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Title: Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll ISBN: 0-8133-3694-5 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: January, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (14 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A must read for anyone who studies or works in Guatemala
Comment: This book was heavily criticized within the Guatemalan media due to its contraversial subject matter. Rigoberta Menchu is very well respected within the international community and this book reviews the accuracy of the 1982 book, I Rigoberta Menchu. I really enjoyed Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. It is obvious that an immense amount of research was invested into the topic and it is very thorough. More importantly, contrary to the media coverage it received, the book is neither attempting to slander Rigoberta Menchu nor is it a racist attack on indigenous peoples. David Stoll presents the Guatemalan civil war and the relationship between some indigenous communities and the guerrillas with refreshing clarity. He reveals the problems with one person, in this case Rigoberta Menchu, in speaking for an entire community-especially one as diverse as the "Mayans" of Guatemala. I would recommend the book for anyone interested in Guatemala.
Rating: 2
Summary: Author misses his own point
Comment: After 10 years of research, Stoll has shown that Menchu's book is an imperfect biography. How shocking! She went to sixth grade! She didn't witness her mother being tortured and murdered (although it did happen)!! There is no record of one of her brothers dying of malnutrition!!! For a time she participated in the unarmed political wing of the Guerrillas!!!!
As one who has spent several years living and working among Guatemalans who (barely) survived army massacres, tortures and disappearances, and who was in Guatemala when Stoll's book came out, I find these revelations to hardly be capital crimes.
Rigoberta's book was an attempt to bring international attention to the Guatemalan army's genocide campaign against the indigenous population. To that effect it was successful, although not nearly successful enough.
Is Menchu's book a perfect account of her life? Apparently not. Is it an accurate portrayal of what happened to millions of other indigenous Guatemalans? The UN-sponsored Truth Commission, and the Catholic Church's REMHI report have definatively answered in the affirmative.
In the end, you could say that Rigoberta's book is more accurately the story of "all poor Guatemalans" than it is her own. What Stoll sees as a fault is really one of the book's main virtues.
There are many stories that urgently need to be told about Guatemala. That Stoll would choose to spend his professional career attacking someone who has tirelessly fought for the human and cultural rights of Guatemala's indigenous people is the real mystery here. Instead of focusing on Rigoberta Menchu, a marginal, if noble, figure in Guatemala's sad history, why not undo the country's more dangerous mythic figure, Efrain Rios Montt (killed tens of thousands during his 16 month reign of terror, and now currently runs Guatemala's Congress and ruling party).
How many as-told-to autobiographies would stand up to 10 years of background checking? Personally, I'm waiting for Stoll's account of his own life story...
Rating: 2
Summary: Witchhunt: a nasty man in an ivory tower
Comment: Stoll doggedly and biasly challenges Mechu's authenticity. By focusing on discrepancies within her testimony as told to Elisabeth Burgos-DeBray and drawing minimal attention to Menchu's actual and substantial political work on the behalf of indigenous people world wide, he paints the picture of an alternately manipulative and naïve puppet of the left. Furthermore, he suggests teachers who use Menchu in the classroom have bought into a romantic myth about virtuous Latin American rebels.
Stoll's argument is three-fold: Firstly, he balks at the
Postmodern notion that view "truth" is subjective, and, through a laundry list of discrepancies, aims at exposing Menchu's truths as false. Secondly, he frets that teachers present I, Rigoberta Menchu, an Indian Woman in Guatemala as a stable, simplistic, and de-contextualized account of the massacres of Guatemalan indigenous persons. Most significantly, Stoll argues that in fetishizing Menchu we not supporting the cause of "all poor Guatemalans," as Menchu suggests in the opening lines of her testimonio, but the cause of Marxist-indoctrinated guerillas. Stoll even goes so far as to assert that the testimony of the Nobel Peace Prizewinner may have extended the violence in the Guatemalan highlands, prolonging "an unpopular war" (p.278).
Like Dinesh d'Souza's extreme right-wing book Illiberal Education, Stoll's poses a critique of the academic left. Unlike d'Souza's rant, Stoll's book is in turn a fascinating, but infuriating read, but ultimately mean-spirited, academically disingenuous and far from "objective."
For example, when Stoll points to debatable discrepancies within the testimony, he offers other voices and political contexts. He interviews people from Menchu's village El Chimel; he interviews I Rigoberta Menchu editor Elisabeth Burgos-Debray and the ambassador who survived the army-induced embassy fire in which Menchu's father ---who along with protesters had taken the ambassador hostage---dies. A chapter is devoted to fragmented interviews with women who allegedly attended a convent school with Menchu. Stoll relishs each detail that invalidates Menchu's claim that, like many other Mayan children, she did not attend formal school and only learned Spanish as she became an activist.
In many respects, Stoll's fieldwork seems exhaustive. It starts to pay off when Stoll deviates from his from his attack on Menchu's authenticity to historicize Guatemalan politics and trace the alliances of peasant and indigenous organizations. However, these discussions tend to break down as condemnations --- and conflations --- of Menchu and Marxism. Stoll's motives appear particularly ominous when it is revealed that, despite ten years of work in Guatemala, he listens to a mere two-and-a-half-hours of the eighteen hours of recorded testimony Rigoberta Menchu gives Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. And Stoll was right there in Burgos-Debray's apartment.
Many years have passed since the week in 1982 when Menchu, a political refugee, gave oral testimony to the Argentine anthropologist. Until recently, that week long meeting represented most of what the public gleaned about Rigoberta Menchu. Since the testimony concludes at the point of exile, it does not reveal Menchu's constant lobbying for indigenous rights and Guatemalan peace treaties at the UN, prior to winning the Nobel Peaceprize. It is fortunate that months before the Stoll hatchet job, Menchu's own account of her political work, including life after the Peaceprize, and episodes that were obscured in the first work, was published. Stoll's self-serving book should only be read along with its source material and her second book. Considered together, the three books fashion an intriguing matrix of truth-making, of interpretations and re-interpretations that shift based on political circumstance and personal positioning.
Still, my fundamental feeling is that Stoll was out to frame Menchu at any cost. It saddens me to see so many people jumping on his bandwagon, serving the purpose of further empowering the wealthy and privileged, and casting doubt on one of the rare voices of Central American indigenous people to reach us. Her story of oppression, resistence and survival is more important than any minor discrepencies Stoll so relishes. Stoll's book is pure careerism and is nasty to the core. Menchu's meaningful life work speaks louder. It inspires while Stoll's knarled intentions digust.
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Title: I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala by Rigoberta Menchu, E. Burgos-Debray, Ann Wright ISBN: 0860917886 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: August, 1987 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy by Arturo Arias, Editor,Arturo Arias, Elizabeth Chin ISBN: 0816636265 Publisher: University of Minnesota Press Pub. Date: March, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala by Daniel Wilkinson ISBN: 0618221395 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 26 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala by Stephen C. Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer, John H. Coatsworth, John H. Coatsworth ISBN: 0674075900 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: August, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Guatemala: Never Again! by Archidiocese of Guatemala, Thomas Quigley ISBN: 157075294X Publisher: Orbis Books Pub. Date: December, 1999 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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