Garcia Marquez: A Tribute to the Enigma

 

This is not the hour for mourning. I believe alike me there are millions across the world who hold that Gabriel Garcia Marquez could never die, men like him and words like his never enter oblivion. He will, without a doubt, continue to live for centuries in the resonance of the words of love, of nostalgia, of solitude, of romance, of freedom. Our hearts will forever remain conquered by stories he left back- of Macondo, Jose Arcadio and Ursula, of Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza, of innocent Erendira and the Saint Girl.

 

Novels and stories of Garcia Marquez have managed to reach out across cultures and languages bridging a global paradigm where readers have communicated and interacted with his novels and stories on personal levels. His works have influenced on grounds of culture and lived realities transforming from stories of the Latin American reality and identity into articulated parchments entailing the experiences of those who wherever and whenever read them. From that huge overarching collage, I am to try and discuss in my humblest of ways why did we the bangla reading populace find this uncanny resonance of our experiences in his writings? What made Garcia Marquez such an instantly relatable literary figure for us?

 

Let us embark on this unsurmountable journey…. Watch how many steps we manage!

 

I choose to start this paper with a few excerpts from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s famous Nobel Lecture presented on 8^th December, 1982. As an avid reader of this master story-teller’s flamboyant tales, the passion with which he dealt with reality and nostalgia, I have always remained petrified with the concentrated truth and the sharp edge of the pain entailed in the following words.

 

“Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? ……

 

……In spite of this, to oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life. Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death.”

 

Before anything else could be said, the sheer adrenalin rush in the nerves, the ardency on merely reading these words is paramount. The simple yet resolutely articulate way in which Garcia Marquez communicates the crux of the zeal to existence and the crisis that an entire culture and an entire people face in rendering  themsleves meaningful is uncannily enthusing. All the more so for a reading populace like us who belong to a comparably similar socio-political and cultural history, a similar horizon of lived realities and existential expectations. It is a universal fact, passionately felt all the more so at this hour of an unrepairable literary loss, that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was one of the greatest, uniquely engaging story-tellers that the globe came to see in the 20th and 21st century. The absolute wizardry in his words, the labyrinthine plots and his enigmatic literary style using the ordinary and realistic and rendering it magical has left millions across the world enthralled and speechless. Amidst all those innumerable lovers of his works is also the bangla world of letters that has since the early 1980s been so much in awe of his literary expertise and his extraordinary creations.

 

I believe that Garcia Marquez instantly communicated with the bangla readers on a foundational psychological level. That which is usually called the belief in the supernatural or passingly termed as social beliefs, it is not just intrinsic to man, we tend to easily bring them down from the plain of the supernatural to that of the natural on an everyday basis. No logic or reasoning, whatsoever, is allowed to explaining it. These beliefs remain deeply rooted in our identity and being, they form a large part of the basis to our existential understanding. Loosing these beliefs would render life itself meaningless and solitary.  Just the way in which in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” Ursula believed that someday a baby with a pigtail would be born into the family. This was a belief that flowered not from just hearing but from experiences, everyday dreams and nightmares, all leading to its further deepening. As bangla readers, isn’t this a near similar experience that we share with Ursula. Still today stories of a snake being born in the womb of a woman in some village in Sundarban is a rampant belief. After birth the snake left for the forest only to return annually at midnight on the day of Manasa puja to meet its family and siblings. Those who believe in this story narrate it with such passion that one can’t just discard it with a grin of disbelief. It is a part of the cultural heritage of the place.

 

When colonisers and imperialists usurp a nation they prioritise the demolition of all the religious, social and spiritual beliefs of its people. They ensure permanent vanquish and slavery by ripping them off their historical secrets and their cultural relics. The colonisers call themselves “rational and civilised” and the colonized to be “irrational and barbaric”. They embark on a selfless responsibility of delivering the barbarics into the light of civilisation. Hence, the threat is laid on the latters ancient source of lived practices and that is when the struggle begins. However, the strength of the hidden secrets of life and history of a culture are so strong that even the decimation of  millions fall short of curtailing it even by a bit. Roots are not so easily reaped off. And that is precisley why dictatorships end, autocracies fall, struggles end with the rise of the people and the outsiders have to leave. This essence of struggle and survival in the face of cultural imperialism is the constant element in most of Garcia Marquez’s writings; that brought the bangla reader face to face with the lived struggles and the relentless resilience of the common masses in a society of social upheavel and political turmoil. Let it be the Tebhaga Movement or the Naxalbari Andolan, the partition and displacement of 1947 or 1971, more often than not we found our experiences resonating in Garcia Marquez’s pen. In his stories and novels we could see similarities with our stories, his interviews (translations) echoed our voices, his words were the words we were so frantically looking around for. Such similarities where the bangla readers horizon of expectations find an expression in Garcia Marquez’s writings are many. As effectively mentioned by Professor Kavita Panjabi (Salaams Gabo, Kavita Panjabi | Times of India; Apr 20, 2014, 05.35 AM IST) in a recent article “We saw Apu's wonderment at the train in Pather Panchali reflected in the washerwoman of Macondo, who, seeing a steam engine pulling a train for the first time in her life, exclaimed that it was "Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it." Both for the washerwoman and Apu the experience resulted in a flash of illuminations that rendered the reality into a magical paradigm.

 

Talk of state sponsored violence or political intrigues, peasant uprisings or labour strikes, emotionally vivid relations amidst grand children and grand parents or ostentatious family disputes and incestuous endeavors, clandestine activists and passionate leaders or mythical stories with inherent moral teachings……literally all of our cultural and lived experiences and aspirations found a direct and powerful counterpart half way across the world in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books. Despite the lingual barrier, thanks to the copious and rampant translations rendered regularly the bangla reader has always felt at home with his words. In reception the bangla world of letters has produced hordes of writings, commentaries, academic journals concerning his works.

 

Other than translations, entire publications and little magazine editions have been dedicated to instigate further reading and discussions on this master novelist and writer over and over again. To mention a few would be Kabi Tirtha; special edition celebrating Garcia Marquez’s 80^th birthday (January 2004, Boimela), Antorjatik Cchotogolpo, Bisesh Sankhya, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 2002, Golpota Bolar Jonno Benche Thaka �" Atmajibonir Marquez by Indranil Mukhopadhyay in Ebong Jolargho, Dec. 2008, etc.