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

5. The Capacities and Constraints of Collaborating Writers, Translators, Editors, and Publishers

11 5. The Capacities and Constraints of Collaborating Writers, Translators, Editors, and Publishers In collaborative testimonios, the speaker is joined by a professional writer who transforms the spoken words that are the speaker’s own representation of experience into written text. Generally such speakers have had little or no formal education, and thus cannot produce their own written testimonios. Collaborating writers also offer access to the circuit of publication and distribution, contributions not to be discounted. Many writers demonstrate their support with texts of their own in the form of prologues, articles, and interviews. Readers may view the collaborating writer as a sort of guarantor, lending prestige or credibility to the testimony and verifying the events narrated, but the potential effect of the collaborating writer on testimonio extends beyond influencing the context in which the readers will encounter the book, or the attitudes with which those readers will pick it up and open it. Writers may also offer the speaker a live context for their narration, and, in the case of conversations and interviews, an engaged interlocutor. While interviews are the most common technique for the production of collaborative testimonios, not all such texts are produced with the writer as sole listener. Some writers follow speakers through a variety of speech contexts, the technique that Moema Viezzer describes in her preface to Domitila Barrios de Chungara’s Let Me Speak! While many times speakers are telling stories that they have long since shaped through repeated telling in other contexts, writers who serve as interlocutors may never- 120 Can Literature Promote Justice? theless help to elicit a more conversational tone. Even when the writer is the only other person in the room, skilled speakers in collaborative testimonio demonstrate that their sense of audience is twofold from the outset. They are speaking to the writer, but also through the writer to the larger audience. The speaker’s sense of collaborating writer as conduit to others does not discount the presence and persona of the particular interviewer, however passive and transparent that person may strive to be. In political and practical terms, the speaker is of course aware that a positive impression on the writer is likely to increase that writer’s efforts to disseminate the story, and perhaps will encourage other efforts in service to the speaker’s cause. Acknowledgment of this dynamic should lend a sense of perspective and humility to writers’ and critics’ interpretations of any apparently personal interactions in such an interview. As seen in previous chapters, effective persuasion requires that the speaker look outward as well as inward, in the double role of experiencer and strategic narrator. In considering their audiences, speakers themselves have passed through a variation on the process of empathy and exotopy that Mikhail Bakhtin identified. Likewise, collaborating writers should ideally move from empathy with the speaker back through exotopy, to become answerable in their own capacity as competent and engaged allies in a social project, participating alongside speakers in the shaping of effective testimonio. Unfortunately, the full possibility of the collaborating writer’s contribution to testimonio is rarely realized. Rather than full-fledged participants, such writers have tended to envision themselves in more limited roles as transcriptionists, collectors, or archivists, or else as speakers’ personal confidants. Many writers report a deepseated reluctance to exert any further influence on the text. Like all participants in the testimonial project, writers face a unique set of constraints. Like the speakers, writers face challenges in Writers, Translators, Editors, and Publishers 121 transforming experience to representation, in deliberately shaping that representation, in imagining and keeping in mind an audience, and in resisting socially sanctioned forms that are inadequate to persuasion. Sectarian conventions for narratives of social action The force of certain conventions for narratives of social action is readily apparent in the paratexts to Child of the Dark. The cover design and copy, blurbs, and prefaces evince the same sectarian expectations of political orthodoxy that would constrain criticism of the diaries. As has often been the case with Latin American testimonial writing, the apparatus of marketing was much at odds with the diary’s content. An early paperback edition offers a woodcut-style depiction of a woman and a boy silhouetted against a favela, set in vivid orange against the book’s black cover. In bright yellow type, a quote from Newsweek promises the prospective purchaser a “desperate, terrifying outcry from the slums of São Paulo...