“Through All Things Modern”: Second Thoughts on Testimonio John Beverley This is why Indians are thought to be stupid. They can't think, they don’t know anything, they say. But we have hidden our identity be- cause we needed to resist, we wanted to protect what governments have wanted to take away from us. They have tried to take our things away and impose others on us, be it through religion, through dividing up the land, through schools, through books, through radio, through all things modern. —Rigoberta Menchi, /, Rigoberta Menchu. An Indian Woman in Guatemala’ To situate the title and the quote: These are second thoughts both on the testimonio itself and on my own work on testimonio? By testimonio This paper had its genesis in a talk presented at a conference at the Kellogg Institute of the University of Notre Dame entitled “Narrative Practices and Cultural Discourse In Latin America,” March 23, 1990. It will appear in a collection of papers from that confer- ence edited by Steven Bell et al., Critical Theory, Cultural Politics and Latin American Narrative (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming). 1. Rigoberta Menchu, with Elizabeth Burgos, /, Rigoberta Menchd. An Indian Woman in Guatemala, trans. Ann Wright (London: Verso, 1984), 170-71. All subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number only. 2. John Beverley, “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative),” boundary 2 18:2, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Duke University Press. CCC 0190-3659/91/$1.50.2 boundary 2 / Summer 1991 | understand a novel or novella-length narrative told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real-life protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts. In recent years it has become an important, perhaps the dominant, form of literary narrative in Latin America. The best-known ex- ample available in English translation is the text that the passage above comes from, |, Rigoberta Menchi, the life story of a young Guatemalan Indian woman, which, as she puts it in her presentation, is intended to represent “the reality of a whole peopie.”* | want to start with the February 1990 elections in Nicaragua, which remind us of Jameson's redefinition of Lacan's category of the real as that which hurts. A decade after the revolutionary high tide of 1979-1981, it is clear that the moment of optimism about the possibilities for rapid social transformation in Central America has passed. Whether this represents. anew, postrevolutionary stage in that region’s history or simply a reces- sion before the appearance of a new cycle of radicalization—perhaps also involving Mexico this time—is open to question. Testimonios like /, Rigo- berta Menchu, or Omar Cabezas's Fire from the Mountain and Margaret Randall’s Sandino’s Daughters from Nicaragua, were very much part of the literary imaginary of our solidarity with or critical support for the Central American revolutions. So the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, while it is certainly not absolute—there is still quite a bit of room for maneuver and struggle—must force us in any case to reconsider the relation between testimonio, liberation struggles, and academic pedagogy. | want to cen- ter this reconsideration in particular around the question of the relation of testimonio to the field of literature. This will in turn connect with some ques- tions about what it is we do in the humanities generally, and particularly in connection with Latin American and Third World literatures. 1 ended my reflection on the testimonio in “The Margin at the Center” with the thought that literature, even where it is infused with a popular-democratic form and content, as in the case of testimonio, is not in itself a popular- Modern Fiction Studies 35/1 (1989): 11-28, a special issue entitled “Narratives of Colo- nial Resistance,” edited by Timothy Brennan. This essay hereafter cited in my text as MC. 3. “My name is Rigoberta Menchil. | am twenty-three years old. This is my testimony. | didn't learn it from a book, and | didn’t learn it alone. I'd like to stress that it's not only my life, it's also the testimony of my people. It’s hard for me to remember everything that's happened to me in my life since there have been many very bad times but, yes, mo- ments of joy as well. The important thing is that what has happened to me has happened to many other people too: My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people” (1).Beverley / Second Thoughts on Testimonio 3 democratic cultural form, and (pace Gramsci) it is an open question as to whether it can ever be. How much of a favor do we do testimo- nio by positing, as here, that it has become a new form of literature or by making it an alternative reading to the canon (one track of the new Stanford civilization requirement now includes /, Rigoberta Menchu)? Perhaps such moves preempt or occlude a vision of an emergent popular-democratic culture that is no longer based on the institutions of humanism and literature. (MC, 26) | might have added “no longer based, that is, on the university,” because | believe that literature and the university (in the historically specific form each takes during and after the Renaissance) have been, appearances to the contrary, mutually dependent on each other and as such deeply im- plicated in the processes of state formation and colonial expansion that define early modern Europe. This legacy still marks each, making their interaction in contemporary processes of decolonization and postcoloniality at the same time both necessary and problematic. Testimonios are in a sense made for people like us, in that they allow us to participate as academics and yuppies, without leaving our studies and classrooms, in the concreteness and relativity of actual social struggles (“we,” “our,” and “us” designate here the readers—or potential readers— of this journal). To borrow a passage from Bakhtin's definition of prose art i essay “Discourse in the Novel” (with thanks to Barbara Harlow for bringing it to my attention), testimonios are texts whose discourses are “still warm from the struggle and hostility, as yet unresolved and still fraught with hostile intentions and accents.” But they are (putting Derrida in parenthe- ses here) still also just texts and not actual warm or, in the case of the victims of the death squads, not-so-warm bodies. | am not trying to guilt-trip people about being academics and yuppies. | am both. Russell Jacoby's critique of the academic encapsulation of the Left is wrong; the university is an absolutely crucial and central institution of late capitalist society. | believe in Gramsci’s slogan of a long march through the institutions, and it follows that | think that our battlefield is the classroom and conference hall, that the struggle over the teaching and interpretation of literature has some- thing to do with the production of new forms of ideological hegemony. As a Pedagogic issue, the use of testimonio has to do concretely with the possi- bility of interpellating our students (and all readers are or were at one time Students) in a relation of solidarity with liberation movements and human rights struggles, both here in the United States and abroad. In the theoretical discussion on testimonio, much deconstructive