Colonization and crossbreeding
When Francisco Pizarro's troops landed in Peru in 1531, the country was in the midst of a civil war. The descendants of Pachacutec, the emperor who had also fulfilled his expansionist vocation in his time, were tearing the territory apart. The Spanish conquest turned out to be bloody, and the destruction it wrought was equally destructive for the native culture. In fact, the Incas had no writing system - unless theirquipus (knotted cords) were a succession of phonemes and not just numbers, as some researchers have suggested, but failed to decipher - so their literary heritage was essentially transmitted by oral tradition. Nevertheless, their languages - Aymara and Quechua - have survived, and some of their poetry (love poetry: harawi or yaraví, or epic poetry: haylli or huaÿno) has reached us. A few rare myths have also been transcribed by missionaries, although one of the most famous - theOllantay - still lends itself to all manner of divergences as to its real origins.
In spite of this, Peru is unique in that the Indians very quickly adopted Spanish writing and language. The result was texts of undeniable ethnographic and historical value, such as Relación de la antigüedades desde Reyno del Perú by Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, or the superb and tragic La primera nueva crónica y el buen gobierno (ca. 1615). This chronicle is the work of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an Inca certainly born just after the arrival of the Spaniards. In a language for which he apologizes, adding numerous drawings (later to inspire Hergé!) to make himself better understood, he recounts the history of his people, their habits and customs, but above all addresses a long plea to Philip III to put an end to the ravages of colonization. Alas, there is no proof that the King of Spain was aware of this text, which was found by chance in the reserves of the Copenhagen Library... in 1908.
Garcilaso de la Vega, generally considered the first Peruvian writer, was of mixed race, the son of an Inca princess and a conquistador, born in his mother's country in 1539 and dying in his father's in 1616. Garcilaso de la Vega wrote the Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609) in two parts: one devoted to his maternal lineage, the other to the conquest of Peru. Although historians have expressed doubts about this text, perceiving certain biases that are a little too subjective, its literary value has never been called into question. Finally, it should be pointed out that the first book printed in South America was on a press installed in Lima by the Italian Antonio Ricardo. It was the Doctrina christiana (1584), a catechism in three languages (Spanish, Aymara and Quechua), a symbol of the Crown's influence in the New World. This is confirmed in the poetic genre, as Juan de Espinosa Medrano (Apurimac, 1628-Cuzco, 1688) dedicates his study Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora to the Baroque poet from Cordoba, and in the novelistic genre with the picaresque-inspired story Lazarillo de ciegos y caminantes desde Buenos Aires hasta Lima (1773), attributed to a mysterious Concolorcorvo, who we still don't know was Alonso Carrió de la Vendera or his Peruvian secretary Calixto Bustamante. Gradually, however, the Romantic movement began to take hold, and with it the desire for independence that was sweeping the country.
Romanticism and independence
As is often the case on the South American continent, three movements followed and responded to each other: Costumbrismo (studies of customs and traditions), Romanticism and Realism, which flirted with Naturalism. The most fervent of patriots, and the most romantic of poets, was undoubtedly Mariano Melgar, executed in 1815 when he was not yet 25. Raised in Arequipa, he studied law in Lima, where he discovered a capital in the throes of libertarianism. Back home, he learns that his sweetheart, Silvia, the woman who inspired his most beautiful yaravís, has been promised to another man. In despair, he joins the revolutionary struggle, but is captured in the battle of Umachiri. In his last will and testament, he prophesied that his country would be liberated within ten years. In fact, the independence proclaimed by José de San Martín on July 28, 1821 was secured at the end of the battle of Ayacucho on December 9, 1824, in which a young man of 19, Manuel Ascensio Segura, took part. Segura is said to have written his first comedy ten years later, but La Pepa was so mocking of the army that he kept it secret so as not to jeopardize his military career. Segura would eventually devote himself to his true vocation, writing, publishing in La Bolsa, which he founded in 1841, and in other periodicals, portraits of his fellow citizens or light-hearted playlets, typical of Costumbrismo. He had also returned to the theater with a new comedy, El sergento Canuto, which was just as critical of the military, this time successfully performed and augured well for his future posterity. But folklore does not necessarily mean praise, and if Flora Tristan's Peregrinations d'une paria (Actes Sud) is anything to go by, after following in her father's footsteps to Arequipa and then Lima, tradition was not all good. Although her story was poorly received at the time, Peru has not held a grudge, as the country's leading feminist organization now bears the name of the woman who lived an extraordinary destiny and was, incidentally, the grandmother of painter Paul Gauguin.
Independence has certainly not resolved all conflicts, and Peru continues to suffer from external and internal tensions. Ricardo Palma, who until 1872 had been involved in the political life of his country, turned away from it and devoted himself to literature, his patriotism embodied in his desire to preserve the common heritage. This was undeniable when he published his most famous work, Tradiciones Peruanas, that same year, and all the more moving when he devoted his best years to rebuilding the National Library, which had been ransacked by the Chileans. This earned him the nickname of "bibliotecario mendigo", as he gleaned new works wherever he could, but only served to increase the admiration of his fellow countrymen.
The century was also marked by the Romantic movement, embodied in the infinite sadness of Clemente Althaus (1835-1876), whose very classical verses are no doubt somewhat neglected today, and in the lyricism of Luis Cisneros (1837-1904), whose attempts to introduce the novelistic genre into a society that at the time had little interest in it(Julia o escenas de la vida en Lima in 1861 and Edgardo o un joven de mi generación in 1864) are especially commendable. But the two tutelary figures who have survived oblivion are undoubtedly Carlos Salaverry (1830-1891) and Manuel Prada (1844-1918). One of the former's poems - ¡ Acuérdate de mí! - features prominently in all school textbooks, and it was with his rhymes that the man gained notoriety, pouring out his sensitivity and lost loves in a collection that has become a Romantic classic: Cartas a un ángel (1890).
The second, Prada, stands on the edge of modernism, and although he abandoned literature for a time to devote himself to politics, notably by contributing to anarchist journals (lectures and articles were collected in Páginas Libres and then in Horas de lucha), the very beginning of the new century revealed his innovative talent with the collection Minúsculas, published in Lima in 1901. The rest of his work was published posthumously after his death in 1918.
Some writers had indeed entered the breach of social realism, as confirmed by a famous female writer, Clorinda Matto de Turner. If she was excommunicated after publishing Aves sin nido - the love story between an Indian woman and a white man that proved impossible because they were born of the same father... a seductive priest - it is above all important to remember that she dedicated herself to defending the Quechua heritage, and thus inaugurated the Indigenous movement. She died in Buenos Aires in 1909, and her body was not repatriated to her native land until 1924, when Congress finally accepted her, but many others took up the torch to preserve the ancestral culture. Luis E. Valcárcel, who created the so-called resurgimiento group, Ciro Alegría, who had to go into exile in Chile but received the Latin American Novel Prize in 1941 for El mundo es ancho y ajeno, and José María Arguedas (1911-1969), ethnologist and poet, who collected traditional songs and tales and published them in Quechua and Spanish(Canto quechua, A nuestro padre creador Túpac Amaru), and used both languages in his own creations(Katatay y otros poemas). His novels are available in French: Les Fleuves profonds (Gallimard), El Sexto (Métailié) and Diamants et silex (Herne).
César Vallejo (1892-1938), certainly one of the greatest Spanish-language poets, continued to delve into the modernist vein, and was even clearly avant-garde. He was born in a small village in the Andes, but his body now lies in the Montparnasse cemetery, where Parisians can pay their respects by reading his works, available from Points(Poèmes humains) and Le Temps des cerises(Tungstène). His astonishing life path was guided by his love of poetry and his encounters with the Surrealists. Politics also took him to Spain, where the war inspired a collection of his works. His verses are by turns imbued with symbolism and then totally deconstructed, but one constant characterizes his writings: a profound despair.
Alfredo Bryce-Echenique, one of the leading exponents of a twentieth-century realist, even neo-realist, followed much the same path. It was no longer the time to focus on the countryside, but to describe the brutality of cities and express indignation at governmental excesses. This is the theme of his novels, published by Métailié(Une Infinie tristesse, Le Verger de mon aimée, Un Monde pour Julius, etc.), which are imbued with both tenderness and biting irony.
Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, was also a symbol of this 1960s boom. A connoisseur of France, where he lived and worked, and fully committed to politics, to the point of running for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, his books are just like him: ebullient! Departing from indigenism to aim for the universal, from magic realism to reach the absurdity of suffocating reality, from the single voice to multiply points of view, they constitute a universe with a strong autobiographical accent to be apprehended with happiness and interest in Folio: La Fête au bouc, Tours et détours de la vilaine fille, La Tante Julia et le scribouillard, etc. Now a member of the Académie française and published in La Pléiade, the writer remains a respected figure in his own country, but is also showing his ageing international image, notably in his support for far-right candidates in Chile and Brazil. A museum is dedicated to him in the city of Arequipa.
The new generation is just as politically disillusioned, as confirmed by books by Alfredo Pita(Ayacucho and Le Chasseur absent, published by Métailié) and Daniel Alarcón(Nous tournons en rond dans la nuit, Lost City Radio, published by Albin Michel).
