due to the fact that they interviewed different Inca panacas or came into contact with different ethnic accounts (Rostworowski, 1987). In this light it is clear that Guamán Poma offers an account of time and history that not only differs substantially, but is in fact at odds with the Cuzco accounts prominent in Garcilaso de Vega, Inca and Juan de Betanzos, for instance. The four ages that Guamán Poma figures preceded Inca times postulate about a million years after Adam (Brading, 1991: 150). He begins the history of the New World with the arrival of Noah sometime after the universal flood. The four ages tell of a human cultural development that precedes the arrival of Manco Capac – the first Inca and cultural hero – and accounts for most of Andean cultural developments: agriculture, cities, laws, and the building of fortresses. Brading notes that the evolutionary development in Guamán Poma is reminiscent of that advanced by Cicero and redeployed by Las Casas (1991: 150–1).
Guamán Poma’s boldness never ceases to amaze his readers, given the climate of orthodoxy and censorship in both Spain and the colonies. Not content with having grafted Andean time onto biblical time by having found the common and universal phenomenon of the flood, the khipukamayuc advances the notion that Andean civilization is actually a forerunner of Christianity. This idea is also advanced by Garcilaso. Although it is not possible to know how Guamán Poma came to learn the details of the Spanish controversy on the American Indians (Adorno, 1986), it is clear in the text that he nimbly uses the natural law argument developed by Las Casas and Vitoria in order to argue that in pre–Hispanic society, people were organized and governed by the reason of natural law. Andean peoples led virtuous lives, as they followed their own laws and the Devil was not anywhere to be seen, except in the person and life of some of the Collas, or Inca queens. There is no doubt that even in this account of Andean pre–Christian virtue, which defies the consensus reached in Spain about the Indian’s immaturity (as in Kant’s immaturity also), Guamán Poma feels “safe.” It may be that he is aware of the fact that his portrayal of the Incas as usurpers and tyrants coincides with the views sought and propounded by the circle of letrados serving the viceroy Toledo. He must have reasoned that his devastating critique of Spanish colonial rule, coming as it did from a doubly virtuous person, that is, Christian pre–Christian, or a natural intelligence taken to its true telos by the enlightenment of Christianity, would gain him an audience with the king.
If his account of universal history would have seemed outrageous to his contemporaries had they had a chance to read it – the manuscript got lost and was not read until 1911 – his daring to give advice to the king of Spain on how to govern so as to save his soul is as admirable as it is laughable. In one of his now famous drawings he imagines a scene in which he sits next to the king of Spain who, as his pupil, listens to the information and recommendations that Guamán Poma, the good governor, offers to His Majesty. Like Las Casas, Guamán Poma envisions the time when the Indians and Spanish will live in separate towns with the Indians having been given back their lands. In this utopian set–up all work would be paid, and the mita, and for that matter all daily life, should be modeled on Inca times and Inca ethics, for they, after all, had the best laws and really knew how to govern. Toledo instead is only creating havoc. His policy to move the Indians to towns, his exigencies of tribute and long periods of work in the mines, together with the neglect of the fields, is bringing the Andes to a catastrophic end, for the world is now upside down and the Indians are becoming extinct. In the end Guamán Poma’s Corónica is saturated by the grief of seeing an orderly and healthy world come to end, as he says, “without remedy in sight.” The pages written by the self–styled prince speak of the terrifying sense of holocaust, for an entire ancient civilization was about to disappear. The urgency of the demographic collapse is written on every page of text and picture that make up the 908 pages of his letter to the king.
How Guamán Poma was able to become conversant with the entire discursive complex of the conquest–cum–evangelization and redeploy it to critique the conquest and colonial rule, as well as offer a plan for good government, is a feat that remains unequaled in the history of colonial or modern letters. Compared with Garcilaso, his disadvantages were greater and his subalternity was extreme. He managed to learn doctrine by attending sermons, law by frequenting the courts, drawing by apprenticing himself to various churchmen and artists. Adorno also traces Guamán Poma’s ecclesiastical rhetoric to written sources that he quotes in his letter. He seems to have been thoroughly familiar, for instance, with Fray Luis de Granada’s sermon Memorial de la vida cristiana which was printed and widely circulated in the New World for evangelizing purposes (Adorno, 1986: 57). The new catechisms and sermonarios printed in Lima after the meeting of the Third Council of Lima allow Guamán Poma a firmer grasp of the problems that preaching Christianity to the Andean people entail. These texts help him sharpen his “pose as a preacher” (Adorno, 1986: 57). No less important are the confession manuals circulating in the Andes, for they offer a model to Guamán Poma for eliciting information and even for inventing the scene in which he instructs the king. Adorno writes that “Guamán Poma’s defense of his race is a direct reaction to the biases expressed in [the] doctrinal texts” (66), texts circulating in the Andes at the time of the Third Council in which the intellectual potential of Andeans is denigrated by none other than Acosta.
There is no doubt that Guamán Poma was also keenly aware of Las Casas’s position regarding the problematic justification for imperial rule and the natural intelligence and ethics of Indian societies. Like Garcilaso and Las Casas, he had no choice but to seek refuge under the umbrella of providential history and thus accept the king’s legitimate authority to govern. This move left open the possibility of demanding good government.
In conclusion, if, as it has been argued by Mendizabal, Botherston, and Brokaw, Guamán Poma worked from the cognitive order of the khipu, from the Andean ontology of numbers and the art of rectification (Brokaw, 2002: 293), perhaps we could say – as with the Cuzco school of painting – that we are confronting something new – modern – in the history of the world inaugurated by the year 1492. Perhaps we could suggest that it is the Andean structure of knowledge that allows him to dismantle European discourses, locate the fragile seems that hold the parts together, break the fragments, and reassemble them into new series with new semiotic relations, as he does in the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. Perhaps we could say that in a perverse way, the urgent need to respond to the destructuration of the self–world, the vital impulse to retreat from agony, allowed Garcilaso and Guamán Poma – from their respective subaltern subject positions – to hone the subject position and discursive perspective that would allow them to redefine the polemic for the postcolonial world.
References and Further Reading
1 oAdorno, Rolena (1986). Guarnán Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press.
2 Brading, David A. (1991). The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3 Brokaw, Galen (2002). “Khipu numeracy and alphabetic literacy in the Andes: Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s Nueva córonica y buen gobierno,” Colonial Latin American Review, 11(2): 275–303.
4 Castro, Daniel (2007). Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
5 Castro–Klaren, Sara (1999). “Mimicry revisited: Latin America, post–colonial theory and the location of knowledge.” In Alfonso de Toro and Fernando de Toro (eds), El debate de la postcolonialidad en Latinoamerica, pp. 137–64. Madrid: Vervuert Iberoamericana.
6 ——— (2001). “Historiography on the ground: the Toledo Circle and Guamán Poma.” In Ileana Rodríguez (ed.), The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, pp. 143–71. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
7 Cervantes, Fernando (1994). The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
8 Cummins,
