I'm a romantic at heart
Commentary on Luis Valcárcel's "Tempest in the Andes"
As a self-described dramatic (as well as described by other people constantly, shoutout my roommates who roll their eyes when I tell my daily encounter stories) I enjoy partaking in fantasy. My worldview is often reimagined, reconstructed and retold in whatever way I find most entertaining at the time. This could be misconstrued as delusion, but I want to argue it’s because I’m a romantic.
Okay, a lot of people might find me self-proclaiming to be a romantic almost as cringe-worthy as I feel writing it but I’m going for something here, stay with me.
Being a romantic is difficult. Despite being the best-selling fiction genre, romantic novels are often met with preconceived notions of frivolousness and lustfulness that give them a salacious reputation. Romance itself is far more often associated with feminity, versus masculinity, and feminity within a patriarchal society is associated with weakness. The shallow idea of valuing beauty over brains and the naivety in expecting giant, over the top running-to-your-plane-at-the-airport-gestures-that-don’t-even-make-sense-because-like-you-had-all-that-time-pre-airport-to-talk-it-out-dummy-type-beat. To be a romantic is to be based in fiction.
However, I would argue there are more exceptions to this idea than romantics are given credit for. Reading Luis Valcarcel’s “Tempest in the Andes” felt like reading a love letter to Peru. A love letter based on real-life experiences, histories and environments that maintains a passionate disposition lending itself to a romantic’s heart (it’s me, my heart has been lended too). While there is violence, pain, regret and rage woven into this piece my over-arching takeaway was the romanticization of Peru before.
Valcarcel continually paints the land of Peru as motherly, writing sentiments like “the land, abundant and maternal” and “splendors and greatness, with a luxuriant vitality found only in those cultures that have not slashed the umbilical cord that unites them to the earth” (p.232). Normally I would assume this sort of language to be metaphorical but I want to question that.
Who am I to say the earth is not a woman? Who am I to say this is a romanticization of land and environment that has led to a gendered personification and not simply because Mother Nature is real? If we are questioning the line between real and not real am I a fair judge on Valcarcel’s writing?
Simultaneously, as I question my biases to disagree with Valcarcel I also want to question my agreement. The idea that wraps up this piece is: the main sin committed to Peru’s great nation is the denial of the Indigenous identity of its people (or as Valcarcel says “Indian”).
In some ways, I think I am the exact right audience to read this piece. I am a white woman westerner raised with fantasies of being at one with Mother Nature. I am a prime candidate for the “finding myself in a forgien land” trope which fully sets me up to read any current day modernity expressed in Peru as “inauthentic” and therefore “bad” without having a intersectional understanding because I am taught to romanaticize this profitable tale of a culture.
This is all to say while I connect with Valcarcel’s love letter I am weary of my own biases going in. My fantastical notions could be the very real denial and invalidation of a living culture. This acknowledgement will not stop my rose-tinted glasses tendencies as my romantic heart beats on but hopefully this stream of consciousness at least allows for more openness.
With love,
Orla
Hi Orla (from the couch in the same room). Also as a self-proclaimed romantic I absolutely adore the way you described your relationship to the real and not-real, is pessimism truly a more accurate representation of the lowercase t truth? I do find it interesting because the earth is characterized as a woman in most cultures and I do think that to deny a sort of essentialism about womanhood is a dangerous path to go on, how can you look at the earth and not see abundance and nurturing yet passion and rage, just like a woman? I think your self-critism about being the primary audience is so genuine. I do think that romanticism in Valcarcel is misguided, but I don't think that romanticism itself if from an Indigenous voice should be disreagarded. And on the note of the living culture, I am critical of the notion that Indigenous peoples are not representative the moment they put pen into paper.
"This could be misconstrued as delusion, but I want to argue it’s because I’m a romantic." There are a number of concepts that are related, but it would be interesting to see the differences between them: delusion and fantasy. For example, is it possible to see a landscape outside the fantasies of Romanticism? If Valcárcel's text is enclosed in a Romantic vision, is there the possibility of undoing indigeneity from there?