John Beverly "The Real Thing"

In this blog post I wanted to discuss John Beverly’s , The Real Thing. Beverly’s article discusses Rigoberta Menchu’s “I, Rigoberta” and the notion of the subaltern and this idea of authenticity. Beverly analyzes the fact that the book refers to the narrator as Rigoberta not RIgoberta Menchu or Menchu. Beverly makes the point that it is informal since we have not formal met Menchu herself. Beverly continues to discuss the question, “Can the subaltern speak?” and compares the work to Elzbieta Sklodowska. Beverly discussed Sklodowska ideas when he states, Elzbieta Sklodowska has something similar in mind when she criticizes what she feels is the appeal in accounts of testimonio, including my own, to the authenticity of a subaltern voice. Such an appeal stops the semiotic play of the text, she implies, fixing both it and the testimonial subject in an unidirectional gaze that deprives them of their reality”. Beverly discusses the subaltern in a negative connotation. I don’t know if this question can truly be answered. Menchu’s text forces the reader to confront not only the subaltern as a represented text but also as the agent of a transformative project that reaches to be hegemonic in its own sense.

I, Rigoberta Menchú

I, Rigoberta Menchú is diverse from any text we have examined so far. It is a biography, which could be debated, that sheds light on Rigoberta Menchú’s life as well as the lives around her. The book depicts what it was like to be a person of Indian descent in Latin America, specifically Guatemala. For tomorrows lecture we are concentrating on the second half of the book. Menchú’s experiences continue to startle me, it was truly astonishing all the hardships the Indigenous people of Latin America had to face. An example of one of these hardships is in chapter 30 when she states, “

But when the murderer Carlos Garcia did was to send his fathers bodyguard to kill the woman in her house. But he told the bodyguard not to shoot her but to hack her to death with a machete. Naturally the bodyguard did as he was told and went to the woman’s house and, catching her by surprise, hacked her up with his machete” (Menchú177). This consequently occurred because a son of a finca owner pre sued the poor woman and she refused to be his mistress. These conditions where truly horrific and disgusting.

Menchú continues on discussing the rest of their struggles. She explains how in order to adapt to society she had to learn spanish. Menchúmakes the reader feel like they are being told a very sacred part of history. It is almost like we are flies on a wall in this distinct time as well as area of history.

Moraña's Current Era

In "The Boom of the Subaltern" Mabel Moraña argues that "the current era could be interpreted as the way in which the left that lost the revolution intends to rebuild its agenda, its historical mission, and its lettered centrality, looking to define a new 'otherness' in order to pass -- 'from outside and from above" -- from representation to representativeness" (651). It would seem then that, after the fall of a number of dictatorships, Latin America's lettered left took up a dictatorial position by subjugating the subaltern as a field of study. I wonder though, what is the relation between the lettered left of Latin America and the lettered left of the North. Does the study of subalternity by Latin American academics merely align themselves with the purpose Moraña sees in their Northern counterparts, namely "intellectual exercise  from which one can read...the history of representational hegemony of the North, in its new era of postcolonial re-articulation" (650). Do they lose their sense of Latin Americanism? Perhaps the answer is yes, that even if the academics reside in Latin America, the separate position from which they examine the subaltern echos the actions of the North, and therefore blurs the notion of national boundaries.