Lucía Charún Illescas

Lucía Charún Illescas is an Afro-Peruvian author and journalist. Charún-Illescas was born on October 19, 1950 in Lima, Peru. Charún-Illescas is the daughter of Felicita Yllescas and Santiago Charún, and is the oldest of seven children. Her passion for literature was inspired by her mother. She grew up reading works of Julio Verne and Alejandro Dumas, and later Emilio Salgari, and poets such as César Vallejo, José María Eguren, and García Lorca. From a young age, she excelled in school when reciting poems and writing her own compositions.

Later, Charún-Illescas attended Jaime Bausate y Meza School of Journalism in Lima. After three years, she wrote for a feminist magazine. After college, Charún-Illescas left Peru. Charún-Illescas eventually settled in Hamburg, Germany, where she is currently based.

Malambo

Malambo (2001) is considered Charun-Illescas’ defining work, and often considered the first novel concerning the Afro-Peruvian community. The author herself has said that “[Malambo] is the work I always sought out to read; not finding it, I wrote it myself.” It is the first Afro-Peruvian literary work of its kind that has been published in three languages (Italian, Spanish, and English), which has widely expanded its audiences in North America, Europe, and other literary circles beyond Latin America and the Caribbean. Much as its subject matter has occupied a marginalized place in history, Malambo still in large part occupies a marginal place in the modern Latin American literary canon. However,  founder and director of the magazine D’Palenque Juan Manuel Olaya Rocha has made a case that Malambo has gradually become standard reading in some universities’ Latin American literature programs.

The novel follows Tomason Ballumbrosio (also spelled “Vallumbrosio”), a wizened Afro-Peruvian painter who - although technically still a slave - is a cimarron, having left central Lima for the town Malambo, which lies on the other side of the Rimac River. He eventually takes in another cimarron Francisco Parra and his daughter Pancha, who eventually works as an herbalist in Malambo. After Francisco’s strange disappearance, Pancha begins a search for her father and his circumstances. On the opposite side of the Rio Rimac in “la Ciudad de las Reyes” (the City of Kings), slave trader Manuel de la Piedra has an illicit relationship with his slave, Altagracia Maravillas, who is married to another of de la Piedra’s slaves, Nazario Briche. De la Piedra publicly proclaims his plans to marry Catalina Ronceros, a widow who also owns a young slave named Anton Cocoli. Pancha’s search for her father becomes paralleled by the search of a young mulatto - Guararé Pizarro - for his unknown father in the city of Lima. Guarare enlists the aid of a young Spanish academic named Chema Arosemena, who is in Lima writing a work on local traditions and culture. After Pancha finally learns of her father’s death - which Tomason and his companion Jacinto Mina have known since the novel’s beginning - she eventually travels westward to the Peruvian coast in order to find Venancio, who has been her husband-to-be for the extent of the novel so that he can buy the freedom of Altagracia, his half-sister, before her master De la Piedra auctions her off in Lima. Tomason and his paintings continually serve as a constant reference point for the reader as the plots develop to the end of the novel. The structure of the novel often mimics a collage, weaving multiple plotlines together simultaneously in different fragments.

Malambo takes place during the Viceroyalty of Peru. Although the novel does not mention specific dates, references within the novel indicate around 1630. It is notable that Charun-Illescas situates her novel in a time in which Afro-descendants were a large, vibrant constituency, outnumbering the Spanish population of Lima at the time. “Charun-llescas returns to the epoch of Peru’s nascency at a critical moment - during a time when the black population of Lima was at its height.”

In the context of Peruvian literature, the novel voices a traditionally voiceless community in Peru, highlighting the marginalized historical perspective of people of African descent in the Western hemisphere. As Emmanuel Harris II - who translated Malambo to English - writes, “Her story is a contemporary novel written by a woman of African descent that grants primacy to Afro-Latino perspectives. Likewise the events of the narrative show the often negated, marginalized, or even forgotten connections found in communities throughout the Americas.” Furthermore, literary critics note how Malambo sheds light on Peru’s historical reality as what Chantell Smith Limerick calls “multiethnic from its foundation.” The diverse - yet underrepresented - society of Lima during this period becomes further evident in the novel, with Charun-Illescas commenting that the population of Lima included “mulatos, zambos claros y prietos. Sacalaguas, colorados, cuarterones, quinteronas, salta pa-tras, prietos, chinocholos y tanto cruce entre negros, indios y blancos que le enseñaron los niños a diferenciar.”

While highlighting the shared struggles of the Afro-Peruvian community, many authors point out that Charun-Illescas also emphasizes the diversity within the Afro-Peruvian community. They argue that she shatters the idea that the Afro-Peruvian community can be understood as only one essence, specifically noting how Charun-Illescas explores characters’ experiences at the intersection of their multiple identities. The author herself notes in an interview that the character of Altagracia Maravillas “represents a triple stigmatization: sexual toy, forced labor, and fertile woman.”  

As a literary work, Malambo fits into several literary genres. Author and literary theorist Quince Duncan designates the historical novel as an exceptional representation of  “literary Afro-realism.” This is due to Charun-Illescas’ reclamation of Afro-Peruvian history, symbolic imagery from the African diaspora, and the search for a solidified African identity. Furthermore, the novel emphasizes the concept of an ancestral community through frequent allusions to traditional Yoruba orisha through Tomason’s paintings and storytelling throughout the novel. In fact, Charun-Illescas herself describes Tomason as a “painter griot” due to these stories.

Awards and Honors

In June 2013, her works and careers were recognized in Peru within Afro-Peruvian Culture Month. The Ministry of Culture granted her a distinguished person through the Meritorious Personality of Culture award. Illescas was also granted the Lyra award for her narrative ability in short stories. In addition, she is also the author of the book Lateinamerika (1995) in Hamburg that was published in Germany.

References

This article "Lucía Charún Illescas" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Lucía Charún Illescas. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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