The name returned like thunder from the tomb.
Two hundred years had passed since Tupac Amaru,
The last Inca, strangled in his room
Of captive stone in Cuzco--since the new
And Spanish order sealed the serpent's mouth
And crowned itself in blood upon the throne
Of Tawantinsuyu--and the south
Had learned to grieve in silence and alone.
But the name had never died. In the valleys
Of the Andes, where the quipu's knotted cord
Still whispered in the hidden mountain rallies
Of a world that no viceroy's whip or sword
Had fully conquered--in the Quechua tongue
That the Spanish tried to strangle but could not,
The prophecy of Inkarri was sung:
The severed head would grow a body, wrought
From the mountain's living stone, and the Inca
Would return to set the world right-side-up--
The pachakuti, the reversal, the still-brighter
Dawn that fills the overturned and bitter cup.
Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui was born
In Tinta, province of the freezing heights,
A kuraka--a headman--the forlorn
And bitter station of the middle: nights
Spent collecting the mita's crushing tax
From his own people for the Spanish crown,
Days spent watching the obraje's racks
Where Quechua women wove until the brown
And bleeding fingers could not hold the thread.
He traced his lineage to the final Inca--
Through the daughter of the last, a thread
Of royal blood that time could never sink or
Sever from the mountain's memory.
He petitioned Lima. He petitioned Madrid.
He begged the courts for the artillery
Of law against the corregidor's grid
Of forced labor, forced purchase, forced tribute--
The repartimiento that compelled each soul
To buy the Spanish merchant's goods, the brute
And simple engine of colonial control:
Buy what you do not need at thrice the price,
Or the corregidor's whip will teach you trade.
The courts said nothing. The petitions' ice
Melted in the bureaucratic shade
Of a system built to profit from the pain.
And so
He chose the other way. On the fourth of November,
Seventeen-eighty, in the mountain's glow
Of the dying year's last ember,
He seized the corregidor Antonio de Arriaga,
Paraded him through Tungasuca's square,
And hanged him from the gallows--the saga
Of petition ended, and the mountain air
Rang with the name he claimed: Tupac Amaru--
The Second--the serpent reborn, the sun
Returned to burn the Spanish empire through,
The pachakuti finally begun.
The Andes rose. From Cuzco to La Paz,
From the altiplano's frozen breath
To the valley floors, the ancient cause
Brought sixty thousand to defy the death
That the empire promised every rebel soul.
Quechua, Aymara, mestizo, the poor
Of every color rallied to the whole
And incandescent vision: a world before
The Spanish came--or a world that might yet be
When the chains were broken and the mita's weight
Was lifted from the shoulders of the free
And ancient peoples whom no colonial state
Had the right to grind to dust.
At Sangarara
The rebel army met the Spanish force
And broke it--the church itself the gharara
Of battle, when the powder magazine's course
Of flame exploded through the sacristy
And the Spanish soldiers burned inside the nave--
Five hundred dead, the fire's ferocity
A sign, the Quechua said, that even the grave
And sacred stones had turned against the crown.
But empires do not die from one defeat.
From Lima came the reinforcements' frown
Of twenty thousand men, the drum's hard beat
Of a professional army on the march.
And the alliance that Tupac Amaru built
Was fragile--for beneath the rebel arch
The creole landowners felt their own guilt
And interest threatened: this was not merely war
Against the Spanish king, but revolution
That might overturn the social floor
On which they too had built their institution
Of hacienda and of peonage.
They pulled away. The creoles chose the crown
Over the Quechua future's open page--
Better the king they knew than the burning down
Of the colonial order that enriched them too.
Tupac Amaru was taken in the field--
Betrayed, as prophets are, by the untrue
And fickle allies. In Cuzco's square, the sealed
And terrible sentence was pronounced in May
Of seventeen-eighty-one. They cut the tongue
Of Micaela Bastidas first--his wife, the stay
And strategist of the revolt--among
The crowd that wept. They killed his son before
His eyes. They tied his limbs to four horses
And tried to pull him apart--but the core
Of his body held, as if the Andean forces
Of the mountain stone had fused within his frame,
And the horses strained and could not tear
The Inca's body from the Inca's name--
Until the axe completed what despair
And horsepower could not do alone.
They severed
His head and sent it south to Tinta,
His limbs to the four corners, endeavored
To scatter him so thoroughly that no hint or
Memory could reassemble what they broke.
They banned the Quechua language. Banned the wearing
Of the Inca royal garments. Spoke
The decree that Inca was a word past bearing--
Erased from law, from title, from the tongue.
But you cannot quarter a prophecy.
In Bolivia the fire leapt among
The Aymara highlands, and the prophecy
Wore a new name: Tupac Katari--
Julian Apaza, who took his title from
Two thunderbolts: Tupac Amaru's rally
And Tomas Katari's martyrdom--
And laid siege to La Paz with forty thousand
Warriors who blocked the mountain passes
And starved the Spanish city till the thousand
Corpses in the streets were the colonial masses
Who had starved the Aymara for centuries.
Katari too was taken, Katari too
Was quartered--but he spoke the centuries'
Unbroken vow: "I die, but I return to you
As millions." And the millions came.
For the name
Of Tupac Amaru would echo through the age
Of liberation--Bolivar claimed the flame,
And every rebel on the Andean stage
Invoked the severed body that the horses
Could not tear apart, the prophecy
That no decree could silence, the forces
Of a mountain people's memory.
Honor Tupac Amaru--whose blood
Was scattered to the four winds and the four
Directions of the Inca world, the flood
Of royal crimson on the Cuzco floor
That seeped into the earth and fed the root
Of every revolution yet to come.
They quartered him, but from the living shoot
Of his sacrifice the millions would become
The thunderbolt he promised: I will return.
The Andes hold his name. The condor flies
Above the peaks where his scattered ashes burn,
And the sun that the Spanish killed still rises.