by VIJAY PRASHAD
The road to Aracataca in northern Colombia runs alongside the Caribbean Sea, and if you travel there in the spring or the autumn, your car will be followed by thousands of yellow butterflies. These phoebis philea flutter along Route 45: a motorway lined with red flowers which leads to the birthplace of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, whose magnificent Cien años de soledad (1967) remains the most famous literary depiction of this corner of the world. Founded in 1912, Aracataca is a town that seems weighed down by the past. The Zona Bananera in which it sits was long dominated by the United Fruit Company (UFC), which came to the area in the early twentieth century and whose ruined buildings – remnants of a bloody and contested history – are still standing.
When Garcia Márquez was a young boy, he would visit a banana plantation named Yoknapatawpha. The name comes from the Chickasaw word meaning ‘split land’, and was used by William Faulkner for the fictional county in Mississippi where many of his novels are set. Under Faulkner’s influence, Garcia Márquez decided to call his own fictional town Macondo, which is the Bantu word for banana and was the name of another nearby plantation. On my visit to Aracataca on a warm day in July, I can see activity in one place only: the street where Garcia Márquez, or Gabo as he was affectionately known, grew up. Today, the main pride of a city sucked dry by United Fruit is the man who wrote much about its ugliness.
The house where the young Gabo lived with his maternal grandparents was later sold, destroyed, rebuilt, burnt down and then rebuilt again by Garcia Márquez and his wife Mercedes Barcha Pardo, who tried to remake it exactly as it was during his childhood. By that time, Garcia Márquez had already turned the home into a literary artefact: the items in Cien años’s Buendia household – furniture, nicknacks, books – were all based on his early recollections. In the front garden, a group of schoolchildren are getting a tour. A man dressed in white with yellow butterflies pinned to his shirt is doing a dramatic reading from Cien años. He has a powerful voice, at odds with the gentleness of Garcia Márquez’s prose, and his audience are mesmerised.
He is standing under a large banyan tree, and behind him there is a small hut that once housed two servants of the Garcia Márquez family who came from the Wayuu community of the Guajiros peninsula. They slept on a hammock above a dirt floor. If it rained heavily, they would have to rush to the veranda while the hut was flooded. Garcia Márquez was not evasive about their presence in his childhood – a legacy of Spanish colonialism, which subjugated the people of the hemisphere and reduced them to cheap labour for the criollo settler class from which he came. In his 1957 short story ‘Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo’, the Wayuu servants try to save their furniture from the incessant downpour but find themselves ‘defeated and impotent against the disturbance of nature’, experiencing ‘the cruelty of their frustrated rebellion’. In Cien años, the servants are Visitación and Cataure: the characters who first identify the plague of insomnia – a disease that causes the residents to gradually lose their collective memory.
As both a jobbing journalist and a man of the left with a deep understanding of Latin American history, Garcia Márquez did not use phrases like ‘frustrated rebellion’ innocently. On the Caribbean Sea, between the two sides of Simón Bolívar’s Grand Colombia – today’s Colombia and Venezuela – lies the peninsula where the Wayuu people waged their tireless struggle against Spanish colonialism, starting in 1701. The Wayuu Rebellion of 1769 saw almost the entire indigenous population join a fierce armed revolt, which prompted the Spanish to dispatch commander José Antonio de Sierra to bring them to heel. Over the next two hundred years, the Wayuu continued to resist the seizure of their lands and the introduction of Christianity before finally succumbing in the early twentieth century, shortly before Garcia Márquez was born. Christian friars created orphanages on the peripheries of the Wayuu territory, including in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and it is likely that the servants in Garcia Márquez’s house came from one of them. It is also likely that they told the young Gabo stories of their rebellious ancestors.
New Left Review for more