Going Global

The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers

Amal Amireh, Lisa Suhair Majaj

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317954088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book explores the problematic of reading and writing about third world women and their texts in an increasingly global context of production and reception. The ten essays contained in this volume examine the reception, both academic and popular, of women writers from India, Bangladesh, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Ghana, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala, Iraq/Israel and Australia. The essays focus on what happens to these writers' poetry, fiction, biography, autobiography, and even to the authors themselves, as they move between the third and first worlds. The essays raise general questions about the politics of reception and about the transnational character of cultural production and consumption. This edition also provides analyses of the reception of specific texts - and of their authors - in their context of origin as well as the diverse locations in which they are read. The essay participate in on-going discussions about the politics of location, about postcolonialism and its discontents, and about the projects of feminism and multiculturalism in a global age.

SECTION II
The Writer as Text

Race, Gender, and the Politics of Reception of Latin American Testimonios

EVA PAULINO BUENO

The phenomenon called testimonio—testimonials—has gamed considerable attention in the study of Latin American texts in the United States in the last ten years, even though the practice of giving testimony is an old one, and texts about testimonials exist in abundance. In this century alone, the testimonials of the survivors of concentration camps, as well as those given by people fleeing their countries in dictatorship-ridden Latin America, constitute moving monuments to human endurance and courage under the most extreme repression, torture, and suffering. In this essay, I want to discuss the peculiarities of the reception of some testimonial texts in the North American university. In the process, I hope to clarify some questions about the almost total concentration on the study of women's testimonials,¹ and to explore the reasons why the vast majority of texts studied in the United States come from people of Indian origin.² ("Indian," here, does not encompass the peoples called Native Americans who live in the United States. Indeed, as far as the study of testimonials in North American academia goes, Indians always live outside this country.) The exclusionary nature of the practice of testimonio and its political reverberations have so far gone not just untheorized, but mostly unquestioned. In this essay, I want to ask why this has been so, and whose interests have been served in the maintenance of this situation.

For this study, I will use three mam texts: I . . . Rigoberta Menchú; An Indian Woman in Guatemala, by Rigoberta Menchu and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, Let Me Speak!, by Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Viezzer, and Child of the Dark, by Carolina Maria de Jesus. The first of these texts is very well known in the North American academic circuit; the second one is known by people who specialize m Latin American texts; and the third one, after a period of relative "success" with students of political science and Latin American history, has almost totally disappeared from shelves and college syllabi. In the two first cases, the women giving their testimonials appear as representatives of their group—in Menchú's case the Quiché speaking Indians of Guatemala, and in Domitila de Chungara's case the miners of Bolivia. In general, both have been considered as representatives of the wider segment of peasants and political victims of the terrorist governments of their respective countries. And, as if inexorably, both Menchú and de Chungara become the representatives of most of the people of Guatemala and Bolivia, respectively.³

In great contrast, no intellectual group or political movement ever claimed that Carolina Maria de Jesus's text represents a segment of Brazilians, or that she herself is a voice for a community. Even when Child of the Dark was constantly in the syllabi of university courses, Carolina de Jesus was never taken to be speaking for the Blacks of Brazil, or for the women of Brazil, or for the peasants of Brazil. At most, she was considered a voice speaking against the evils of favelas (shantytowns) and on behalf of favelados (the people who live in favelas).⁴

Two of the reviews quoted on the covers of the book demonstrate how Carolina de Jesus stands out as an individual speaking from (or even against) her background. The review in the New York Herald Tribune says that Child of the Dark is "the raw, primitive journal of a street scavenger . . . who fought daily for survival for herself and her three illegitimate children." In the piece quoted from the New York Times Book Review, de Jesus is referred to as "a witness to the vicious fights, the knifings, the sordid sex life of the favelados—prisoners of poverty, prey of the unscrupulous, breeders of revolution."⁵ On the other hand, the covers of the books by de Chungara and Menchu immediately present these women as leaders of their societies. Let Me Speak! refers to de Chungara as "a leader of a Housewives' Committee, dedicated to improving miners' and peasants' conditions." This book, the Library Journal writes, is "an important document from a usually silent group." Two Thirds, also quoted in the back cover, refers to Let Me Speak! as "the story of a people as much as . . . the story of an individual."⁶ The excerpt from the review in the London Times on I . . . Rigoberta Menchu summarizes other commentaries: "This is a fascinating and moving description of the culture of an entire people."

Two questions preoccupy me at this point: first, what kind of community can produce an individual who can express, in her personal history, the history of the whole community? And, second, what historical circumstances give some women the power to speak from inside their communities and represent them to the outside world? Adrianne Aron, writing about testimonies as "a therapeutic tool in the treatment of people who have suffered psychological trauma under state terrorism," states the following:

In many areas of Latin American people with little preparation for public expression—most notably, women—have come forward with their testimony to challenge oppressive power structures and to reappropriate for themselves and their communities the moral standards and social order taken away by the repression.

(175)

Among these women Aron mentions the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the Co-Madres (Committee of the Mothers and Relatives of the Disappeared, Political Prisoners, and Assassinated) of El Salvador, and the GAM (Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo—Mu tual Support Group) of Guatemala. But the existence of these groups in the countries mentioned still does not explain why their members are mostly women. Could it be because women have traditionally been seen as nurturing, as deeply embedded in the dynamics of the group, rather than as separate individuals? Or could the reason be more simply that, precisely because of their gender, they expect more respect (or less violence) from the political powers of their countries? Whether we accept all or none of these possibilities, another question still remains in relation to all testimonial texts in general: to what extent have these women been able to speak as women, and to what extent have they had to totally ignore their gender and become, instead, communal beings? And, if they have become communal beings, why are some communities seen as worthier of telling their stories than others? Child of the Dark, Let me Speak!, and I . . . Rigoberta Menchú together provide an excellent occasion for the discussion of these matters. I will use them not so much as antagonistic examples of testimonial texts, but as complementary ones.

Since the conditions that the three women portray in their texts have many similarities, it is strange that in this latest surge of interest in testimonial texts by Latin American women, Carolina de Jesus's text is never mentioned. Here we have, on one side, two texts produced by two oppressed Latin American women of Indian heritage, and their enthusiastic reception by North American academics; and on the other side, a text produced by an oppressed Black woman, and its non-reception by North American academics. It surely cannot be either the subject matter or the formats of the books themselves (de Jesus's diary format, as opposed to Domitila de Chungara's and Rigoberta Menchu's more traditional oral testimonial accounts) that determine this difference. Books, as cultural artifacts, do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, as I hope to demonstrate, Carolina de Jesus's race, as well as her self-depiction as a sexual female being, contributed to the fact that her work was not hailed even as a precursor when the study of testimonios became fashionable in the United States. And it is the political energies existing within the North American academic world that determined the different reception of these testimonials.

Of course these energies are a world onto themselves, but any discussion of testimonios needs to acknowledge their existence. Consider, for instance, George Yudice's opening paragraph in "Testimonio and Postmodernism" where he says that "[m]ore than any other form of writing in Latin America, the testimonio has contributed to the demise of the traditional role of the intellectual/artist as spokesperson for the 'voiceless' " (15). That is, because of testimonio, the formerly silent people can now have a direct, unmediated access to the public. The problem with Yudice's statement is that it ignores the fact that, if it were not for the heavy sponsorship of testimonial texts in the North American university, these texts would have never achieved such a high degree of political and intellectual provocation in the country. It is true that Rigoberta Menchu's book reached the North American classrooms in numbers never before seen for a book of this kind. However, because of the high volume of scholarship generated about testimonios, and I . . . Rigoberta Menchú especially, the most measurable result has been that the people whose voices have been heard most are those who work in North American academic institutions. In other words, the study of testimonio has been transformed into a game of mirrors in which North American academics who write, speak, and publish on the subject assume the position of spokespersons for the rest of American academics, determining which book is worthy of study and why.

Of course, it is quite encouraging that this subject, the testimonio, has attracted the attention of so many scholars in the country. The problem that needs to be addressed is that the scholarship generated around the testimonial narrative from Latin America has created a very rigid canon. This canon, dictated from top to bottom, follows an oppressive pattern and ends up creating a given set of "oppressed" who are Indians, live "far away," and conduct very strict, if any, sex lives. As it is prescribed now, in the United States, the study of testimonios has become the construction of a form that, on the one hand, effaces the individuality and the gender of its authors and, on the other, promotes their identity exclusively as representatives of their communities. Moreover, it has become entangled in rigid formulas that detract from the testimonials' initial liberating and democratic impulses.

At this point, I must emphasize that I believe that the plight of the people represented by the three women is equally important: the poor of Brazil, the miners in Bolivia, and the Guatemalan Indians all deserve respect and liberty to pursue their lives with dignity. Moreover, the lives of Carolina de Jesus, Domitila de Chungara, and Rigoberta Menchú offer examples of extraordinary courage and resistance during moments of extreme suffering. Any people should be proud to have among their members such individuals who can persevere in duress, fight against their oppressors, and yet keep a generous attitude towards their fellow human beings.

This essay does not intend to assess these texts, or their authors, much less to compare the suffering that each portrays. Rather, it intends to be a reflection on the factors—race, sex, place of origin—that determine that some books become part of a "canon" of testimonials, whereas others either attract little attention or become "out of fashion" even when the conditions that gave rise to them have not disappeared. The study of testimonies has become prominent in the United States since the last years of the 1980s, especially in departments of Latin American Languages and in departments of Languages and of Humanities. As I see them, however, the factors leading to this interest in the testimonio are extremely complex, extrapolating merely academic concerns, and becoming the vehicle of ideological and political practices. What I want to suggest is an "opening" of the canon, so that more texts, from different places, can be fully incorporated into the study of testimonial texts. And, although it might be clear by now, I will stress that I do not agree with intellectuals of Dinesh D'Souza's persuasion, whose claims that Menchú's text is not good literature are fraught with political intentions. I believe that D'Souza's statement that the study of this book is a "romanticizing of (the) suffering" of the oppressed only serves a political agenda whose intent is, ultimately, not to hear the oppressed at all, but to ignore their appeals to justice, or to silence them completely.⁷ In what follows, I will review the existing scholarship on the form of the testimonio and propose the reasons why, I believe, Carolina Maria de Jesus's book, Child of the Dark, has never been considered part of the testimonio canon.

I

Carolina Maria de Jesus's account, unknown in the disciplinary context of the studies of testimonios, has many differences from both Domitila de Chungara's and Rigoberta Menchu's books. In April 1958 Audálio Dantas, then a young reporter working with a local newspaper, met Carolina Maria de Jesus in a ceremony for the opening of a playground near Canindé, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. She was one of the residents in a slum nearby. What called Dantas's attention to Carolina de Jesus was the fact that, in an argument with some adults who were taking the children's place on the playground toys, she threatened to put their names in her book. Curious about this "book," Dantas approached de Jesus and asked to see it. It took him some time to gain her confidence, but she finally showed him a number of notebooks in which she had two kinds of text. In one, she wrote stories; in the other, she wrote her diaries. After looking at the material, Dantas simply discarded the fictional stories as "childish fantasies" and took the diaries to his newspaper office. These diaries speak in very exacting detail about her life as a single mother who picks paper and scrap metal from the street and sells it in order to feed herself and her children. Excerpts from de Jesus's diaries appeared in the newspaper and attracted considerable attention. In two years, a somewhat edited version of the whole text of the diaries appeared in print with the name of Quarto de despejo (literally "room where garbage is dumped").

When the book appeared, ten thousand copies were sold in three days and, "in less than six months ninety thousand copies were sold in Brazil and today it is still on the best-seller list, having sold more than any other Brazilian book in history" (translator's preface, 13). Carolina, we are told in the preface, used the profits from the book to buy a brick house, but finally died in abject poverty.⁸

Domitila Barrios de Chungara's book originated in a much more p...