Fecal Realities and the Making of a Worlded Self: Rigoberta Menchú, Jamaica Kincaid, and Slavenka Drakuli?

Abstract

In Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonial, I Rigoberta Menchú (1983), the essays collected under Slavenka Drakuli?’s title, Cafe Europa (1996), and Jamaica Kincaid's generically undefinable narrative, A Small Place (1988), relationships to bodily waste are showcased as part and parcel of processes of self-making in relation to the making of national/colonial imaginaries. Such processes involve not just insular practices of individual cultivation but also the material conditions of the world that impact, in a Foucauldian sense, the artistry involved in enacting the care of the self in relation to other people and other times. The concluding argument is that the making of the narrative self, as a carefully “worlded” entity, emerges in Menchú, Kincaid, and Drakuli? as a continually shifting work in the art of a nonfictional search for the conditions under which diverse realities and their accompanying truths come to be spoken. It is in the distances that separate different truths, and through the bending of genres like the testimonial and the personal essay that the nonfictional self becomes rather than is, both in relation to the expose of its most intimate bodily needs and in relation to what that expose leads to: the visceral encounter with its most unknowable others.