Juxtaposing the Comic and the Tragic: remembering Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The knowledge is always there, tugging at my consciousness: the hundreds killed now and last week and last month and last year. Those girls in the hands of brutal rapists and murderers, the media frenzy swirling around their stories but unable to reach them. I am heartsick.  A few weeks ago, Professor Kanchana Ugbabe of […]

The knowledge is always there, tugging at my consciousness: the hundreds killed now and last week and last month and last year. Those girls in the hands of brutal rapists and murderers, the media frenzy swirling around their stories but unable to reach them. I am heartsick.  A few weeks ago, Professor Kanchana Ugbabe of the English Department at the University of Jos sent me a tribute for the Nobel-prize winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who passed away on 17 April 2014. “In Mexico,” Marquez told interviewer William Kennedy for The Atlantic in 1973, “surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.”  He later told interviewer Peter H. Stone for The Paris Review “The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination. […]The trouble is that many people believe that I’m a writer of fantastic fiction, when actually I’m a very realistic person and write what I believe is the true socialist realism.” I understand Marquez better every day as I observe events in Nigeria, where Boko Haram commits nightmarish violence and where the political reaction is more bizarre than the most surreal Nollywood plot.  Marquez told Stone, “The more power you have, the harder it is to know who is lying to you and who is not. When you reach absolute power, there is no contact with reality, and that’s the worst kind of solitude there can be. A very powerful person, a dictator, is surrounded by interests and people whose final aim is to isolate him from reality; everything is in concert to isolate him.” Although he no longer lives on this earth, I think Marquez has something to say to all of us. I turn the rest of my column today over to Professor Ugbabe. – Carmen
Death has not snatched from us Gabriel Garcia Marquez as it was announced on the 18th of April, 2014. He has just made a fleeting transition to another magical-realist world where the comic cohabits with the tragic, where the trivial and the serious are juxtaposed, and where everything is exaggerated in perspective but is starkly real. The storytelling tradition Marquez inherited from his grandmother in Arcataca enabled him to reach readers worldwide with stories so fantastic to seem entirely legendary, yet so close to everyday life in contemporary Colombia that even those of us who have not been to that part of the world can experience it fully. Marquez wrote in Spanish but the excellent translations available render in English the richness of the author’s language together with his eye for the quaint and the extraordinary. If you take things too seriously it can become trivial and petty. If you laugh and laugh, tears run down your face and you literally begin to cry. This is the delicate balance, the perspective that Marquez adopts in his novels and short stories. It is a juxtaposition that is nothing short of an incredible feat of the imagination. We in Nigeria should be able to readily identify with Marquez’s fictional world. Don’t we accept as ‘true’ (without hesitation) when told that the baby on a woman’s back had turned into a tuber of yam? And that it happened, not too far from us, in the centre of town or in the motor-park? Accuracy of detail or credibility is not an issue here. Don’t tell the time when strangers accost you, or you may lose your private parts! The Virgin Mary has appeared on trees and clouds and people have travelled long distances on pilgrimage to witness the event. Such is the magical-realism of our everyday lives, rich in colour and texture. We await a Nigerian Garcia Marquez to spin yarns out of the contradictions we live amidst and take as the stuff of life.
It is Marquez’ short stories that resonate in my mind, that I savor and re-read for the wealth of descriptions contained therein as those of the grandmother in ‘Innocent Erindera’. She is enormous as a whale; Erindera bathes her, powders her body, puts a floral dress on her, combs her rich grey hair, and seats her on a throne to listen to old-world gramophone records with tear-stained eyes. She is tender-hearted, yet scheming and authoritarian. She has eyes on the back of her head, literally. She is everyone’s grandmother, yet with sinister qualities combined with endearing accoutrements. Erindera and Ulysses make two futile attempts to murder her. Boiling water in the bath, rat poison in the birthday cake, and finally Ulysses runs into her with a dagger spilling green blood like ‘mint honey’. The Colonel and his wife in ‘No one writes to the Colonel’ are people we meet on the street, living in poverty but hiding their wretchedness behind a cloak of respectability. They boil stones in the pot lest the curious neighbours wonder why there is no cooking going on. Their only son has been gunned down for distributing subversive political pamphlets. The Colonel is eternally hopeful that his pension would arrive in the mail. He has been making the trip to the post office every Friday for fifteen years. His wife who is asthmatic is confined to her bedroom most of the time. But on her good days she cleans the house, mends the Colonel’s jacket, and cooks up corn mush which they share with the rooster for their lunch. The rooster tied to the bedpost is a symbol of wealth and release from poverty. Cock-fighting was a popular sport in the region. The quirkiness of the Colonel together with his wife’s idiosyncrasies are delicately balanced with the tragedy of losing their only son and being left, bereft of care and comfort in this world.
‘The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ sounds truly legendary, even the very title, until we get caught up in the experiences of Pelayo and Elsinda who come upon this drenched, winged creature lying in the corner of their courtyard. The creature is put in the chicken coop and given vegetable scraps to eat until suspicions are aroused by neighbours that perhaps this was an angel (angel of Death? Fallen angel?). Thereafter candles are lit, Latin prayers recited, a message is sent to the Pope, and the creature is fed mothballs (is that what angels feed on?) The little fishing community where this extraordinary event takes place has never seen excitement like this. Canopies are set up, stalls erected, and the place takes on the aspect of a regular Fairground. The curiosities at the Fair include a young woman who was turned into a spider for disobeying her parents! Marquez ends the tale leaving the readers wondering if this was indeed a real event, hearsay, rumour, gossip, or a legend re-told. ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’ also plays on the excitement amongst a fishing community on discovering a dead body on the beach. The women take away the dead man, wash him, dress him, and dote over him, even naming him ‘Esteban’. He is a man from a distant world arrived in their midst to give them status and significance. The event brings all the women together and gives them something to do.
Humour is central to magical realism. There is a whole spectrum in the use of humour in Marquez’ writing. Some of his characters like the military dictators are monstrous caricatures bloated with greed, corruption and filth. There is gentle humour in his treatment of the idiocy and foibles of the common man. There is subtle humour, there is humour that makes you guffaw and laugh out loud.
From One Hundred Years of Solitude to Love in the Time of Cholera and The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has left us many great novels and short story collections to immerse ourselves in the pleasure of good reading. We in Nigeria are surrounded by the weird and the wonderful, Marquez-like situations and characters–fifty thousand people squeezing themselves into a stadium for five thousand non-existent jobs, political rallies amidst Boko Haram bombings, pension guzzlers, First Ladies with larger-than-life appetites for the good things of life…. Where are the writers who will take up the challenge and adopt a unique, inimitable style appropriate to the subject matter? Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez remains the ‘one and only’ for now, in the literary arena.