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Literary Review
Verbal Autobiographies of Contemporary Peruvian Women
By Claudette Kemper Columbus
Review by Marcia Koth de Paredes

This impressive collection of interviews of Peruvian women offers a pleasurable and unique opportunity to gain insight into social change in Peru. Twenty eight Peruvian women reflect in conversation with Claudette Columbus on their feelings, values, work and socio-political concerns. The book reminds us that although science and technology frequently are said to be the key elements of change, the individual stands at the center and many relationships have undergone profound change as women seek greater self-control and participation in decision-making.

Dr. Columbus selected women to interview from many different positions in Limeno society -the rich, the powerful, the aspiring and the desperate- all sharing the need to deal with a multicultural personal situation. She has achieved the sound of the women in her reports. I can vouch for the fact that she enables them to speak in their own voices because I was present in a few of the interviews.

I met Claudette when she enjoyed a Fulbright grant to carry out research in Peru. She is a scholar, brilliant and productive, warm and friendly as well. She was born in the United States but spent her childhood in a mining community in Bolivia. She moved as a teenager to the U.S. for high school and college so she understands the positive and negative aspects of a bicultural upbringing. She recently retired from teaching English and Latin American literature in Hobart and William Smith Colleges… a university dedicated to interdisciplinary teaching and research that has offered her a fertile environment to explore her interests.

She has been consistent about her research interests, prolific as a writer especially about concepts that are basic to the way Andean people deal with the environment, both physical and social. Her work on Jose Maria Arguedas, for example, clarifies many aspects of how he understood the psychological boundaries between the two cultures he experienced profoundly.

This book is a different but logical result of her previous work. It is different because it is written in a style that is more like short stories than scholarly reports. It is similar because of her continued intention to understand the ways people define their worlds and feel about their personal possibilities. I think you will enjoy the strength in the voices of the Peruvian women and the warmth and respect in hers. But, let her speak for herself:

“My goal: to begin to redress the images of women in Latin America generally, and in Peru, particularly, by letting them speak for themselves and by interfering with their self-presentations as little as possible while they were speaking. In writing up the interviews from handwritten notes, however, I frequently render them as conversations by including my responses to them. I consider this approach the most honest possible for me. For although the focus in almost all of these pieces is on the lives of women as told to me, I think of objectivity as pretense… In this effort not to assume the treacherous authority of objectivity, the interviews sometimes border on conversations and sometimes my voice is as audible as the other woman's… My claim is that, by hearing a few women speak of themselves, I learned more than from formal learning through institutions, lectures, scholarly books. I look on these interviews as more informative and more unforgettable than my formal scholarship… I can only assure you that I tried not to play games or to impose a frame. I sought to represent some of the incredible variety of voices.”

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