The Quechua language is an oral language spoken by more than 10 million people today. This was the language of the Inca Empire which was destroyed and in turn, the Spaniards assimilated the majority of the population into Spanish tradition by forcing them to abandon Quechua and most of their practices. My family is from the Pomabamba province in Ancash and we, like the majority of the population kept our indigenous traditions even though colonizers desperately tried to remove our culture. Statistically, 84.83% of the population in Pomabamba speaks Quechua, but when my family moved from the Ancash region to Lima, they were forced to leave the language behind. My dad told me about his childhood in Lima; the kids at his school would bully him and his siblings for speaking in Quechua, and since my dad was young, he ultimately lost all his knowledge of the language. He can understand it, but he was unable to pass it on to me. When the opportunity came to see the reading of the first comic book written in Quechua, I knew I had to go see it.
The comic book was about the life of Rasu-Ñiti, a famous danzante de Tijeras, which means a scissor dancer (a traditional dance from the southern Andes mountains in Peru. The dance consists of two or more dancers, followed by their respective orchestras of a violin and a harp. The dancers dance in turns, doing explicit moves and challenging steps, such as dancing with just one foot which can also result in a lot of agony and pain due to the complexity of the dances). It was originally written by the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas; it was collected from oral tradition. Rasu-Ñiti dies in trance, so Wamani, who is the spirit of the mountains (who manifests in the form of a condor and is also an Andean god) comes to help Rasu-Ñiti become part of the Andean vision.
The reading was hosted in an auditorium at New York University (NYU) in Manhattan. The speaker was the translator of the comic book, Professor Odi Gonzales. Both the professor and the students from the Quechua Program at NYU helped translate the book into Quechua. The writer of the translated version was answering questions from the audience and also reading excerpts of the book. He was reading it very quietly; it was a small group of people for the reading which could explain why he was quiet. His posture was also very relaxed along with his tone. I think I would have preferred to read this comic book on my own because I would have added so much more feeling to the characters and words. However, I always prefer to listen to poetry being read. Most of the questions asked to the translator of the comic book were about the logistics behind creating a comic book out of an oral language.
When I went home to tell my parents about the reading I asked them about the writer José María Arguedas, and my dad told me about how he was a professor at his university, Universidad Agraria, back in Perú. Arguedas was an activist for the Indigenous community in Peru, which is why he wrote a comic book about the scissor dancers from the Andes, to help the people from the urban areas in Peru better understand the culture that still exists in Peru, and also educating people about how that is their own ancestry. Through his writing and his studies, he won a Noble Peace Prize. My dad told me at the end of this conversation that he took his own life in his office at the university after seeing all the suffering of the indigenous community and feeling as if he could not help them. As an indigenous Peruvian activist, I can understand the pain of Arguedas; it’s hard to see your community suffering and not being able to fix all the systemic problems.
Coming to this reading was interesting but difficult. I feel as if I was stripped of my culture because of the assimilation my father had to go through. I hope I will be able to learn Quechua in the future so I can finally read the copy of the comic book that I bought at the reading.