“There he had spoken by signs. A report had been sent to Wayna Capac Inca in Cusco, saying that the first men had gone ashore, that they wore very long beards, and that they were shrouded, like corpses; Wayna Capac then had them carry him on a wando [litter] by chasqui [messengers], so that the Inca greenhorn and the Spanish greenhorn could meet. They spoke by signs; Wayna Capac asked the Spaniards and by signs, pointing at things, that he ate gold and silver. And so [the Inca] gave him a lot of gold dust, silver, and gold utensil; with all this, (the Inca) ordered him to turn back, escorted by the chasqui, to the port of Santa” (Guaman Poma 103).
I include this quote at the beginning to set the tone and scope of this piece of writing, originally this document consisted of 1,200 pages that are stored now at the Danish Royal Library. The text I read was just over 300 pages, and was vastly edited for readability and enjoyment. This section about the Spanish Conquest was fascinating, and this moment I think meant to be funny as Guaman Poma is aware of his audience and how the Indian story would have differed so much from the Spanish version.
“May Your Lordship read this book and chronicle, and the chapters it contains, and may you carry out justice. What is written here was not done to cause harm or damage, but to serve God and good justice, so that bad Christians and proud men might mend their ways. Your Lordship should know that, had I set out to write about each padre or Spaniard separately, there would not have been enough paper; therefore, I have talked about all of them together. Your Lordship should keep a copy of this book, to see to your justice. It is right that every church inspector carry a copy of this book and follow it when taking accounts, doing inspections, and meting out punishments. Each vicar should have another copy, so that they can confess the Indians and learn the language, and to restrain their consciences and their pride with this book” (Poma 229).
I include this quote here because it encapsulates what Guaman Poma's express intentions are, sincerely I think, that he only wants the Spanish to live by their own expressed code of conduct which is an interesting rhetorical move on his part.
“A
Spaniard without whiskers looks like an old whore, his face a mask. The
Spaniard is honored by his beard” (Guaman Poma 265).
This text is riddled with phrases like this that are funny now and would have been funny then.
“Therefore, he had to write and labor over this New Chronicle and Good Government of This Kingdom, in service to God and His Majesty and for the well-being, increase, conservation, and multiplication of the Indians of this kingdom, in service to God and to His Majesty’s royal crown” (Guaman Poma 359).
Guaman Poma’s text is a strange text to contend with. I will say this over and over again throughout this project, but I would love to be able to retrace my steps and find what was pulled out and referenced in any one of the volumes I scraped names from to get me the reason why I have this author in front of me. I refer here to Guaman Poma by this name because this is what David Frey does throughout his translation and editing of this text, though his full name is Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala which means more than I am able to ascertain at this point. There is a lot going on in this text. Frey edited down 1200 pages of hard to read, mixed language writing and illustrations into a 350 page book that spans several volumes of the text itself. The first third of the book is Guaman Poma’s estimation of how the Andean/Incan/Indian society functioned before the arrival of the Spaniards as he calls them. This section is fascinating really to see this society broken down by age group responsibilities from infants to old men and women which he lists out separately. There are 10 designations and each age group has a responsibility to the one above and the one below. If this civilization ever actually existed in this way or to this rigid prescription this would have been a dazzlingly, well ordered society. Down to the 5 to 9 year old children are meant to collect the feathers of tropical birds for some of the specific ornaments of another age groups dress. It is fascinating.
The picture that Guaman Poma paints is one of a sort of utopia of order and belonging. Obviously there was war and strife, he mentions that there were laws around what should happen if a crime is committed so there seems to be plenty of prescriptions in case violent crime occurs which suggests the existence of crime though these points are really deterrents rather than things that are actually done. This hints at a type of unrest specifically sexual violence that Guaman Poma takes seriously throughout the rest of the work. This may be read rhetorically to suggest that the Incas though the did not have pervasive sexual violence in their culture, were better at managing it and punishing it than the Spanish who seem rampant and barbaric in these sorts of dealings and never find justice for those that commit these heinous acts. I am not sure at this point what Guaman Poma is trying to do here.
The second roughly third of the book is the arrival of the Spaniards and the travesty of what their arrival meant. He doesn’t focus specifically on the atrocities of the conflict, but rather how their two civilizations fundamentally mismatch each other and how, in Guaman Poma’s mind, the Incas had a fully functioning society that the Spanish/Europeans/Rest of the World should have recognized as an equal party to them. This section then goes through each role of the Spaniards society breaking each role down like he did for the Incan society and how the Spanish mismanage their own people. He constantly references corregidores and encomenderos, doctrina priests and others that function in a specific way in their interactions with Incas but that they are disorderly, corrupt, wicked and injustice and to introduce the phrase of the book, there is no remedy to any of this.
The last third of the book is how the Incas should function in this new society together with the Spanish and what Guaman Poma’s hopes are for the Spanish in their continued dealings in the New World. The last 10th of the book is the most capitvating of the whole text. Guaman Poma is writing this whole document to the King of Spain at the time, Don Phillip III who he continually blesses his name because he assumes this document will find an audience in Castile where the Spanish kings sits at this time. This last 10th of the book though is a direct address to King Phillip III in a form of an imagined dialogue between himself and old, 80-year old poor scholar, and the king. He positions this dialogue as the king interviewing Guaman Poma and himself answered these questions patiently after the totality of the text. It is a strange, magical sort of discourse where he is pleading for his people before the king.
Guaman Poma is a fascinating person whose position in his own era is hard to ascertain. Did he think that it was possible for his work to be read by the King? Who was his actual audience? What did he think he would accomplish by writing this very long document? It is hard to know. What we know in the following years is that this text was largely forgotten to history until the early 1900’s when it was discovered in the Danish Royal Library and sort of revived to history. It is hard to fathom that the only document every written by person of this illustrious history was squirreled away somewhere an ocean away. This seems impossible to me. There is so much additional research that I want to conduct as I walk away from this text which is more for my own amusement than the purpose of this project.
I do want to pause here and say that this text is fully a product of its time with some very “problematic,” to use a fashionable term, concepts of gender roles and race. There are full separate spheres for men and women with women being second class citizens that often should be protected for sure, but also the concept of maidenhood and corruption here being central to his understanding of an orderly society. In addition to this, Guaman Poma’s views on the race are very much of their time but are unacceptable by today’s standards, he equates or even thinks less of those ethnically European because of their actions in the New World, so of the hierarchy in his estimation, the Indians (but only the noble Indians – there are pueblo Indians who he does not consider his equals), then the Spaniards, then the mixed race individuals who would be the children of the mixing of the Europeans and Indians of any kind I imagine, and then below this curiously are the blacks that would have been brought from ‘Guinea’. Even in this New World divorced from the ways these relations played out in the Northern Hemisphere, Guaman Poma thinks very poorly of those persons brought as slaves to the New World. This is a fascinating note in this text that constantly befuddled me as I read it. This could be a carry over from how the Spanish treated these people, and he equates the ‘Guinea’ people as being equals with those of the rest of the world because he at the end of the text imagines a world where the king of the whole world would be Don Phillip III, but then there would be 4 other sub kings that would rule the world together, the Turks, the New World (this would be one of his sons of course), and the King of the ‘Guinea’ peoples so they have a seat at the table, obviously – probably rhetorically – below the King of Spain. The nature of these things is complex, and distressing really.
One of the last words Guaman Poma records is his sort of thesis statement for the whole work, “Therefore, he had to write and labor over this New Chronicle and Good Government of This Kingdom, in service to God and His Majesty and for the well-being, increase, conservation, and multiplication of the Indians of this kingdom, in service to God and to His Majesty’s royal crown” (Guaman Poma 359). It is the note about “conservation” that I find the most fascinating here. He is certain that the Inca people are being replaced, removed, and will not multiple any longer. The editor of the text, David Frey, suggests in the introduction that Guaman Poma would have been born, if he presents his lineage as true, into one of the most powerful families that his side of the world had ever seen. Also, from this place of power, it appears that the Incas were not a conquest driven civilization but rather allowed for peaceful tribute to be paid to them. So, he was aware of a type of civilization that allowed for a peaceful arrangement of stability, and lived in this peace for probably the first 20 years of his life, then as a young man just able to take up arms and defend his people, the Spanish arrive unannounced and decimate an entire continent of civilizations. Everything he would have ever known was turned upside down, and this regime was not as peacefully oriented as his own people and so his plea in the end is that the Spanish conduct themselves by their own code of Christianity, and as a practicing Christian himself points out all the ways that the priests, inspectors, and the bishops do not follow these rules at all, and that is what he finds the most distressing. Guaman Poma lived long enough to this the dissolution of his people and wrote the book that pleaded with the invaders to stop invading. This is the power of the written word, that ultimately Guaman Poma’s people disappeared, but not entirely because he conserves them here.
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