Portrait · Knowledge · c. 1615
Plate · Generated interpretation
A Letter the King Might See
An Andean noble writes and draws a thousand-page letter to a Spanish king: a world, a conquest, a way of seeing that will not arrive in Madrid.
- The Andes, on the manuscript now in Copenhagen
- Early colonial Andes
- 13.52°S 71.98°W
A drawing that is also a letter to a king. Who is supposed to see?
Listen · Eve
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Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, completed around 1615. Nearly 1,200 pages, hundreds of drawings. Addressed to Philip III. The manuscript is found in the Royal Danish Library in 1908. It did not do the political work it asked. It remains a seeing.
The autograph is at Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, GKS 2232 4°. Rolena Adorno’s work and the library’s digital facsimile are doors. Quechua, Spanish, and Andean genres share the page. Do not reduce it to “resistance” as a slogan.
Sor Juana, decades later in Mexico City, will write a hunger of the mind inside a convent. Guaman Poma writes a hunger of a world to be correctly seen by a king. Both are colonial letters. They are not one criollo soul.
A drawing of a hanging, a sowing, a khipu, is a claim about what happened and who may judge it. The king’s not reading is also part of the story.
What kind of witness is a book that finds its reader three centuries late?
Distant echoes
Echo
Baroque New Spain · Mexico City, convent of San Jerónimo
The hunger in the convent
Sor Juana also writes to be seen by a distant authority. Different viceroyalty, different hunger.
One question remains
Knowledge · What counts as knowing?
If a world is drawn so that a king might see, and the king never does, where, then, was the seeing supposed to happen?