In
two recent articles, 'The Broom Flower' (on Robin
Kirk's dispatches) and 'No Escape from the Anthill'
(on Kirk's translation of Gustavo Gorriti's
history of Sendero Luminoso), I've established a
few tentative comparisons and many contrasts
between contemporary Peruvian and Irish insurgencies.
Finishing The Peru Reader: History, Culture,
Politics--ed. by Kirk, Orin Starn, and Carlos
Iván Degregori (Durham, NC/London: Duke UP, 1995),
I now conclude my thoughts on further echoes
between two lands long linked by potatoes, poverty,
and patriotism. Fitting Celtic and Inca paradigms
into modern post-colonial nationalism has, to my
knowledge, never been attempted. Perhaps for good
reason. What we know of both ancient empires come
down to us mainly from the reports of their Christian successors,
who gave the peoples they converted the ability
to write what for so long had been transmitted orally
and/or cryptically.
Imagine
a kingdom over 3,000 miles long, from Chile to Ecuador,
its peoples never knowing the wheel, the written
word, or that civilisation existed outside of this
vast domain. Like the Celts, legend more than fact
seems to have played a role in the Inca narrative.
Using only mnemonic devices, knotted quipu,
their mentality remains as mysterious
to us as what Druids truly believed. Attracted
by a sophisticated culture rich in gold and
silver, the Spanish gradually achieved a foothold
in the area before--literally--topping over its
king. As they had succeeded in worming
their way into the core of Aztec power
over two years, so their patience paid off again
against overwhelming odds. The Incas, like the Aztecs,
had only lately attained hegemony over
hundreds of subject peoples. Unlike the Aztecs,
the rule of the Incas proved less harsh. The
Incas divided up land and resources so all could
survive, and avoided uprisings by transferring subjects
to other areas of Inca rule in complicated
levees of laborers and their families. Pedro de
Cieza de Leon gives an engrossing report of
how this process forced peace. Guamán Poma de Ayala
penned a 1,200 page letter to King Philip III of
Spain about the Inca bureaucracy--a bit's excerpted
here--in which he details this society in which
he was raised. Incan power, however, was
short-lived even before Pizarro came; the Incas
had been decimated by plagues advancing years
ahead of the conquistadores. Their dominion
tottered after a civil war in the 1520s. Lacking
primogeniture, sons fought for control of their
realm. Pizarro, learning of this strife,
manipulated it--as had Cortés in Mexico--to the
advantage of his 150 soldiers and 60 horses.
One day in late 1532 at Cajamarca, each of the Spanish
averaged 14 kills over a couple of sunset hours--around
8,000 unarmed troops died while thousands more encircled
the fortress, not daring to enter the conflict they
witnessed. The conquest had been achieved by Spanish
cunning and Incan naivete--the latter had waited
too long to kill off the few soldiers, having been
flattered by the Spanish that they had come to help
Atahualpa crush rival rebels from the civil war.
The Incas allowed these intruders to walk
into the centre of their stronghold. They had prepared
to murder them or make them eunuchs--and
to steal their horses and guns.
But,
like Strongbow and MacMurrough in 1169-71, invaders
gained the throne and never abandoned it again.
Internal strife and the chance for allies
from abroad in Irish and Incan power-struggles
led to collapse of unstable rulers whose hold
on power lacked consensus and suffered from clannish
competition.
This
overthrow, studied through John
Hemming's masterful chapter from his The Conquest
of the Incas, led to the Spanish dominance
over the Incas. Yet, as the editors stress in
their selections following, the following centuries
led not to a neat native vs. European divide,
but--as in the Irish-English case--an array of
castes, degrees of cooperation or resistance against
the new ideology, economy, and spirituality brought
by an occupier to a subdued territory.
Unlike the Irish, the native Peruvians had a totally
different belief system that had been totally practiced
when its conquerors arrived. Christianity,
arguably shared by both mediaeval nations in the
Anglo-Irish clash, had already taken hold of the
Irish to mingle and overlap with older traditions
before 1169; after 1532, militant Iberian Catholicism
pursued aggressively the elimination of Incan
rituals and beliefs. Steve J. Stern, in 'Tragedy
and Success', rigorously sifts archival evidence
to prove that, rather than a 'timeless' and 'unspoiled'
land untouched by European influence, the post-Conquest
period teemed with those who entered willingly
the Spanish culture to advance their own interests,
and that sexual, economic, and familial gains
often trumped loyalty to past traditions.
A
parallel circumstance comes to mind: on Árainn,
or Inis Mór, the high number of inhabitants intrigued
visitors as survivors from supposedly
the last holdout of the Celts--yet many of Dun
Aengus' tribes carried substantially English
bloodlines, thanks to the garrisons posted there
from Cromwell's time onwards.
And,
whether in the Andes or Aran, those who could
or would not enter into cooperation or collaboration
with their rulers suffered. A minority, anglicised
or hispanised, prospered. The majority did not.
Consider the fate of the O'Neills. Stern summarises:
Hispanism symbolized the conversion of Indian
society's foremost figures into partners of colonial
rule and exploitation, a widening split of interests,
loyalties, and orientations that accompanied differentiation
into rich and poor. It symbolized, too, a loss
of "confidence" that touched all sectors of Andean
society. Poor Indians understood very well the
temptation to escape or soften burdens by allying
with the world of the colonials, in a search
for personal gain that weakened community solidarity
and confirmed the superiority of the Hispanic
over the Andean. (129) Certainly any observer
of the crumbling of the Gaeltachtaí or
those cringing as 'bungalow bliss' spreads over
the Irish landscape can find precedents here.
Like the Hiberno-English, the creolisation of
Peruvian culture advanced; Amazonian, African,
European, and Andean residents continue, over
the past five centuries, to mix and mate, and,
over this same period, prejudice and poverty continue
as well to separate.
Subsequent
coverage of Colonial and then Republican Perú lacks
the inherent drama of the Conquest and the
fascination of pre-Columbian lore. Yet, as with
Ireland under British occupation, parallels persist.
Flora Tristán's proto-feminism found itself projected
upon the veiled ladies who walked unchaparoned
in Lima; they became as exotic as those from a harem,
or shawled and red-petticoated posing for illustrated
London Sunday supplements. A magistrate's decree
to abolish Quechua and Incan customs reminds
one of the Statutes of Kilkenny. Túpac Amaru may
be not be as familiar to us as Tupac Shakur (named
by his Black Panther mother after the Cuban-Marxist
revolutionary import that in turn took its
name from a supposed 'last of the Incas' rebel),
but he closes an era of, between 1720-80,
over a hundred Indian revolts. Examining Amaru's
actions, romanticisation has obscured the reality:
both Spanish and natives had granted him a much
greater degree of freedom in his dissent due to
their shared expectations that he would act according
to the Inca standards of conduct. Túpac's army's
hierarchy integrated colonial organisation; rebels
followed the Spanish model--by which they were supplied
with wages, coca and alcohol--and this
latest claimant to the Inca throne expressed
fealty to the King of Spain and Catholicism even
as he revived Inca royal trappings. Shades of the
O'Neills again. Like the fate of 1916 leaders,
the public death of Túpac and his coterie exacerbated
colonial-native tensions rather than suppressing
them.
So,
as with post-Independence Ireland, war followed
Perú's four-year insurrection leading to freedom
from an imperial crown--in 1824. Border tensions erupted
against Chile, which took over portions of its rival.
Allegiances divided, traitors were charged, and--in
a familiar pattern--the Peruvians most admired by
teachers were those who sacrificed their lives, outnumbered
by far in often pointless conflicts. Peruvians
savored two themes: heroic martyrdom and 'scientfic'
rationalism. The trust in progress and lust
for profit beckoned many into the vastness Perú
contains. As a reminder of what was transforming
the Amazonian interior, for so long relatively isolated
from the coastal cities and the mountain plains,
this anthology includes Manuel Córdova's enthralling
account of his stint as a teenager captured by natives
and his story of acting as a go-between with Brazilian
rubber-traders as he, by now unaccustomed to clothes,
must don them briefly and with a few words
of Portuguese has to turn himself back into the
mestizo he once was--before his abduction
at fifteen. His tale of being caught between
two ways of life reminds me, in an Irish context,
of Lord Edward Fitzgerald amidst the Native
Americans during the Revolutionary War.
Politics grips
early 20c Perú; The Gaelic Revival's counterpart
could be the indigenistas. Sinn Féin roughly
might pair off with APRA; even if Fianna Fáil and
deValera don't exactly match with populist reformer-military
officer-cum-dictator Juan Carlos Velasco. Luis Valcárcel,
in his musings about the superiority of the ancient
culture, reminds me of Pearse; socialist Juan Carlos
Mariátegui and Connolly could have found many points
of agreement. Literary influences, with José Maria
Arguedas merging Quechua expression with Spanish
control, might transfer to Synge Poetic surrealism
by César Vallejo and the Parisian exiles Joyce and
Beckett could converse enigmatically; the squatters
from rural areas immigrating to the
outskirts of Lima, turning deserts into pueblos
jovenes (young communities; instant shanty-towns)
might remind some of Travellers, some of Davitt's
Land Leaguers, some of Ballymun. Previous articles
I have written for The Blanket cover in detail
the rise and demise of devolved intellectual Maoists
into the Shining Path. Contrasts with Irish republicanism,
blessedly, outnumber comparisons for Abimael
Guzmán's personality death-cult that provoked a barbaric,
nihilistic, and catastrophic twenty-year 'long
war'.
In
closing, Perú, like the North of Ireland, faces
a wider panorama than previous decades have allowed
its people to contemplate. Threats of apocalypse
recede; pressures of capitalism and a dynasty of
hapless politicians less willing to assist their
poorer citizens than to make themselves millionaires on
the global market perpetuate uncertainty. Brutality
in both nations by those fighting and those resisting
a rebellion have wearied millions and killed thousands.
An anonymous soldier tells of his own culpability
in an interview that could have come from a Para
or an FRU operative. A student who drifted into
the Senderos speaks of his murders
and his fear that he will be forced back into the
ranks of the SP as (at that time) they vowed to win
by detonating the capital. Emigration, long
a given for the Irish, has more recently enticed
Perú; thanks to air travel, a million have
left for Miami, Paris, or Tokyo. Meanwhile,
millions move into Lima, swelling its size
and its slums as the Shining Path and its suppressers
from the police and military made many into desplazados.
Yet,
in a provocative essay, evangelical Protestantism
has emerged out of the guerrilla era as a counter-force
to Marxism, Catholicism, and the coca trade. Many
in both cities and villages have vowed to sustain
self-governing entities to control crime, create
jobs, and educate themselves. A funny folktale,
poems, fiction snippets, photos, and journalism
on gay activists, feminists, and urban organisers
round out these 500 pages. A cholera epidemic
slinks towards Lima even as Alberto Fujimori slurps
cebiche for the cameras. A young woman leaves for
the city, and after years at odd jobs exports back
heavy skirts to her colder compatriots in
her mountain village--but she will never go
back, unless to visit in her new shiny car. The
editors wrap up their introduction, from the perspective
of a decade ago, as war faded but the bank balances
failed to brighten. They wonder if Perú faces a
second-class rank in the league of nations--never
Rwanda or the Sudan, but a vacation or research
destination--to ogle at or to theorise upon. A dumping-ground
for laundering cash or obsolete computers? Since
1995, Fujimori, who had made himself dictator, pushed
Perú even lower down the ladder; ousted by Alejandro
Toledo--El Chino replaced by El Cholo--the
government continues to slump and inflation staggers--only
10% of those polled at present support Toledo. Without
being fatalistic, perhaps--as in an Irish context--people
survive by coming together as a clan, or in the
Incan case, the ayllu--a group of 30-40
people among whom one could always seek and share
support. And, in both Irish and Peruvian milieux,
such comfort can be enhanced by chemicals.
One of the best excerpts here reminded me of Tim
Mackintosh-Smith's book on Yemen: Travels in
Dictionary Land when he evokes the narcotic camaraderie
created by qat. Coca leaves being a far
milder form of what Westerners abuse as cocaine,
Catherine J. Allen's 'The Hold Life Has' blends
personal testimony with anthropological frameworks
to produce a provocative scene of the other side
of the Reagan-Bush drug war, in which the escape
all of we humans seek somehow bonds people closely
together, for better and worse, even if it isn't
the Maoist utopia the senderistas demanded.
Coca's truly organic, cheaper,
and a calmer opiate for the masses. If Perú could
export these benign leaves, not powder to cartels,
then it might rescue its economy after all!
As we Irish know, don't count only on the next
crop of potatoes.
