(Book chapter) "Winking at his Readers from the Gaps: Guamán Poma de Ayala's Silent Texts” (original) (raw)

2023, Pluriversal Literacies: Tools for Perseverance and Livable Futures.

In this essay, I address the perception of confusion, entanglement, incomprehension, opacity, and enigmatic nature of Guamán Poma’s book that made scholars like Peruvian Historian Porras Barrenechea uncomfortable enough to push it to the margins of historical studies due to its perceived lack of value and merit. To this end, I briefly discuss examples of 'Nueva corónica'’s apparent gaps and mistakes and contend that, rather than looking at them as errors, these occurrences provide glimpses into the interstices of Andean enunciation under the Spanish colonial regime. They constitute marks or hints by the Indian author, who still winks at his readers with clues of alternate ways of thinking while recording past and present history. Guamán Poma took hold of all possible tools and devices at his reach to achieve these hidden—but “visible” to all who were/are willing to see—messages. As a Ladino Indian, he combined his Quechua knowledge with elements from other cultural horizons that he learned, experienced, experimented with, appropriated, resisted in one way or another, and transformed in his writings. After commenting on 'Nueva corónica'’s textual gaps, I return to Porras’s critical discourse about Indigenous writings and deconstruct it in terms of tenets of colonial thought.