The Monkey's Paw: New Chronicles from Peru

Combining interviews and personal narrative, the author presents a portrait of the turbulent history of Peru, starting in 1983 when the Shining Path guerillas plunged the country into crisis. She explores why so many Peruvian women felt compelled to join the terrorists.

The exceptionally well written account of a journey to another world and another time-- in this case, the Peruvian back of beyond, during the years of its domination by the Sendero Luminoso, the Peruvian security forces and the ancient system of encomienda, whereby the peasants are bound to the soil and to the ruling class.

It's the very best sort of ethnology: equal parts diary, sociology and current history. As well, it tells a gripping tale of survival in uncertain political terrain, where death squads sent by a distant government, columns of Maoist 'true believers' or those more banal devils from within one's own village can upset one's plans for the future in a single hour. It is incumbent on the author to understand as quickly as possible the codes everyone follows to prevail over their fellows. The world in these parts is raw and brutal, with little sentiment to spare for those who don't fight back.

In short, the book ranks with those of the great adventurers of the nineteenth century. It's a window onto the vast place that exists beyond the safe areas of our Fourth World's cities and towns, patrolled day and night by those layers of security forces that keep the nation's wealth securely in the pockets of the strong and the well born.

Additionally, the author is a first rate story teller, with scores of stories illuminating those crises of ethics and character that confront people who only confront the starkest of choices. For Americans living their safe lives in a world where all their choices are bland, this volume will have an impact like being dunked in ice water.

Possibly the book's greatest strength is its gaze into the minds and motivations of those who've been born with nothing, have worked very hard to gather very little, and must defend what little they possess every day of their lives, against those who have even less as well as those with the power to destroy it all.

Sobering and extremely well written, and instantly recognizable to anyone who has been there. I have no insights into the inexplicably negative or indifferent reviews this book has gathered.

Flor de retama, the broom flower with its yellow shoots flourishes from soil nourished by blood. Peru's Shining Path fanatical cult, devolved from earnest Maoism into indoctrinated millenarian warriors determined to bring down their corrupt nation and destroy it in order to rebuild it into a utopia, chose this weed as their logo.

Robin Kirk, in her collection of rather disparate chapters, charts her Peruvian encounters with the senderistas, their pursuers, and the victims left by both sides--'internal refugees' forced off their land by those who claimed to fight for and protect them, whether government or guerrillas. Beginning with her 1983 first visit to Orin Starn as he was writing his dissertation about a Piura hamlet, Tunnel Six, that grew around the spew from an irrigation works near the Ecuadorian border, she records various stints spent in the country over the next decade and more, as the war with Abimael Guzmán's disciples intensified and spread to the cities.

I read her account after having studied her translation of Gustavo Gorriti's history of the SP. I wondered, from an English-language vantage point, why so few reporters from outside Perú had produced book-length works for a popular audience on the movement. Why? In large part, the hostility towards 'Western' gringo observers, not only by the army and police suspicious of collaborators, but from the SP itself.

Kirk, like previous chroniclers to a land of harsh weapons and forbidding walls, finds herself trapped. Her white skin, San Franciscan provenance, and education distance her from her subjects. They mistrust her, and she finds herself caught between pity and contempt more than once as she listens to guerrilla prisoners. Powerful moments emerge here, but overall, the book feels like a cobbling of previous notes and journalistic material upon which she presumably sent back while in Peru. The section on one family's search for the fate of their son bogs down the pace considerably. The accounts of her quest to find female SPers to talk to reappear throughout, but in a rather scattershot pattern, as does her Lima scenario. I was never sure where I'd find her or when, as about fifteen years appear to have been spanned and compressed here, somewhat confusingly.

However, Kirk's honesty, her own realisation that she can only approach but never enter the interior of those she interviews, makes for a bracing if disheartening recounting of her Peruvian journeys.

A sample quote: "{W}hen the column came, people hid. But the column could drag them from their homes and administer a 'popular trial.' The column could shoot them or hack them to death with machetes or stone them as they begged for mercy. Or the column could force a daughter to kill a father; a husband his wife. La columna could force an entire village to march before them, forming the people's vanguard of an attack. It burnt the houses of those it deemed traitors. It took those, especially the young, it found useful. The column called itself 'the people's wrath.' Its appearances could be as sudden as a thunderhead cresting a ridge. Its departures were scored by the slow, measured sound of grief." (104)

Its name taken from a poem (by José Carlos Maríategui, founder of Perú's CP in the 1920s), its nightmarish rhetoric, its idealised portraits transforming its portly Ayacucho doctor into a cherubic, trimmer messiah of redemption through decimation: all underscore the actual distance between the SP and those from the lowly for whom it mediated in fevered litany its 'pensimiento Gonzalo'. As an aid worker asks Kirk: 'if they are fighting for the people, why kill them? Why did they drive them away?' (170) This discussion leads into an excellent analysis of what differentiates senderistas from other militants.

Kirk, by the end, finds that she cannot keep returning to the flame that threatens to devour her. As a journalist, she finds that her employers less eagerly solicit stories on community reform than terrorist assaults. As the SP reels from the backlash by not only the government forces but vigilante peasant groups, these same gatherings find that they may have learned a bit from the mystical nihilism of the senderos after all. Not in content so much as in form. For what were once dreams begin to assume reality. In the wake of first Velasco's land reform and then the SP, despite the near-collapse of the economy and its mismanagement by whoever manipulates himself into the presidency, the common people begin to embrace local control of their justice system, their farm production, and their faith, which increasingly finds its dynamism fueled by evangelical Protestantism and its insistence upon self-worth and hard work to achieve security. As Kirk wings her way from Perú for the final flight home, she admits her bravery and its lack. In the awe-inspiring but also awful--in its sheer reach beyond human power--array of climates and terrains, Perú represents a microcosm of our planet's diversity--and our inability to grasp our place in the macrocosm. She learns the lesson: 'Never underestimate fear.' This land, fabled as our El Dorado for so long in our Western legends, resists those of us who dare to delve into its hidden veins.

(See also the compilation edited by Kirk, her partner Orin Starn, and former colleague of Guzmán and expert on the SP Carlos Iván Degregori, The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.)For an extended version of this: Belfast's on-line journal The Blanket, "The Broom Flower."

This is not a comprehensive, academic account of the Shining Path or of Peru's recent social & political history, so readers who are looking for something along those lines will be disappointed. What it is, however, is a fascinating story of the author's experiences investigating the impact of Peru's social and political upheavals on poor Peruvians from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. The role of the Shining Path naturally takes a prominent central place in that story. Robin Kirk has produced a highly readable and engaging book that paints portraits of individual Peruvians' lives, as they deal with their country's troubled recent history. From her account of the Tunnel Six 'ronda campesina,' to the search for justice in their son's murder by Cromwell Castillo & Carmen Rosa, to the stories of women in the Shining Path, Kirk's anecdotal approach makes reading this book as enjoyable as a good novel.

As a past and future visitor to Peru, I found this book helpful in relating something of the substance of Peruvian society to me, as it has been experienced by a fellow American in her work as an investigative journalist and past resident of the country.

I read this book in anticipation of an upcoming trip to Peru. I hoped to gain some historical and cultural perspective to help me understand and appreciate the country. My goals were not met. Instead, I learned about injustice, corruption, prejudice, violence,and poverty. While I understand that these problems are real I didn't understand them in light of the history and development of the country of Peru. The author provides accounts of interviews and experiences in a haphazard manner with little contextual background or effort to pull them together in a coherent way. So, if your goals are similar to mine I would not recommend this book.

I was very disappointed by this book. I'm from Peru and I expected a sharp, original account. Instead, I learned lots about the author and her struggles with my country. I understand her frustrations but in the end I felt that she simply realized that Peru is not Berkeley or Manhattan. It's too bad she didn't capture good things such as people's resourcefulness or sense of humor. I also got lost between different sections. Too bad. I know that many gringos will enjoy this. Peruvians will dislike it, even those who fight against violence and inequality.