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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. 

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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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