A woman places a banner next to a picture of late Colombian 1982 Literature Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, outside the house in which he was born -- now turned into a museum -- in Aractaca, Magdalena Department, in northern Colombia, on April 18, 2014. PHOTO: AFP
It is a tragedy that South Asian interest in Latin America, for obvious geographic and cultural reasons, is sparse — because we have much to learn from the words of arguably the region’s greatest writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who passed away at the age of 87 on Thursday.
Marquez’s fiction focuses on timeless, isolated communities that both experience — and commit — great violence. His characters exhibit both surprising compassion and unspeakable brutality towards others and themselves. The men in his novels are martial, whether it is the isolated, delusional dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch, or the many military officers — minor characters and protagonists — who feature in so many of his books.
In what critics regard as his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez narrates the story of a family and the town that it founds, and traces both across seven generations in which the town experiences plagues of insomnia, killer ants, war, and neo-imperialism under the guise of the American Fruit Company.
These characters, settings and themes should be intimately relatable to Pakistanis. Whether it is the dictators, the war, the constant show of ghairat and its many lapses — our own political trajectory, the highs, and the lows that outnumber them, uncannily resembles his fiction. The violence, the resilience, the isolation, the contrast between the extraordinary acts of charity and the equally extraordinary cruelty with which we behave towards one another — have been central to Pakistan and to Marquez’s fiction.
Amidst the violence and the solitude — above all — is Marquez’s characters’ capacity to love — quite aptly, even in the time of cholera. Perhaps, it is love — adolescent, spiritual, romantic, familial — or simply its Platonic form that Marquez himself identified to be most salient feature of his characters. Perhaps, it is optimistic, but such a characterisation of ourselves is hardly a fictional notion.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 19th, 2014.
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He was a great writer. I have read few of his books 'one hundred years of Solitude and Love in the time of Cholera' were two of them and was impressed by his intellect.
Gabriel Márquez was the most popular writer in Spanish since Cervantes, used the technique of magic realism to promote a rather rose tinted version of Columbian cultural history. But he had his faults. Like many leftist intellectuals he disliked the “mediocrity” of western democracy and he apparently never came across a communist dictator he did not like. He praised Lenin and Stalin at the height of the Russian massacres and defended the indefensible abuses of Fidel Castro. Despite his huge reputation he did nothing to help negotiate an end to Colombia’s long internal conflict and instead left to live in Mexico. He was like the off-shore Pakistanis who become internationally famous and do anything for back home. but live there. A great loss indeed.
Pakistani intellectuals' response to a similar situation to Latin America (dictatorship, poverty, deep gulf between the rich and the poor, colonization) has been no less. Earlier it was in the form of Urdu poetry by masters like Faiz, Insha and Faraz, now it is Pakistan's emerging writing in English. These contributions should make Pakistanis, indeed all South Asians proud.