Writing Overseas: Allegories of “Us,” the Peruvian Nation, in Novels by Patricia de Souza and Teresa Ruiz Rosas

• In Event: Perspectivas críticas sobre la literatura peruana

Abstract

Criticism on Peruvian postconflict literature has been dominated by (inter)national bestsellers, primarily written by authors from Lima, that subsequently spark the criollo/andino debate. Furthermore, the criticism has not adequately included women authors, nor has attention been paid to those writing from a different discursive space, thereby allowing for critical distance and more objectivity when examining the aftermath of the Peruvian armed conflict. Therefore, I would like to draw our attention to the cultural production by two women writers that engage the aftereffects of the armed conflict, Patricia de Souza (Arequipa; France) and Teresa Ruiz Rosas (Arequipa; Germany). First, de Souza prefigures the literature to come in the 2000s—including her own allegory of the internal conflict La mentira del fauno (1999)—and her more recent work, rooted in the armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s, presents an experimental and psychological dimension to trauma, language, and identity. In a similar vein, Ruiz Rosas in La mujer cambiada (2008) takes on the destruction and reconstruction of identities after the conflict. I argue that these works depart from the criollo/andino debate by focusing on a wounded cultural identity. These texts, either allegorically or literally, configure the armed conflict as an impediment to moving forward and focus on the unifying thread between criollo and Andean texts: the cultural trauma that has lacerated us.

Author

• Adriana B Rojas, Eastern Mennonite University