Deep Rivers

Imagine growing up in the bosom of loving Peruvian Indians, only to find later you're shackled to a white community who enslave those very people.

In "Deep Rivers," Jose Maria Arguedas tackles the emotional fallout from this kind of upheaval in a story told through Ernesto.  Abandoned to a boarding school for well-to-do white boys, he is left in no doubt that he is not an Indian.  Yet the Quechua Indian world view is Ernesto's oracle. whereby people, mountains, animals, rain and truth all have powerful dimensions of their own.  To each, he attributes tenderness and love.


I think Ernesto must see his classmates as philanderers who ignore the graces he has come to understand.  Arguedas describes how one of the boys boasts that his father whips the Indians at his disposal to keep them cowed.  The author also relates how the white boys mistreat girls so they have control over them.


Ernesto dreams of a girl who might take for her own his memories of the rivers and mountains he'd seen, of the sheer cliffs and wide plains populated with lakes he'd crossed.  But she should be small and slender with blue eyes and braids.


In his confusion, Ernesto comes to imagine he springs from some non-human species and asks himself if the song of the lark is the stuff of which he is made.  He is drawn to obscure intuition and magic.


Arguedas argues that reality can hardly be logical for the exploited Indian peasant, scorned and humiliated all his life and defenceless against disease and poverty.  Neither can the world be rational to the outcast child, rootless among men.


So what of Arguedas; a scholar who has written one of the most authentic works we have in relation to the indigenous people of South America.  Yet he committed suicide at the end of 1969.  In his last letter he wrote, "I withdraw now because I feel I no longer have the necessary energy and inspiration to continue to work and thereby justify my existence.  Such deflation in a successful man shows how isolation can destroy the spirit.


I would like to believe the appalling treatment of Indians described by Arguedas is assigned to the mid twentieth century.  The government in Peru are promising much but I fear that little will change.


What do you think?