The desire for solidarity and the desire for objectivity:

The question of testimonio testimonial narrative intertwines in both frames

Testimonio is by nature a demotic and heterogeneous form
, so any formal definition of it is bound to be too limiting
Testimonio is a novel or novella-length narrative:
produced in the form of a printed text, told in the fi rst person by a narrator who is
also the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts. Its unit of
narration is usually a life or a signifi cant life experience.
Because in many cases the direct narrator is someone who is either functionally
illiterate or, if literate, not a professional writer.
The production of a testimonio generally involves the tape-recording and then the
transcription and editing of an oral account by an interlocutor who is a journalist,
ethnographer, or literary author
Testimonio is not exactly the same thing as a life history.
In the life history it is the intention of the interlocutor-recorder (an ethnographer or
journalist) that is paramount.
In testimonio, the intention of the direct narrator, who uses (in a pragmatic sense)
the possibility the interlocutor offers to bring his / her situation to the attention of
an audience to which he / she would normally not have access
because of the very conditions of subalternity to which the testimonio bears
witness.
In Ren Jaras (1986: 3)
It is rather a narracin de urgencia an emergency narrative involving a
problem of repression, poverty, marginality, exploitation, or simply survival in the
act of narration itself.
Where is the problem of representation?
The predominant formal aspect of the testimonio is the voice that speaks to the
reader through the text in the form of an I that demands to be recognized, that
wants or needs to stake a claim on our attention. }
This presence of the voice, which the reader is meant to experience as the voice of
a real rather than fictional person, is the mark of a desire not to be silenced or
defeated, to impose oneself on an institution of power and privilege from the
position of the excluded, the marginal, the subaltern.
Me llamo Rigoberta Mench, y as me naci la conciencia, Soy un delincuente. Si me
permiten hablar.
Testimonio is an affirmation of the authority of personal experience, but it cannot
affirm a self-identity that is separate from the subaltern group or class situation that
it narrates. Testimonio involves an erasure of the function and thus also of the
textual presence of the author that is so powerfully present in all major forms of

Western literary and academic writing.

By contrast
,in autobiography or the autobiographical implies necessarily that the narrator is no
longer in the situation of marginality and subalternity that his or her narrative
describes, but has now attained the cultural status of an author (and, generally
speaking, middle or upper class economic status).
The metonymic character of testimonial discourse the sense that the voice that
is addressing us is a part that stands for a larger whole is a crucial aspect of what
literary critics would call the convention of the form: the narrative contract with the
reader it establishes.
Not require or establish a hierarchy of narrative authority, testimonio is a
fundamentally democratic and egalitarian narrative form.
It implies that any life so narrated can have symbolic and cognitive value. Each
individual testimonio evokes an absent polyphony of other voices, other possible
lives and experiences (one common formal variation on the first-person singular
testimonio is the polyphonic testimonio made up of accounts by different
participants in the same event).
In testimonio, the distinctions between text and history, representation and real life,
public and private spheres, objectivity and solidarity are blurred.
It is, to borrow Umberto Ecos expression, an open work.
(Because of its reliance on voice) The testimonio implies in particular a challenge to
the loss of the authority of orality in the context of processes of cultural
modernization that privilege literacy and literature as a norm of expression.

The inequalities and contradictions of gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and
cultural authority that determine the urgent situation of the testimonial narrator

may also reproduce themselves in the relation of the narrator to the interlocutor,
especially when that narrator requires to produce the testimonio a lettered
interlocutor from a different ethnic and/or class background in order fi rst to elicit
and record the narrative, and then to transform it into a printed text and see to its
publication and circulation.

But it is equally important to understand that the testimonial narrator is not the
subaltern as such either; rather, she or he functions as an organic intellectual of the
subaltern, who speaks to the hegemony by means of a metonymy of self in the
name and in the place of the subaltern.
By the same token, the presence of subaltern voice in the testimonio is in part a
literary effect something akin to what the Russian formalists called skaz: the
textual
simulacrum of direct oral expression.
We are dealing here, in other words, not with reality itself but with what
semioticians call a reality effect that has been produced by both the testimonial
narrator using popular speech and the devices of oral storytelling and the
interlocutor-compiler, who transcribes, edits, and makes a story out of the narrators
discourse.
Elzbieta Sklodowska (1982) cautions in this regard that it would be nave to assume
a direct homology between text and history [in testimonio].
The discourse of a witness cannot be a reflection of his or her experience, but rather
a refraction determined by the vicissitudes of memory, intention, ideology. Thus,
although the testimonio uses a series of devices to gain a sense of veracity and
authenticity among them the point of view of the fi rst-person witness-narrator
the play between fiction and history reappears inexorably as a problem.
(Sklodowska, 1996)
It would be better to say that what is at stake in testimonio is the particular nature
of the reality effect it produces

The word testimonio carries the connotation in Spanish of the act of testifying or
bearing witness in a legal or religious sense. Conversely, the situation of the reader
of testimonio is akin to that of a jury member in a courtroom.
. In this sense, testimonio might be seen as a kind of speech act that sets up special
ethical and epistemological demands.
"DESIRE FOR SOLIDARITY
The capacity to identity their own selves, expectations, and values with those of
another.
To understand how this happens is to understand how testimonio works
ideologically as discourse, rather that what it is
What if much of story is not true? Could be a mythic inflation? Stoll David (1999)
But the point remains: If the epistemological and ethical authority of testimonial
narratives depends on the assumption that they are based on personal experience
and direct witness?
RIGOBERTA MENCH:
She had grafted elements of other peoples experiences and stories onto her own
account. In particular, she admitted that she was not herself present at the
massacre of her brother and his companions in Chajul. She says that this and similar
interpolations were a way of making her story a collective one, rather than a
personal autobiography.
Her testimonio is a performative rather than simply descriptive or denotative
discourse. Her narrative choices, including her silences and evasions, entail that
there are versions of what really happened that she does not or cannot represent
without relativizing the authority of her own account.