i have now lost my fight in avoiding thinking about francisco pizzaro

well, i thought more about pizzaro's context then pizzaro himself

Where my body holds my trust, my mind holds my pride, and I must gingerly admit I am a prideful person, and only one who finds her dignity unbreakable cares to be an artist openly. I may come off as arrogant or perhaps I may not, but what greater gift to the universe can I offer than my time and a gift of my contemplation. If thoughts hold the power to break oceans and forests, to manipulate to deceive to promise and to concieve, to reimagine to disrupt to reinforce and to create, I then must regard the thoughts I currently hold and the future ones as sacred, powerful, with equal potential for desctruction and emancipation.

Such a lengthy introduction simply is a self-indulgent description of how enjoy the refusal of continued domination by attempting to disregard Christinaity as much as I can, especially when I can eagerly spend the time learn about traditional Indigenous methodologies and the stories of my culture. A few friends of mine who grew up in deeply religous backgrounds now spend much of their time engaging in Enlightenment texts whose main agenda is to refute the power of Christianity—meanwhile my roomates and I jovously attempt to assemble the fragments of Christmas carols and geopolitical conflicts to make sense of what the religon, knowing that our early education had suceeded, and the epistemic injustices are being resolved.

Five years ago, I entered dozens of cathedrals in Spain, to the point of boredom. Lima’s Plaza Mayor has the same grandiose magnificence, architectural detail, yet there is a disagreement on my stomach with the knowledge that it is but the most obvious reminder of the colonial history and the ground beneath it is dark with blood. A gently less symbolic is the conquests of Francisco Pizzaro, whom I tuned out in my mind when I felt as if I knew enough. There is a fine line between forgetting violent history and maintaining a violent hegemony, and I believe that I may be towing the latter.

One of this week’s reading, Atahaulpa and Pizzaro by John Hemming, arms 28 pages of graphic depictions of warfare between the Spanish and Inca, boasting Spanish Victory as so strategically achieved as if Sun Tzu himself sponsored the text. It’s uncomfortable to learn about violent history and genocide, our ignorance of what is happening in Palestine is proof enough that ignorance is majorly systemic. Yet is the same degree of deatiled awareness and active dismantling of ignorance required when reading about the Spanish processes of conquest? The other example I consider is the white professor who reads a racists texts and speaks reacial slurs in an attempt for historical accuracy—perhaps there are better ways to learn about dark histories.

The most racist and oppressive yet insanely influential text I have ever braved is Hobbe’s Leviathan (at least in my opinion), and while I hated reading every word I searched for its modern value, diving deeply into the sentences for a spark of traditional wisdom or version of truth (I didn’t find much). I can’t say I did the same for Atahaulpa and Pizzaro, maybe because it is not meant to be a philisophical text but a historical one (though the distinction is often unclear) or maybe because it seems more violently Christian than Leviathan.

Hence, I won’t address the text itself but my experience in reading it and the broader impliciations of this text that I suspect. I won’t make a case for most of these thoughts, but there are things that passed through my mind that I beleive you will resonate with.

• i think the sheer volume of the text demonstrate the centrality to violence and warfare in western colonial ideology. the majority of indigenous oral traditions i’ve encountered spend the most space and time through the miniscule details of creation stories, but never the exact days of warfare and number of bodies killed the the same extent.

• hemming seems to reagard the inca with the same value systems and intentions as the spanish. i am skeptical that the inca so willingly ‘fell into their trap’, which would indicate a culture of naievity, whereas if reframed they could just as easily be merciful and humane.

• wow i thought i had more but looks like i do not.

I actually need to sleep now, but tldr, I often try my best to think about Christianity (and by extension Pizzaro) just at the bare minimum in order to disrupt dominant epistemic patterns, yet here reading Hemming’s has made me wonder if I shouldn’t do that. I still did, so I decided to look at the structure of the text more than its specific events.

Ciao loves

Annie