Four Narratives
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For members of marginalized groups, limited access to education and literature compel them to forge fresh relationships to language. Writers from these groups base their work on modes of speech, on communal traditions of oral communication, and, sometimes, on the reimagining of European art forms. But, when they employ the standard framework of novel, chronicle, or autobiography, the standard is transformed. As a group, they (and others like them) are creating a genre, the novela-testimonio, in which the disenfranchised seize the weapons used to oppress them, and turn them on their rulers. That is the case for the following four narratives, which take very different forms: Toni Morrison's Beloved is a novel; Rigoberta Menchu's life story. I, Rigoberta Menchu, was compiled from a series of interviews; Omar Cabezas wrote his autobiography in Fire from the Mountain; and the fourth book is a collection of Aztec chronicles entitled The Broken Spears. But their similarities are far more important than their differences. Each of these books is a form of testimony. The writers, all members of oppressed groups, bear witness to the nature of their oppression. Their books provide new analyses of the relationship with the oppressors, analyses that derive from the experience of the oppressed. Though each writer employs different narrative strategies, all the writers draw on the oral traditions that were often the only public voice of their people. In bringing this voice to the
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o think. The Aztec audience would be able to draw its own conclusions from this material.
When writers address their oppressors, rather than the members of the oppressed group, the forms of the narrative are necessarily different. In their autobiographies, Rigoberta Menchu and Omar Cabezas address the members of Guatemalan and Nicaraguan society as well as the North Americans and Europeans whom the writers hold to be at least partially responsible for the exploitation of their people.
Menchu's narrative was constructed in collaboration with her interviewer and editor, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Hours of taped interviews were assembled by Burgos-Debray. She then removed her own questions, edited the responses, and arranged the book in its present form. The mechanics of this process might seem to reduce Menchu's importance in the construction of her own narrative. But Menchu comes from a culture with a strong oral tradition. Just as the Aztecs may have been uneasy with alphabetic writing, Menchu was uneasy speaking Spanish, a language she had acquired only three years earlier. But the thematic repetitions that are one of the principal features of her account are an important narrative strategy in oral presentations. Th
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3354
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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