Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-Telling in Post-Shining Path Peru ed. by Cynthia E. Milton (review)

The internal war that ravaged Peru during the last two decades of the twentieth century affected the rural indigenous populations more than the citizens of the coast. This aspect of the war bears similarities to other Cold War conflicts throughout Latin America, such as Guatemala and El Salvador, where indigenous civilians also suffered greater rates of violence than the urban populations. However, the extreme violence of the Shining Path revolutionary movement in the Peruvian highlands set it apart by justifying, for many national elites, the similarly ruthless tactics by state forces. This has made memory and truth-telling in post-conflict Peru a particularly contentious topic. Cynthia Milton's edited volume brings together ethnography, ethnomusicology, and history to analyze a variety of artistic productions that constitute the contested space of post-conflict memory of those most affected by the war: the indigenous populations of the Peruvian highlands and the many people displaced by the war now living in the margins of Lima.

In August of 2003, Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or Comité de Verdad y Reconciliacion (CVR) presented its Final Report, which attributed 54% of the violence during the nation's internal conflict (1980-2000) to the Shining Path. The state's armed forces, it concluded, were responsible for 35.6% of the violence. As a result, "successive governments and elites have largely ignored the internal war or attempted to rewrite the narrative as one of a national tragedy during which the armed forces defended the nation" (66). Although this statistic has elicited a focus on the human rights violations committed by the Shining Path, this volume pushes back against this dominant narrative by examining local memories of Ayacuchanos, many of whom express a common victim narrative of being caught between two violent extremes.

In the first chapter, Milton analyzes painted drawings (dibujos pintados) and comic strips (historietas) that depict the experiences of people in regions directly affected by the armed conflict. These detailed renderings of traumatic events were submitted to the Rescate por la Memoria contests in Ayacucho and Huancavelica in 2003 and 2004, which Milton argues reflects the shifting emphasis of NGOs from "development" to "human rights" over the 1990s. Emphasizing the theoretical difficulties of analyzing such art in terms of audience, divergent perspectives of "truth," and subject positions, Milton nonetheless provides a culturally sensitive interpretation of these renderings, connecting the engraving techniques to traditional Andean carved gourds (mates burilados). Many contributors to the volume include images of the visual art they analyze, drawing the reader in to observe the original pieces with added historical and cultural context. The presentation and analysis of art intended to depict personal trauma and tragedy during the war elicits an emotional response from the reader in ways that transcend official accounts, while raising important questions regarding representation, art as a medium for truth-telling, silences, and social and ethnoracial divides.

Perhaps the most powerful theme of the volume is the comparison between local depictions of traumatic memories and the "official story" from the CRV. As Milton explains, entries to art contests "showed gendered differences in experiences of the armed conflict—one of the truths of the violence on which the CVR and art converge" (57). Although the artistic renderings do not reveal secrets or recover lost memories, "they are rescuing experiences that are at risk of marginalization in national discourses" (66). Anthropologist María Eugenia Ulfe's chapter expands on artistic representation of marginalized memories through an examination of the social commentary in retablos ("a two-level triptych box with open doors"), its symbolic use as a stage for the release of the CVR's Final Report, and debates over its place as "popular" or "fine" art. Víctor Vich's analysis of Alonso Cueto's 2006 novel La hora azul stands out in...