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How not to be a sucker 3.1: the book report

Authors frequently refer to other books to support their argument. Readers are trained to assume the author actually read the book and is summarizing it fairly. In chapter 3 of Illiberal Education (1991), D’Souza uses four pages to summarize a book, the memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. His summary describes the book he needed for his argument, not the book Ms. Menchú produced. (I say “produced” rather than “wrote” because the book is based on 24 hours of interviews, transcribed and edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray.)

There’s a lot to cover, so I’ll break this up into two posts. In the first, I’ll demonstrate that D’Souza is falsely describing the book. I’ll use resources (contemporary reviews of Illiberal Education and comments on those reviews, Menchú’s actual book) that are much easier to get today than they were in 1991.

Even though you could do what I did in the past month (web searches, buying the Menchú book with only a few clicks), it’s unreasonable to expect a casual reader to do that. So I have to show you how you could get a strong suspicion that D’Souza’s summary is false without doing a lot of work. That will be the next post.

As with all these posts, I link to archive.org’s copy of Illiberal Education so that you can check my citations. (At the moment of writing, though, the archive.org book service is still unavailable due to a cyberattack.) In quotes, words in boldface are my emphasis.

Evidence D’Souza made it up

In the chapter, D’Souza discusses how Stanford replaced an eight-year-old “Western Culture” curriculum with one titled “Cultures, Ideas, and Values” (CIV). The earlier curriculum had a fixed “canon” of 16 books. The CIV curriculum had a smaller core of five books and let individual professors supplement the core with their own choices, under broad guidelines for content or topic: “each course would have to include works on race, class, gender, and at least one non-European culture.” Source: Robert Marquand, “Stanford’s CIV Course Sparks Controversy,” Christian Science Monitor, January 25, 1989, p. 13, cited by D’Souza. At least one class used I, Rigoberta Menchú. D’Souza says that book is “perhaps the text that best reveals the premises underlying the new Stanford curriculum” (p. 71). His concise summary is this:

“Published in 1983, the book is the story of a young woman named Rigoberta Menchú growing up in Guatemala. As a representative of an oral tradition, Rigoberta does not write: rather, her views are transcribed and translated […] Much of the book simply details the mundane […] But integrated into the story, and impossible to miss, is the development of Rigoberta’s political consciousness—her parents are killed for unspecified reasons in a bloody massacre, reportedly carried out by the Guatemalan army, and Rigoberta vows to fight back. She begins to see her cause as intertwined with the struggle for self-determination of South American Indians. She rebels against Europeanized Latino culture in all its manifestations, including domestic machismo and political indifference to Indian cultures. She becomes first a feminist, then a socialist, then a Marxist.” (ibid.)

Let’s trace this summary of the book into The New York Review of Books. There, C. Vann Woodward reviewed Illiberal Education. Here is what he repeats about I, Rigoberta Menchú:

It is the transcription of an oral autobiography of an unlettered woman first published in 1983 telling how, after her parents were killed in a massacre, she turned against European culture, renounced marriage and motherhood, and became a feminist and a Marxist.”

In a letter to the editor, Gene H. Bell-Villada – who had read Rigoberta’s book – says D’Souza, and consequently Woodward, got it wrong:

“[Woodward’s] summary leans exclusively on the four pages from Illiberal Education in which D’Souza bashes Menchú’s testimony. D’Souza’s account of her very powerful story, let it be said, is replete with mistakes—he has clearly given it little more than a superficial skimming. […] Professor Woodward’s third-hand account in turn manages to repeat as many as three of D’Souza’s errors and misrepresentations:

(1) ‘She turned against European culture.’ Menchú’s is an essentially local account of the struggles of her Mayan village against brutal Guatemalan army repression. “European culture” scarcely comes up in the course of her narrative […]

(2) ‘She became a feminist.’ If anything, Menchú defends the traditional role of women in Maya society, and is on the whole indifferent to Western feminist concepts.

(3) ‘A Marxist.’ Actually, Menchú is a Christian activist [his emphasis] To be, well, snarky, a lot of the right in the ’80s and early ’90s had trouble telling the difference between Latin American Christians and Latin American Marxists. Hence the famous quote from Brazilian Archbishop Hélder Pessoa Câmara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."

D’Souza totally falsifies both the spirit and the letter of Menchú’s autobiography. Professor Woodward ritually repeats some of those falsehoods.” I should note that Menchú was accused in 1999 of fabricating parts of her testimony. For example, she actually had gone to school as a child and was not illiterate. She also conceded that “she had mixed her own experiences with those of others to try to draw attention to Guatemala’s violence.” (article, book chapter) I guess both D’Souza and Menchú let the ends dictate the means.

Bell-Villada’s was one of a series of letters criticizing Woodward’s review of Illiberal Education. (I recommend them all.) Woodward’s response to these critics confirmed that D’Souza grossly misrepresented the book. Woodward writes:

“Having now read I, Rigoberta Menchú, unavailable when I wrote about her, I find nothing in the book to support the three statements complained of—another score as well against Mr. D’Souza.” I think the suggestion that Woodward, a professor retired from Yale, would have ordinarily read Menchú’s book when composing his review, but – gosh darn it! – it was “unavailable” charming in an odd sort of way. Less charming is that conceding he’d parroted falsehoods – not just about Menchú’s book – left his conclusions unchanged. It’s the old “OK, I had the wrong reasons, but I was right anyway” dodge.

Rigoberta Menchú

At the end of his discussion of I, Rigoberta Menchú, D’Souza summarizes her thusly:

“Rigoberta’s claim to eminence is that, as a consummate victim, she is completely identified with the main currents of history. Undergraduates do not read about Rigoberta because she has written a great and immortal book, or performed a great deed, or invented something useful. She simply happened to be in the right place at the right time. […] Rigoberta’s victim status may be unfortunate for her personal happiness, but is indispensable for her academic reputation. Rigoberta is a modern Saint Sebastian, pierced by the arrows of North American white male cruelty; thus her life story becomes an explicit indictment of the historical role of the West and Western institutions. Her very appearance and tribal garb are a rebuke to European culture; for Rigoberta to style her hair, or wear a suit, would corrupt her with Western bric-a-brac. As it stands, she is an ecological saint, made famous by her very obscurity, elevated by her place in history as a representative voice of oppression. Now it is her turn to be canonized—quite literally, for her to enter the Stanford canon.” (p. 72-73)

Readers of this passage in 1991 must have been surprised when, the next year, Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize. That suggests she might not have been the passive token peasant D’Souza paints. So what is he leaving out?

Menchú was born shortly before the Guatemalan Civil War started. Wikipedia describes that war thusly:

“[…] a civil war in Guatemala which was fought from 1960 to 1996 between the government of Guatemala and various leftist rebel groups. The Guatemalan government forces committed genocide against the Maya population of Guatemala during the civil war and there were widespread human rights violations against civilians. The context of the struggle was based on longstanding issues of unfair land distribution. Wealthy Guatemalans, mainly of European descent, and foreign companies like the American United Fruit Company had control over much of the land. They paid almost zero taxes in return–leading to conflicts with the rural indigenous poor who worked the land under miserable terms.”

(Note that the war was still ongoing when D’Souza’s book was written.)

Menchú is Quiché, one of the Mayan peoples, those on the receiving end of that genocide. Her home was in the forbidding and relatively infertile “Altiplano.” To survive, the people would spend some of the year as migratory agricultural labor in the fertile lowlands (the “fincas”). Menchú’s parents became leaders in an indigenous-centered group of rebels, the Committee for Peasant Unity (CUC). Menchú was active in the movement from a young age, and became a leader too. CUC went public in 1978 and was destroyed in a scorched earth campaign by 1982. (It was that campaign that killed her mother, father, and one brother, in separate incidents.) Menchú fled to Mexico, where she cofounded the United Republic of Guatemalan Opposition.

It was because she was a resistance leader that she was invited to Paris, where a mutual friend suggested Burgos-Debray interview her. What were Burgos-Debray’s motivations? D’Souza knows:

“As Burgos-Debray suggests in the introduction, Rigoberta’s peasant radicalism provides independent Third World corroboration of Western progressive ideologies. Thus she is really a mouthpiece for a sophisticated left-wing critique of Western society, all the more devastating because it issues not from a French scholar-activist but from a seemingly authentic Third World source.” (p. 72)

I used Google Books to read the introduction. It seemed nothing like D’Souza’s summary. But perhaps the damning statements were in the pages Google wouldn’t show me? So I bought I, Rigoberta Menchú and read the introduction.

Nope. So let me stand up for Burgos-Debray.

First of all, she’s not a French scholar-activist. She’s a Venezuelan anthropologist. (I don’t know if she’s an activist or not.) As an anthropologist, it’s kind of her job to be interested in culture, and she seems to have a special interest in how “adjacent” cultures adjust to each other.

For example, she herself is a ladino (her italicization). At the beginning of the conquest of South America by (mostly) Spain, there were no ladinos: there were the Spanish and the indigenous inhabitants (like Menchú’s ancestors). However, over time, a distinct, blended ladino culture developed:

The ladinos have adopted many features of the indigenous culture and those features have become what George Devereux calls the ‘ethnic unconscious’. The ladinos of Latin America make a point of exaggerating such features in order to set themselves apart from their original European culture: it is the only way they can proclaim their ethnic individuality." (p. xvi)

To the extent Menchú is criticizing someone else’s society, it’s ladino society. So let me correct D’Souza:

“Rigoberta is a modern Saint Sebastian, pierced by the arrows of North American white male cruelty the Guatemalan ladino military dictatorship; thus her life story becomes an explicit indictment of the historical role of the West and Western ladino institutions. Her very appearance and tribal garb are a rebuke to European culture what she’s used to; for Rigoberta to style her hair, or wear a suit, would corrupt her with Western bric-a-brac make her feel uncomfortable – literally ill-suited. As it stands, she is an ecological saint, made famous by her very obscurity her work as a public advocate for her people, elevated by her place in history as a representative voice of the oppression directed at the indigenous peoples of, not just Guatemala, but other places in South America. Now it is her turn to be canonized—quite not literally, for her to enter as her book is just an optional add-on to the reduced Stanford canon.”

But I don’t get the impression from skimming the book, reading a few chapters, and searching for keywords that Menchú cares all that much about ladino culture: she just wants them to leave her people alone and give them political representation. (At the time, the indigenous people were the majority. I don’t know if they still are.)

Indeed, Burgos-Debray praises Menchú not for rejecting ladino culture, but for, um, cultural appropriation. For example, as a Christian, Menchú uses Bible stories to mobilize her people in defense of their culture. Burgos-Debray writes, “[Menchú’s] people need to base their actions on a prophecy, on a law that comes down to them from the past.” (p. xviii) The Bible supplies such: See I, Rigoberta Menchú, chapter 18, “The Bible and Self-Defense: the Examples of Judith, Moses, and David.”

Burgos-Debray admires Menchú for how she navigates the inevitable adoption of ideas from a nearby culture; how she chooses what to take in order to more successfully protect what she wants to preserve.

How is this being “a mouthpiece for a sophisticated left-wing critique of Western society”?

Why does D’Souza get the book so wrong?

There’s a cliché, “every accusation is a confession.” It’s a cliché because it’s so often true. I believe it’s true here. When D’Souza says:

“[Menchu] embodies a projection of Marxist and feminist views onto South American Indian culture.” (p. 72)

… I think it’s he who’s projecting. He has beliefs about the advocates of the new Stanford curriculum:

“[They] believe, with Hegel and Marx, that being is historical and that history progresses toward a designated end, in this case the final emancipation of the proletariat.” (ibid.)

If such people are teaching Rigoberta, she must be a fellow traveler:

“[Her book] supports the historicist pedagogy of CIV advocates who believe, with Hegel and Marx, that being etc. etc. etc.” (ibid.)

Besides, some of the Latin American opposition to military dictatorships did come from socialists, Marxists, or communists, so might as well assume she’s one too. Does it really matter that no form of the word “socialism” or “socialist” appears in the book (neither introduction nor memoir)? Does it matter that the four-character string “Marx” appears in only one paragraph?

“The world I live in is so evil, so bloodthirsty, that it can take my life away from one moment to the next. So the only road open to me is our struggle, the just war. The Bible taught me that. I tried to explain this to a Marxist compañera, who asked me how could I pretend to fight for revolution being a Christian. I told her that the whole truth is not found in the Bible, but neither is the whole truth in Marxism, and she had to accept that. We have to defend ourselves against our enemy but, as Christians, we must also defend our faith within the revolutionary process.” (Chapter 24)

Naw, that’s not a great fit for his thesis.

D’Souza isn’t in the business of actual human complexity, so best to use exactly one quote from Menchú:

“At times, we managed to scrape a living in the Altiplano and didn’t go down to the fincas.” (D’Souza, p. 71) Yes, these really are the only words of Menchú he quotes. He uses them to complain “It is not always easy to follow this narrative, because it is lavishly sprinkled with Latino and Indian phrases." This seems an entirely gratuitous insult. It’s easy to figure out those words from context – I did it just by skimming chapter 1. He would not write the same of, say, Dickens' Great Expectations (also written as a memoir), which contains “I purposely passed within a boat or two’s length of the floating Custom House, and so out to catch the stream, alongside of two emigrant ships, and under the bows of a large transport with troops on the forecastle looking down at us.” Or, if he would, Dartmouth should revoke his bachelor’s degree in English.

… and provide no supporting evidence for his claims about her progression: “first a feminist, then a socialist, then a Marxist.” (p. 71)

Or maybe…

Perhaps I’m wrong in hypothesizing that D’Souza knows Menchú isn’t a Marxist but just doesn’t care. But remember these pictures from a previous post?

I used them to illustrate my argument that people with an “us vs. them” mentality will come to collapse all opposing opinions into one extreme opinion. Menchú isn’t a Marxist, but she is a trade unionist. See chapters 22 (“The CUC Comes Out into the Open”) and 32 (“The Strike of Agricultural Workers”) in I, Rigoberta Menchú. Burgos-Debray identifies trade unionism as one of the elements of ladino culture that Menchú consciously appropriated. Being a trade unionist is practically being a Marxist, right?