The publishers of David Stoll's book,Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans, will be gratified at the willingness of the New York Times to adopt and embellish their thinly veiled innuendos and ill-supported allegations. (See Larry Rohter's story in the NYT for December 15.) The book, wrote Stoll's publishers, was about a "living legend, a young Guatemalan orphaned by death squads who said that her odyssey from a Mayan Indian village to revolutionary exile was 'the story of all poor Guatemalans'. Published in the autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchu her words brought the Guatemalan army's atrocities to world attention and propelled her to the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize." But, they imply, their author had dug up another story entirely. I, Rigoberta Menchu was "not the eyewitness account it purported to be" but rather a story edited by Elisabeth Burgos which the Nobel laureate has "seemed to repudiate" and which "served the ideological needs of the urban left". Indeed, this tendentious tale is alleged to be responsible for "caricaturing the complex feelings of Guatemalan Indians towards the guerrillas" and for misleading "human rights activists and the new multicultural orthodoxy in North American universities." But anyone who actually reads David Stoll's book, based, we are told, on many years of research, soon finds that these tantalising allegations are not borne out, although they are sometimes echoes of insinuations to be found in his last chapter. For starters, Stoll discovered that I,Rigoberta Menchu is exactly the book it has claimed to be. Elisabeth Burgos, the Venezuelan writer and anthropologist who edited the book from twenty-six hours of interviews with Rigoberta in 1982, had, he found, produced a text very faithful to those interviews; she allowed him to check for himself by listening to the tapes. Burgos encouraged Rigoberta to speak at length and without interruption, to tell her own story in her own way. Stoll was unable to find any evidence at all that Burgos was imposing her own viewpoint on the self-possessed and articulate 22-year-old. Burgos did, however, urge Menchu to explain her cultural background and the customs of her people. Some of this material was then spliced into the narrative at appropriate points and digressions trimmed. But the words and emphasis of the book were Rigoberta's. The insinuation that the book was somehow scripted by the "urban left" with their romantic notions of peasants and violence is quite at odds with anything that Stoll discovered. He might also have mentioned that Verso, the publishers responsible for the English edition of I, Rigoberta Menchu, also published a study of the Central American civil wars, James Dunkerley's Power in the Isthmus, first published in 1988 and subsequently much reprinted, which gave a critical account of guerrilla activities in Guatemala and more scrupulous narrative of the complexities of the events in Guatemala than is to be found in Stoll's work. For some reason Stoll fails to mention this well-known study in his extensive bibliography, no doubt because it would undermine simplistic claims about the "urban left." Both Elisabeth Burgos and Rigoberta Menchu made it clear from the outset that they had a political purpose - to expose the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan army and to allow the voice of an Indian peasant to be heard. Rigoberta made it perfectly clear that she was a supporter and activist of a peasant organisation and guerrilla group. Her account was avowedly partisan and not the fruit of some judicial investigation striving to be fair to the landlords and army officers. It was based on her own experiences and those of close relatives and friends. While Rigoberta did not foreground family or village quarrels, any reader of the book could see that indios and ladinos, the people of one village and those of another, were sometimes at odds with one another. Rigoberta was not telling the story of a triumphant peasant rebellion but rather of a movement which had suffered cruel repression and sometimes failed to get its message through. From the New York Times's report it might seem that Rigoberta's book is "all lies," as it quotes someone saying. Is it, perhaps, the case that Rigoberta's mother and father were not killed, or that the army was not massacring thousands of peasants? In fact, both Stoll's book and the reporter's story confirm such facts. Instead, the New York Times queries details of Rigoberta's account and her claims that she personally was present at all the killings she describes. In literal-minded fashion the Times tries to fault Rigoberta's transparently metaphorical claims, such as to be telling the story of "all poor Guatemalans." Both the Times and Stoll, though the former far more blatantly than the latter, write on the implicit assumption that if Rigoberta's account does not square at all points with those of someone else, then Rigoberta must be lying. For example, she describes how her brother Petrocinio was captured by the army and burnt in front of other family members, whereas the reporter finds another brother who says it was not like that at all; in fact Petrocinio was kidnapped, kept in a hole and shot. Two other younger brothers of the laureate had died of disease and malnutrition, but a family member is quoted to the effect that Rigoberta could not have witnessed this and it had happened before she was born. The New York Times made great play with the supposed fact that a brother called Nicolas, whom Rigoberta describes as having died, is actually alive and well. Yet in Rigoberta's new book, Crossing Borders, she furnishes a chart of family members and their fate from which it appears that she had two brothers named Nicolas, one who died and another who was given the same name. Stoll notes that Crossing Borders contains essentially the same story about Rigoberta's early years as I, Rigoberta Menchu but does not submit it to the detailed examination his thesis should require. The New York Times reporter claims that Rigoberta was not as poor as she makes herself out to be and that she attended a "prestigious boarding school." Rigoberta did mention living in a convent in I Rigoberta Menchu and also her time working as a maid. Stoll's researches bear out that she worked as a maid at the convent school, being allowed to attend classes at the same time. While Rigoberta's family was not the poorest in her village they were able to pay nothing towards her few years of education. By Guatemalan, let alone North American, standards they were of very modest means. Reading both the report and the book, it is evident that there are a number of puzzling discrepancies between Rigoberta's testimony in 1982 and what others with first-hand experience claim. The recently orphaned 22-year-old will have lacked information and misunderstandings could have arisen between interviewer and interviewee. Despite working on this story for ten years, Stoll failed to check out these possibilities in some elementary ways. For example, Burgos was willing to let him listen to all the tapes of her conservations with Rigoberta yet, for reasons he does not explain, he chose only to listen to two hours of tape. Some of the discrepancies which he writes about over pages might have resulted from small differences in tense or the precise language used to describe degrees of family relationship. Stoll himself says that Menchu's command of Spanish, while impressive, was not perfect. It seems at least possible that, say, references to brothers and cousins could sometimes have been confused in a quite innocent way. Armed with Rigoberta's verbatim testimony of 1982, both Stoll and the reporters could then have sent questions written in Spanish to Rigoberta for elucidation. By the time Stoll first meets Rigoberta she has already learnt that he is questioning her account of her brother's death; at this meeting he fails to explain to her the scope and character of his researches or to request her cooperation. Presumably to excuse his failure to submit queries to Rigoberta, Stoll relates the rebuff Rigoberta administers to a visiting Swedish academic to whom she explains her distrust of investigators and her belief that Native Americans should be allowed to tell their own story in their own way. Instead of seeking to allay the her fears and suspicions, or even simply sending a few simple questions, Stoll simply mails the English manuscript of his book to her foundation. While Elisabeth Burgos did all in her power to obtain Rigoberta's own story, the academic and journalist seem to have conducted themselves less professionally. Perhaps Menchu, speaking in a Paris flat in 1982, edited her own account, identifying with stories she had been told by others, highlighting her own hardships and presenting a hostile portrait of her enemies. Those who have worked in similar oral cultures tell me that the distinction between what has happened to oneself and what has happened to close relatives or friends can be easily lost. Likewise, in our culture, we think we have witnessed something when we have seen it on TV. Rigoberta was trying to explain how cruel and murderous the Guatemalan military were and how bad the situation was in her country for her people. The affected naivety belongs not to those who have lauded Rigoberta's book but to those who now seek to discredit it. Did they really suppose that because she was a Guatemalan peasant she was incapable of rhetoric and metaphor? Burgos explained to Stoll that Rigoberta's story had emerged as a torrent from the young woman who spoke without notes, or a diary, or preparation. The meeting had been set up simply for a short article in a Parisian weekly. It was Burgos who realised that they might make a book. Rigoberta was on a propaganda tour and may well have learnt to simplify her ordeals to make them more comprehensible. While she did mention her time with the nuns she dwelt on the hardships of the toilers in the coffee plantations. Stoll has not succeeded in proving that Rigoberta never worked on such a plantation, though he is happy to insinuate this. But even if all Stoll's suspicions are well-founded, which they may not be, he knows very well that she did not invent the blood-soaked plight of her people and country, even if she did portray it with partiality and curious, but ultimately inconsequential, errors of detail. Whether or not Rigoberta simplified her story for dramatic effect the journalists certainly simplify Stoll's book, almost eliminating his political argument. Stoll declares: "Indicting a Nobel Laureate for inaccuracy is not the point of what follows." The declaration is probably disingenuous but has anyway been ignored by the New York Times, which is only interested in exposing Rigoberta's supposed "lies." David Stoll's political criticism is flawed but should be registered nonetheless, since it is, he claims, the real point of his book. He alleges that Rigoberta and the "urban left" romanticised a guerrilla force whose activities had brought appalling violence to the region where she grew up, much of it intra-communal in nature. The curious aspect of this criticism is that the attentive reader of I Rigoberta Menchu would have grasped the enormous human cost of the guerrilla war or the fact that it often pitted indios against ladinos rather than peasants against landlords - with these categories overlapping at points but being by no means identical. Stoll sees the guerrillas and those who backed them as equivalently responsible for the terror in Guatemala, whereas Rigoberta has always refused to make such an equation. The claim that Rigoberta and Elisabeth Burgos were romanticising the guerrillas misses the fact that the two women were really embarked on a momentous change in the terrain and method of struggle. By telling her story as effectively as possible Rigoberta was doing something which the guerrilla commanders had failed to encompass - she was putting the army's brutal regime on the defensive. With Elisabeth Burgos's help she succeeding in alerting international public opinion. The eventual decision of the government to negotiate with the guerrillas was in part a fruit of this successful moral campaign. Stoll belabours Rigoberta for tardiness in endorsing the peace agreement without properly acknowledging her huge role in bringing the government to the negotiating table or the legitimacy of seeking to extract as many concessions as possible from the regime. Despite his book's length, Stoll also engages in his own simplification and editing. In particular he plays down the role of Catholic priests and the Catholic Church in Rigoberta's story and of its significance in the Guatemalan context. The Guatemalan military dictator in 1982 was General Rios Montt, a member of La Verbe, a Protestant fundamentalist organisation sponsored by the US organisation Gospel Outreach. Since the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala in 1954 the country had, in effect, been at the mercy of rightwing military men. In 1992 the government of Rios Montt resorted to a regime of outright terror significantly more murderous than that visited by Pinochet on Chile. In the years 1980 to 1985 some 50,000 peasants were killed and 46,000 driven into exile. The army itself boasted of its free-fire zones and of destroying 440 highland villages. Stoll half-heartedly suggests that Rios Montt, during a seventeen month stint as President, was a restraining influence. Much later Rios Montt was to relent and play a moderating role, but in the mid 1980s Catholic activists and priests understandably held him responsible for injecting a religious element into the bloody repression of the rebellious peasant communities. Indeed some sectors of the Catholic Church aligned themselves with the peasant and guerrilla organisations to which Rigoberta belonged. While her Catholic faith and her respect for the Church was already evident in I, Rigoberta Menchu, in the new book, recently published in English under the title Crossing Borders, Rigoberta makes even clearer the important role played by her Catholic mentors, such as Monsignor Ruiz, Bishop of Chiapas, Julia Esquivel, Mario Colen and the members of the Christian Coordinating Committee for Guatemala. But Stoll does not explore the influence of radical Catholicism on Rigoberta. On page 143 Stoll does register that the Church suffered persecution, while a brief passage on page 173 of Stoll's book refers to "Rigoberta and her story" being "in the middle of the central debate in the Catholic Church of the late 1970s and early 1980s." But in the next sentence Stoll is back to taxing the 22-year-old as if she was a duplicitous leader of the Marxist guerrillas: "What Rigoberta understated in 1982 was just how bad the previous year had been for the revolutionary network in the capital." Why is Stoll so coy about the role of the Catholic clergy? Why does an author so keen to expound the complexities of the conflicts in Guatemala fail to investigate the religious dimension? Could it be that Catholic priests make a less convenient target than "politically correct" urban leftists? Yet the fact is that the clergy had far more influence with Rigoberta than the North American urban leftists whom Stoll pillories so relentlessly. Stoll's own view of events is highly coloured by the fact that he did his research in the aftermath of a vicious civil war in which tens of thousands of those lucky enough to survive the army's onslaught had been driven from their homes into exile. Rios Montt responded to the guerrilla success in enlisting the support of indio peasants by a civic action plan called fusiles y frijoles (guns and beans) which successfully appealed to layers of the population which the guerrillas had not been able to reach. Not surprisingly, many participants in the military's civic action programme were Protestants, as are about a fifth of Guatemala's population. Much of Stoll's information seems to come from those who survived Guatemala's terrible internecine strife by aligning with, or accommodating to, the victors. At the close of his book Stoll almost admits some of the severe limitations of his approach to I, Rigoberta Menchu : "Even if it is not the eyewitness account it claims to be, that does not detract from its significance. Her story has helped shift perceptions of indigenous people from hapless victims to men and women fighting for their rights. The recognition she has won is helping Mayas become conscious of themselves as historical actors. To many ladinos as well as Mayas, Rigoberta is a national symbol and will continue to be one, however many vicissitudes she suffers because she is a living one." If he had taken these last points a little more seriously Stoll might have written a work less inviting of sensationalist exploitation. And he might have qualified that phrase "not an eyewitness account" since he does not deny that Rigoberta experienced and witnessed much that she relates, nor that there are other sorts of truth to be found in her story. David Stoll seeks to impose on her testimony standards that are very appropriate for work written by anthropologists in their own name. The view he strenuously opposes insists that the story of indigenous peoples belongs to them alone and that anthropologists should not seek to counterpose their own accounts to it. But his own standpoint is the mirror image of this exclusionary position. To insist on only one standard of truth and one type of document is a sterile and reductionist enterprise. I, Rigoberta Menchu is a classic work of testimony that must be compared with, for example, The Interesting Narrative of Elaudauh Equiano or Marjorie Shostack's Nisa: the Story of a Kung! Woman. The new Penguin/Viking edition of Equiano's work suggests that he probably borrowed a couple of scenes from another narrative by a former slave. And the reader of Shostack's vivid book sometimes wonders whether all of Nisa's amorous escapades are to be fully credited. But such doubts should not detract from the understanding we gain from the document; rather they should be seen as part of it. The last sentence of Stoll's book is probably true despite its awkward attempt to echo or mimic a Maya myth of regeneration: "The story Rigoberta gave her people can be chopped to pieces, like some of her neighbours were during the violence, but it will grow back together again, and maybe Guatemala will too." Verso Editorial Department, London, December 23rd 1998.