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

Introduction

1 Introduction Latin American Testimonio and Testimonial Criticism as Project, Process, and Product Among Latin Americanists, the genre of testimonio is most often traced to Esteban Montejo and Miguel Barnet’s 1966 Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave). Barnet, an anthropologist with a deep interest in Cuban history, conducted a series of interviews with Montejo, a veteran of the War of Independence . Born to parents enslaved on a sugar plantation, and separated from his mother at birth, Montejo tried repeatedly to escape. “I was,” he declares, “a cimarrón from birth” (22).1 As a young man, Montejo took to the mountains to live as a solitary fugitive, returning only after emancipation had been declared in the effort to attract broader support for Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain. After working as a free man in a variety of occupations, Montejo enlisted in the War of 1898. The book, a broad-ranging account of Montejo’s life and times, ends with his insistence that, at the age of 103, he is still ready to take up his machete and defend his country should the need arise. In his biography of Montejo, Barnet chose to elide his own interview questions and write in the first-person voice of his speaking subject, a man who could not read or write. This technique became a commonplace of Latin American testimonio , as did Barnet’s assertion that the project he undertook with Montejo was more than the life story of an individual. Montejo, Barnet insisted, gave voice to an entire class of people whose history had been ignored. Barnet’s choice to end the last chapter with Montejo’s promise to join in any future battles for Cuba—and such battles were a distinct possibility in the turbu- 2 Can Literature Promote Justice? lent sixties—offers evidence that the goal of the book was not only to amplify and correct readers’ images of the past: both Montejo and Barnet sought to inspire readers to change the future. While not all testimonios have been collaborative, the tripartite combination of a first-person narrative of injustice, an insistence that the subject’s experience is representative of a larger class, and an intent to work toward a more just future soon came to define the genre. Despite later characterizations of testimonio as a uniquely “demotic and dynamic form, not subject to critical legislation by a normative literary establishment” (Beverley, Against Literature, 71), what began in the sixties as a genre of margins coalesced fairly quickly into a center complete with its own literary prize. Barnet began to theorize about testimonio at the same time he began to write it, and other collaborating writers soon followed his lead with articles that presented critical formulations of testimonio while chronicling the process of producing specific texts. By 1970, Havana’s Casa de las Américas publishing house had already recognized testimonio as a separate category in its annual literary prize competition, alongside novels and poetry. The rules of the contest spelled out a relatively capacious definition of the genre. Testimonies must document some aspect of Latin American or Caribbean reality from a direct source. A direct source is understood as knowledge of the facts by the author or his or her compilation of narratives or evidence obtained from the individuals involved or qualified witnesses. In both cases reliable documentation , written or graphic, is indispensable. The form is at the author’s discretion, but literary quality is also indispensable. (Beverley, Against Literature, 155n) Iwouldextendthefoundingdatefortestimoniobackto1960, with the publication in Brazil of Quarto de Despejo by Carolina Maria de Jesus.2 The book, whose Portuguese title translates as Introduction 3 “the trash room,” is a collection of daily entries written by an Afro-Brazilian woman struggling to raise her children in a cardboard shanty in the favela, the poorest district of São Paulo. She had learned to read and write during her two years of primary school, and kept a diary that combined her accounts of day-today life with political analyses and calls for social action. After a chance encounter between the writer and a newspaper reporter , excerpts from her diary appeared in the Brazilian press, and Livraria Francisco Alves published a selection of entries as a book. Quarto de Despejo caused a sensation in Brazil, selling ninety thousand copies within the first six months, making it at that point “the most successful...