Miguel Marmol, and: Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village, and: The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (review)

214 the minnesota review workplace and income equity, etc., but also indicate steps toward the final objeaive of a socialist society. Margaret Randall has won her struggle to stay in the U.S., and we've won the voice of a major writer of our times who can continue to ask these questions and can continue to move the dialogue forward. Thus, Albuquerque: Coming Back to the U.S.A. gives a full measure of reasons to rejoice. Regardless of the failings in books by politically committed writers, the initiative is always passed back to the mass movement in the U.S. to make the most of the positive aspects of this work. The support which developed around Randall's case with the INS wUl perhaps strengthen both Randall's putting down roots and producing new books. Unlike Agnes Smedley before her, who died penniless and largely forgotten in England (the People's Republic of China paid to have her remains buried there), Randall has returned to the U.S. and perhaps has another 40 books ahead of her. Look around us: from Yellowstone to New York, from the barrios of East Los Angeles to Albuquerque, we face of four more years of Reaganism without Reagan, and a rough strategic fight in any case. We need writers like Randall to keep these vital questions current, in front of the movement , so reasoning about them can be sharply engaged. SESSHU FOSTER Miguel Marmol by Roque Dalton. Translated by Kathleen Ross and Richard Schaaf. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1987. xviii + 503 pp. $19.95 (cloth). Testimony: Death ofa Guatemalan Village by Victor Montejo. Translated by Viaor Perera. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1987. 113 pp. $16.95 (cloth); $8.95 (paper). The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey by Salman Rushdie. New York: Viking, 1987. 171 pp. $12.95 (cloth). "Marxism and balls: that's the formula for revolution." — Miguel Marmol The three books under review, while markedly different in scale, tone, and purpose, are nevertheless united by a generic commonaUty that is best captured in the title of Viaor Montejo 's eyewitness account of repression in rural Guatemala: testimony, in Spanish, testimonia. This is by now a familiar genre to North American readers, exempUfied perhaps most famously in Elisabeth Burgos-Debray's splendid narrative, / .. . Rigoberta Menchu, and in the powerful film featuring Rigoberta herself, When the Mountains Tremble. Neither autobiography nor history (in any rigorous sense of the term) nor journalism, testimonial literature combines the authority of the participant observer with the narrative coherence and potential for identification with character that are more properly the domain of fiction. The least compelling, but at the same time the most carefully crafted, of these three "testimonies" is Salman Rushdie's record of his three-week visit to Nicaragua in July 1986. Least compelUng because Rushdie, despite his manifest sympathy for the Sandinista Revolution , remains determinately an outsider in the world he portrays. El escritor hindú, the Nicaraguans dubbed him, thus revealing their own insularity. Rushdie is of Muslim heritage. This is not to say that The JaguarSmile is in any sense a negligible book, nor that its perspective on Nicaragua is uninformative. Particularly when one compares it with such egregious distortions of history and contemporary reality as Joan Didion's Salvador or the reporting of James Le Moyne in the New York Times, Rushdie's account ofpost-revolutionary Nicaragua is a model of objeaivity, intelligence, and sensitive regard for the distinctiveness of the historical society he encountered in his journey there. Reviews 215 Still, Rushdie's politics and ideology have decided limits. Not to put too fine a point on it, he remains like many sympathetic observers in the metropolitan West, and this despite his presumed credentials (trumpeted by his publisher in the jacket copy) as a "Third World writer," a left liberal, skeptical finally of the incipient totalitarian tendencies he discerns among the FSLN. This comes out in smaU ways, as when he titles the chapter recounting his meeting with Daniel Ortega, "El Señor Presidente," consciously recalling, one surmises, Miguel Angel Asturias's famous novel about a typical Latin American dictator. And the by now hackneyed issue of press censorship, while it occupies...