The Cost of Communalism: Individual Autonomy and Growth in Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” and Rigoberta’s “I, Rigoberta Mench”

The Cost of Communalism: Individual Autonomy and Growth

in Maxine Hong Kingston’s No Name Woman and Rigoberta’s I, Rigoberta Mench

        Patricia Hill Collins, in Shifting the Center, articulates that “Without women’s motherwork, communities would not survive, and by definition, women of color themselves would not survive” (643).  According to Collins, this communal project, however, “extracts a high cost for large numbers of women” (643).  The cost, she says, is that “there is loss of individual autonomy and there is submersion of individual growth for the benefit of the group” (643, emphasis added).  Similarly, in Asian and Native American culture, for the benefit of the community, women’s individual autonomy and individual growth are often submersed as well.  Maxine Hong Kingston’s unnamed protagonist, in No Name Woman, and Rigoberta, in I, Rigoberta Mench, both sacrifice their individual autonomies and individual growths for the benefit of their communities.  Their seemingly self-sacrificing ego-dissolutions, however, are not some conscious, individual choice they make; rather, they are unconscious choices owed to their cultural upbringings and the social systems they are born into.  Although, their willingness to lose their egos is highly noble, they are simply abiding by the powerfully effective, unstipulated moral laws operating within their communities for generations. 

For the women of color, more specifically, women of older Chinese generation and Native American women, communalism is not a choice, but a way of life they are born into and must hold on to.  For Rigoberta and Kingston’s unnamed aunt, therefore, individual autonomy and growth are not alternatives they consciously deny.  Both protagonists are oblivious to other ways of living.  To them, communities are the only support system they know.  They believe that a good life is attained only through strict adherence to their ancestral customs.  As an option, if self-autonomy was offered to Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt, they, most likely, would have rejected it for a wise reason.  For any woman, who has never known other culture nor crossed over communal boundaries, to defect her own community would be deemed suicidal and self-destructive.  It can translate to death, if not literally, then psychologically.  It is not surprising, therefore, that regardless of the severe hardships Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt encounter, they do not think to venture out of their communal boundaries; for them, communalism is not only the safest but the only way of life.   

Due to social and cultural conditioning, the sense of communal identity for Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt eclipses their sense of self identity.  In Rigoberta’s case, her communal identity starts to formulate while she is yet in her mother’s womb.  When her parents make the birth announcement to the people in their community, she becomes their collective asset because her parents promise the people that her baby “belong to the community and [that the baby] would…serve it when [he/she] grew up” (49).  In Rigoberta’s Indian culture, even the personhood is a communal asset – every person is owned and shared by one another.  On her tenth birthday, her communal identity is further reinforced.  According to her Indian traditions, she makes an oral, yet official promise to her community that she will “do many things for the [them]” (49).  Her parents make sure that she repeats the vow in front of every single person in the community.  Corollary to such cultural and social inculcations, Rigoberta grows up with a peculiar sensibility and conscience; she feels and thinks of her community before she does her selfhood.  Likewise, the fact that Kingston’s unnamed aunt, wields no significant, individual power over her life, casts her as someone lacking self identity.  Kingston articulates that Chinese, patriarchal culture and customs are responsible for her aunt’s lack of individuality.  According to Kingston, “women in the old China” (310), would naturally be more community conscious than self conscious, because her life is controlled by forces other than herself (emphasis added).  For instance, she “did not [have the right to] choose” (310), “not even the biggest event of one’s life – marriage” (310).  Kingston continues to speak for her aunt:  “When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband, she…promised before they met that she would be his forever” (310).  In other words, her aunt’s course of life was dictated more by community customs than her individual will, thus weakening her selfhood.  Her life is owned by patriarchal authorities and maneuvered by communal customs.  Psychologically and socially, she is so repressed that she has no room to forge an identity of her own.  Thus for both Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt, the fact that their communal identities are more dominant over their individual identities is a result of social/cultural construction. 

As in the case of Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt, once their minds are culturally/socially constructed to abide by the communal ideologies, then, any inklings of individuality are deemed eccentric, problematic, and antithesis to communal solidarity.  In other words, individualism and communalism are considered to be mutually exclusive, and thus cannot coexist in one person’s mind.  In the minds of Rigoberta and the unnamed aunt, the collective, communal identities are so deeply ingrained that a concept of individual pursuit and growth is almost non-existent.  If they have any sense of self-identity, then, it is sure to be culturally suppressed and submersed, until they no longer crave it nor recognize it.  These two women’s main preoccupations and anxieties deal only with issues concerning communal values and their personal conformity to them.  Rigoberta’s elder sister echoes this notion of cultural conformity when she tells Rigoberta to “accept life as it is” (49).  Her sister exhorts Rigoberta that “[they] shouldn’t become bitter or look for diversions or escape outside the laws of [their] parents,” (49).  Likewise, according to Kingston’s mother, back in her (and the unnamed aunt’s) Chinese hometown, not only every woman in the village shared a common will, they even looked alike: “All the married women blunt-cut their hair in flaps about their ears or pulled it back in tight buns.  No nonsense” (311), she say.  In fact, Kingston’s mother continues, “a woman who tended her appearance reaped a reputation for eccentricity” (311).  Thus, for Asians and Native Americans, then, apparently, the community’s ultimate goal is that everyone blends well with the whole; no one should stand out; everyone should merge harmoniously with one another.  Under this politic of communal solidarity, individual egos must be sacrificed to sustain this utopian ideology of “oneness.”  

Interestingly, in a well-ordered community, there are unstipulated, moral laws which heightens this oneness in a perverse way because if any one member violates the law, then, that person becomes the common enemy of the entire community and receives severe punishments.  Rigoberta says that in her community, their common “enemy is someone who steals or goes into prostitution” (57).  She says that in her community, laws are formulated orally: “this is how we make our pleas and…promises” (57).  Although Rigoberta realizes that her law making customs “[do not] reflect so much to the real world” (57), she asserts that this is “[her people’s] reality” (57).  Furthermore, if a member of Rigoberta’s community endangers the lives of other members, “although it hurts us,” she says, the people “would have to execute [that person]” (146).  Likewise, in the unnamed aunt’s village, there are unwritten moral laws, too, that are more powerful and effective than any written state laws.  If in Rigoberta’s village, a prostitute is the villager’s common enemy, in the village of the unnamed aunt, an adulterer is.  Kingston tells us that her aunt became the villager’s common enemy because the people believed “that her [aunt’s] infidelity had…harmed the village” (313).  The villagers demanded that she tell the name of the impregnator, but her aunt did not disclose it, thereby paying the ultimate price of being private, for keeping “the man’s name to herself ” (312, emphasis added).  Kingston confirms that the ultimate reason why “the villagers punished her [aunt],” (313) was because she “act[ed] as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them” (313, emphasis added).  The villagers “ripped up her clothes and shoes and broke her combs, grinding them underfoot…‘Pig.’ ‘Ghost.’ ‘Pig.’” (309).  After the villagers left, however, her own family members exacerbate her misery.  They relentlessly rebuke her, too, for being an unfit, dishonorable member of their family who has acted singularly in an infamous way: “the family broke their silence and cursed her…Death is coming. Death is coming.  Look what you’ve done.  You’ve killed us. Ghost! Dead ghost! Ghost! You’ve never been born” (314).  Her family, unable to accept her disgraceful eccentricity, disowns her, and her place in the community thus altogether disappears.  Although she is not what Rigoberta describes as someone “guilty of endangering a member of community,” she, with her newborn infant, self-executes both lives by drowning in a well.  Thus, in such a tightly-knitted community where “all [in] the village were kinsmen” (313), those who become the common enemy of the villagers by breaking the communal law, can/will suffer ignominious punishment.  The unnamed aunt literally, and perhaps heroically, loses her ego to soothe the villager’s collective shame, superstitious fear, and indignity.

If the unnamed aunt’s death is a literal dissolution of self in an attempt to lift her sexual curse from the village people, Rigoberta’s self-sacrificing decision to not marry is also a form of mental, self-dissolution for the sake of her community.  Rigoberta genuinely feels that any form of individual growth and autonomy, namely, even marriage on her part, is a selfish act that betrays the communal vows she made as a girl.  As a female bound by such communal vows, however, she admits that she, too, had her share of struggles and temptations in terms of personal aspirations:   

As I said, I was engaged once…I came to all sorts of conclusions because I loved this companero…Well, there I was between these two things – choosing him or my people’s struggle.  And [community] that’s what I chose, and I left my companero with much sadness and heavy heart.  But I told myself that I had a lot to do for my people and I didn’t need a pretty house while they lived in horrific conditions. (225-6)

Seemingly from pure altruism, Rigoberta devotes everything she has/is for the cause of her beloved community.  Her message is unequivocal: “my primary duty is to my people and then to my personal happiness” (225).  It is clear that Rigoberta’s individual autonomy and growth are the dear price she willingly pays to live up to her communal expectations.

The stories of both I, Rigoberta Menchu and No Name Woman illustrate that a woman born into a communalistic social structure has no room for individualism.  One of the key concepts of communalism is that each member in the community is inextricably weaved into the whole, as one big family.  Every one thus share one, all-inclusive identity that eclipse any individual identities.  Both the unnamed aunt and Rigoberta, mentally and literally, dissolve their sense of selves into the larger, utopian “us” concept for the sake of their communities.  Also, what these two stories have in common, is that in a sound communal system, there are unstipulated laws – though not written – govern its members more powerfully, effecting the choices and shaping the conducts of its members.  As Rigoberta’s thoughtful responses to individual autonomy and growth reveals, women who are ingrained into communal ideologies and committed to communal solidarities will willingly give up their egos and autonomies for the sake of the collective, communal good.

Works Cited

Collins, Patricia Hill. “Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. 

DeShazer, Mary K.  New York: Addison-Wesley Educational, 2001. 638-653.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. “No Name Woman.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature.  DeShazer, Mary K.  New York: Addison-Wesley Educational, 2001. 308-315.

Menchu, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchu. Wright, Ann. New York: Verso, 1984.