No longer Orpheus’ lyre but the qhirqhinchu of layqa: the conception of death in the Andean world in Rosa Cuchillo by Óscar Colchado Lucio and in El pez de oro by Gamaliel Churata

Abstract

This text analyzes two of the most important works of modern Peruvian literature from the viewpoint of the concept of death in the Andean world. We thus review Gamaliel Churata’s El pez de oro and Oscar Colchado Lucio’s Rosa Cuchillo with a focus on the particular conception of the cosmological space associated with the dead and its relationship with History, no longer understood as progress but rather as a recovery from a past in constant tension with the present. We will see how both texts seek a vindication of local knowledges and alternative forms of organization of a territory-specific collective subject.