I, Rigoberta Menchu

by Rigoberta Menchu

  My father was a very simple man, like my mother. My mother had a round face and I look rather like her. My father was a very patient man. He wasn’t at all bad tempered. He was very kind. Whenever he corrected us, he’d talk to us about it. Unfortunately he wasn’t at home a great deal because he was often in the finca or in the capital; working for a few centavos for us, or dealing with papers. He often came home only once a month, or once every three months; we’d all be together and then he’d have to leave again right away. There were very few times he was with us, but however short a time it was, we learned many things through his teaching. The whole village did. I feel very proud of my father. He was an orphan with no father of his own to teach him or educate him, and even less a mother: he only had people teaching him bad things–hate and rejection. But in spite of this, he made his life himself and I’d say he was a complete man in human terms. He endured real suffering, and had huge problems to resolve, but he never lost his calm way of doing things. And this is the important thing for me. I often can’t do things even though I know they are very important, but he did everything with all the serenity this work needs. If he’d been a nervous man, he’d never have been able to do anything, with all that happened to him in life.

  I didn’t have enough time with my father, but I spent more time near him than my brothers and sisters, because I began going to the capital with him when I was very little. Sometimes I left the work in the finca to accompany my father to the capital and other places. And he’d talk to me and explain things to me. When we had nothing to eat, I’d have to go hungry with him, and he’d explain to me why this was so. It was when I still wasn’t earning, so my father told me that to earn a centavo, something we all knew very well, we had to make a few sacrifices. When I was older, my father regretted my not going to school, as I was a girl able to learn many things. But he always said: ‘Unfortunately, if I put you in a school, they’ll make you forget your class, they’ll turn you into a ladino. I don’t want that for you and that’s why I don’t send you.’ He might have had the chance to put me in a school when I was about fourteen or fifteen but he couldn’t do it because he knew what the consequences would be: the ideas that they would give me.

  I remember that we once went to work in a region to the north of El Quiché, in Ixcán. It’s the region they call the Zona Reina. It’s very well known in Guatemala. There are high, high mountains. No buses or lorries, not even bicycles or anything, can get there. You have to walk over high mountains to reach the area. We went there because we had no more maize. We’d been told that there was work in the Zona Reina at that time, because a certain priest had been there for a long time helping the people with money so they could cultivate their own plots. We’d been told that there was a lot of fruit there: all the fruit, maize, vegetables, beans, that people want to sow. It’s a hot region. So when our maize finished, my father said: ‘Let’s go and work there, and perhaps it will be better than going to the finca, if we get maize in exchange for our work.’

  We went with all the things we needed for the week or month we’d be there. We took little tamales already cooked, so we wouldn’t have to waste time making food. We left home all loaded down: my elder brothers, my father and myself. It took us three days to reach the Zona Reina. And on the way I discovered that there were many people, Indians like myself, who’d never seen other people. They were so isolated in the mountains that they didn’t know any other people in the world. The first night we were in a town whose name I don’t know in Spanish, but we call it ‘Amai’. The people hid and wouldn’t let us into their homes. We were thirsty and wanted to rest for a while but the people did not welcome us. We stayed in the yard of an abandoned house there, and carried on our way the next day. We reached the next town. My father had a friend there who later became an undesirable person in the government. He asked him for hospitality for the night and we stayed there. Then we carried on walking.

  During the journey my father told us all about the marvellous things there were in our land (and thinking of our ancestors of course), and the closeness of the peasant to nature. We kept quiet and listened to the silence of the mountains. It’s a pleasant silence. And in that silence, birds and animals were singing. It is a beautiful region. After a third day’s walking we reached the village. This village was wonderful, because everybody had bananas in their gardens. Everyone had a lot of crops: bananas, plantains, yuca, maize, beans, ayote, chilacayote, all the things that grew there. There were so many things, there were things to spare. But the problem was that it was three days’ journey through the mountains, and another day from my village to the town–in fact four days in all–so it was difficult to transport the produce. They couldn’t get their produce out themselves because horses didn’t come as far as these areas. There were some horses but they belonged to the landowners who lived not far away, although they didn’t own the whole area.

  So the people there received us but they were all afraid. They’d had bad experiences with people who’d taken advantage of this natural wealth. The people said: ‘We don’t go hungry but we don’t have any other things. We buy our clothes every three or four years.’ Most of the children were naked, with swollen bellies. They ate hardly any of their maize because they took it to a man who lived nearby. He was a landowner but he didn’t own the land where we were yet. They sold him the maize for a little money. They did have a pharmacy. They had a cantina. That was all they had. What they earned, they spent straight away. The people ate baked or grilled banana every day. They ate almost no tortillas because there was no market to buy lime. And lime was very expensive there. The few little traders hardly even carried soap. These people, isolated in the jungle, didn’t even have salt.

  We stayed there for a month. It was a very good time. We worked every day. There were beautiful rivers: rivers of crystal where you could see the stones at the bottom. They were white or grey and made the river look white or grey. That’s what I liked most about being there. But there were a lot of snakes and the people were constantly being bitten by snakes. The snakes used to bask in the sun at midday. It was incredibly hot. So my father said: ‘We must get to know what time it is here, otherwise the animals will bite us. We have to know when the snakes are out, because the snakes come out into the sun and then go into the rivers when they are hot. And they could give us scurvy, one of those diseases snakes have.’ We liked catching little fish in the waters of the big rivers which ran through there. Four rivers flow through there. The people there call them the Four Torrents. They are four rivers which join together and form one big one. The noise it makes is the noise of a plane taking off. We worked there for a month because there wasn’t much food. We had to eat plantains, bananas, camotes, and yucas, because there was no maize for the people to eat. And there wasn’t any lime either. What does all that fruit do? The children all have worms, and little animals in their stomachs. They all have really swollen bellies. I said to my father: ‘These children are very fat.’ I’d had worms, I’d had them in the finca. And my father said: ‘It’s because they only eat bananas. These children won’t live, they’re going to die.’ And we realized the value of our maize, the value of our lime. That is why, as our ancestors said, it is so sacred. It is true that without maize, without lime, a man has no strength. And perhaps that’s why many of us Indians have survived, eating only maize and lime which is in the maize.

  Then we went home. On the way–we’d been walking for two days–my father fainted on the path. It was because he was very weak. I was thirteen at the time. I was carrying fifty pounds of maize. My father was carrying a hundred pounds and so were my brothers. With a mecapal, as we say in Guatemala–that’s the rope we carry the maize with. Then suddenly, my father fainted. We didn’t know what to do with him. We were right up in the mountains. I was terrified, really very frightened. It was the first time in my life I’d been really frightened. I’d been afraid when I got lost in the mountains that other time, afraid that a lion or another animal would ea
t me. But I wasn’t too afraid, because I thought, if the animals come I’ll talk to them and they’ll understand me. But this time, perhaps because I was older, it was a fear which I couldn’t express. I just said: ‘Oh God! So few of us here in the mountains.’ Just my two elder brothers and my father, and my father had fainted. After a while we managed to lift him up, and we shared out his load between the three of us, leaving him with just a little because we couldn’t manage all of it.

  It was the first time that I felt how much I’d miss my father if he died. My father used to say: ‘Don’t be afraid, because this is our life, and if we didn’t feel this pain, perhaps our life would be different, perhaps we wouldn’t think of it as life. This is our life: we must suffer it but we must also enjoy it.’ My father loved my brothers too, but for me he felt the same love I did for him. I loved him very much. If anything was wrong, if my stomach ached, I’d go to him rather than to my mother. He discussed everything with me. When we went off to work, for instance, he’d have a conversation with me just as if he were talking to a neighbour. He had a lot of confidence in me and he explained a whole lot of things to me. Me…always behind my father. What I liked was that my father never stopped to rest. Sometimes he’d get home, and some trees near the house had to be arranged so that the hens could go and sleep there at night, so my father would climb the trees. He’d say to me: ‘Come with me if you want,’ and I’d give him my hand for him to help me up the tree. And every time my father opened up a path to go up into the mountains, I’d go behind him to see how he did it. Any single little thing and I’d go with him. But most of all I’d accompany him when he went round doing his work, because although my elder sister worked in the fields and in the fincas like I did, when she grew up it was up to her to look after our house in the Altiplano. We’d go off to work and she’d stay. So my work was almost the same as my father’s and I was very fond of the work we did.

  My father always sorted out my problems: that’s why I missed him so much when he died, even though we hadn’t seen each other for a long time. I was still dependent on him in so many ways. He helped dispel my doubts. Whatever I asked him, he’d explain my doubts exactly. He also defended me a lot. From my brothers and sisters, and from my mother. From anything. However, if justice had to fall on me, if they were my mistakes, well, then I would feel his hand too. But he always defended me. The thing was that when I was a little girl, I was very shy. I was very timid. Sometimes I didn’t even complain when my brothers hit me. And so when I grew up, I felt very insecure about many things. I had a lot of doubts. My father tried to get me out of that and always backed me up. Many of the things I found difficult, my father would explain to me. He said: ‘Learning is difficult, but you do it and you learn.’ When he had meetings with people, he’d choose me first, so I’d stop keeping my opinions to myself. I didn’t like intruding when all the others were giving their views. So my father taught me how to speak. ‘You must speak here,’ he’d say. I hardly ever fought with any of the boys in my village, because I’ve got more or less the same attitudes as they have, getting mixed up in different things in just the same ways as my brothers. Take darkness, for example–my elder sister is terrified of the dark. Sometimes we’d be sent off to work at night, at three in the morning, to another village and we’d go through the mountains with a small ocote. My sister always thought that lions were coming out from all sides. But I wasn’t frightened. If I thought there was something there, I’d stop, and if there wasn’t anything, I’d carry on walking.

  XXVII

  KIDNAPPING AND DEATH OF RIGOBERTA’S MOTHER

  ‘We must prevail over the times we are living in with the help of our ancestors.’

  —Rigoberta Menchú

  ‘He bragged that he would burn up my borders, and kill my young men with his sword, and dash the suckling children against the ground, and make mine infants as a prey, and my virgins as a spoil. But the Almighty Lord hath disappointed them by the hand of a woman.’

  —Book of Judith 16:5–6

  And so my mother went back to our village, and was going secretly to buy things for the community when they kidnapped her on the 19th of April, 1980.

  I knew that after they’d killed my father, my mother was on her way back to my village. It made me very sad for her because she told me that she had a lot to do with other ethnic groups, in other regions, getting people organized. If my mother went back to the Altiplano it was certainly because eight compañeros from my village were killed in the Spanish embassy. These eight compañeros were our village’s best, most active compañeros. Well, my mother said: ‘I’ll go back to my home because my community needs me now.’ And she went back. The priests and nuns who were in my village at the time offered to help her leave the country, but my mother had never thought of being a refugee. She said: ‘No, I can’t, my people need me and here is where I have to be.’ She went home and, in fact, it was true that the community was dying of hunger, because they couldn’t go down to any town or anywhere. Nobody dared risk their lives just to go and buy something to eat.

  I sometimes used to hear that my mother was in other provinces because, just by chance, people would tell me about this woman who’d had such and such an experience. And I’d say: ‘That’s my mother. Thank goodness she’s not in the Altiplano.’ But I was extremely uneasy because I didn’t know where she was and what could be happening to her. We know very well, we’re quite clear about it, that if the time comes for our parents to die, they die knowing it’s for our cause. And I always hoped to see them again. If only we could all be together again one day. My mother used to say that through her life, through her living testimony, she tried to tell women that they too had to participate, so that when the repression comes and with it a lot of suffering, it’s not only the men who suffer. Women must join the struggle in their own way. My mother’s words told them that any evolution, any change, in which women had not participated, would not be a change, and there would be no victory. She was as clear about this as if she were a woman with all sorts of theories and a lot of practice. My mother spoke almost no Spanish, but she spoke two languages–Quiché, and a bit of Kekchi. She took all that courage and all that knowledge she had, and went to organize her people. But it was, oh, so painful for me, when I’d hear that my mother was in Sololá, and then I’d hear from someone else that she was in Chimaltenango, or that she was going around El Quiché.

  My mother travelled through many provinces organizing. She actually went to the women and said that when a woman sees her son tortured and burned to death, she is incapable of forgiving anyone or ridding herself of that hatred, that bitterness. ‘I can’t forgive my enemies,’ she said. She took this important message and was very influential in many places. Many people respected her. She even went into the shanty towns round the cities. My mother was very active. She worked alongside other women and she talked to them. That is, you didn’t have to go to a meeting to talk to my mother because she’d go to houses and recount her experiences while they all made tortillas. That was how she worked. She talked about her experiences while she helped them with their work.

  I remember when my little brother disappeared, our whole community united and joined together in a protest, after my mother had gone to enquire after him at the police, and the army, and had received no reply. So, they all went, all of them. The community acted together for the first time; the majority of them were women. We knew that if the men went, they’d be kidnapped and tortured. So my mother said it would be better to hold a demonstration of women and children to see if the enemies, the army, were so shameless, so cowardly, that they would massacre women and children. We knew they were capable of it. That is, we all came knowing full well that there could be a massacre in the town. They reached the town, occupied the administrative offices, and took the mayor prisoner. If he saw justice was done, they would respect him, but if he turned his back on justice, he would be executed. It was the first time women had acted this way. Everyone admired them. First,
because they’d come a long way, and second, because they came with their children to protest to the authorities against the kidnapping, and demonstrate their revulsion.

  Some days later, they occupied the Guatemalan Congress. My mother was there, and my father, and the peasants. It was on the Guatemalan National Day. All the deputies were there. Indians from all over El Quiché joined those from Uspantán in the march and, with the help of the unions and of the CUC, took over the Congress building. When the deputies realised what had happened, it was too late to get us out. We were helped by the unions, other peasants and students as well. So what would they do? Were they going to massacre us? That was the first danger we faced. Something rather amusing happened. When they entered the Congress, the soldiers immediately raised their rifles. The person at the head of the demonstration was one of my brothers. When my eldest brother began to speak, they raised their rifles and took aim. Then my little sister came with a white flower. This is very meaningful for us. I think I said before, we only cut flowers when we really need to or when it’s for something important. Well, all the people on the demonstration held bunches of flowers to mean that they appealed for respect for human life and also for a solution to their plight. My little sister put herself in front of the rifle with her flower, and they didn’t dare shoot my brother. We occupied the Congress to plead for my little brother who’d been kidnapped, and for the hundreds of catechists who’d been taken away in different villages. We also demanded the withdrawal of the army from our communities and that they cease massacring us and raping our women. It was a protest to ask the president to stop the repression, and we did it peacefully. But nothing.