Representing yourself

Our experience in Guatemala has always been to be told: ‘Ah, poor Indians, they can’t speak.’ And many people have said, ‘I’ll speak for them.’ — Rigoberta Menchu The idea of representational tyranny is the ability to produce authoritative knowledge of the Other. When Cook said that he was deified by the Polynesians it became objective fact, just as Cortez’s conviction that he had successfully bamboozled the Aztecs into considering horses immortal meant an acceptance that the Aztecs were fooled. Within this conception, the colonized subject, the non-European Other, becomes an object to study. Knowledge can be generated about them without their contribution. Their intelligence is measured, their ‘rituals’ studied and ‘understood’, their ‘superstition’ exploited. Their knowledge, their language, their traditions are evaluated on a weighted scale, one that defines European values as civilization itself. A people are understood, thus, through the eyes of their oppressors. It’s a fundamental disempowering – one that refuses a people the right to define even themselves. Instead they’re defined in negation – against the civilization of Europe. Consider the sheer defensiveness of ‘I, Rigoberta Menchu’ whenever it comes to anything that might be judged according to European standards. ‘That’s why they call us polytheistic. But we’re not polytheistic… or if we are, it’s good, because it’s our culture, our customs.’ She says, apprehending the idea that polytheism, on the European scale, veers close to the barbaric end. Rigoberta Menchu thus, speaks as a defense against this act of representation and evaluation on an unfair scale. In order to re-represent her people, Rigoberta must learn Spanish – her own language is invalid, ‘unworthy’ of an act of generating ‘legitimate’ knowledge. She describes – defends – her culture, her values, her traditions – her history. ‘It’s not true what the white people say,’ she says, paraphrasing the words of her elders, ‘that our ancestors didn’t defend themselves.’ She must explain that if her people are dirty, it is because they cannot afford soap, the time taken to wash their clothes or multiple pairs of clothing. That her people are not animals, they are merely driven to inhuman states by the exploitation of others. She must not only defend her people against dehumanizing stereotypes, she must describe a very different scale, one on which if she is polytheistic then it is good, because it is hers. Misrepresenting the Indian people and devaluing their knowledge is, within the text, not just a theoretical concept of abstract knowledge production on an academic, anthropological or historical level but an exceptionally immediate and political act. The ‘ignorance’ of the Indian people in the language of their oppressors, the language of administration, renders them effectively mute to the world and allows others to speak for them in all manners of damaging ways, such as allowing the government to manipulate them into signing away their rights to their land. The valuation of one language – one knowledge –  over another serves as the valuation of one people and one culture over another, forming a justification of tyranny, one that under girds all others – that the Indians did not resist  colonization – that they’re fundamentally lesser.