Colonization and crossbreeding
When the troops of Francisco Pizarro accost in Peru in 1531, the country is in full civil war. The descendants of Pachacutec, the emperor who had also in his time assuaged his expansionist vocation, tore the territory. The Spanish conquest proves to be bloody, and the destructions which it involves it are also for the native culture. Indeed, the Incas did not possess a system of writing - unless their cords with knots (quipus) are successions of phonemes and not only of numbers as some researchers consider it... without succeeding however in deciphering them -, their literary heritage is thus essentially transmitted by the oral tradition. Nevertheless, their languages - Aymara and Quechua - have survived, some of their poems (love: harawi or yaraví, or epic: haylli or huaÿno) have thus been able to reach us. Some rare myths were also the object of a retranscription by the missionaries, although one of the most famous - theOllantay - still lends itself to all the divergences as for its real origins.
In spite of everything, Peru has this particularity to see Indians seize very quickly the writing and the Spanish language. The result is texts with an undeniable ethnographic and historical value, like the Relación de la antigüedades desde Reyno del Perú of Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, or the superb and tragic La primera nueva crónica y el buen gobierno (around 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 of which he apologizes, adding numerous drawings (which later will inspire Hergé!) to make himself better understood, he tells the history of his people, its habits and its customs, but especially addresses a long supplication to Philip III so that the ravages of the colonization cease. Unfortunately, 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.
The one who is generally considered as the first Peruvian writer is for his part mestizo, son of an Inca princess and a conquistador, born in the country of his mother in 1539 and died in that of his father in 1616. Garcilaso de la Vega is the author of the Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609) composed of two parts: one devoted to his maternal lineage, the other to the conquest of Peru. If this text raises some doubts on the side of the historians who perceive some biases a little too subjective, its literary value has never been questioned. Finally, it is necessary to specify that the first book printed in South America was it 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 influence that the Crown had in the New World. This is confirmed in the poetic genre, since Juan de Espinosa Medrano (Apurimac, 1628-Cuzco, 1688) dedicates his study Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora to the baroque poet of Cordoba, and in the novelistic genre with the picaresque story Lazarillo de ciegos y caminantes desde Buenos Aires hasta Lima (1773), attributed to a mysterious Concolorcorvo, whose identity is still unknown, whether he was Alonso Carrió de la Vendera or his Peruvian secretary Calixto Bustamante. However, little by little, the romantic current begins to impose itself, and with him the desire of independence that gains the country.Romanticism and independence
As is often the case on the South American continent, three movements follow one another: Costumbrismo (studies of customs and traditions), Romanticism and Realism, which flirts with Naturalism. The most fervent of the patriots, and the most romantic of the poets is without a doubt Mariano Melgar, executed in 1815 when he was not 25 years old. Raised in Arequipa, he studied law in Lima and discovered a capital in the grip of libertarian upheavals. Back home, he learns that his sweetheart, Silvia, the one who inspired his most beautiful yaravís, has been promised to another man. In despair, he joins the revolutionary struggle but is captured during the battle of Umachiri. In his last will and testament, he prophesied that his country would be liberated within ten years. However, the independence proclaimed by José de San Martín on July 28, 1821, will be effectively ensured at the end of the battle of Ayacucho which was played on December 9, 1824 and in which a young man of 19 years, Manuel Ascensio Segura, participated. It is said that Segura wrote his first comedy ten years later, but La Pepa was so mocking towards the army that he kept it secret in order not to jeopardize his military career. However, Segura eventually devoted 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 amusing sketches, typical of the Costumbrismo. He also returned to the theater with a new comedy, equally critical of the military, El sergento Canuto, which this time was successfully performed and augured well for his future success. But who says folklore does not say necessarily praises, and to believe in the Peregrinations of a pariah (editions Actes Sud) that Flora Tristan wrote after having followed the traces of her father until Arequipa and then until Lima, the tradition did not have only good. If his account was then badly received, Peru did not remain rancorous because, indeed, the main feminist organization of the country carries henceforth the name of the one who knew an extraordinary destiny and who was, incidentally, the grandmother of the painter Paul Gauguin.
The independence certainly did not solve all the conflicts and Peru continues to undergo tensions, external and internal. Ricardo Palma, who was invested until 1872 in the political life of his country, turns away from this one and dedicates himself to the letters, his patriotism is embodied then in his will to preserve the common heritage. This will be undeniable when he publishes his most famous work, Tradiciones Peruanas, and even more moving when he dedicates his best years to rebuild the National Library which had been sacked by the Chileans. This earned him the nickname of "bibliotecario mendigo", because he gleaned new works wherever he could, but it only increased the admiration of his compatriots.
The century was also marked by the Romantic movement, which was embodied in the infinite sadness of Clemente Althaus (1835-1876), whose very classical verses are probably somewhat neglected nowadays, and in the lyricism of Luis Cisneros (1837-1904), whose attempts to introduce the novelistic genre in a society that was not very fond of it at the time (Julia o escenas de la vida en Lima in 1861 and Edgardo o un joven de mi generación in 1864) can be praised. But the two tutelary figures that have survived the oblivion are undoubtedly Carlos Salaverry (1830-1891) and Manuel Prada (1844-1918). One of the poems of the former - ¡ Acuérdate de mí! - features prominently in all school textbooks, as 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, is on the edge of modernism, and although he abandoned literature for a time to devote himself to politics, collaborating in anarchist newspapers (lectures and articles were collected in Pájinas Libres and later in Horas de lucha), the very beginning of the new century revealed his innovative talent with the collection Minusculas published in Lima in 1901. The rest of his work was published posthumously after his death in 1918.
Some writers had indeed rushed into the breach of the social realism, a famous female pen confirms it, that of 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 turned out to be impossible because they were born from the same father... a seductive priest - it is important to remember that she dedicated herself to the defense of the Quechua heritage, and thus inaugurated the indigenous movement. She lost her life in Buenos Aires in 1909, her body was repatriated to her native land only in 1924, when the Congress finally accepted her, but many people took up the torch to preserve the ancestral culture. Among them, Luis E. Valcárcel, who created the so-called Resurgimiento group, Ciro Alegria, 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 songs and traditional tales that he published in Quechua and Spanish (Canto kechwa, A nuestro padre creador Túpac Amaru), and used these two 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-speaking poets, continued to work in the modernist vein, and was even clearly avant-garde. He was born in a small village in the Andes, but his body now rests in the Montparnasse cemetery, where Parisians will be able to read his works, available at Points (Poèmes humains) and Le Temps des cerises (Tungstène). This astonishing life path will be guided by his love for poetry and by his meetings with surrealists, politics will also bring him to Spain where the war will inspire him a collection. His verses will be in turn marked by symbolism and then totally deconstructed, but a constant will characterize his writings: a deep despair.
It is more or less the same itinerary that Alfredo Bryce-Echenique will follow, one of the singers of a twentieth century that shows itself realistic, even neo-realist. The time is no longer to be interested in the countryside but to describe the brutality of the cities and to be indignant of the governmental drifts. This is what he will write about in his novels, to be discovered by Métailié(Une Infinie tristesse, Le Verger de mon aimée, Un Monde pour Julius, etc.), which are imbued with tenderness as well as biting irony. Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, was also one of the symbols of this boom in the 1960s. Fine connoisseur of France where he lived and worked, fully invested in politics to the point of running for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, his books are in his image, bubbling! Departing from indigenism to aim at the universal, from magic realism to reach the absurdity of the suffocating reality, from the unique voice to multiply the points of view, they constitute a universe with a strong autobiographical accent to be apprehended with happiness and interest in Folio: The Feast to the goat, Turns and detours of the naughty girl, Aunt Julia and the scribbler, etc. The new generation is just as politically disillusioned, as confirmed by the books of Alfredo Pita(Ayacucho and The Absent Hunter, published by Métailié) and those of Daniel Alarcón(Nous tournons en rond dans la nuit, Lost City Radio, published by Albin Michel).
