Ciro Alegría

Ciro Alegría

Ciro Alegría Bazán (born November 4, 1909 in the Quilca homestead near Huamachuco in the La Libertad region , † February 17, 1967 in Chaclacayo ), known as Ciro Alegría , was a Peruvian writer , politician and journalist . He is considered to be one of the leading representatives of the indigenistic novel , who turns away from the European optimism for progress and sees future solutions in autochthonous roots.

Life

Ciro Alegría came from a large landowning dynasty . His father, José Eliseo Alegría Lynch, who was influenced by the Peruvian anarchist Manuel González Prada , carried out a small land reform among the Indian farm workers of his hacienda against the will of Ciro Alegría's grandfather and married the daughter of the foreman of the hacienda (Herminia Bazán Lynch). Ciro Alegría's grandfather Teodoro Alegría, who lived as a MP in Lima, then removed José Eliseo from the leadership of the hacienda and exiled him to a remote post in the hacienda, the Quilca homestead, where Ciro Alegría was born and spent his earliest childhood in a purely Indian environment . When he started school, his grandfather removed him from his familia and sent him to school in Trujillo , the capital of the La Libertad region, where his first teacher was the Peruvian poet César Vallejo . The paternal and maternal grandmothers were cousins ​​and were of purely Irish descent, although Ciro Alegría always claimed that his maternal grandmother had “ Indian blood ”.

As a youth, Ciro Alegría was imprisoned where he was tortured. The reason was his active membership in the APRA . At the age of 21 he was finally deported to Chile . He lived in exile for 30 years, first in Chile, then in the USA , in Puerto Rico and finally in Cuba . He wrote about his native Peru from exile for most of his adult life. He only returned to Peru at the age of 51, where he died at the age of 58. Ciro Alegría was married three times and had a total of 8 children with the three women, including the director, theater director and author Alonso Alegría .

Public work

During his stay in New York, Ciro Alegría resigned from the APRA party. After his return to Peru, he joined the Acción Popular party at the request of his friend, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry , for which he became a member of parliament in 1963. In 1960 he was inducted into the Peruvian Academy of Spanish Language and became President of Peruvian Writers and Artists.

Literary work

Together with José María Arguedas , Ciro Alegría is considered to be the most important representative of the Peruvian indigenous novel. In his novels he tells the life of the Indians in the Andes of northern Peru, who, in contrast to the characters of Arguedas, whose novels are set in southern Peru, largely represent pure Indio life. The most important work is El Mundo es ancho y ajeno , which the writer Mario Vargas Llosa described as the “starting point of modern Peruvian prose”. For him, Ciro Alegría is the first classic among Peruvian novelists. His work reflects modern Peru with its diversity of ethnicities, cultures and customs. In El Mundo es ancho y ajeno the protagonists leave the Andean highlands because a cruel landowner (Don Álvaro Amenábar) has stolen their land from them. They travel across Peru in search of a way to make a living. The two main characters are the wise, old and traditionally rooted Indian Rosendo Maquí and the young mestizo Benito Castro, who returns to his Indian community after the death of Rosendo to defend the right of the Indians to their land.

In general, all of Ciro Alegría's novels defend the integration of all Peruvians into society and criticize the misery and social injustice from which the lowest social classes, especially the Indians, suffer. His works have an epic tone. In them, the nature and traditions of Peru and the struggle of its inhabitants for survival stand out.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ciro Alegría in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Ciro Alegría in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin
• Literature by and about Ciro Alegría in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Klaus-Dieter Ertler: Small history of the Latin American novel. Movements - authors - works. Narr, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-8233-4991-0 , p. 120.