Truth, Lies, and Politics in the Debate over Testimonial Writing: The Cases of Rigoberta Menchu and Binjamin Wilkomirski

In 1985 Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala), the testimony of an obscure Guatemalan campesina about her own and her family's experiences during their country's civil war, gained international attention and ultimately played an important role in bringing about the end of that war. Partly on the basis of her powerful book, in 1992 Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Three years later Binjamin Wilkomirski, a Latvian Jew living in Switzerland, published Bruchstücke (Fragments), a memoir of his childhood experience in the Nazi death camps. The book won numerous awards in Europe and the United States, and Wilkomirski became an instant celebrity, not only as the author of a compelling work of testimonial literature, but as a spokesperson for, and champion of, countless other child Holocaust survivors.

Not long after their respective publications, both books were exposed as partial or complete fabrications. Menchú was shown to have embellished facts and invented incidents, that is, to have stretched the truth to promote her cause, whereas Wilkomirski had apparently invented his entire story. The responses to these scandals, in both academic circles and the popular press, were vehement, often quite nasty, and to a surprising extent aimed not at Menchú or Wilkomirski, but at those responsible for exposing them.

Despite the parallels between the two cases, their outcomes were quite dissimilar. Fragments was withdrawn from publication, and Wilkomirski was stripped of his literary honors; however, Menchú continues to enjoy the status of Nobel laureate, and her book still appears on high school reading lists and college course syllabi.

Although the initial outcry surrounding both these controversies might have been expected to invite debate over urgent, fundamental issues such as the blurring of fact and fiction, the unreliability of memory, and the very nature of truth, such legitimate concerns were for the most part relegated to the background or ignored entirely. Instead, politics and personal or professional agendas dominated and distorted the discussion, replacing honest inquiry with polemics and the strident defense of a particular position. The result in both cases was, albeit to different degrees of intensity, an atmosphere of suspicion and hostility exacerbated by ad hominem attacks that to this day have not completely subsided.

This alarming situation demands that some important questions be asked. What brought about such polarized, politicized responses to reasonable doubts about the authenticity of these testimonies? To what degree and to what ends does post-modern skepticism toward truth inform the debate? What do the scope, depth, and intensity of the controversies imply about our ability, both inside and outside the academy, to grapple effectively with current, vitally important issues involving truth, lies, and politics?

Literary fabrications and their ensuing scandals are nothing new, of course. The eighteenth-century controversies over James Macpherson's Ossianic ballads and Thomas Chatterton's Rowley poems still generate debate, although the circumstances surrounding them and the questions they raise are for the most part quite different from those concerning Menchú and Wilkomirski. Both Macpherson and Chatterton claimed to have discovered long-lost works of literature that they had, in fact, written themselves, and much of the controversy that arose had to do with the question of whether well-crafted, aesthetically superior, yet fraudulent works can be considered to have literary value.¹

The question of literary value is less clear when applied to testimonial writing, which occupies a precarious position somewhere between history and autobiography, yet contains novelistic elements as well. In addition, as John Beverley points out, testimonial writing is invariably tied to a political or social cause. As "a literature of personal witness and involvement designed to make the cause . . . known to the outside world," it performs "the act of testifying or bearing witness in a legal or religious sense" and "unlike the novel . . . promises by definition to be primarily concerned with sincerity rather than literariness" (32). Thus, the importance of testimony lies both in its factual accuracy and in its far-reaching effects on the cause it espouses...