I, Rigoberta Menchu

by Rigoberta Menchu

  Their immediate reply was to burn my brother. And they went on massacring more villages, like before. Well, because of this, we had to act more quickly. What they told us was that Congress wasn’t a building for Indians, and that Indians had no right to enter Congress. It was a respectable building, because it was for members of the government. But the peasants said, we’re here and it’s here you can kill us…That is, they’d gone ready to die, knowing that if there was a massacre, it would not be in vain but would be a protest against our situation. And after that, we went on organising continually, we did it joyfully because ours was a just cause and we were motivated by something, something real.

  My mother was kidnapped. And from the very beginning she was raped by the town’s high-ranking army officers. And I want to say in advance that I have in my hands details of every step of the rape and torture suffered by my mother. I don’t want to reveal too many things because it will implicate some compañeros who are still doing their work very well. My mother was raped by her kidnappers, and after that they took her down to the camp–a camp called Chajup which means ‘under the cliff’. They have a lot of pits there where they punish the people they have kidnapped and where my little brother was tortured as well. They took my mother to the same place. There she was raped by the officers commanding the troops. After that she was subjected to terrible tortures. The first day they shaved her head, put a uniform on her and then they said: ‘If you’re a guerrilla why don’t you fight us here.’ But my mother said nothing. While they beat her, they asked her where we were, and said that if she made a confession, they’d let her go. But my mother knew very well that they did that so that they could torture her other children and would never let her go. She pretended she knew nothing. She defended every one of us until the end. On the third day of her torture, they cut off her ears. They cut her whole body bit by bit. They began with small tortures, small beatings and worked up to terrible tortures. The first tortures she’d received became infected. It was her turn to suffer the terrible pain her son had suffered too. They tortured her the whole time and didn’t give her any food for many days. From the pain, from the torture all over her body, disfigured and starving, my mother began to lose consciousness and was in her death throes. Then the officer in charge sent for the medical team they have in the army and they gave her injections and enough serum to revive her, to bring her back to life again. They gave her medicine, they looked after her well, and found a place for her where she was treated well. When she was a little better, well, of course, she asked for food. They gave her food. Then they started raping her again. She was disfigured by those same officers. She endured a great deal, but she didn’t die.

  When my mother was on the point of dying again, they sent us messages by all sorts of methods. They took my mother’s clothes to the town hall in Uspantán. They exhibited it to prove to us that she was in their hands. We sent certain people to investigate what was happening to her and they said that we should go, that my mother was still alive, that she was in their hands and they were torturing her. She needed to see one of her children. It was like that, the whole time. We’d lost my little brother, but I didn’t know if my little sister had been captured with my mother or if she was doing other things. No-one knew. It was very painful for me to accept that my mother was being tortured and not to know anything about the rest of the family. None of us presented ourselves. Least of all my brothers. I was able to contact one of my brothers and he told me not to put my life in danger, that they were going to kill my mother anyway and would kill us too. We have to keep this grief as a testimony to them because they never exposed their lives even when their grief was great too. And so we had to accept that my mother was going to die anyway.

  When they saw that none of her children were coming down to collect my mother’s clothes, the army took her to a place near the town where it was very hilly. It was my hope that my mother would die surrounded by the nature she so loved. They put her under a tree and left her there, alive but dying. They didn’t let my mother turn over, and her face was so disfigured, cut and infected; she could barely make any movement by herself. They left her there dying for four or five days, enduring the sun, the rain and the night. My mother was covered in worms, because in the mountains there is a fly which gets straight into any wound, and if the wound isn’t tended in two days, there are worms where the fly has been. Since all my mother’s wounds were open, there were worms in all of them. She was still alive. My mother died in terrible agony. When my mother died, the soldiers stood over her and urinated in her mouth; even after she was dead! Then they left a permanent sentry there to guard her body so that no-one could take it away, not even what was left of it. The soldiers were there right by her body, and they could smell my mother when she started to smell very strongly. They were there right by her; they ate near her, and, if the animals will excuse me, I believe not even animals act like that, like those savages in the army. After that, my mother was eaten by animals; by dogs, by all the zopilotes there are round there, and other animals helped too. They stayed for four months, until they saw that not a bit of my mother was left, not even her bones, and then they went away.

  Of course, it was dreadful for us when we knew my mother was dying in agony. But, afterwards, when she was dead…naturally we weren’t pleased because no human being is happy about that…but all the same, we were relieved to know my mother wasn’t suffering any longer. She’d gone through so much torment that the one thing we wanted most was for them to kill her quickly, that she should live no longer.

  XXVIII

  DEATH

  ‘They began slowly to descend the side of the setting sun. Then a cloud like rain hid them.’

  —Popol Vuh

  Among Indians, the phenomenon of death is something that we prepare ourselves for. It’s not something unknown that happens, it’s more like a preparation. For instance, the coffin is built a long time beforehand so that the person who is going to die, the old person, gets to know his coffin. And, at the moment he is going to die, the moment he feels he will die, he calls to him the person he loves most, the person he is closest to (it can be a daughter, or a granddaughter in the case of a grandmother, or a son or a grandson if it’s a grandfather, or any person close to them). He makes his last recommendations to them and at the same time gives them the secret of their ancestors, their own experiences, their reflections. He tells them his secrets, and advises them how to act in life, towards the Indian community, and towards the ladino. That is, everything which is handed down through the generations to preserve Indian culture. The person who receives these recommendations keeps the secrets, and passes them on before he dies, and so on, from generation to generation. Then after that the family gathers, and he talks to them as well. He repeats his recommendations, and goes through his life for them. This is not like the secrets. Those are only given to one person, the recommendations are made for everyone. Then he dies peacefully. He dies feeling he has done his duty, completed his life, as he had to.

  The death ceremony is performed in the house of the dead person. Everyone comes, the whole village pays its respects to the dead person and visits the family. The community takes care of all the expenses. That is, the family bears none of the expense. They sit with the dead man through the night and prepare food for the people present. One very important thing is the drink, what they serve to drink, and it’s one occasion that we can eat a little better. We can eat meat and other things. There’s also a sort of ceremony, which is a bit like the ceremony we perform for the maize, when we sow our maize. We put candles in the four cardinal points, and cut flowers–one of the few occasions we do that. We cut flowers for the dead person and put them round his coffin. Then we talk about the dead person. Everyone recounts something about him. The family speak, and if he hasn’t any family, the village representative speaks because he is like his family. We talk about him and recount the things he did during his life, but we don’t only praise him–we can criticize him to
o. We spend the whole night talking about the dead person, about his life, remembering him.

  We don’t leave the body in the house for long. Respects are paid quickly and the body is buried within twenty-four hours. He is left as short a time as possible; just one night for the ceremony and then he’s buried. The actual burial is very important. One detail is that, when he’s buried, all the objects he most loved in his lifetime are put in his coffin. The objects are not to be used by his heirs but stay with him. We bury all the things he liked: the machete he’d had all his life; the cup he drank from; all the things he used every day. When he dies, his clothes are put in a place and not used again, unless they are used by a very dear friend, someone he loved very much. When he’s about to die everyone is attentive to what he’s going to say and recommend. We say that a person, on his deathbed, makes an inventory of his life, and his mind passes over all the places he has lived. That is, if he’s lived in a finca, he returns to it again in his spirit, in his mind.

  As for killing someone: death lived by others–be it death through an accident or any other kind–is something we feel very deeply, we feel it in our own flesh. For example, the way my little brother died: murdered. We don’t even like killing animals. Because we don’t like killing. There is no violence in the Indian community. Take the death of a child. If a child dies of malnutrition, it is not the fault of the father but the fault of the conditions imposed on us by the ladino. It is the system which abuses us. In the past especially, everything was the fault of the ladino. Now we’ve thought a lot about many of the things our grandparents used to tell us again and again. That now they want to destroy us with medicines and other things. Now they want to make us live differently to the way we want to live. For us, killing is something monstrous. And that’s why we feel so angered by all the repression. Even more than that: our dedication to the struggle is a reaction against it, against all the suffering we endure.

  We have put our trust in the compañeros in the mountains. They saw our plight. They go through what we go through, and they have adapted to the conditions we live in. We can only love a person who eats what we eat. Once the Indian opens his heart to them, all those in the mountains will be his brothers. We didn’t feel deceived as we did with the army, when the army takes away the sons of Indians. That means a break with their culture, with their past. We felt abused when they came and took our men, our boys, because we knew that although we might see them again, they would no longer be the same. And for the soldiers, it’s something much more serious than that. It’s not only that they might lose their culture, but that the Indian soldier can kill other Indians. When Indians decide to go to fight in the mountains, they know that anything can happen to them. They can die in combat at any time. Since those rituals cannot be performed for a dying person in the mountains where conditions make it difficult, the ceremony of recommendations is performed in the village. The same ceremony that the dead person performs with his family, before dying, an Indian does before going off to fight in the mountains, in case anything happens to him. In this way he passes on his secrets before joining the guerrilla army. They get together one night. A family which is leaving the next day, for instance, gets together and performs the ceremony to make their recommendations. After that they leave. It’s to fulfil your duty in case something happens to you.

  XXIX

  FIESTAS AND INDIAN QUEENS

  ‘What hurts Indians most is that our costumes are considered beautiful, but it’s as if the person wearing it didn’t exist.’

  —Rigoberta Menchú

  The fiestas which take place in the towns are more than anything a mixture. The actual fiestas that our ancestors celebrated probably no longer exist, and they are being replaced now by celebrations of some saints’ days, some famous people’s days. In the schools they often celebrate the day of Tecún Umán. Tecún Umán is the Quiché hero who is said to have fought the Spanish and then been killed by them. Well, there is a fiesta each year in the schools. They commemorate the day of Tecún Umán as the national hero of the Quichés. But we don’t celebrate it, primarily because our parents say that this hero is not dead. So we don’t celebrate. It’s the ladinos in the schools who celebrate it. For us it would be rejecting him to say that he was a hero, that he fought and died, because that is talking about him in the past. His birthday is commemorated as something which represented the struggle of those times. But for us the struggle still goes on today, and our suffering more than ever. We don’t want it said that all that happened in the past, but that it exists today, and so our parents don’t let us celebrate it. We know this is our reality even though the ladinos tell it as if it were history.

  ‘Tecún Umán’ means the grandfather of everyone. ‘Mán’ means something like father, or grandfather, someone respected. He was actually the leader of all the Indians, like their king or their president. Well, when the Spaniards arrived, there were great battles and many kings like him died. He was the last one to die in the struggle against the Spaniards. The story we tell about Tecún Umán is different to the one the ladinos tell. We don’t celebrate Guatemalan Independence Day either because, in fact, it isn’t a celebration for us. We consider it a ladino celebration because, well, Independence as they call it means nothing to us. It only means more grief and greater efforts not to lose our culture. Other than that it has no meaning for us at all. It is only celebrated in the schools and the people with access to schools are above all people with money. The majority of Indians have no access to primary or secondary schools. The bourgeoisie, middle-class people, celebrate it but lower down there’s none of that. When teachers come into the villages, they bring with them the ideas of capitalism and getting on in life. They try and impose these ideas on us. I remember that in my village there were two teachers for a while and they began teaching the people, but the children told their parents everything they were being taught at school and the parents said: ‘We don’t want our children to become like ladinos.’ And they made the teachers leave. What the teacher wanted was for them to celebrate the 15th of September. They had to wear school uniform and buy shoes. We never buy those things for children. They told them to put on a uniform, to disguise themselves by taking off their own clothes, their costumes, and putting on clothes of all one colour. Well, the parents didn’t want their children to be turned into ladinos and chased the teachers out. For the Indian, it is better not to study than to become like ladinos.

  As I was saying, the fiestas in the towns are always held for a saint or for any image. This happened more and more after Catholic Action started operating. At the same time, we began taking the Bible as a way of telling us about our ancestors. So our people identified with the Bible and with the Catholic religion a great deal. And that’s how today in our towns we have fiestas for our patrons, for saints and images, because the people absorbed all this and made it their own. Indians regard all fiestas as a rest from work. But it’s a rest which harms them as well, because instead of actually resting for two or three days, he has to spend the whole day of the fiesta in the town. He doesn’t go to the fiesta only if he’s ill, or very, very busy, or has nothing to eat. For music, they play the marimba. I remember marimbas years ago, but they were marimbas without other instruments and the people of the town played them themselves. There are dances in which the Indian represents how he repelled the Spaniards. We call it the ‘Dance of the Conquest’. The Indians put on white or red masks to represent the Spaniards. The Spaniards have horses and the Indians fight them with the weapons of the people–machetes, stones. So they have a battle. And they do it as a dance. I liked everything but I like the ‘Dance of the Conquest’ very much because it gives an exact meaning to what Indians think about the ‘Conquest’. There are other dances too: the ‘Dance of the Bull,’ the ‘Dance of the Deer’. They are performed in the towns too, and men dress up and use masks like a bull or a deer. It’s usually the people over thirty-five who do the dances.

  My town is called San Miguel Uspa
ntán. We commemorate Miguel Uspantán twice a year. One fiesta is dedicated to the town on the day of San Miguel, but since the people are very fond of the Virgin, the Virgin’s fiesta is also dedicated to San Miguel de Uspantán. It starts on the 5th or 6th of May and doesn’t finish until the 9th of May. The people are on their feet for all those days. People come down from even the furthest away villages and it’s like a meeting for all the different communities which live outside the town. They come down and sell their things. For instance, if they’ve got an animal to sell, they sell it in the fiesta because a lot of tradesmen come too. Some of them are big tradesmen. There are also lotteries, and there, that’s where you lose everything. They hold masses as well, and first communions. And there are cantinas. People come out of mass and into the cantina. Women drink as well. That is something incredible in these towns because it’s not only the men who want to let themselves go and forget their problems for a while, but the women too. The thing is that very often a mother hasn’t had a moment’s relief, so she takes advantage of the fiesta to rest a bit. As I said, I see this as a rest for the people. My mother used to drink as well. My father, now, his personality was such that when he drank, and then couldn’t drink any more, he’d give in and go to bed or sleep. Sometimes they’d go and drink together and sometimes my mother would be drunk and my father not. It’s not unusual to see our women drinking. In fact, many women drink. And even more so in the fiestas. There have been cases of women sleeping on their children. And this is scandalous. Everyone, everyone, gets drunk, and after the fiesta there’s not a centavo left. The ladinos are there too. Since not all ladinos live well, many poor ladinos get mixed up in all this drunkenness too. But many other ladinos take advantage of the fiesta to sell, to do business, and make money. For them every fiesta is for making money.