In order to transform the spoken word into a book, I worked as follows.
I began by transcribing all the tapes. By that I mean that nothing was left out, not a word, even if it was used incorrectly or was later changed. I altered neither the style nor the sentence structure. The Spanish original covers almost five hundred pages of typescript.
I then read through the transcript carefully. During a second reading, I established a thematic card index, first identifying the major themes (father, mother, childhood, education) and then those which occurred most frequently (work, relations with ladinos, linguistic problems). This was to provide the basis of the division of the material into chapters. I soon reached the decision to give the manuscript the form of a monologue: that was how it came back to me as I re-read it. I therefore decided to delete all my questions. By doing so I became what I really was: Rigoberta’s listener. I allowed her to speak and then became her instrument, her double, by allowing her to make the transition from the spoken to the written word. I have to admit that this decision made my task more difficult, as I had to insert linking passages if the manuscript was to read like a monologue, like one continuous narrative. I then divided it into chapters organized around the themes I had already identified. I followed my original chronological outline, even though our conversations had not done so, so as to make the text more accessible to the reader. The chapters describing ceremonies relating to birth, marriage and harvests did cause some problems, as I somehow had to integrate them into the narrative. I inserted them at a number of different points, but eventually went back to my original transcript and followed the order of Rigoberta’s spontaneous associations. It was pointed out to me that placing the chapter dealing with birth ceremonies at the beginning of the book might bore the reader. I was also advised simply to cut it or include it in an appendix. I ignored all these suggestions. Perhaps I was wrong, in that the reader might find it somewhat off-putting. But I could not leave it out, simply out of respect for Rigoberta. She talked to me not only because she wanted to tell us about her sufferings but also–or perhaps mainly–because she wanted us to hear about a culture of which she is extremely proud and which she wants to have recognized. Once the manuscript was in its final form, I was able to cut a number of points that are repeated in more than one chapter. Some of the repetitions have been left as they stand as they lead in to other themes. That is simply Rigoberta’s way of talking. I also decided to correct the gender mistakes which inevitably occur when someone has just learned to speak a foreign language. It would have been artificial to leave them uncorrected and it would have made Rigoberta look ‘picturesque’, which is the last thing I wanted.
It remains for me to thank Rigoberta for having granted me the privilege of meeting her and sharing her life with me. She allowed me to discover another self. Thanks to her, my American self is no longer something ‘uncanny’. To conclude, I would like to dedicate these lines from Miguel Angel Asturias’s ‘Barefoot Meditations’ to Rigoberta Menchú:
Rise and demand; you are a burning flame.
You are sure to conquer there where the final horizon
Becomes a drop of blood, a drop of life,
Where you will carry the universe on your shoulders,
Where the universe will bear your hope.
Elisabeth Burgos-Debray
Montreux-Paris
December 1982.
I
THE FAMILY
‘We have always lived here: we have the right to go on living where we are happy and where we want to die. Only here can we feel whole; nowhere else would we ever feel complete and our pain would be eternal.’
—Popol Vuh
My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I am twenty-three years old. This is my testimony. I didn’t learn it from a book and I 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, moments 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.
I must say before I start that I never went to school, and so I find speaking Spanish very difficult. I didn’t have the chance to move outside my own world and only learned Spanish three years ago. It’s difficult when you learn just by listening, without any books. And, well, yes, I find it a bit difficult. I’d like to start from when I was a little girl, or go back even further to when I was in my mother’s womb, because my mother told me how I was born and our customs say that a child begins life on the first day of his mother’s pregnancy.
There are twenty-two indigenous ethnic groups in Guatemala, twenty-three including the mestizos, or ladinos as we call them. Twenty-three groups and twenty-three languages. I belong to one of them–the Quiché people–and I practise Quiché customs, but I also know most of the other groups very well through my work organizing the people. I come from San Miguel Uspantán,* in the north-western province of El Quiché. I live near Chajul† in the north of El Quiché. The towns there all have long histories of struggle. I have to walk six leagues, or twenty-four kilometres, from my house to the town of Uspantán. The village is called Chimel,‡ I was born there. Where I live is practically a paradise, the country is so beautiful. There are no big roads, and no cars. Only people can reach it. Everything is taken down the mountainside on horseback or else we carry it ourselves. So, you can see, I live right up in the mountains.
My parents moved there in 1960 and began cultivating the land. No-one had lived up there before because it’s so mountainous. But they settled there and were determined not to leave no matter how hard the life was. They’d first been up there collecting the mimbre that’s found in those parts, and had liked it. They’d started clearing the land for a house, and had wanted to settle there a year later but they didn’t have the means. Then they were thrown out of the small house they had in the town and had no alternative but to go up into the mountains. And they stayed there. Now it’s a village with five or six caballerias of cultivated land.
They’d been forced to leave the town because some ladino families came to settle there. They weren’t exactly evicted but the ladinos just gradually took over. My parents spent everything they earned and they incurred so many debts with these people that they had to leave the house to pay them. The rich are always like that. When people owe them money they take a bit of land or some of their belongings and slowly end up with everything. That’s what happened to my parents.
My father was an orphan, and had a very hard life as a child. He was born in Santa Rosa Chucuyub,* a village in El Quiché. His father died when he was a small boy, leaving the family with a small patch of maize. But when that was finished, my grandmother took her three sons to Uspantán. She got work as a servant to the town’s only rich people. Her boys did jobs around the house like carrying wood and water and tending animals. But as they got bigger, her employer said she didn’t work enough for him to go on feeding such big boys. She had to give away her eldest son, my father, to another man so he wouldn’t