The Otavalo Gaze

What I learnt from Jorge Icaza's novel, "Huasipungo"

An example of Ecuadorian textile art. I used to own one a lot like this.

Dear Reader

As I am on my summer break until the end of June, I am re-posting essays from September 2023, the month I started writing on Substack. As the number of subscribers and followers to English Republic of Letters numbered at most a few dozen that month (this essay, for example, was originally sent to 30 subscribers), most of you won’t have received these postings the first time around. I hope the hardy stalwarts who have been with me since then, and to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude for your support since those early days, will forgive the repetition.

I have resisted the temptation to rewrite the essay, so it comes to you, paraphrasing the ghost in Hamlet, with all its imperfections on its head.

Your comments are very welcome, as always.

In his excellent Numb in China series, Sam Kriss recently wrote, “After Julia Kristeva’s visit to China in 1974, she wrote about the gaze of a peasant in Huxian, regarding her and her fellow travellers like ‘some weird and peculiar animals, harmless but insane. Unaggressive, but on the far side of the abyss of time and space. A species—what they see in us is a different species.’” 

As someone who has lived in many different cultures, I am familiar with that gaze. But by far the most intriguing example of it for me was in Ecuador, back in 1988. Newly arrived in that beautiful Andean country, I went out walking around the well-known market town of Otavalo. The centre of the town in those days bustled with activity and many locals, mostly indigenous people, would sell their lovely wares to tourists. Some locals had also travelled to Europe, I was told, to sell directly to buyers in Paris or Berlin.

But the surrounding countryside gave little sign of bustle and certainly not of prosperity. The little villages seemed poor, their inhabitants apparently getting by on subsistence farming. Dogs barked protectively, a few sheep wandered here and there. Children played outside on dusty roads. And the adults gazed at me without curiosity. Trying to show I wasn’t a tourist, I greeted them cheerily in Spanish; there was barely a change in their expression. 

Then it dawned on me. As a white person with light brown hair, I could have been one of the ‘blancos’ from Quito. In fact, they probably thought I was. But far from viewing me as they might a compatriot, it made no difference. I could see them eyeing me as an outsider. 

At one level, this made me feel less of an outsider in one sense; I could be taken for an Ecuadorian. But at a more fundamental level, I felt greater estrangement. There was a huge gulf between us, protected on their side, or so it seemed, by a drawbridge more of indifference than hostility. On my side, there was ignorance and shyness. And was there an element of arrogant condescension, too? Perhaps I could have pursued a conversation, made a connection and picked up an insight or two, I don’t know. But I froze, the moment passed, and I walked on along the path, surrounded by the thick woods of eucalyptus trees. 

I then realised that I wasn’t in the South America of Julio Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, some of my literary heroes at the time. 

In literary terms, as I came to realise soon after, I was in Jorge Icaza’s South America. I’d told a friend from Quito about my experience, and she, knowing my habit of looking at the world through the lens of literature, suggested I read Huasipungo. I’m glad I did. 

Jorge Icaza Coronel (to give him his full name) was an Ecuadorian writer who was only 28 when he wrote his most famous novel, in 1934. It is set in Ecuador during the first half of the 20th century. It tells the story of Andrés Chiliquinga, an indigenous man who faces oppression and mistreatment from the wealthy landowners who own the huasipungos (ranches). Spoiler alert: things don’t go well for him. 

Andrés loses his leg in a work accident and his wife, Cunshi, is seduced by the owner. The novel depicts the generally harsh conditions and social inequality experienced by indigenous communities. It culminates in a violent uprising against the landowners, with Andrés ultimately sacrificing himself for the cause.

It’s a dark but defiant tale. The landowners of the time hated it - they denounced it as crude propaganda and a threat to society (i.e. their wealth) and power). 

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The book is crude at times, in more than one sense. The language is rough and there's never any doubt about where the sympathy of the author lies. 

But it is also a magnificent critique of a system based on racism, power, violence and greed. An analysis of the book I read at the time described its concentric circles of oppression, with the most oppressed at the centre and the powerful in the outer circles. You could draw it a bit like this:

But perhaps you could also think of it as the circles of hell in Dante. 

One thing is missing from the above schematic, however. Although Andrés Chiliquinga is the hero of the story and represents the oppressed indigenous people, there is another figure who is even more oppressed. And that’s Cunshi, his wife. The victim of the landowner’s sexual violence, she is also routinely beaten by her husband. She apparently treats this as a normal state of affairs. 

The author says at one point that if someone had tried to intervene during one of her beatings, she would have told them not to meddle: “Para esu es maridu” (‘that’s what a husband is"for"—the Spanish is corrupted to approximate the rendering by speaker for whom it is a second language, imperfectly spoken).  

So Cunshi is—so women are—really at the centre of the circle, the most oppressed of all. 

As I said, it is a harsh, dark book. 

But there are moments of lyricism. These probably sound better in Spanish (many things do), but here’s the ending:

“Al amanecer, entre las chozas deshechas, entre los escombros entre las cenizas,

entre los cadáveres tibios aún, surgieron, como en los sueños, sementeras de brazos

flacos como espigas de cebada que al dejarse acariciar por los vientos helados de los

páramos de América, murmuraron con voz ululante de taladro.

—¡Ñucanchic huasipungooo!

—¡Ñucanchic huasipungo!”

In English: "At dawn, among the ruined huts, among the rubble, the ashes, and the still warm corpses, there arose, as in dreams, fields of arms thin as barley spikes that, when caressed by the icy winds of the high Andean skies, murmured in a howling voice like a drill:

—¡Ñucanchic huasipungooo!

—¡Ñucanchic huasipungo!”

‘Ñucanchic’ apparently means ‘our’ in Quechua, so the last, defiant cry of the novel is something like ‘defend our lands’. It is a cry that would be heard again.

Democracy would gradually become the engine for creating a less hierarchical country, with some notable wins for popular votes, including this very recent one. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/31/ecuador-oil-drilling-ban-climate-solution?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

For an update and overview of things now, here is Tony Wood’s recent article: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/reviving-correismo

Back to the book. Despite the opposition of the landowners, the novel became hugely successful. Here are the covers of just a few of the many published editions:

This image not only suggests the success of the novel but also the way it sparked or inspired the imagination of generations of readers and graphic artists. 

My own reception in Ecuador was extremely warm. It really is one of the most welcoming places I have lived in. But reading Huasipungo, I could see how I naturally slotted into a rather privileged part of that society. A year later, I was to feel something similar watching local farmers ploughing the fields with a team of oxen near the atmospheric ruins of Ingapirca. 

Going back to my experience outside Otavalo, I could find my own place in the schematic - in a conflation of the circles of the ‘blanco’ and the ‘gringos’. Not a happy revelation and one I think I resisted at the time (I thought of myself as a penniless teacher); it has taken me years to reflect fully upon my position of privilege in such a setting.

What had mattered that day in the village was not the colour of my passport. It was not a question of nationality. And it was not wholly about race. It was also about language, about culture and, perhaps above all, about property and power. 

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