Secrets and Silence: The Extraordinary Collection of Clara Miccinelli (original) (raw)
(Book chapter) "Winking at his Readers from the Gaps: Guamán Poma de Ayala's Silent Texts”
Pluriversal Literacies: Tools for Perseverance and Livable Futures., 2023
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.
1996
This paper postulates that colonial Inca portraits and their captions, including those of Guaman Poma de Ayala, a set in the Biblioteca Angelica, and another set in the Thomas Gilcrease Institute contain fragments of a lost, alternate Inca history.
The Quito Manuscript: An Inca History Preserved by Fernando de Montesinos
The Quito Manuscript: An Inca History Preserved by Fernando de Montesinos. By Sabine Hyland (New Haven, CT: Peabody Museum, Yale University Publications in Anthropology, 2007). Reviewed by Thomas Whigham, Professor of History, University of Georgia. In Ethnohistory, 56:2, Spring 2009; pp. 349 – 351. The term “conquest”, as applied to the early Spanish experience in the New World, suggests a precipitous event in which native empires yielded to European interlopers after a sharp, decisive struggle. In fact, the elaboration of a new colonial regime in the Americas took many years to accomplish, and because it was erected upon the ruins of complex Indian civilizations – with their own histories and traditions – it necessarily proved incomplete and artificial. Many elements of the old order regularly percolated through from the bottom rungs of society. These filled the conquered peoples with a sense of identity that, if it was not loudly proclaimed, nonetheless always asserted itself. The colonial masters, for their part, felt safe in the assumption that history is written by the winners; they thus felt comfortable in dispensing with all native superstitions, stories and accounts of past heroes. Such blather, they felt was retrograde and childlike at best, sacrilegious at worst, and in any case worthy only of suppression. Because the Spaniards took this duty seriously, the Indian “voice” usually speaks to us from the past only in highly modified form, except in a very few cases. This, just perhaps, is one of them. In the early 1640s, the Spanish priest Fernando de Montesinos assembled the five-volume Memorias antiguas i nuevas del Pirú, a magisterial study of all the things that he had seen and learned while on a fifteen-year sojourn in the Andean provinces. The work was encyclopedic. It included extensive information on Peruvian flora and fauna, the region’s mineral wealth, and the history of Pizarro’s victory over the Inca Atahuallpa a century before. Montesinos had hoped that when the manuscript was published, its Spanish readers would respond enthusiastically to his intricate descriptions of a curious land and particularly to his principal thesis: that Peru bore an uncanny, and perhaps not coincidental, resemblance to the Old Testament Ophir. Unfortunately for the priest, he found no patron to finance the publication of his work, which, after his death in 1653, made its way unnoticed into the extensive collections of the Real Academia in Madrid. There it lingered unmolested and unnoticed until the nineteenth century, when scholars who were looking for other materials chanced upon it by accident. Ironically for Montesinos, his entire work has yet to be published even today. His contention about a “Spanish Ophir” never found any support from modern Andeanists, who tend to find his anti-Indian diatribes both distasteful and ill-informed. Yet, Book 2 of the work nonetheless excited considerable interest. No wonder – it contained a remarkable set of Incan myths and histories that were known from no other account. Because these stories contradicted the standard Cuzco-based version of Incan origins, they tended to be rejected by many historians, who pointed out the sloppiness and imprecision in Montesinos’s text, which was derived from an earlier anonymous chronicler associated with the diocese of Quito. As Sabine Hyland points out in this new edition, the “Quito Manuscript” deserves to be taken seriously. Textually, it seems quite distinct from the other four volumes, which are marked by a turgid, overly-polished prose, obviously of Montesinos’s own authorship. This work, by contrast, has a more regular style, set within a unified poetical structure, similar in tone to Biblical genealogies. Its author, almost certainly, was an Indian whose original language was Quechua, for certain terms and syntactical structures make this case strongly. The Quito Manuscript is striking on several levels. It contains an extensive pre-Incaic king list that covers many centuries of political authority in Peru before the advent of Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo. No matter that some of the personages it mentions are clearly mythic, the work merits attention as an indigenous response to Spanish colonialism in the years just after the conquest. Its author rejects the slander that the early kings were morally corrupt idolaters and portrays them instead as thoughtful and just rulers, honorable predecessors of the Incas, who themselves acted with greater decency and wisdom than the Spaniards. These early peoples had a writing system all their own, he insists, and this fact (questionable though it may be) placed them on par with modern Christians. The Quito Manuscript is also noteworthy for its frank discussion of sexual themes – homoeroticism, pederasty, and the “love magic” that women used to turn the men of an earlier epoch away from their bestial inclinations. These topics clearly show how the interpretation of the anonymous author reflected Christian teachings, but they are not entirely overwhelmed by them. One can sense the Andean realities – the pride – just beneath the surface. Hyland intends that we accord the Quito Manuscript a just portion of recognition. That seems an easy enough assignment, but I would likewise wish to praise the specific role she played in the process. Not only has she saved for posterity an important source on early Peru, she has effected its rescue with all the deftness of a Sherlock Holmes. She has carefully examined the various early editions, and discovered exactly where error or bowdlerization crept into them. She has made similar examinations of the extant manuscript versions. Perhaps most interesting of all, she has pondered the question of exactly who wrote the book and how it must have fallen into Montesinos’s hands in the first place. As a piece of bibliographic research, this is a very impressive study, hard to put down.