Thousands of years ago a nine year old boy was sacrificed to the god Viracocha lord of the Mapocho river in the high Andes of Chile to prevent drought and ensure the waters to generously give the Inca people their share of life.1 His preserved body was found at the very top of Cerro el Plomo, recoiled as a seed inside earth’s bosom, where his spirit was hidden from sight for thousands of years protecting the people and the waters of the river.2 Artist Cecilia Vicuña learned about this discovery when she was a child, she felt called, her spirit akin to the boy, united with him by the sacred thread of life, summoned to continue the work of this sacrifice to ensure the generosity of the waters for generations to come. Cauri Paccsa or Niño de El Plomo, as the preserved body has come to be known, performed a strong calling to her, specially, when years later, she discovered that the red thread she had been working with most of her life was running between the boy’s petrified fingers. She imagined the thread to be an extension of the boy, himself an extension of the mountain and water, the fluid that runs through earth. The boy was like a seed, the hidden embryo that needs the obscure bosom of earth to sprout, opacity is its cradle and alterity is its soil. How to imagine seed without obscurity or opacity? How to imagine sacrifice without alterity? In this paper I contend that opacity is key to incubation and the seat of life’s process, however, it is not possible to understand opacity if we don’t grasp the notion of alterity in its thread: “Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics” writes Edouard Glissant, and he adds: “To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.” (190) Vicuña’s Quipu Mapocho a woven, knotted textile is akin to the texture of the flows of the river as well as the thread in the boy’s hands and different in its “irreducible singularity” to all its components.3 Opacity seems to be the ability to remain in wonderment towards the questions of the cosmos that are not answerable. To remain in expectancy of that which is passed through
storytelling from one generation to another, and, let’s say, has no scientific base. The Quipu Mapocho in its strange voyage down the waters of the river that traverses down the Andes, knows no end or beginning, nor does it know, or the artist, what entanglements will it approach.4 As Glissant writes: “For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering
what lies at the bottom of natures.” (190) When Vicuña first met El niño de El Plomo, she just stayed with his image for a long time, not knowing how, or not wanting to discover what lies at the very bottom of his body and his story. She dwelled with the possibility of his image to disentangle knots and obscure sacrifices, staying with the trouble for years and years. The preserved boy had been a sacrificial rite to the river Mapocho, and this sacrifice in its opacity along with the signifying violence of his death are to be understood under an “economy of predatory alterity.” In Viveiros de Castro’s words: “[T]he idea, in brief, was that the interiority of the social body is integrally constituted through the capture of symbolic resources –names and souls, persons and trophies, words and memories–from the exterior.” (144) Thus, in this case, opacity and predatory alterity are a continuation, making it almost impossible to understand one without the other. It is Levi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, which provided Viveiros de Castro with the concept of metonymyc contiguity in sacrifice, a trope that points to the sacrifice of the boy as an equivalence to divine grace for the people of the river banks; as we can read it in his words:
“The scheme of sacrifice consists in an irreversible operation (the destruction of the victim) with a view to setting off an equally irreversible operation, on another plane (the granting of divine grace), which is required by the fact that two ‘recipients’, situated at different levels, have previously been brought into communication.” (L.-S. 225) If we expect to understand in terms of concepts and scientific explanations the reason behind the sacrifice of the boy, we would be trying to operate a transparency that would overload the very fine notion of the story of the Niño de El Plomo.
Vicuña, a Chilean mestiza artist, intuits deeper than to exploit and mine the delicate significance of such a sacrifice, intending, instead, to continue its thread so the exposed seed of the boy’s body would not decay due to light and transparency.5 She discovers then that the red thread she had been working with most of her life was also between the boy’s stiff fingers. She has an epiphany of sorts in which she hears the call of the spirit of the river inviting her to continue the work initiated by the sacrifice. This continuity of sacrifice-labor-grace is a metonymy in which the preserved body of the boy, once hidden in the bosom of the mountain, now naked to the profane eye, is turned into life by Vicuña’s labor and becomes the grace granted in the performing installation of red thread that swims down the Mapocho river. The predatory alterity that is at the cradle of the ritual is understood in its opacity by the continuation of the sacrifice. The myth of the Niño del Cerro El Plomo is in this way able to give us a hint, just a thin opening into the opacity and predatory alterity of the Inca rites in the High Andes.
Viveiros de Castro, in his deconstruction of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus cites them in explaining why return to myth:
[R]esorting to myth is indispensable, not because myth would be a transposed or even an inverse representation of real relations in extension, but because only myth can determine the intensive conditions of the system (the system of production included) in conformity with indigenous thought and practice. (D&G 157)
For this reason, to be able to at least make an attempt to elucidate what the rites of this sacrifice that took the life of the small boy at the mountain meant, the myth is able to explain something that concepts would not. Moreover, if we did not have the myth at the base of the sacrificial ritual we would completely misunderstand the puissance or the power behind the ritual the Incas performed at the banks of the Mapocho. It is important to understand that the supposed lack of concepts does not entail a lack of intricacy or ability to philosophize from the indigenous groups. In Viveiros de Castro’s words: “This absence of the rational concept, that is, could be taken as a positive sign of the existential disalienation of the peoples in question – the
manifestation of a state in which knowledge and action, thought and sensation, and so on are inseparable.” (80) As a matter of fact the possibility of a state of knowledge, action, thought and sensation is akin to the most advanced notions of intelligence we know. The myth said that the god Viracocha had to be given in sacrifice every year the most beautiful and healthy child from the towns of the Collasuyu, the southernmost territory of the Tahuantinsuyu, for the ceremony of the Capacocha or the feeding of the river.6 The child was prepared with rich accessories, to later undergo the long road to the top of Cerro El Plomo where he was to be buried alive. He was fed coca leaves and chicha, an alcoholic beverage made of fermented corn so he would fall fast asleep before death arrived in his frozen grave. It is difficult to say if the unburial of the boy’s body is as terrifying as his sacrifice. The search for transparency that science and money driven archaeological endeavors represent, are always at odds with the desire of leaving things in opacity to retain their mystic state intact, and the sacrifice still in place. Vicuña’s mise-en-scene is a reenactment of the value of the sacrifice of the child to ensure the flowing waters of the river.
It is then both in opacity and predatory alterity that we find the nuanced path to understand complete and utter otherness, not otherness that results from seeing myself in the mirror of the other, but true otherness, so other that we cannot even conceive. Such is the difficulty that the predatory alterity of the sacrifice of El Niño de el Cerro de Plomo presents us with; to such
overbearing ethical and cultural discomfort I offer the words of Glissant:
I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) not to ‘make’ him in my image. (193)
It will not be necessary then, to understand why the Incas sacrificed the boy for the god Viracocha in the manner they did. It would be enough to feel in solidarity with them; for which the work of the artist opens a possibility. In placing the red thread of her Quipu Mapocho on the waters of the river, she is conceiving the opacity of the other for her without being reproached for her own opacity. The metonymyc contiguity that the triad sacrifice-labor-grace enacts is then the passage for the artist into her own opacity and, why not, predatory alterity. It is not in vain that Oswald de Andrade declared in his Cannibalist Manifesto: “Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. The earthly goal. “ (43) As an invitation into an anthropophagy that mimics the well-known “model of inspiration” the Europeans served themselves from the Americas, Africa, etc. For every culture which has been cannibalized by conquest, Quipu Mapocho in its own fluid textures provides a continuous translation of that predatory alterity. It is not difficult to search for identity when it is understood through the power of myth’s opacity.
I end by a way of conclusion with the words of Glissant: “The conquered or visited peoples are thus forced into a long and painful quest after an identity whose first task will be opposition to the denaturing process introduced by the conqueror.” (17) Decolonizing our mind would be then to go truly beyond the limits of decolonization itself, a task that seems impossible at times. However, when translated by the voyage that Vicuña embarks on with the red woven thread floating down the river, the waters seem to contradict our overwhelming desire for transparency. On the contrary Quipu navigates the Mapocho in search for the opacity that lies at the seat of life, in continuity to the notion of predatory alterity and its woven textures. The red thread textile floating on the river becomes one more island, a poetic addition to archipelagic relations.
Bibliography
Bary, Leslie. “Cannibalist Manifesto.” Latin American Literary Review (1991): n. pag. Print.Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan Press, 1997
Levi -Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. The University of Chicago Press, 1967
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a post-structural anthropology.
Minneapolis, Univocal, 2014