ABSTRACT
Malambo (2001) by Lucía Charún-Illescas, articulates a notion of freedom in late sixteenth-century Peru grounded on the syncretism of Yoruba sacred cosmology and European Catholicism, which, together with Indian religious beliefs, shaped the complex roots of Peruvian society.1 Yoruba cosmology is characterized in the novel by the memory of the ancestors and the socialization among enslaved Africans of ways of apprehending the world through ancient oral tradition, botanical healing rites, the interaction between spirits and humans, and the notion of social space as spheres inhabited by the dead whose connections with the living, far from disappearing, are reaffi rmed in daily life. This complex cosmology appears, on one level, as a life force that vindicates the humanization of Africans and their descendants in Peru at the same time that it subverts the alienation to which they are subjected as enslaved individuals. As an Afro-Peruvian author Charún-Illescas’s focus on Black spirituality as a legitimate way of being in the world is in itself a profoundly meaningful act in the affi rmation of Black people’s humanity. From this point of view, Malambo is a groundbreaking, courageous text, which brings into dialectical perspective the presence of Afro-descended people obscured by the racist practices that inform canonical Peruvian historiography. The novel’s rejection of Eurocentric views conventionally used to explain the African Diaspora leads Costa Rican writer Quince Duncan to consider it illustrative of the new Afro-Latino literature (135-143). Malambo’s omniscient narrative voice captures with scientifi c rigor the tight machinery of the transatlantic slave trade as well as the racial stratifi cation of late sixteenth-century Peru while looking critically at the attitudes and actions of Black individuals in Peruvian society. The description of the logistics of the trade in Lima that the slave traffi cker Manuel De la Piedra offers Chema, a young man from Guijón who is gathering information for a book he is writing on the customs of Lima, illustrates this aspect of the novel:
Don’t you want to note in your book how many slaves I have in quarantine? . . . A hundred and eighty-three. All of them entered legally, none are contraband. I have an associate who . . . buys them in the
Cartagena de Indies market. He travels with them to Portobelo . . . and from there he crosses the Chagres river to get to Panama. From Panama to Callao they arrive to me in a month, if they don’t have a layover in Paita or Guanchaco . . . Even though it cuts into my profi ts, I prefer to spend a few more pesos in shackles and chains, to keep the slaves well secured during the trip. (75)
De la Piedra concludes: “But the important thing is that the cargo arrives healthy to El Callao . . . That’s why, as soon as they arrive, I send them to Malambo. I look for a doctor to check them over, and I begin to fatten them with a lot of sango and stewed potatoes” (75-76). The economy embedded in the character’s description of the slave traffi c articulates the novel’s defamiliarization and indictment of the violence that sustains a structure in which Black lives are made disposable.
