SOURCE: Hawley, John C., S. J. “We Wretched of the Earth: The Search for a Language of Justice.” In Postcolonial Literature and the Biblical Call for Justice, edited by Susan VanZanten Gallagher, pp. 125-35. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

In the following essay, Hawley draws on Bakhtin's claim that language shapes our self-definition to frame Arguedas's personal and literary development as a three-stage development of mythological consciousness: his childhood immersion in the language and culture of the Quechua Indians; his “agonistic and abstract phase” when he learned Spanish and received his formal education; and his years writing fiction when he tried to break out of colonial and oppressive forms of consciousness and extend the power and meaning of ancient stories, songs and myths.

“In the beginning was the Word,” writes John—God's revealing utterance that “was made flesh and lived among us.” This incarnational character of the Word...