John Leo

I, Rigoberta Menchu is a famous 1983 book, "the cornerstone of the multicultural canon," as one journal reported, and a book that helped its writer win the Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1999 the book presents us with two problems: (1) huge portions of it are untrue, and (2) a lot of professors who teach it on our campuses don’t want to hear about the falsity, or they just say that the truth doesn’t matter. "Whether the book is true or not, I don’t care," said Marjorie Agosin, head of the Spanish Department at Wellesley College.

Menchu’s book told the harrowing story of oppression of Mayan Indian peasants by light-skinned landowners in Guatemala. It tells how the author joined the guerrilla movement that flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book has strong appeal because it stresses indigenous rights, feminism, identity politics, Marxist class analysis—virtually the entire bundle of concerns of the campus left. The author won the Nobel in 1992 as a sort of anti-Columbus prize given to an oppressed native of the Americas on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing. But Menchu’s version of events has been picked apart in a new book by David Stoll, a Middlebury College anthropologist who interviewed 120 people in Menchu’s hometown. Menchu says she was an illiterate and monolingual girl whose father refused to send her to school. Stoll found that she had attended two elite boarding schools run by nuns and knew Spanish as well as Mayan.

Stoll discovered that Menchu’s black-and-white depiction of villainous landowners and virtuous oppressed peasants was too simple—the landowners often cooperated with the peasants. The great land struggle described in the book between Menchu’s father and the landowners was actually between her father and his in-laws. Though described as poor and oppressed, her father actually had title to 6,800 acres of land.

According to Stoll’s book, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, Menchu was right about the savagery of the Guatemalan military. But, people in the village were just as terrified of the guerrillas, who introduced political assassination to the area. One of Menchu’s brothers was killed by the army, but villagers said he was not burned alive as she writes in her book.

In chapter after chapter, Stoll claims, Menchu describes "experiences she never had herself." Stoll writes that she consistently altered facts and stories and "achieved coherence by omitting features of the situation that contradicted the ideology of her new organization, then substituting appropriate revolutionary themes."

Stoll’s account is unusually convincing because, he says, "I’m a lefty myself" and his book often seems to bend over backward to give Menchu the benefit of any doubt or ambiguity. He says he is astounded by the reaction of professors who dismiss his book as a right-wing attack or who insist that truth is irrelevant to emotionally authentic testimony from the oppressed. "When I began to talk about my findings," he wrote, "some of my colleagues regarded them as sacrilegious. I had put myself beyond the pale of decency."

"Sacrilegious" is a good word, because it captures Menchu’s current status as a semi-religious political icon. Besides, the oppressed are never supposed to be analyzed or criticized by professors representing the oppressor cultures of the West. (Stoll has an interesting take on this: If the job of Western professors is to listen in silence to the authentic voices from the Third World, what happens to the other authentic voices in Menchu’s village, who tell very different stories about what happened there?)

Listen to some of the statements coming from the campus. Michael Berube of the University of Illinois, a star professor of the campus left, says he will continue teaching Menchu’s autobiography just as he will continue teaching the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. (No explanation. Apparently the two books are equally reliable or unreliable.) Joanne Rappaport, president of the Society for Latin American Anthropology, told a reporter that Stoll’s book is "an attempt to discredit one of the only spokespersons of Guatemala’s indigenous movement."

Another school of thought seems to suggest that lies by the oppressed don’t matter. John Peeler, a professor of political science at Bucknell, says that "the Latin American tradition of the testimonial has never been bound by the strict rules of veracity that we take for granted in autobiography." And Magdalena Garcia Pinto, director of women’s studies at the University of Missouri, says what Menchu is offering "is not mendacity. Rather it is a narrative about how large communities in the region are/have been oppressed."

Why is it not mendacity? Because our campus culture puts more emphasis on voice, narrative and story than it does on truth. A growing number of professors accept the postmodern notion that there is no such thing as truth, only rhetoric. The result is the blurring of distinctions between history and literature, fact and fiction, honesty and dishonesty. One outraged professor wrote in an Internet message that "The Menchu controversy, like the Clinton controversy, reveals the depth of academic disregard for truth in the postmodern era." Sounds right to me.