” after the publication of Stoll’s study. This may be true, but only in as much as Beverley argued that Menchú’s testimonio goes against literature; not because he ever considered Menchú to be a naïve narrator.
Sommer holds a position similar to that of Beverley’s with respect to Menchú’s social purpose. However, Sommer’s study (1996, 1999, 2001) steers us to listen to Menchú’s audible omissions. Sommer argues that Menchú taunts the reader by withholding information to emphasize the ways she differs from her interlocutors. According to Sommer, Menchú does this to create the type of distance that commands respect. For example, Sommer analyzes Menchú’s refusal to speak as a recurring reminder of the fact that she is foreign—and thus, shall remain enigmatic—to us. She shares an anecdote about Menchú’s refusal to translate some Quiché terms she used to open her remarks at Harvard. Sommer (1996) recounts Menchú’s reasons: “They were a formal and formulaic greeting in Quiché, she said, and they would lose their poetic quality in a different rendering.” She then analyzes her reasons in the following way: “This speech act was not hostile, but it was a reminder of difference: its meaning resided in the very foreignness of words” (Sommer 1996, p. 122).
Felman (in Felman and Laub 1992, p. 3) discuss how people are somehow appointed to bear witness, an act that she describe as one “from which the witness-appointee cannot relieve himself by any delegation, substitution or representation.”
Evidence of this ideology can be seen in the titles of the following recent monographs: (Gilligan 1982; Taylor et al. 1995; Francisco 1999; Haag 2000). The titles of recent edited volumes, as well as a perusal through their tables of contents provide further evidence of this intellectual current holding that speaking (and especially through writing) is a powerful way to represent oneself (see, for example Hall and Bucholtz 1995). And not surprisingly, books dedicated to the writings of and study of Latina women also seem to emphasize the importance of “speaking,” as is the case in Galindo and González’s (1999) book on language and gender, entitled Speaking Chicana.
Subjectivity is defined here as an expression or the bringing into prominence the individuality of the person.
See Gal (1991) for a review of sociolinguistic study on silence.
In an illuminating article, Rumsey (1990) argues that standard average European (SAE) languages such as English embody and entrench the ideology that language is capable of representing language through and by the grammatical features of direct quotation. He makes this point through a contrastive analysis with Ungarinyin, a language spoken by the Ngarinyin people that inhabit northwestern Australia. Their language does not have direct quotation as a possibility in grammatical design. Matoesian (2001) explains, “[d]irect quotes implicate a broader form of linguistic ideology in which the sole or primary function of language is to refer to things, what Mertz (1985) refers to as the ‘drive for reference’.’” Matoesian’s point is that listeners focus on the referential and fail to notice the pragmatic and interactional work their interlocutors do when talking and/or narrating.
See Eades (2000) for a good example of how aborignals are constrained in the collaborative process of courtroom storytelling.
For example, when Stoll’s findings were first distributed internationally, newspapers published stories entitled: “Tarnished Laureate” (Larry Rohter, New York Times), “Lies by the Nobel Prize Winner” (Jorge Palmieri, El Periódico de Guatemala), “The pitiful lies of Rigoberta Menchú” (Octavio Martí, El País, Madrid), etcetera.
What Stoll says he does with words, and what he actually does with them in the text are two different things. He claims not to be adversarial, but many instances within his text prove otherwise. Rodríguez (2001, p. 343) eloquently states the main problem with his study, “What could have been an excellent scholarly exercise in the unraveling of the difficulties of organizing populations, and even a theoretical position on hegemony, and counterhegemony, becomes a piece of propaganda at worst, and at best, a sentimental writing of indigenous misrepresentations of indigenous people.”
The Law and Society Association, a professional organization of sociolegal scholars, defines the “reach of law” on its web site as “the impact of law in a globalized world, the extent to which law regulates social and political life within and across borders, how law defines the experiences and treatment of diverse groups within societies, the promulgation of law and legal systems in developing societies, and the significance of law in everyday life.”
I examine the risks inherent in narrating violence in the protective order application because these data correspond with Klein’s (1996, p. 192) finding that civil protective orders have “become the chief means of protecting victims of domestic abuse in many jurisdictions.” Moreover, as Ptacek (1999) notes, protective order applications are perhaps the most frequented legal venue from which women negotiate with the state in their search of a life free of violence.
Stoll points out that Menchú’s brother “Nicolás” is still alive. In response, when asked to explain the incongruity, Menchú, while artfully ethnicizing the subject, argues she had two brothers named “Nicolás.”
Hearsay is a legal term “applied to a species of testimony given by a witness who relates, not what he knows personally, but what others have told him, or what he has heard said by others” (Black’s Law Dictionary 722). “… the law states a preference for what a witness has seen over what a witness has heard” (O’Barr and Conley 1996, p. 117).
Other such terms include: here/there, up/down, and even north/south. As indexes that signal their referents without naming them, they cannot be interpreted outside of the sociolinguistic arena in which they are used.
Deconstructing the speech of the President of the United States, Duranti (1997) and others (Matoesian 1999) have made clear how this triad of participant roles functions. The presidential speechwriter is author of what the president says, because s/he is the person who selects words, strings them together in syntax and provides the cohesion for them. The White House press secretary is animator, as she is the person who actually delivers the words, while the president is principal of the utterance, taking all credit and all criticism for what is said.
During the course of 13 months of fieldwork in two different cities in the U.S. Southwest, I observed and tape recorded interviews between service providers and Latina survivors of domestic violence in ten different social and legal organizations. Once participants gave me permission to tape, I retreated into the background, as much as possible, to allow service providers to do their jobs. In these two cities, two distinct agencies helped women apply for protective orders: a district attorney’s office and a pro bono law clinic.
All names, dates, and other identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy and the anonymity of the people who cooperated with me during data collection.
The transcription conventions used here have been adapted from those found in Matoesian (1993). They are as follows:
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P: refers to the paralegal or volunteer interviewers.
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I: refers to the interpreter in the interview.
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C: refers to the client in the interview.
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CF: refers to the client’s friend or family member who acted as an interpreter in the interview.
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[ A single left-hand bracket indicates an overlap.
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(.00) Timed intervals indicate pause-lengths to nearest second.
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( ) Single empty parentheses indicate that audio material is inaudible.
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(with words) Single parentheses that enclose words indicate transcriber’s best guess.
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((with words)) Double parentheses enclosing words denote the description of a sound such as ((laughter)).
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(.) A period enclosed by parentheses indicates a brief pause or less than a second.
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“Words” Single quotation marks with words, immediately following Spanish data are my translations of the Spanish into English.
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The utterances that come before and include “I bit him” reflect story time, because they are meant as a linguistic representation of events that took place in the past.
Goffman (1981) describes footing as the alignment one takes up in relation to another in conversation. Footing is an analytic term that allows us to see these paralegals function as both advocates for their clients in some utterances, but as gatekeepers for their institution in others.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science Program (SBR#-9709938) and the Social Science Research Council’s Predoctoral Sexuality Research Fellowship Program for supporting the 13 months of fieldwork that I carried out to collect the protective order interview data. In addition, I am indebted to the Latina women and the service providers in my field sites, who agreed to participate in this study. The idea for this article was inspired by Lisa Frohmann’s study on women’s conceptualizations of safety. Her innovative study in this area led me to think that women must also have very specific ideas of what risk looks like. Though Latina women speak about other forms of risk when creating their testimony in protective order interviews, this article focuses on the risks involved in “speaking.” This article had its genesis in two conference papers that I wrote: “Testimony vs. testimonio?” Safe and risky communicative spaces for Latina survivors of violence” (presented at the Sixth Annual Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies Conference in Valdosta, Georgia, March 1–3, 2001) and the “Narrative as testimony and as testimonio: Issues of safety and risk in Latina women’s accounts of violence” presented at the joint meetings of the Canadian Law and Society Association and the Law and Society Association, Vancouver, British Columbia May 29–June 1, 2002.
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Trinch, S. Risky subjects: narrative, literary testimonio and legal testimony. Dialect Anthropol 34, 179–204 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9105-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9105-x