Storyteller

When a storyteller dies, a library burns.—Moroccan saying

A storyteller did die last week.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia is often described as the greatest writer in the Spanish language since Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote. In 1967, he published One Hundred Years of Solitude that took the world by storm. The novel was quickly translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of copies. It ventured a new genre called “magical realism.”

Two decades after, Garcia Marquez was honored with a Nobel Prize for literature. By which time, the author released more novels, most notably Love in a Time of Cholera that entrenched the genre most associated with his writing. By which time, too, the writer had chosen self-exile, disillusioned with the curse of stupidity that had taken possession of his home country’s politics.

Today, Colombia will hold commemorative rites for one considered “the greatest Colombian.” The orphaned nation pleads for at least a share of the writer’s ashes — to, at least ceremonially, bring back a son it managed to disillusion.

Mexico, the country Garcia Marquez chose to inhabit over the last three decades organized a ceremony led by no less than President Enrique Pena Nieto. All over Latin America, public readings of his works have been organized.

Literature enjoys a privileged place in Latin America. It is the mirror by which the people have defined their identity in the post-colonial world.

In Havana, workers hand-rolling cigars get through the day listening to oral readings of newspapers and great literary tracts alike. Garcia Marquez’s estranged friend, Mario Vargas Llosa, himself a Nobel laureate, was once called upon to serve as Peru’s president as the country tried to find its way on the road to democratization.

Men of literature, servants of their own truths, have often been imperiled in the once-turbulent politics of this region. The men of the pen have often found it necessary to be warriors as well, pursuing their vision of a preferred future for their people.

When military juntas took over many Latin nations in the seventies, many writers and cultural workers were tortured and killed. The poet and balladeer Victor Jara comes quickly to mind.

Garcia Marquez belonged to some sort of Golden Age for Latin American literature. When nations struggled through tyrannies and turbulence, adrift from the clarity of colonialism and uncertain about the future, fiction provided foundational truths. The quality of writing emerging from Latin America speaks to this. The poet Pablo Neruda will attest to it.

The Nobel Prize committee said, in its citation, that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing represented a “microcosm” of all humanity. In his incomparable prose, the boundary between the factual and the imagined is often blurred — as it always is among peoples struggling between their past, their future, their plight and their dreams, their fate and their faith.

Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, I think, offers the best tribute to Garcia Marquez: “I owe him the impulse and the freedom to plunge into literature. In his books, I found my own family, my country, the people I have known all my life, the color, the rhythm and the abundance of my continent.”

Magical realism is a literary form that gave authors the freedom to report as well as imagine at the same instance. As a genre, it was liberating.

The shock waves of magical realism hit my generation in the seventies when our politics was most surreal and the characters who loomed over this nation’s life most bizarre. We did not need to imagine political leaders possessed by their own delusions: they inhabited our milieu in the flesh. All we needed to do was to report the facts and a warped reality emerges.

No Filipino writer emerged during the last three decades approximating the likes of Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa or Neruda. In these parts, writers do not reach the stature of rock stars. Literature is not the prism by which our age is understood.

This was not always the case. Jose Rizal, the eye doctor, was executed because he wrote novels. Those novels, in a matter of speaking, became the collective eyes that enabled us to understand where we stood.

 Rizal, like Solzhenitsyn or Victor Hugo way before, transformed the novel into a weapon of subversion without compromising artistry. The potency of literature lies in its artistry.

In the harried and hurried lives we lead, the novel seems to have lost the power the medium once had. That, however, could not be the reason literature, in general, appears to have dwindled the past few decades.

There has to be other reasons. It could be that petty propaganda overwhelmed serious literature. Our politics, long ago, killed ideas and in place installed personality cults. That could not be the womb that nurtures literature as a craft that interprets the collective life.

A lobotomized politics parches the earth for great literature. This, I am sure is why our literature is in such a dehydrated state today.

For nearly two decades now, I have nursed a novel in my mind. Set in the seventies, when rebelliousness could not uproot superstition, when imagination was always overwhelmed by orthodoxy, when inventiveness always surrendered to habit, it was bound to be a despairing novel. In which case, it is not worth writing.

Besides, how can fiction compete with the news?

On our front pages, we have landlord politicians casually cussing at powerless citizens, inutile bureaucrats swamped by calamities and leaders who imagine themselves divinely ordained. They are more warped than any of the characters the magical realists created, without need for fine prose.