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Untangling Memories of Violence: The Khipu in El rincón de los muertos (Alfredo Pita)

Vol: 3, Issue: 1
2025
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This research proposes a structural reading of El rincón de los muertos to decode and trace echoes to the khipu which are embedded throughout the novel. Contrary to a graphic writing system, the Incan empire’s khipu (khipu) was a mnemotechnic system—a three-dimensional communicative device, an archive of memory that recorded information using different colored strings, and a system of knots. Our concept of mnemonics is different than that of the indigenous communities who relied on oral tradition and specifically for khipu a khipukamayuq (reader of khipu), in a narrative and discursive manner, to reconstruct the message the khipu contained. This research explores why these trans-medial references are made and precisely what aspects of a khipu are ‘translatable’ via a written text. Pita’s novel, however, is a metaphoric ‘translation’ of this recording device, provided that an exact translation is impossible based on the textual limitations of a novel. The focus of my essay will be to demonstrate how certain elements of the khipu are translatable in the novel but in a metaphoric sense. El rincón de los muertos’ polyphonic narrative, explicit references to the khipu, and the novel’s structural components are a few of the several aspects that make a metaphoric comparison to a khipu plausible. Vicente, this literary work’s protagonist, figuratively attempts to piece together, or rather, untangle the frayed strands of the khipu — the lost, forgotten, and neglected narrative of the origins of violence in the Andes.

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