I, Rigoberta Menchu/Salvador Witness/The Same Fate as the Poor
Druska, John
Human witness, earned advocacy I, RIGOBEBTA MEMCHD AN INDIAN WOMAN IN GUATEMALA Edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray Translated by Ann Wright Schocken Books, $8.95, 251 pp. SALVADOR...
...What the Maryknolls had seen happen earlier in Chile, for example, suggested a lesson in popular deprivation that cried out to inform their work among the poor elsewhere, a lesson that became of a piece with their experiences in Nicaragua and El Salvador...
...Through distillations of suffering, bafflement, and fellow feeling, they bear quixotic witness against predestined death...
...While many North American press accounts treat Central American conflicts in terms of East-West pawnslips, Men-chii speaks out for a disenfranchised majority within her country, arguing for tribal cultural rights...
...I've read parts of them at leisure, a two-week-old child propped on my lap, and invoked in response Pasolini's filmed vision of King Herod's slaughter...
...In presenting other versions of sociopolitical reality, the hortative texts under review are not without their flaws...
...And the genuine devotion of three nuns' lives to a mission vocation make of their actions — however abbreviated in this account — a convincing single utterance, a prayer raised for us all insofar as we speak and listen as people to other people...
...She describes a symbiotic attachment to the Gospel's liberating message while insisting on the integrity of Indian ways, each tribe's and person's right to identify as free people with their own cultural history...
...Deeper than the persistent oppression and death in these works runs the forceful current of persons — the mystery of persons radically touching each other — in a way that seldom touches the way nations label each other...
...Do we entertain a kind of political pathetic fallacy that denies whole peoples their own characters, inconsistencies, errors, and triumphs — and does this encourage oppressive leaders interested in our financial aid to cater to our projected self-centered illusion...
...It is not as finely-shaped biography or exhaustive reportage that we value books like these...
...State-decreed killings claim her parents, her brothers...
...They vilify some Central American governments, admire revolutionaries, decry overt and covert U.S...
...What's important here is the human witness, the important presences evoked...
...The labels come easier...
...But these personal histories surprise...
...In a local bar I've heard a tourist describe her Mexican vacation as a resort-bound, week-long happy hour and had to imagine Jean Donovan living it up in Cleveland, the world at her disposal, before her conversion to missionary work — and I tried to imagine what mysterious human intricacies made for the change, what determines how close we come to one another's lives and deaths...
...intervention in Latin America...
...It's a lesson some of us have a hard time hearing because eyewitness language doesn't fit the "scenarios" some of our leaders choose to broadcast...
...John Druska THE SAME undercurrent, tracing social oppression's role in shaping lives and deaths, runs through these Central American accounts...
...In these countries, at least, histories repeat...
...Nothing in Jean Donovan's conventional youth and short lucrative business career quite prepares us for her later sometimes quirky rejection of conventional expectations and her feisty willingness to risk death for others...
...Insofar as these books take or imply similar stands, they may be called propaganda...
...Ironically, Carter recently has attacked the Reagan administration's inability to perceive other peoples' valid concerns in the hemisphere, apart from our superimposed labeling...
...Menchii, then, came to draw on Christianity in helping her advocate specific human rights, while Jean Donovan in Salvador Witness, and the three Mary-knoll Sisters in The Same Fate, came to draw on their fieldwork with Indians and the poor as a way of fulfilling Christian ideals...
...This propaganda is personally earned, advocacy growing from the evidence the senses compose rather than from the exigencies of political ideology or policy...
...In the others, something testamental assumes life...
...It argues, in Ita Ford's brother Bill's words, that both the Carter and Reagan administrations have had "a fixed policy in Salvador, and that policy will not bend to reason, or eyewitness, or anything else...
...Burgos-Debray lets stand Menchii's repetitious recollections...
...Menchii's repetitions assume the power of incantatory refrain, hallowing the lives she remembers — now lost but not quite...
...Rigoberta Menchii's survival sounds, too, its miraculous note: body and spirit somehow whole and triumphant after passage through inhuman violence and suffering...
...They force us to place ourselves and our lives in relationship with the lives and deaths they tell...
...But let's distinguish...
...Because oppression, revolution, repression have so easily led to capricious and general murder throughout Central American history, these three books brim with death...
...MaryknoU Sisters Publication, $4.95,150 pp...
...Or those quotidian details — the absurdity of Donovan's lunching at McDonald's the afternoon of her last day in El Salvador, or her sometimes banal colloquial musings — they accentuate our bond with her to the commonplace...
...Rigoberta Menchii's autobiographical monologue shows the oppressed themselves driven to self-awareness and toward self-determination, while the biographical chronicles of four women variously drawn to serve the oppressed reveal how their service drove them deeper into a vocation of identification with the poor, the deprived, the murdered...
...The most compelling part of Salvador Commonweal: 152 Witness is a grimly terse epilogue (''Chronicle of a Cover-up") that reports the efforts to uncover the truth about the churchwomen's deaths...
...Carrigan's prose occasionally romanticizes portentously...
...Against lethal backgrounds — the systematic Okie-like enslavement of Guatemalan Indians, or the 1930s Nicaraguan and Salvadoran slaughters of revolutionaries and restoration of oligarchic power — these stories about natives and North American Christians moved to organize for grass-roots needs seem at times pathetically overshadowed, their heroines foredoomed...
...THE SANE FATE AS THE POOR Judith M. Noone, M.M...
...A married friend, who spurns a landowner's son, gets hacked to pieces while holding her baby...
...Repressive murders increase with the Indians' awareness that their landless migrant status has made them economic zombies, and in proportion to their efforts to organize for homesteads, whether spiritual or physical...
...SALVADOR WITNESS: THE LIFE AND CALLING OF JEAN DONOVAN Ana Carrigan Simon and Schuster, $16.95, 324 pp...
...It is the key question all three books raise: the degree to which we, as North American partisans, read other places in the world in self-centered terms...
...The Same Fate focuses on Carla Piette's accidental death and Maura Clarke and Ita Ford's murders, and here we sense solidarity reaffirmed, the MaryknoU mission spirit ascendant over the morass El Salvador has become...
...In one, a protagonist survives to testify abroad...
...The same fate is ordained for today's poor and those who stand close to them as in the past...
...Yet in their contexts these stories command respect...
Vol. 112 • March 1986 • No. 5
