Tribute to Gabo: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Father of magic realism)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez popularly called Gabo across Latin America, where he is the most famous and who was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and beyond departed this burdened world on April 17, 2014 and was turned to ash on April 22, 2014 in Mexico city where he lived for over […]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez popularly called Gabo across Latin America, where he is the most famous and who was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and beyond departed this burdened world on April 17, 2014 and was turned to ash on April 22, 2014 in Mexico city where he lived for over three decades, at the ‘tender’ age of 87.Gabriel Garcia Marquez, grandson of Colonel Nicolas and Trimquilina Marquez, with whom he spent early childhood and from whom he received his ideological and political ideology as well as his literary inspiration has left Latin American and world literature much depleted by his death. Details of his bio-data are available on the internet and can be googled by anyone and everyone who is interested In his biography as a social being and as a world famous literary personage and need not preoccupy us here. It is the aspect of his career and life engagements which constitutes, literary and political news that will properly engage the attention of column readers, essentially. For instance, why would such a widely travelled literary patriarch—who had lived in the United States, Spain and Cuba, and so on—write, not urban and cosmopolitan life and culture but on the work which transformed his life of poverty to one of fame and immense means through the inspiration of his native country home, Aracataca in Colombia, One Hundred Years of Solitude ( 1982). This is the masterpiece that mesh fact, history and fantasy, bed-rocked on the story-telling narratives of his home as told him by his first teacher and grandfather, Colonel Nicolas, himself a hero Liberals in the One Thousand Days Wars. Beyond the narratives and their magical effects are the accounts narrated to him at such an impressionable age of the horrifying wars waged by the ‘free-thinkers and anti-clerics ‘ against the Colombian Conservative government which influenced his political and socialist leanings—especially his unabashed criticism and constant opposition to the dictatorships in Latin America.
 Now, it is not just political correctness that he took from the accounts of ‘Papelo’ (Gabo’s  pet name for his grand-pater), the narrative technique, which fused magic with fact, later christened as magic realism (or marvelous realism) partly etched into Garcia’s literary technique, which stood in constant opposition to the conventional narrative style and tradition of Colombia. I have said, advisedly that the magical realist style came to him, in part from the stories of his homeland as told him by his grandfather, because, indeed the formal aspect of magical realism was adopted and popularized by him from Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist who first applied the term magical realism in the 1940s. It was Carpentier who introduced magic realism into Latin American literature until it became an essential feature of that literature. It is interesting to note that magic realist aesthetic became a canon following his winning the Nobel Prize, the fourth Latin American winner of the Prize, coming after two Chilean poets, Gabriele Mistral in 1945, Pablo Neruda, 1971, Miguel Angel Austurias 1967 and Jorge Law Borges who shared the credit with Marquez as the best known writers in Latin American history. It should be remarked that it was his dominant literary form, marked out by his penchant for lucidity of verbiage, visual images, and plot crafting with touchable details and tightness; free-flowing prose that has been rightly attributed to the influence of his American mentors—William Faulkner and Ernest Hemmingway. His novels carry an impressive capacity for humour and entrancement, offering access, both to the popular and higher cultural audience, all at once. The gripping power of A Hundred Years of Solitude caught the exaggerated, I believe, but also justifiable largely, the encomium of William Kennedy thus; Solitudeis “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading by the entire human race”
Another unusual dimension of the uniqueness of Marquez’s history is that the Nobel Prize, fetched him tremendous influence and intangible power. It also turned him into a figure whose friendship was coveted and sought after by people in the corridors of power, nationally and internationally. Rather than weakening his political, radical persuasion, he converted fame into an instrument of brokering negotiation between radical wings and government. He deployed his influence and credible visibility to facilitate dialogue between the Columbian Government and guerrillas, especially the 19th of April Movement and the FARC and the ELN organizations; forces that have fomented formidable resistance and social tension in the country on protracted scales. In furtherance of his socialist leanings, he became a notable friend of the Cuban revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, even though he never hesitated to define the friendship as an intellectual relationship, describing Castro as a ‘very cultured man.’ Quite remarkably, his opposition to American imperialist hegemony continued to attract his fierce and publicized vitriol, such that he became labeled a subversive element and an unofficial personal non-grata in the United States as the nation’s immigration persistently denied him the Entry Visa of the country until Bill Clinton became President of the United States when his Visa was restored. Internally, his writing continued to expose and denounce the dictatorial regimes in Latin America until the tail end of his active life.
Gabo Marquez lived the life of a man with the heart of both a lion and a dove. Some of his short stories carried the instruction of the enduring and unassailable power of love. Yet, long after he was diagnosed for lymphatic Cancer in 1999, he continued to write as if life had just begun. First, he worked furiously and unstoppably on his memoir propitiously and aptly titled Living to Tel the Tale, depicting the events of his first thirty years on earth. He then went back from this autobiographical work to fiction completing novel and short stories, long after his publishers have told the world that he had since stopped writing! This is clearly the life of a man with an indomitable spirit of creativity and an incredible passion for living.
It was indeed remarkable that during those moments of the ‘exaggeration of his death’ (Like one great leader of Nigeria, Zik of Africa, was wont to quip), after being taken in on admission for infection of the lung, dehydration and urinary tract, that a worried President of Colombia paid him a memorable homage. President Juan Santos, in a pre-death nostalgia said; ‘All of Columbia wish a speedy recovery to the greatest of all time.’ Alas, he did not recover to read or hear this national wish. And so, Gabo Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel laureate, patriot, novelist, radical creative artist, film-maker, journalist and global citizen went the way of all the earth, leaving the writing community at the painful side of the bitchy shore. I believe the former Colombia President, Alvaro Uribe Velez spoke for most of us in a way that should be etched on his epitaph thus: ‘Master Garcia Marquez thanks forever. Millions of people with on the planet fell in love with nation, fascinated by your work.’ Millions of others will live inspired by the magic power of Marquez story and inimitable life. Adieu, Gabo, father of marvelous realism.