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The Pongo’s Dream
by José Maria Arguedas
(Arguedas learned Quechua as a boy from servants in the household of his
stepmother and his father, an itinerant lawyer. Until his suicide in
1967, the novelist and anthropologist was perhaps more responsible than
any other Peruvian for the impassioned defense of the Incan tongue and
cultural autonomy for millions of Quechua speakers, challenging the
powerful ideologies of “modernization” and “national integration”
predicated on the erasure of Peru’s indigenous past. Although there was
a strong utopian strain in Arguedas, he was not just interested in
indigenous traditions. He also wrote about the challenges of migration
and modernity, and proclaimed himself an “hombre Quechua moderno,” a
modern Quechuan man, reflecting his desire for a cultural pluralism for
Peru that would go beyond a retreat into a narrow traditionalism. An
adaptation of a story Arguedas heard from a Cusco peasant, “The Pongo’s
Dream” captures the rigidity of the feudal order that still prevailed in
many parts of the Andes in the mid-twentieth century. But the
denouement, where the world turns upside down as in the Inkarri myth,
suggests the existence of a spirit of independence and opposition, which
was to fuel the peasant movements of the 195os and the break-up of the
landlords’ rule.)
*******
A little man headed to his master’s mansion. As one of the serfs on the
1ord’s estate, he had to perform the duty of a pongo, a lowly house
servant. He had a small and feeble body, a meek spirit. His clothes were
old and tattered. Everything about him was pitiful.
The great lord, owner of the mansion and lands surrounding it, could not
help laughing when the little man greeted him in the mansion’s corridors.
“What are you? A person or something else?” the lord asked the little
man in front of all the other serfs. The pongo bowed his head and did
not answer. He stood frightened, eyes frozen. “Let’s see!” the lord
said. “With those worthless little hands, you must at least know how to
scrub pots or use a broom. Take this garbage away!” he ordered.
The pongo knelt to kiss his master’s hand and followed him to the
kitchen hanging his head.
full: http://louisproyect.org/2015/07/10/the-pongos-dream/
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