Gabo 1927 – 2014
A requiem for Gabo
Gabriel García Márquez changed my life.
I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was in college in the mid-80s, and that was it. Within weeks I read everything I could find at the university library and our local used-book shop – Leaf Storm, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold – and then read them again. I convinced a favorite professor to let me do an independent study and for a semester immersed myself in that world of tangled bloodlines and parallel mirrors, forbidden desires and lethal honor, a world where metaphor flung off the bounds of literary device and jumped into the action. My friends read the books as well and we spent hours in coffee shops and bars arguing their finer points.
I came into the fictional world of García Márquez with only the vaguest awareness of the real Colombia: all we knew about the place in those days was warfare, violence, and Pablo Escobar. But I came out with an ardent curiosity. Living in a small mountain town in Arizona, I found the image of this vast, wild, dangerous land irresistible. I even managed to find some Colombian friends, who I would badger endlessly with questions about the great writer and life in their country. Like Gabo’s books, their answers were maddeningly contradictory and seductive: It’s so beautiful! Don’t go there!
Before long I realized that if I were ever to really understand García Márquez, I would need to learn his language and read him in the original. So I bought myself a book called Teach Yourself Spanish, and got to work. By the early 90s my Spanish was coming along (but still no match for the latest novel, Love in the Time of Cholera), and I decided to go and see the great writer’s homeland for myself.
I moved to Bogotá, found a job at a newspaper (short-lived), rented a room in La Candelaria, spent my afternoons studying Spanish and scrawling feverish accounts of my fevered existence, fell in love, and even took a bus to Aracataca (aka Macondo). Within months I was able to fight my way through the freshly published Del amor y otros demonios – I didn’t need to wait for the translation! Living in Colombia also gave me license to start using the nickname “Gabo,” since everyone else did.
As months became years, as these things go, Gabo and I had a falling-out. I became annoyed by the great man – by the titan’s shadow he threw across his beleaguered and long-abandoned homeland (which I had come to love beyond all reason), by the fawning adoration he received whenever he deigned to come visit and offer his suggestions on how the place really ought to be run, by his apologia for the oligarchy and his tenderness for dictators, by the suppurating epidemic of “magical realism” that had infected a generation of writers… But none of that matters now. The time for petty differences has passed. Gabo, brilliant chronicler, revered uncle of my adopted second home, the man who shaped my life more than any other, is gone. Gabo is dead. Long live Gabo!
Mark Litwicki. Writer and actor, he lives in Chicago.
Magic Realism: Eating Up Exotic Stereotypes
When I was in college in the late 80s and early 90s— when it seemed that every college student, everywhere, was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude—one of the surest ways to annoy me was to talk about “magical realism.” Hearing (mostly white) undergraduates in literature classes wax poetic about the fabulous images they had encountered in García Márquez’s work—exotic clouds of butterflies, a primitive village mysteriously plagued by insomnia, an apocalyptic book written in Sanskrit—only made me grind my teeth and roll my eyes. These folks are just eating up their exotic stereotypes of Latin America, I said to myself. They didn’t understand that García Márquez wasn’t trying to make magic real, but rather wanted to suggest that “reality” itself was mind-boggling, wonder-inducing . . . and often terrifying. When a workers’ strike results in the massacre of hundreds of people, and the government denies the event ever even occurred? That seemed more like the sur-reality I recognized from my history classes than a flight of fancy. When it seems like your Dictator has been around for at least 100 years, and you suspect he’s been getting secret political support from a powerful president who, 20 years later, will develop Alzheimer’s and deny any involvement? One thing is sure: you’re not in Kansas anymore. You’re probably entering the Macondo Zone—or the 20th century.
The term “magical realism” will probably be bandied around again enthusiastically in the media in remembrance of García Márquez, but I’m hoping that this time around, it will lead people to appreciate different dimensions of his writing: Namely, how the primordial influence on García Márquez’s work was the fantastical stories told to him as a child by his grandmother, an oral phantasmagoria of memory and folklore that gave him an appreciation for other modes of thinking, for silenced communities whose beliefs and traditions have been lost in the bloody march of colonial history. How his stories are often wry parodies of every major genre in the history of Latin American writing—from the miraculous tales of wonder and discovery told by Spanish colonizers, to the incredibly monotonous and repetitive historical novels of the 19th century, to the self-reflexive, labyrinthine works of the 20th century—and how he used his writing always to suggest that violent authority would eventually crumble under the weight of its own absurdity, while marvelous dreams of liberation really could become history.
Bill Johnson González. Assistant Professor in the English Department at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on Latino Studies, American literature, and critical theory. His article on “On the Downlow”, a film shot in Pilsen, was published in January in the journal GLQ.
