Peru’s living dead: Spectrality, untimeliness, and the internal armed conflict

Abstract

In this article I examine the use of spectral figures in two works related to the Peruvian internal armed conflict, Julio Ortega’s novella Adiós Ayacucho (1986) and theater troupe Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani’s play Santiago (2000), as representations of the untimely, a notion that, according to Giorgio Agamben, defines the contemporary. I contend that by employing ghostly images, as well as those of undead beings and hauntings, both pieces not only bring to the fore the underlying tensions that gave rise to the conflict and gesture toward the victims of political violence, but they also reveal official narratives of healing, national reconciliation, and the overcoming of trauma as essentially fractured. By countering these current discourses, the text and the play offer the possibility of rethinking the period of violence in order to see it not as a dark chapter to grapple with, but as the condition of possibility of Peruvian national history. Finally, I argue that these texts constitute an intervention into the current discourse of memory—one that is officially sanctioned by the state—to offer a glimpse of the past that uncovers the myriad ways in which it is still at work in the present.