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A man waiting on Saturday morning in Canta

Robin Kirk is a human rights activist and Latin American scholar. She reported from Peru during the guerra interna during the 1980s. Later, in 1997, she published a personal narrative of her time in Peru, The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru. The following passage comes from that book.

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It takes a stubbornness, perhaps arrogance, and a certain faith in the face of long odds to write about someone else’s country. Nothing binds me to Peru, no family or history. Yet that is not the same as saying that writing is impossible. Perhaps it takes an outsider to discover in details invisible to natives a window onto a national soul…

I have not aspired to be a Peru expert. In my mind, the fact that I have lived for a time there and seen certain things, talked to some people and traveled a fair amount qualifies me only as adventurous Peru is a place I’ve been, but not always. It has occupied my thoughts, but not without respite. The stories I heard, some told in these pages, conclude with no prescriptions for Peru’s many ills. In a decade, what will Peru be? Besides poor, I can’t say…

Peru is my lens, a country where the challenge to lead a moral life is perhaps greater or more present than in my own. It is not a country founded on morality, but rather the exploitation of natural wealth: gold, jewels, people, cotton, guano, rubber, coca. Yet is also a place where morality has been taken to a lethal extreme, most recently in the war between the government and the Shining Path… [Y]oung Peruvians set out to destroy the world they new in order to build something that was barely a waking dream…

To say I have no physical connection to Peru does not mean I lack an emotional or intellectual one … I have a history, albeit brief, in the scheme of things, and a place to stand.

Despite all, and in Peru facing stifling odds, I met people for whom moral questions were not simply to be considered, but forces that shaped their lives, their axis and molten center. They believed and acted on those beliefs. In part, my aim in writing this book is to recognize them and put them in a context, to explore what a hard and astonishing thing it is to carve this path out of that wilderness. And I measure myself there, and wonder: where do I stand?

It is one of the basic questions, to ask what, if circumstances were different, would become of me. What is my essential self and what, if my comforts vanished, would I become? What if my child died? What if my electricity stopped and my faucets ran dry? … What if I were taken into the glare of the headlights on the rocky road, with the fleeing hares and the prick of the puna wind, and made to kneel? What if I forced the kneeling?

Perhaps it is the conceit of a writer to believe that the questions I find absorbing are more poignant now than they ever were. But I also wonder whether what all the modern world has given me—my soft chair, my tight roof, my full belly, my peacefully sleeping daughter, my cash machine and my safety belt and my hope and my vacation time and my birth control pills and my assumption that I will never be completely without a choice—makes me and those like me almost a different species from most of the rest of humanity and certainly most Peruvians, whose lives revolve around finding a meal, a night’s sleep, a bit of money, a place to rest. To Peru, the centuries have brought not progress but a place on a precipice. Any of the winds that periodically blow can crack away a tenuous purchase, won at high cost and never, ever sure.

Can I bridge the gap? Is my quest doomed? Is there, in all of this, a place to stand? And then?