Novel
Yanakuna
Not translated into English
Jesús Lara · 1952
Synopsis
As a child, Wayra tends sheep on the slopes and leads the games of the little shepherds; her father is the richest peasant in the region. When he dies, her mother, in debt from burying him, gives her in payment to moneylenders from the town, don Encarno and doña Elota, who make her their servant. Wayra runs away, and steals remedies from her masters for the Indians of the highlands. Grown up, she lives in her husband's community. When her eleven-year-old daughter is raped, she sets off to seek justice in the town.
Context
Like almost all of its author's fictions, the book is subtitled “novela quechua” although it is written in Spanish, a Spanish in which the Quechua words of the valley appear. Wayra was born of a real peasant woman who had told the writer her life story. Critics read in it the agrarian feudalism that preceded the reform of 1953, and the almost religious bond that ties the Indians to the land. Lara extended the ending of the novel in a second edition, in 1958.
Who it is for
In Spanish, with no French translation. The violence done to the child and then to his daughter is told without detour, and the Quechua words can be understood from context.
Prizes and reception
Published in the year of the revolution, it was bought by the hundreds of copies by the new government; the Bolivian state included it in 2023 in its Bicentennial Library.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.