Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio

1. A Genre Without a Strategy?

1 1. A Genre Without a Strategy? Latin American Testimonio as a Rhetorical Project Testimonio is not only a text. It is a project of social justice in which text is an instrument. Testimonial narratives are doubly connected to the lifeworld, in their inceptions as responses to speakers’ real-life experiences of injustice and also by their intended outcomes in social action on the part of readers. Although the genre is frequently characterized as didactic, that description fails to recognize that the goal of testimonio is not only to educate readers about injustice, but to persuade those readers to act. Given its goal of persuasion, testimonio is properly situated in the realm of rhetoric, which offers crucial analytical tools for approaching the genre on its own terms. Rhetorical analysis of testimonio demands close attention to the speaker’s goal with reference to a particular audience, as well as identification of specific strategies. Already this approach runs counter to a dominant mode in the history of testimonial criticism—a reluctance to acknowledge or assess speakers’ rhetorical strategies. In the preface to At Face Value, Sylvia Molloy explains that testimonio lies outside the scope of her study of autobiography since she has “chosen to study texts written by writers, that is, autobiographers who, when sitting down to inscribe their selves on paper, are aware, in some form or other, of the bind of translating self into rhetorical construct; writers who, with a fair amount of literary awareness, resign themselves to the necessary mediation of textual representation.” Molloy 20 Can Literature Promote Justice? does add that testimonial literature should be considered “a genre unto itself,” but her decision not to include testimonio’s speakers in the company of self-aware producers of mediated texts illustrates one type of critical reticence regarding testimonio (10). In her 1996 essay, “Spanish American Testimonial Novel: Some Afterthoughts,” Elzbieta Sklodowska writes of ethical reservations about criticism, of “a concern with invalidating testimony, of transposing the reality of human suffering into nothing more than text” (98). In “Political Code and Literary Code,” Ariel Dorfman initially evinces a similar reluctance. “This is,” he reminds the reader, “a literature born of urgency.” Is not this sort of communication produced by casting aside beforehand any idea of a sustained, intellectual elaboration? If such a necessity stems, as we have seen, as much from the nonprofessional character of the writers as it does from their desire to avoid, to the extent possible, any stylizing of their own voice as a means of camouflaging their individuality, are we not committing an act of methodological folly, applying traditional literary criteria to acts that do not pretend to be anything more than immediate memory and emotion, texts that present themselves as instruments to drastically influence the social flow of events? (154) Nevertheless, Dorfman ultimately comes to terms with his own reservations and insists on the need for critical assessment of testimonio’s strategies. Acknowledging the expertise of testimonial speakers Much has been made of the fact that most testimonial speakers are not writers. Less has been said about the fact that their local communities generally regard them as skilled orators. This A Genre Without a Strategy? 21 emphasis on what speakers are not—as opposed to what they are—parallels much of the critical response to the genre itself, but the speakers’ empirical expertise at oratory should come as no surprise. People who have emerged as political organizers in their communities are generally talented speakers, and they have had frequent occasion to hone their persuasive skills. Neither the patronizing notion that ordinary people do not shape their discourse nor the romantic ideal of a transparent and nonstrategizing speaker stands up to scrutiny. Data on the expertise of folk speakers is readily available from the fields of anthropology and folklore studies, as well as from testimonial texts themselves. In her work on the personal experience tale, folklorist Linda Dégh has analyzed in detail the narrative strategies with which ordinary people portray themselves in the stories they tell to define their own identity. In the live context, speakers consciously shape their self-narratives, employing familiar types and motifs, frame sequences, and formulaic repetition (62–63). In “Why Tell Stories?” W. F. H. Nicolaisen likewise insists that skilled storytelling is by no means limited to literary writers, or to the better-known examples of myth and legend. Real life is also the stuff—and the product...