Month: May 2024

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?

Categories
Experience

II: A City on Fire

Twenty students are racing through central Lima at night. The streets are packed with people, couples, children, cars, horns blaring, the smell of burnt corn, sugar, fried chicken, garbage. The sweating basement of the seafood restaurant I used to work at, sometimes cigarette smoke, some respite. Couples are laying down in the park without blankets holding each other on sparse and immoderately green grass from an excess of moisture not a lack. Twenty metres in every direction the thick mist takes on the character of the whole: boiling orange and green, green light. I keep thinking, the city is on fire, the city is on fire.

Jon, our pirate captain, is leading the charge, torn leather jacket and ponytail, waving his flag in the air for all to hurry. I watch our caring TA at the back of the pack, making sure none are left behind. I see my classmates dive across the street in flocks, ready for anything. I hear Jon scream:
and hurriedly jot it down on my phone as I hobble after them. I tell Jon I’ve never been to a city like this before. He says: where are you from? Vancouver. He laughs. Vancouver is not a city! Vancouver is a town pretending to be a city! Right then I had the crazy feeling I didn’t know if I’d ever been to a real city before.

All the night my nose is lightly running and when I sit my temperature fevers. I should be more concerned about spreading whatever I have to other people. I justify that it just feels like a personal fever, something that I brought upon myself and is only my duty to deal with. Yet it feels just like the city. My labour adjusting to the city. And the city is beautiful.

I wonder if you all feel the same?

Categories
Rama

I: Layered Symmetries in Lima

Today we visited Museo Larco in Pueblo Libre, Lima, which had an amazing collection of pre-Incan art from the region of Peru. Each figure had such a striking personality. I mean, just look at this guy!

Our tour guide told us that the oldest buildings discovered in the region were religious temples. She said that, in the cultures of ancient Peru, the priests were all-powerful and served as governors. The cultures generally followed both dualities (understood as codependent, like night and day) and cyclical patterns, and this is reflected in their art. We analyzed a 2500-year-old rug (fatefully preserved in the Peruvian desert) to see how it incorporated both of these patterns. It made me think that ancient Peruvian cities (especially since the first buildings were built with religious intent) would be similarly designed to embody these patterns or logics.

In “Pre-Hispanic Lima,” Vélez writes that, beginning with edicts during the reign of Charles V and Philip II in the 16th century, the Spanish Crown followed the policy of not founding cities amidst pre-existing Indigenous settlements. While this is supposedly the case with Lima, “it so happens that [the region has] an elusive, centuries- or millennia-long heritage, as some of the most ancient (over twelve thousand years old) human settlements known have been discovered in its vicinity” (Vélez 9). Vélez adds that “[s]ome believe … that the promontory of the atrium of the Cathedral of Lima may betray the presence of a small native huaca, or shrine, which was, as was common practice at the time, destroyed prior to the construction of the Christian temple” (Vélez 11). This practice of building settlements upon cultural or religious sites important to previous groups can also be seen in the case of the Basilica Santa María del Mar in Barcelona, likely built upon a Roman amphitheatre, which may have itself been built upon culturally significant neolithic settlements.

In The Lettered City, Rama writes about how the cities that the Spanish founded in the Americas, like Lima, reflected their utopian visions of the future, grounded in their notion of “reason” as the only divine, unerring source of knowledge. These new cities were designed to be “rational” and embody their regulating principles of “unity, planning, and rigorous order reflecting a social hierarchy” (Rama 5). As an anonymous commenter on the 1746 earthquake in Lima writes, “Lima had arriv’d to as great a degree of perfection as a city situated such distance from Europe … the streets were laid-out with the exactest regularity, and adorned with all the beauty which a nice symmetry could give” (Anonymous 47).

These reflections have got me interested in how the patterns or symmetries of the pre-Columbian cultures of Peru might persist in today’s Lima. This could be as small as how the curvature of the plaza around the Basilica Santa María del Mar reflects that of the former Roman amphitheater. I am more broadly interested in how spatial patterns and logics reflect a culture’s religions, philosophies and mythologies, and what it looks like (spatially) when these conflict.

Categories
Uncategorized

Introduction

Hi there!

My name is Adam. I’m going into my fourth year studying English literature, and am excited to be taking part in a seminar abroad for six weeks this summer in Peru, with the theme “Making and Unmaking Indigeneity in the Andes.” We will be thinking about and discussing how the notion of Indigeneity has been negotiated over time on the land, reading from a variety of disciplines including history, anthropology, political theory and literature. This blog is a record of my explorations of this and related topics, as I journey through Peru alongside my nineteen fellow classmates, our TA Daniel and our professor Jon Beasley-Murray. This will be a time of great change for me and many new experiences—this marks my first time traveling to South America, and somehow, my first time creating a blog (though, in an important sense, everything is a first).

I’m especially excited to visit the Andes and spend a month breathing mountain air, living around three thousand metres above sea level. I’m curious to see the histories we read and discuss manifested in space—how the region’s many cities and valleys have been (and continue to be) carved out and shaped by different traditions, conflicts, migrations and settlements. I know that, given the right attention, what we find will be so much greater and more fascinating than what we expect.

—I’ll see you all in Lima!

 

 

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