Categories
Neruda

XII. Macchu Picchu

There is a light in the valley:
bodies gather from the horrible dark
and find a couple, many-feathered and bright
weaving a tapestry of song
into the dead reality of night.

There is a man at the door
in a mask with golden eyes:
better to burn the sacred gift
than to let him re-divine
the old and knotted matter of our lives.

And there is a word in the street
among the old and the blind:
they say you can find
(if you are ever so benign)
a single fabric untouched by the violence of time.

Categories
Mamani & Huamán

XI. Idiot Wind

What kind of holdings could this nameless wisp of wind have? My daughter’s not interested in the lice this unknown drifter has got stockpiled away. (Mamani 38)

Andean Lives brings together the testimonial narratives of Gregorio Condori Mamani and Asunta Quispe Huamán, an older Indigenous couple who have lived in the Andes all their lives. Their testimonies were recorded by Ricardo Valderrama Fernández and Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez, who “had them provide more detail on certain passages, amplify certain themes, return to others that they had quickly passed over” (Gelles 5). The interviewers’ questions and the couples’ “many repetitions” were removed from the transcribed text, which was edited to present two chronologically ordered narratives. The text was then translated into English by Paul H. Gelles and Gabríela Martinez Escobar, who had a North American and European readership in mind. So it’s important to note there were many layers of mediation—many perspectives and decisions between the original Indigenous voices and the printed text that made the stories accessible for a particular audience

The quote above shows how Mamani was rejected as a marriage prospect by the father of a girl he was interested in. The father calls Mamani a “nameless wisp of wind” and a “drifter” without property, suggesting that stability and a name are incompatible with Mamani’s vagabond lifestyle. I was interested in the other times wind is mentioned in the text. Throughout Andean Lives, Mamani and Huamán blame cases of ill-fortune on “ill wind,” which the translators contextualize as an “evil breeze … a kind of sickness that moves through the air itself and that is generated by malignant spirits, such as those ‘exhaled’ from the body of the recently deceased or from ancient tombs” (Gelles & Escobar 163). Mamani similarly understands his adriftness, and his inability to find a stable home or job as his curse and misfortune. Another time Mamani mentions the wind is when he recounts an elder named Laureano Cupita’s story of how Cuzco was built by the original Inka. Originally, Cuzco was completely flat “and the wind would come roaring through like a rushing bull, knocking down any wall or house Inka put up” (Mamani 22). The original Inka built mountains around Cuzco to protect it as a fortress against the wind. The wind symbolizes a natural force of terror that prevents security and settlement for these people.

The father who rejected Mamani was kind of right—Mamani was adrift under horrible colonial and economic conditions, and could not shelter his loved ones and himself from the storm. He understands his lack of place as his fate and tragedy, and perhaps that of many runas like himself. However, as we discussed in class, Mamani’s forced mobility allows him to experience many different kinds of life in the Andes. It allows him a range of knowledge and perspective that the landed hacienda owners might not have. This is a possible advantage to his position, though it is surely not something he would value over better living conditions.

This got me thinking about Che Guevara in the film The Motorcycle Diaries, and perhaps ourselves, who were able to travel without having to do so to sustain the immediate conditions of our lives. At least as it showed in the film, Che’s range of experiences while traveling contributed to his revolutionary awakening. Though he did get into precarious situations, I think they were not as threatening to his existence as Mamani’s in his testimony. The dangers Che faced were often chosen by him in a way Mamani’s were not.

I’m wondering to what extent our travels allow us the possibility of experiencing diverse and challenging perspectives, or if our economic condition or orientation to travel restricts the kinds of experiences we can have. I think these conditions can determine whether travel and mobility are a gift or a curse. I don’t think that more travel necessarily grants you more diverse or accurate knowledge. I think you can travel the whole world and change your understanding less than if you walked a block from where you live.

Categories
Experience

X. Uno Gringo Chino

Waiting for the train from Aguas Calientes to Ollantaytambo, I asked Daniel how to see and write in terms of affect. Of course it’s important to talk about ideology. But I think I think too much in categories and broad concepts and don’t pay enough attention to how bodies move and are affected by other bodies. I said my writing has been too detached. I’ve been afraid to fuck up. Daniel said I should pay attention to the moments of intensity.

I journal every night in bullet points recounting the day’s events. At the very least a single line, but sometimes I write a few pages. If there’s something I need to flesh out or give more detail I linger on it. I scanned through my journal this past week and found no moments that screamed out at me. Until I noticed something I’ve noted down almost every day here: people confronting me or yelling at me in the street about my race. I feel disgusted whenever I hear the word race but it just feels more honest than the word ethnicity. Ethnicity is race in the language of tolerance. And tolerance is at best a conditional acceptance of difference. Cleansed, aestheticized difference. Difference kneeling in its right place. Ethnicity is not just “cultural,” it is irreducibly political. 

I’ve been bothered by people yelling things like “Chino!” and “Japonés!” here before but I’ve never really been mad. I assumed it was just a crude recognition of difference. One of my favourite race moments was when I was eating chaufa de carne at one of my favourite stands in the Pisac market and the owner, Dina, poked me: “Better than your country, right?” I asked her: “What is my country?” She didn’t reply. But she was right. It was among the best I’d had.

The worst moment was probably in Aguas Calientes. As it’s primarily a tourist town for Macchu Picchu, there are already so many people in the streets and in front of restaurants harassing people and trying to get business. One day a man stopped me as I was leaving the market to ask me where I was from. When I said I was from Canada he refused to accept it. He said: “You don’t look like a Canadian.” I asked him: “What does a Canadian look like?” No response. I gave him a friendly glare and walked off. But on the way back to the hotel a man started yelling at me in the street. I hardly remember what he was saying. It was like all the times before but more intensely aggressive and patronizing. This was the first time I wanted to yell back. I wanted to scream at him like a real righteous fucking racist. I wanted to match him and get all of our ugliness out in the open. Because if you know what it is it’s to be seen as a caricature of all the worst associations you can imagine and to see yourself as that, to become that caricature at the same time. I wanted to take away his humanity. I wanted to make him into a figurine on a shelf. I wanted him to feel on what level it hurts and on what level it works. But I didn’t turn around. I just walked away.

Yesterday after Inti Raymi I stopped at a mercado for water. A few women were chatting there, most likely the owner and her friends. One asked me where I was from: “Canada.” She made a gesture with her fingers and her eyes. “Oriental?” I let her guess a couple times until she got it right and she cheered a little like they always do. But she was very sweet. With the warmest smile, she said: “Welcome to Peru.”

Part of me likes this treatment better than back home. I often feel these impressions implicitly even when it’s unsaid. Sometimes my mom and I notice it in the way a waitress treats us. Without words, we know it’s there. I don’t know if I like pretending it’s not. It doesn’t give us a chance to speak back.

I wonder if any of you have had similar experiences here you’d like to share, and if you feel similarly about them?

Categories
Garcilaso

IX. Barbarians

Finally he told them: ‘When you have reduced these people to our service, you shall maintain them in reason and justice, showing mercy, clemency, and mildness, and always treating them as a merciful father treats his beloved and tender children … I wish you as children of mine to follow this example sent down to earth to teach and benefit those men who live like beasts. And henceforward I establish and nominate you as kings and lords over all the people you may thus instruct with your reason, government, and good works.’ (Garcilaso 46-47)

Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, completed in 1612, is a history of Peru that describes the high rationality and civilization of the Incas to argue that the Spanish conquest was not wholly legitimate. Garcilaso was writing in response to Spanish authors who claimed that the barbarousness of the Indians justified their subjugation—that it was the correct duty of the Spanish to educate the Indians in the civilizing force of Christianity. Garcilaso does not refute Christianity; he argues that the Incas were not obstacles to it but paved the way for its introduction. The real obstacle to the full realization of Christianity was the greed of the Spaniards. Garcilaso was of the first generation of mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Incan blood, and proudly claimed the legitimacy of his argument from his roots in both societies.

The quote I included above is from Garcilaso’s account of the sun’s instructions for his first son and daughter on Earth. Garcilaso claims that the sun was the sole god of the Incas. Here the sun tells his children how they should treat non-Inca people. Notice the patriarchal attitude he assigns the Incas: to treat others “as a merciful father treats his beloved and tender children” and to be “kings and lords” over them. The sun is the father of the Incas who are to act as the fathers of the rest. While this patriarchal attitude seems to be benevolent, it creates and maintains a construction of non-Inca peoples as (effectively) children, whose ways of living and understanding are primitive in contrast with that of the Incas. Non-Inca people are granted a patronizing innocence. Incan and non-Incan groups are not antagonistic equals—the non-Incas have yet to be educated and civilized. Compared with the “reason, government, and good works” of the Incas, the non-Incas “live like beasts.”

I think Garcilaso draws his argument from the very discourses he wanted to combat, creating a barbarous non-Incan other to define his Incan ideal. Garcilaso does not do away with the idea of “barbarians” but instead recasts who embodies that category. The barbarians are no longer the “Indians” but the non-Incas; Garcilaso insists the Incas were a people as civilized as the ancient Romans (except for the fact that they lacked writing) who lived according to reason. While Garcilaso still held Christianity as his highest ideal for a people (it is important to remember: this was a necessity for him to receive a Christian audience), he managed to create an ideal conception of a non-Christian people, the Inca, palatable to a Christian audience. Like the distinction Guaman Poma creates between the Christian line of Topay Capac and the heathenous line of Manco Capac, Garcilaso’s casting of the Incas as rational and opposed to the non-Inca barbarians allows him to assert that not all “Indians” are the same. Barbarism then justified the Inca’s colonization of non-Inca peoples but not the Spaniard’s conquest of the Inca empire. I think it is significant that Garcilaso possibly adopted from the Spanish the argument that barbarism justifies colonization as well as the strategy of taking a patriarchal and infantilizing attitude toward the other to maintain them as barbarous. While these strategies may be abhorrent, Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries are an early surviving example of the Spaniards’ justifications for colonization being used against themselves by an Indigenous writer.

I wonder if Garcilaso’s aim is common to all processes of colonization: propping up the image of the disparaged other to be more similar and worthy of value and respect from the standpoint of the colonizer. I also wonder to what extent casting other people as barbarous is necessary to assert the value of a culture. I’m thinking of how at the Inca ruins we have visited, like Sacsayhuamán, our tour guides have often claimed that the magnificence of the sites makes the fall of the Incas lamentable. What does this say about cultures that don’t have similarly surviving ruins? Do these claims disparage the value of these other cultures?

Categories
Experience

VIII: The Real Deal

A few days ago, most of our class paid for a “Traditional Community Day” a small way from Pisac. This is how it is advertised in a brochure I discovered after the day was over:

Delight in a 45-minute drive into the majestic high Andes and a twenty minute walk through the patchwork fields replete with potatoes, fava beans and corn in the traditional highland community of Amaru, where a genuinely authentic way of life is still practiced to this day. Members of the community who are consciously preserving their ancestral heritage will welcome you. Through participation in a communal workday a beautiful cultural exchange unravels as you experience this incredible opportunity to step back in time and appreciate a quality of life with an admirable simplicity that is strikingly moving and profound. Enjoy a traditional lunch prepared with prized agrarian products from their fields, as the women begin to spin their naturally dyed wool. Others meditatively set up their back strap looms to share their ancestral weaving skills with us. This wonderful opportunity to purchase textiles directly from the weavers is not to be missed. Upon return to Pisac Inn in the afternoon, enjoy some time to relax and reflect on your own.

I didn’t want to include the entire overview but I found each sentence much too interesting to leave out. It claims that in the community of Amaru “a genuinely authentic way of life is still practiced to this day,” as if the way most people live these days is inauthentic, and the way of life the community has managed to preserve is a precious relic of the past. The community visit is an “incredible opportunity to step back in time and appreciate a quality of life with an admirable simplicity that is strikingly moving and profound.” Here it reinforces the idea that the community exists in a state of the past that we tourists have supposedly transcended. Who wouldn’t pay 150 soles for time travel? At the same time, the community members’ way of life has “an admirable simplicity” that is surely “strikingly moving and profound” for those brined in the vinegar of modernity. I’m concerned that the “Traditional Community Day” is being sold as a special glimpse into an authentic, unspoiled, Edenic source of Indigeneity, and that the “beautiful cultural exchange” it offers is not just between Andean and “Western” cultures, but between premodern and modern ones… though the overview does suggest that their Andean ancestral heritage is being “consciously” preserved. The overview also sets up requirements for the subjectivities of the community members, who are expected to set up their looms “meditatively.” This all brought up a few questions:

  • Is advertising experiences as rare and unlike the tourists’ everyday lives necessary to sell them?
  • Does this advertisement reinforce a reductive and patronizing binary between modernity and Indigeneity, and therefore between the tourists and community members?
  • To what extent is Indigenous tradition being consciously preserved or created for us, the tourists?
  • If the “Traditional Community Day” is complicit in all of this, is it still worth participating in the experience to support the community?

Already so much to think about and I haven’t begun to discuss the experience itself. But my memory of the experience, blurry from sickness, is permanently tainted by the overview. 

The day began when we arrived at a small field in the morning in two minibuses. We were seated in a row, then given bitter coca leaves to chew on and mate to drink. Then we were given traditional ponchos, dresses and hats to wear—clothing that would feel wholly inappropriate on the streets of Pisac but was granted given our invitation into the community. I will admit: the clothing was beautiful and fun. But I felt as though we were paying to wear it in a way that wasn’t culturally insensitive. The “communal workday” was us helping to till a field, which we did for at most an hour and somewhat haphazardly. I’m sure my technique was terrible, but the clothing seemed really ill-equipped for the job—-I wondered if the community members wore it outside of these “experiences”—some of the really little kids who were around had already taken theirs off. When we eventually tired out we were allowed to stop, and it was clear to me that this was always our decision to make. We witnessed many varieties of potatoes being baked in a fire, then we were adorned with pink flower necklaces and white flower petals on our heads as we entered a sort of courtyard and living space. We were told this was traditional Andean hospitality, but it (alongside all the ceremonial hugging and kissing) felt strange to me given that we paid for the experience (though I don’t want to assume Andean traditions are removed from the politics of debt). There we were surrounded by small adobe buildings and hanging Andean textiles for sale. A few women demonstrated textile weaving—they were wonderful but I wouldn’t describe them as “meditative.” The little kids ran around and whispered things in our ears. We danced, bought things, and ate quinoa soup, potatoes, and guinea pig, while our dear captain lay sleeping in the grass.

On the whole, I’m still conflicted about the experience. I don’t know what we brought to the “beautiful cultural exchange” except for good will, money and curiosity. The problems the overview brought to mind were all present. It seemed as though the community members were presenting us with what they thought we wanted to see—perhaps an ideal of Indigeneity. At the same time, I know I should also question what I imagine they didn’t want us to see—it could be just as harmful or more. For better or worse, I encountered just a few interesting people and things—not that “admirable simplicity.”

Categories
Guaman Poma

VII: The Bible’s Influence on Pre-Columbian History

But the very first Inca, Tocay Capac, had no idol and no ceremonies; the Incas were free of such things until the reign of the mother and wife of Manco Capac Inca, followed by his lineage, who were descended from amaros (serpents). (Guaman Poma 32)

Felipe Guaman Poma de Alaya’s The First New Chronicle and Good Government is a massive manuscript finished around 1615 with nearly 400 drawings and 800 pages of text. It argues, primarily to the King of Spain, that many Spanish colonial forces like priests, corregidores and encomenderos are not good Christians, and should actually learn from the very “heathen” Indians they serve to subjugate. Guaman Poma writes Inca history and Christian history together, claiming that the first Indians were descendants of Noah who split off from the rest of humanity following the flood.

The quote I included above is Guaman Poma’s description of the beginning of the royal Inca lineage. He contests other chroniclers of Inca history to claim that the very first Inca, Topay Capac, was descended from Noah and that the Incas “had no idol and no ceremonies” until the reign of the mother and wife of Manco Capac Inca, who was descended from serpents. Effectively, Guaman Poma’s claim is that at the beginning of Inca history, Topay Capac’s rightful rule and lineage was usurped by a woman and that this event is to blame for all the ways the Incas have deviated from Christianity. If this event had not happened, the Incas would still be Christian, and Spanish colonization would have been completely unjustified. Inserting this usurpation at the beginning of Inca history allows Guaman Poma to externalize any Andean practice that diverges from Christianity as not truly Inca. It invites the King of Spain and other readers to not dismiss all Andean practices as heathenry but to interrogate them with critical eyes—to decide for themselves which Andean ways of life are good and evil. 

I find it curious how much Guaman Poma’s narrative of Incan history mirrors Christian narratives of history. The mother and wife (still getting over that concept) of the Manco Capac Inca, like Eve, are to blame for initiating the fall from grace and are negatively associated with serpents. A usurpation or transgression of the proper order of things is to blame for introducing everything undesirable—it explains why the real does not meet the ideal. Also, as the owner of a small gelato store in Cusco told me (I’m not sure how much of a reliable source he is, but he provides another account), the serpent does not carry the same negative connotation in Incan mythology as it does in Christian mythology. According to him, the serpent symbolized a connection to the underworld (not Hell) and was associated with agriculture and a certain kind of intelligence. Under the Inca, people were sorted into three archetypes or groups: condor, puma and serpent, and would work jobs related to their groups. Each of these was understood as complementary and necessary—people could also have multiple of these archetypes within themselves. So it’s very likely that Guaman Poma’s account of Incan history takes strong influence from the Bible, in a bid to preserve/create an ideal of the Incas (and the Indians) in the minds of the King and the Spanish. Guaman Poma effectively created a new ideal of the Incas to counter how the Spanish conceived of the Indians, to make Andeans more worthy of respect and critical attention.

I wonder if Guaman Poma was consciously playing with Incan history to effect practical change in the lives of Andeans (or if that matters?). If so, then was he willing to sacrifice the religious practices and traditions of his people for their survival? What Guaman Poma’s text makes clear is that there can be no representation of a culture or anything at all that is “pure” and uncontaminated by the very specific contexts and interests of its creator. 

Categories
Experience

VI: “I like to move my body”

Our second night in Pisac—I order a grilled chicken plate from my now-frequent haunt: one of the six-or-so market stalls that sell meals for around ten soles. I run into Emily and Cissy, who tell me people are dancing in the main plaza—the dancing women love them, and they’ve already been offered beer.

We get to the plaza where thirty to forty people are dancing in circles like in slow conga lines except no one is touching each other. They all seem to be locals, at the very least middle-aged, and they are moving their bodies in age-appropriate ways, scooping their arms in the air like they’re doing breaststroke as they tilt from side to side. Sometimes one gets in the middle of the circle and the rest copy their movements—Emily, Cissy and a few more classmates join a circle and follow along. I sit in a white plastic chair on the sidelines, choke on my very spicy food and try to ignore a very hungry dog attempting to make eye contact.

Eventually your guy gets in the mix. At first I feel awkward, but with each loop I become more comfortable until I’m not concerned about looking stupid. An older guy in another circle gives me a funny look of approval each time our circles meet—this exact look, with two thumbs up and a smirk:

I don’t understand why. Each time he does it I look around at my classmates as to ask: are you seeing this? But I don’t think they do. At some point a woman in New Age hippie attire enters the scene. She is wearing a black robe like this, but New Age hippified:

She dances alone just slightly apart from the main circles, not really making eye contact with anyone. She seems self-conscious and watching her I become self-conscious too. Soon a man in matching dress wanders onto the floor and joins her, which makes her distance less uncomfortable but not by a lot.

Watching this couple I thought were intruding upon the scene made me uncomfortable with my own position. It spoiled the moment a bit—I truly like to dance. When Julian said his famous words “I like to dance. I like to move my body” at our pre-departure meeting I thought “I like to dance and move my body too.” Except I didn’t say it out loud, because that would have been weird. Anyways, this particular dance made me suspect I am not so different from the New Age hippies. What exactly was the “scene” I felt they were interrupting? Is their presence really any more disruptive than mine? I don’t know. One thing’s for sure: the strange approval of that man means something, doesn’t it?

Categories
Experience

V: Conditions

A couple days ago, standing upon Sacsayhuamán overlooking Cusco, stretching my eyes to the clouds in the distance, I felt awake in a certain way for the first time in a long time. I was on top of the distant mountains I looked to and overcome with strong sensory impressions like those I experienced all the time when I was little. Everything was whole. I felt myself pulled to the sky by a thread running through my spine and the top of my head. I said I could stand tall because there was no ceiling above me—Jasmine said it because I was not surrounded by tall buildings. 

I wanted to return the next day, so I got a full sleep and prepared. However, I had the most terrible stomach issues. I thought I could thug it out, but eventually, I could only walk a few steps in the sun before I had to stop and rest until my stomach settled. During these breaks, I meditated, took deep breaths, and was approached by tour guides and people selling horse adventures. Thankfully, I was supported by a miracle crew who looked after me along the way—Grace, Jasmine, and later Emma, who brought me a roll of t.p. and a banana. 

The second day inspired an old idea in me: perhaps just as much as it was the space itself that inspired awe in me, it was the me that came to it: fueled by an alpaca burger, but not yet feeling the wrath of what was probably the previous night’s shawarma. If my experience of Sacsayhuamán was only like the second day, I would not have been able to take in its beauty. However, the second day allowed me to pay a particular kind of attention too. My sickness forced me to not hurry by with a “no, gracias” and stop and consider the tour salesmen’s offers, and think about where they were coming from—I learned one man lived in a community of 150 families with 80 horses, just over the hill.

So how to be critical of our experiences? With a great meal and a beautiful sleep, surrounded by my lovely classmates, I might come to the Corpus Christi festival, for example, uncritically in awe of the costumes, the dancing and excitement in the air. However, having read from Carolyn Dean’s Inka Bodies, I might be able to identify how the festival’s representations of Indigeneity serve as an other to be continually symbolically triumphed over by both Christ and the Spanish conquest. So I think there is a balance—to be able to embrace things and feel them wholly, and to reflect and be critical. I want to strengthen my ability to critically interrogate spaces, events and feelings when need be. One way could be to take a step back and reflect on the conditions of your experience. You can find this in a book. You can also find this in your last meal. Of course what you find in the past is irreducibly tied to your current state. I want to hear about how you all have managed to negotiate this balance.

Categories
Arguedas

IV: Sound and Light in Deep Rivers

José María Arguedas’ novel Deep Rivers follows a fourteen-year-old boy named Ernesto who, like the author, has Spanish and Indigenous Andean cultural roots. Through the course of the novel Ernesto confronts the complexity of Andean society and comes to assert his place in it. When he visits the Plaza de Armas in Cusco for the first time, he notices that “[t]he little trees that had been planted in the park and the arches seemed intentionally dwarfed in the presence of the cathedral and the Jesuit church” and says: “They must not have been able to grow … [t]hey couldn’t, in front of the cathedral” (Arguedas 9). Like the trees, Ernesto feels “completely subdued” in the shadow of the buildings, and it seems like they were designed this way (Arguedas 9). The buildings also dominate auditory space:

In the silence, the towers and the terrace echoed the smallest sound, like the rocky mountains that border the icy lakes. The rocks send back deep echoes of the cry of the ducks or of the human voice. The echo is diffused, and seems to spring from the very breast of the traveler, who is alert to the silence and oppressed by it. (Arguedas 9)

For Ernesto, the cathedral recalls the solidity of rocky mountains and icy lakes. To speak before its silence is to be in dialogue with only oneself—the returning echo “seems to spring from the very breast of the traveler” and oppresses them with the realization of their own isolation. The Spanish built these oppressive structures out of Inca stone chiseled into harsh rectangular bricks. Ernesto reflects that “Chiseling them must have broken their ‘enchantment.’ But perhaps the domes on the tower retain the radiance they say there is in heaven” (Arguedas 11). When I visited the cathedral, I thought the space was designed to direct attention to its statues and displays, the few sources of light, perhaps the domed ceilings. The stone supporting it all was secondary and not worthy of attention, its personality chiseled away. Ernesto describes how “[t]he light that filtered through the alabaster windows was different from sunlight,” and says that “it seemed as if we had fallen into some city hidden in the center of a mountain, under layers of inextinguishable ice that sent us light through the rocks” (Arguedas 19). All of this lightplay serves to direct attention towards the crucifix, “a forest of candles” burning before it, “a gilt altar screen in the background,” visible through the smoke (Arguedas 19). 

Blackened, suffering, the Christ maintained a silence that did not set one at ease. He made one suffer; in such a vast cathedral, in the midst of the candle flames and the daylight that filtered down dimly, the countenance of the Christ caused suffering, extending it to the walls, to the arches and columns, from which I expected to see tears flow. (Arguedas 20)

Ernesto finds that the ruins of the Amaru Cancha, visible from the street, allow a different kind of silence. He says: “it was the wall who commanded silence, and if someone were to sing out clearly, the stones would echo, with perfect pitch, the very same music” (Arguedas 12). Instead of intensifying one’s suffering and isolation, when the walls of the Inca palace speak back they make one feel heard. The silence is granted by a sense of awe, which creates a space for reflection. In another moment, Ernesto describes an Inca wall like this: “The lines of the wall frolicked in the sun; the stones had neither angles nor straight lines; each one was like a beast that moved in the sunlight, making me want to rejoice, to run shouting with joy, through some field” (Arguedas 18-19). While the Cathedral concentrates all of its light on the figure of Christ, each of the stones of the Inca wall play in the sunlight. I wonder how the ways the Inca and Spanish Catholic structures play with affect through sound and light speak to the values and practices of their societies, and want to investigate further.

Categories
Arguedas

III: “The Pongo’s Dream”

José María Arguedas’ short story “The Pongo’s Dream” was inspired by a story he heard from a peasant from Cusco. Arguedas was born in 1911 to wealthy mestizo parents, and spent much of his childhood in the care of Indigenous servants, through which he became fluent in Quechua. As the editors of the second edition of The Peru Reader write:

[T]he novelist and anthropologist was perhaps more responsible than any other Peruvian for the impassioned defense of the Incan tongue and cultural autonomy for millions of Quechua speakers, challenging the powerful ideologies of ‘modernization’ and ‘national integration’ predicated on the erasure of Peru’s indigenous past. (Starn et al. 273)

“The Pongo’s Dream” follows the relationship between a small Indigenous man “who had to perform the duty of a pongo, a lowly house servant” and his (likely mestizo) master, who mistreats him horribly (a small note, but I think it is important that Arguedas first describes the small man as having to perform the duty of a pongo, rather than necessarily being a pongo himself—it shows he is greater than his role) (Arguedas 273). The master regards the pongo with a special contempt and constantly dehumanizes him, calling him “offal,” making him act like a dog and a hare, shaking him vehemently “like a piece of animal skin” and asking him: “What are you? A person or something else?” (Arguedas 273-275). Yet the pongo only speaks to affirm his subservience: “Yes papacito, yes, mamacita” (Arguedas 274).

Until one day the pongo asks: “Great lord, please grant me permission. Dear lord, I wish to speak to you” (Arguedas 275). The master cannot not believe his ears, and prompts the pongo with uncertainty: “Talk … if you can” (Arguedas 275). The pongo then tells of his dream the previous night, in which both the pongo and the master died and were met by Saint Francis, their hearts subjected to his judgement. Saint Francis called the most beautiful angels to gloss the master in honey from a golden cup, and “[a] worthless, old angel with scaly feet, too weak to keep his wings in place” to smear the pongo with human excrement from a gasoline can (Arguedas 277). Then, just when the master thinks things are as they should be, Saint Francis tells the the master and the pongo to lick each other’s bodies for all eternity (I found a hilarious rendition of this on YouTube: https://youtu.be/cb-zshqW4dE?si=O_rEUfDE_wj0HUv1&t=597). 

The pongo’s dream can be read as a sort of wish fulfillment, as it establishes an unrealized equality between the master and pongo that grants each an (infinite) taste of the other’s lot. It also seems to be in dialogue with an “asymmetrical duality” said to be central to the Andean worldview, in which reality is built by forces that are different and compromised but need each other to be complete. One force is slightly larger or more powerful than the other, leading to a disparity that is the foundation of reality and all change. As Saint Francis is described as having “eyes that reach across the heavens, I don’t know to what depths, joining night and day, memory and oblivion,” bringing the relationship between the master and the pongo back into balance, I wonder whether this is an example of a Catholic figure being used to express a concept central to pre-Columbian Peru, or whether the pongo’s depiction of Saint Francis is actually congruent with Catholicism (Arguedas 277-278).

I was also left with a certain ambiguity at the end of the story as to whether the pongo can be represented by the old angel. At the very moment the master and pongo were condemned to lick each other for eternity, the old angel “became young again. His wings regained their blackness and great strength. Our father entrusted him with making sure that his will was carried out” (Arguedas 278). Before his transformation, the old angel is described as having “scaly feet,” perhaps analogous to how the pongo was dehumanized. The restoration of order allows the old angel to regain his “blackness,” construed as something strong and essential rather than deficient, as night can be seen as the counterpart to day. Perhaps the pongo conceives of himself as a servant of God like the old angel, and dreams that if he does his duty correctly, he too will become necessary and beautiful.

This story puzzles me and I would love to hear other interpretations of it. To what extent do you think the pongo speaking his dream works as an act of defiance?

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