From colonization to independence
1532 was not a sweet year: the country is then at fire and blood following the rivalry between two brothers disputing the territory. If Huascar possesses the southern part and erected Cuzco to the rank of capital, Atahualpa - who was attributed the North and Quito - does not cease his repeated attacks, before falling himself in the hands of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro who will make him put to death the following year. So much for the reality that signs the beginning of the colonization of Ecuador, far from the fiction that Laurent Binet invented in the uchrony Civilizations (Grasset, 2019) when he imagined that the crossing of the Atlantic - and the territorial conquest - were done in the other direction. For all that, this dramatic episode was still the subject of a review ... which cost its author prison. Indeed, Jacinto Collahuazo, an indigenous chief from Otavalo born around 1670, wrote a chronicle of the Ecuadorian civil wars, but he did not use Spanish, which he had been taught, but Quechua, his native language. This displeased the colonists, who imprisoned him and ordered the destruction of his work, a fragment of which - in a Spanish translation - was miraculously discovered several centuries later: Elegía a la muerte de Atahualpa. Another literature appeared with the men of the Church, among whom we could mention, for example, Juan Bautista Aguirre (1725-1786), who tried his hand at poetry, both religious and amorous, or Juan de Velasco, also born in Ecuador two years later, who wrote Historia del Reino de Quito en la América Meridional
in 1789.An important turn was taken with Eugenio Espejo (1747-1795). Of mestizo origin, his childhood was not idyllic, yet he managed to pursue his studies, first in the field of medicine and then in that of law. With his keen intellect and critical sense, influenced by the Enlightenment, the Quiténien soon got into serious trouble for his uncompromising portrayal of colonial governance. Maintaining alliances with intellectuals from neighbouring countries, specifically Colombia, Espejo was to plant the first seed of independence. As a satirist, he left behind an abundant body of work, including the scathing El nuevo Luciano de Quito, published under a pseudonym, and the highly acclaimed Discurso sobre la necesidad de establecer una sociedad patriótica. He also launched the first Ecuadorian newspaper, Primicias de la cultura de Quito, which unfortunately only had seven issues, proof of the oppression he suffered. Finally, his medical research was the subject of publications that remind us that his time also witnessed a famous scientific expedition, that of the Frenchman Charles Marie de La Condamine to Ecuador from 1735 to 1743 with the aim of proving, in accordance with Isaac Newton's theory, that the Earth was not perfectly round. At the beginning of the following century, in 1835, the naturalist Charles Darwin set off for the Galapagos Islands, but that is another story in his Journal de bord du voyage du Beagle
(published by Honoré Champion). As Eugenio Espejo had foreseen, a wind of revolt and freedom was to blow across Ecuador. Several uprisings took place in Quito and then in the Sierra, and although the insurgents were defeated in 1812, the support of Bolivian Simón Bolívar and the power of "Great Colombia" gradually paved the way for independence, which became a reality in 1830. Several writers took on a patriotic role, one of the most renowned being José Joaquin Olmedo (1780-1847), who is often associated with the Venezuelan Andrés Bello (1781-1865) and the Cuban José-Maria de Heredia (1842-1905). Olmedo held high political office, but his books allowed him to fuel his struggle. To do so, he chose to adopt a neo-classical style - far from the Romanticism that was then conquering the continent and to which Numa Pompilio Llona and Julio Zaldumbide adhered - by using epinicia, a form used to glorify athletes in ancient Greece. His best-known poem is Canto a Bolívar. Juan Montalvo (1832-1889), who was just as committed and just as well known, also left his mark on Ecuadorian literature, notably with his Seven Treatises (printed in Besançon in 1883), which are reminiscent of the works of Montaigne, and with his pamphlets, largely written in exile, which were pithy and harsh against the conservative president Gabriel García Moreno - whose pen he said killed him - and the dictator Ignacio Veintemilla. In 1895, he finally published Capítulos que se le olvidaron a Cervantes, the "forgotten chapters" of the great Spanish writer and father of Don Quixote, which earned him the admiration of his peers around the world. However, the one who is considered the first Ecuadorian novelist is Juan León Mera who, in addition to writing the lyrics of the national anthem Salve, Oh Patria, wrote Cumandá o Un drama entre salvajes in 1879.A committed literature
Belonging to the indigenous movement, which is concerned with the condition of Amerindians, Mera sets the scene in 18th-century Ecuador, where he portrays the love affair between Cumandá, who gives her name to the novel, and Carlos, and where - above all - he reflects on slavery and the damage caused by the colonial domination of ancestral tribes, while at the same time praising the beauty of nature. His work has become a classic and has been adapted many times since, notably for the opera and the cinema. At the same time, Luis Cordero Crespo, a progressive who was president from 1892 to 1895, was fascinated by the Kichwa language, to which he devoted a dictionary. While the end of the century saw the corpus of Remigio Crespo Toral (Mi Poema, 1885; Últimos pensamientos de Bolívar, 1889; Canto a Sucre, 1897), who would be proclaimed National Poet in 1917, grow, the beginning of the twentieth century was adorned with a modernist tinge that can be found especially in the poems of Humberto Fierro (1890-1929), who was assimilated to the Generación decapitada. It should be noted that the link that unites him with the other members of the "decapitated generation" - Medardo Ángel Silva, Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño, Arturo Borja - lies in the fact that they all chose to kill themselves. Following them, Hugo Mayo (1895-1988) embodied ultraism, an avant-garde movement that met with little success in Ecuador but made a name for itself abroad. Finally, the one who became undeniably famous beyond the borders of his country was Alfredo Gangotena (1904-1944) who studied in France from the age of 16. Having made it his duty to master the language of his adopted country as well as his native tongue, it was in French that he wrote the majority of his texts. His elective affinities led him to rub shoulders with the greatest, from his compatriot Jorge Carrera Andrade to Max Jacob, from Jean Cocteau to Henri Michaux, to whom he took a tour of Ecuador, where the Belgian writer wrote his famous Ecuador, published in 1929. Gangotena's French poems
can be found in two volumes published by La Différence.In literature, Luis Alfredo Martinez (1869-1909) introduced the realist movement. Born into a large family, he was expelled from school because of his indiscipline, and his father decided to make him work as a farmer on one of his farms. It was there that his first inclinations as a budding writer took hold, and perhaps it was there that he began to develop the idea for A la costa
, considered his masterpiece. Beyond the sad story of Salvador, it is a true Ecuadorian fresco that he elaborates, lucid and acerbic even in his writing, a thousand miles from the lyricism of Mera.If with José de la Cuadra (Los Sangurimas, 1934), Realism becomes magical, the tone becomes harder with certain writers who use their voices to denounce historical facts, Joaquín Gallegos Lara, in Las Cruces sobre el agua, recounts the 1922 general strike in Guayaquil, while Nelson Estupiñan Bass, who was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, evokes the guerrilla warfare that followed the assassination of President Eloy Alfaro in Cuando los guayacanes florecían. For his part, Jorge Icaza (1906-1978) explores the delicate and painful question of Indian identity, notably in L'Homme de Quito, translated into French by Albin Michel in 1993, but now unfortunately out of print, and even more so in Huasipungo, published in 1934, a novel in which the massacres of which the indigenous populations were victims were illustrated. Alfredo Pareja Díez-Canseco (1908-1993), who also joined the Guayaquil Group, whose novels Baldomera and Las tres ratas are a perfect complement to the work of his predecessor, and Humberto Salvador Guerra (1909-1982), who, with En la ciudad he perdido una novela
..., demonstrates the extent to which he responded to the demands of Social Realism while flirting with the avant-garde. Adalberto Ortiz (1914-2003) perfectly combined these two approaches with a colourful language that broke free from the codes in force, earning him the Eugenio Espejo Prize in 1995. It is still with the clan spirit that the new generations continue to explore the limits of literature, the tzantzismo initiated by Marco Muñoz and Ulises Estrella is a perfect example, since this group will bring together such important writers as Jorge Enrique Adoum(Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda, 1976) or Abdón Ubidia(Sueño de lobo, 1986). Others made their own mark on the period, such as Jorge Davila Vazquez, who shook up the established order with the daring - in form and content - María Joaquina en la vida y en la muerte (1976), or Alicia Yánez Cossió, born in 1928, who lived in Cuba for a long time, but was the first woman to receive the Eugenio Espejo Prize (2008) for her poetry(De la sangre y del tiempo) and novels(Bruna, Soroche y los tíos) With the new generation, Ecuadorian literature is tending to become more feminine, as demonstrated by the success of María Fernanda Espinosa - who also holds the prestigious post of president of the UN General Assembly - who was awarded the National Poetry Prize for Caymándote, a collection in which she sharpened her half-erotic, half-ecological poetry. As for Gabriela Alemán, also representative of these new perspectives, she is finally being discovered in French thanks to the translation work of the Marseille-based publisher L'Atinoir, which has published La Mort siffle un blues, an astonishing collection of short stories. Finally, Rocío Durán Barba, a journalist born in Quito in 1956, but a tireless traveller, has become one of the greatest spokespersons for the contemporary concerns of her native country. Her essay Hymn to the Eternal Spring (Éditions Caractères) was published on the occasion of the bicentenary of Ecuador's independence.
