Carolina Maria de Jesus in the Context of Testimonios: Race, Sexuality, and Exclusion

Criticism, Spring, 1999 by Eva Paulino Bueno

The phenomenon called testimonio--testimonials--has gained considerable attention in the study of Latin American texts in the United States in the last ten years, even though the practice of giving testimony is an old one, and texts about testimonials exist in abundance. In this century alone, the testimonials of the survivors of concentration camps, as well as those given by people fleeing their countries in dictatorship-ridden Latin America, constitute moving monuments to human endurance and courage under the most extreme repression, torture, and suffering. In this essay, I want to discuss the peculiarities of the reception of some testimonial texts in the North American university and, in the process, I hope to clarify some questions about the almost total concentration on the study of women's testimonials.(1) More to my point, I will explore the reasons why the vast majority of texts studied in the United States come from people of Indian origin. But "Indian," here, does not encompass the peoples called Native Americans who live in the United States. Indeed, as far as the study of testimonials in North American academia goes, Indians always live outside this country. The exclusionary nature of this practice and its political reverberations have so far gone not just untheorized, but mostly unquestioned. In this essay, I want to ask why this has been so, and whose interests have been served in the maintenance of this situation.

For this study, I will use three main texts: I ... Rigoberta Menchu; An Indian Woman in Guatemala, by Rigoberta Menchu and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray;(2) Let Me Speak! by Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Viezzer,(3) and Child of the Dark; The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, by Carolina Mafia de Jesus.(4) The first of these texts is very well known in the North American academic circuit; the second one is better known by people who specialize in Latin American texts, and the third one, after a period of relative "success" with students of political science and Latin American history, has almost totally disappeared from shelves and college syllabi.(5) In the two first cases, the women giving their testimonials appear as representatives of their group--in Menchu's case the Quiche speaking Indians of Guatemala, and in Domitila de Chungara's case the miners of Bolivia. In general, both have been

considered as representatives of the wider segment of peasants and political victims of the terrorist governments of their respective countries. And, as if inexorably, both Menchu and Barrios de Chungara become the representatives of most of the people of Guatemala and Bolivia, respectively.(6)

In great contrast, no intellectual group or political movement ever claimed that Carolina Maria de Jesus's text represents a segment of Brazilians, or that she herself is a voice for a community. Even when Child of the Dark was constantly in the syllabi of university courses Carolina Maria de Jesus was never taken to be speaking for the Blacks of Brazil, or for the women of Brazil, or for the peasants of Brazil. At most, she was considered a voice speaking against the evils of favelas (and favelados--the people who live in the favelas) in Brazil.(7)

Two of the reviews quoted on the covers of her book demonstrate how Carolina Maria de Jesus stands out as an individual speaking from (or even against) her background. The review in the New York Herald Tribune says that Child of the Dark is "the raw, primitive journal of a street scavenger ... who fought daily for survival for herself and her three illegitimate children." In the excerpt from the New York Times Book Review, de Jesus's story is referred to as "a witness to the vicious fights, the knifings, the sordid sex life of the favelados--prisoners of poverty, prey of the unscrupulous, breeders of revolution."(8) On the other hand, the covers of the books by Barrios de Chungara and Menchu immediately present them as leaders of their societies. Let Me Speak! refers to Barrios de Chungara as "a leader of a Housewives' Committee, dedicated to improving miners' and peasants' conditions." This book, the Library Journal writes, is "an important document from a usually silent group." Two Thirds, also quoted in the back cover, refers to Let Me Speak as "the story of a people as much as ... the story of an individual." The excerpt from the review in The Times on I ... Rigoberta Menchu summarizes other commentaries: "This is a fascinating and moving description of the culture of an entire people.(9)

Two questions preoccupy me at this point: first, what kind of community can produce an individual who can express, in her personal history, the history of the whole community? And, second, what historical circumstances give some women the power to speak from inside their communities and represent them to the outside world? Adrianne Aron, writing about testimonies as "a therapeutic tool in the treatment of people who have suffered psychological trauma under state terrorism," states: "In many areas of Latin America people with little preparation for public expression--most notably, women--have come forward with their testimony to challenge oppressive power structures and to reappropriate for themselves and their communities the moral standards and social order taken away by the repression."(10) Among these women Aron mentions the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the Co-Madres (Committee of the Mothers and Relatives of the Disappeared, Political Prisoners and Assassinated) of El Salvador, and the GAM (Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo--Mutual Support Group) of Guatemala. But the existence of these groups in the countries mentioned still does not explain why their members are mostly women. Could it be because women have traditionally been seen as nurturing, as deeply embedded in the dynamics of the group rather than as separate individuals? Or could the reason be more simply that precisely because of their gender they expect more respect (or less violence) from the political powers of their countries? Whether we accept all or none of these possibilities, another question still remains in relation to all testimonial texts in general: to what extent these women have been able to speak as women, and to what extent they have had to totally ignore their gender and become, instead, communal beings. And, if they have become communal beings, why are some communities seen as worthier of telling their stories than others? Child of the Dark, Let Me Speak!, and I ... Rigoberta Menchu together provide an excellent occasion for the discussion of these matters. I will use them not so much as antagonistic examples of testimonial texts, but as complementary ones.