Chapter 10 - Landscapes of Heterogeneity in a Mid-Twentieth-Century Quechua Poem

Summary

This chapter discusses a bilingual poem in Quechua and Spanish by the twentieth-century Peruvian writer, Teodoro Meneses Morales (1915-87). It argues that the poem evinces a loss of solidarity between humanity and the wider cosmos and that this loss is the result of social, cultural, and environmental transitions occurring at the time. By synthesizing Cornejo Polar’s concept of heterogeneity with Westphal’s geocritical approach, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that accounts for how transitions in mid-twentieth-century Peruvian society disrupt normal patterns of relating to the natural environment as reflected in the poem. As humanity becomes ever more fragmented, pulled in opposing directions between traditional Andean and Western ways of relating to the land, so the land itself ceases to be the stable environment that it was before. In Meneses Morales’ poem, the emblem of such transformations is a drought. While far from unprecedented in the Andes, in a context of heterogeneity this natural disaster becomes symbolic of a more fundamental dislocation between the human inhabitant and the wider landscape of which humans form a part.