On the Crest of a Wave: Surfing and Literature in Peru

Abstract

After arriving in Peru from Hawaii in the 1940s, surfing was for decades associated almost exclusively with the country's white male elite, its practice concentrated around Lima. Peru's extensive coastline, and the presence of the Panamerican Highway, meant that the sport spread fairly rapidly to other population centres, notably the northern city of Trujillo, but the rise to prominence of surfers from traditionally non-hegemonic sectors of society (women and non-whites) is a more recent phenomenon. The rapidly growing space occupied by surfing in Peru has extended to works of literature as some of the country's most distinguished narrators and poets include this sport as a central part of their texts. This study offers the first consideration of the cultural impact of surfing in Peru, through a contextualized analysis of a number of literary texts that have surfing at their core. It also represents the first study to focus on the presence of surfing in a national literature, and provides initial reflections on the challenges of the literary representation of this most fluid of sports.

Notes

1. Abelardo Sánchez León, Oh túnel de La Herradura. (Madrid, 1995).

2. See, for example, http://www.perusurfguides.com/peru_surfing_peru_surf_history.php or http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A02E1DF133FF937A35750C0A9629C8B63, accessed 31 Oct. 2008.

3. Antonio Cornejo Polar, ‘Profecía y experiencia del caos: la narrativa peruana de las últimas décadas’, in Karl Kohut et al., eds, Literatura peruana hoy: crisis y creación. (Madrid, 1998), p. 27. Translations from the original Spanish are mine throughout.

4. Nick Ford and David Brown, Surfing and social theory. Experience, embodiment and narrative of the dream glide (London, 2006), pp. 10–12.

5. Herman Melville. Moby-Dick (New York, 1851); Jack London. The cruise of the Snark (New York, 1911).

6. José Carlos Mariátegui. ‘El problema de la tierra’, in his Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Lima, 1928).

7. Geoffrey Dutton, Sun, sea, surf and sand (Oxford, 1983).

8. Douglas Booth, Australian beach cultures. The history of sun, sand and surf (London, 2001); Douglas Booth, ‘From bikinis to boardshorts: Wahines and the paradoxes of surfing culture’, Journal of Sport History 28 (1) (2001), pp. 3–22.

9. John Fiske, Reading the popular (Boston, MA, 1989), p. 56.

10. Rob Shields, Places on the margin. Alternative geographies of modernity (London and New York, 1991), p. 9.

11. See, for example, Mario Vargas Llosa's ‘Día domingo’ (‘On Sunday’) from the 1959 collection Los jefes, or Julio Ramón Ribeyro's ‘Sobre las olas’ (‘On the waves’) from the 1977 collection La palabra del mudo III.

12. Fiske, Reading the popular, p. 48.

13. Abelardo Sánchez León, La soledad del nadador (Lima, 1996).

14. See, among others, http://es.youtube.com./watch?v=GW5NpyDN82A, accessed 31 Oct. 2008.

15. Mario Vargas Llosa, Los cachorros (Barcelona, 1967).

16. Michael Oriard, Sporting with the gods. The rhetoric of play and game in American culture (Cambridge and New York, 1991), p. 460.

17. Ford and Brown, Surfing and social theory, p. 7.

18. Fernando Ampuero, Malos modales (Lima, 1994).

19. Ford and Brown, Surfing and social theory, p. 30–1.

20. Mirko Lauer, Sobrevivir (Lima, 1986).

21. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of presence: What meaning cannot convey (Stanford, CA, 2004), p. 114.

22. Fiske, Reading the popular, p. 76.

23. Alvaro Linares, El Señor de las olas (Lima, 2002).

24. Fiske, Reading the popular, p. 76.

25. Fiske, Reading the popular, p. 73.

26. Gumbrecht, Production of presence, p. 107. Fiske, Reading the popular, p. 18.

27. Gumbrecht, Production of presence, p. 107. Fiske, Reading the popular, p. 18.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Wood

David Wood, University of Sheffield