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Exit Gabriel García Márquez

“Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt…was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

—Gabriel Gárcia Márquez on death, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez died at 87 on Thursday, depriving the world of one of its greatest writers. I first met his work as a senior in high school, when I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude and devoured it in short order. Within a year, I’d started writing my own novel, and in the opening scene, the protagonist had his nose buried in One Hundred Years of Solitude. There was no coincidence in my decision, nor in that of my protagonist.Image

Among foreign critics, it’s normal to cite García Márquez for his portrayal of the “exotic” side of Latin American life. That’s true to an extent, as he wandered far from his home and probably had some appreciation for the apparent absurdities of life in rural, northern Colombia. But we must remember that, for him, these were not unusual and exotic locales: they were home. His hometown of Aracataca gave him fertile ground for writing, sure, and in interviews, he always modestly played down his own inventiveness. Yet García Márquez took a nondescript town in the middle of nowhere, Colombia, and made it into perhaps the widest-reaching allegory in all literature. Out of the little details of his home, out of the vagaries of local history, he created something both timeless and placeless. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a monument to the possibility of literature, one that shows how the novel can tell our stories—many of them at once—in a manner nothing else can match. No wonder I was sucked right in.

Glancing back through the opening lines now, I’m struck most by the simplicity of the writing. It’s not overly verbose—my edition is in Spanish, and I have no trouble with it despite the rather rusty state of my Spanish at the moment—and flows effortlessly into little glimmers of literary play, part silly and part poignant. Sure, there are elements of Hemingway and Faulkner and Borges wrapped up in there, but the voice is so distinctly his own.

It was a voice that came to define a literary movement, and for good or ill, most Latin American fiction since has been in its shadow. It also stirred up its share of political controversy; a number of the metaphors on that front are anything but subtle, and García Márquez added to his legend with his habit for hobnobbing with Latin America’s most powerful leaders. Chief among all of these, of course, was Fidel Castro, a man he counted as a friend, to the extent that Fidel has any friends. García Márquez’s leftism is easy to malign now, though Jon Lee Anderson’s 1999 New Yorker profile (temporarily freed from their paywall) suggests the author abandoned any serious belief in revolutionary Marxism some time ago. He was sympathetic, certainly, but he maintained his ties because he was still a reporter above all else, trying to get to the heart of the story, perhaps so as to ultimately have the final word. But once again Castro has outlived one of his more prominent contemporaries, and perhaps the only one who could have given his biography justice. However serious his political views, and however much we might judge them, García Márquez’s best works transcended political consideration and spared no one.

Life did indeed matter to García Márquez, and his work is infused with nostalgia. It is a collection of histories, from his parents’ romance in Love in the Time of Cholera to his exposure of long covered-up massacres of striking banana-pickers by the United Fruit Company in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The stories are personal, and that provides an added dose of care, despite his frequent use of the gruesome and the macabre. Perhaps that is why, despite his dark and often grisly works, despite the failure of his political views to gain much traction, he remained a genial optimist. He lived richly, and that wealth is evident in his prose. He had a strong memory and was willing to probe its depths with neither adulation nor disdain, but with an entirely different attitude: the world was his plaything, both in its triumphs and its absurdities, and the fruits of his delight will long endure. And while nothing I write will ever endure in that way, I do hope that, so long as I have life, I can share in that nostalgia-tinged wealth.

Of all of the ink spilled in remembering García Márquez, the best thing I’ve come across so far is this essay by Edwidge Danticat. As usual, the Spanish language Nexos magazine is delivering some quality content as well. If I find more good reflections, I’ll add links here.

Image credit: http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/gabriel-garcia-marquez-suffering-from-dementia-says-brother-1.1284018

Nelson Mandela and Political Sainthood

Nelson Mandela was laid to rest today in Qunu, a town in the idyllic South African hill country straight out of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. I thought of Paton’s novel several times over the past week, as torrents of remembrances were beamed about the world. Written in just before the South African regime formally established Apartheid, it presaged both the darkness of the decades of repression that Mandela fought so persistently. The characters, white and black, admirable and questionable, were almost certainly straight out of Mandela’s life. But most importantly, it also presaged Mandela’s greatest triumph.

Mandela was an idealist, but idealists are a dime a dozen. He suffered hardship and a long prison sentence, but he’s hardly alone there, either. He was the first president of a reborn nation in the 1990s, but there were quite a few of those in the days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and some of them didn’t turn out very good. No: like the two protagonists in Paton’s novel, Mandela transcended all of that, and managed to bring some healing to a profoundly broken nation.

It wasn’t perfect, of course. Contemporary South Africa has its share of horrors, from AIDS and crime to ongoing poverty and division. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that investigated Apartheid era abuses did not prosecute those who came forward, a compromise that was brilliant for its political savvy but neither put the past to rest nor brought the worst abusers to justice. Mandela’s political party, the African National Congress, has an unhealthy level of control, and, as shown by the boos for current President Jacob Zuma at Mandela’s funeral, politicians in South Africa will long be stuck in his shadow. By the end of his life, Mandela was the closest thing the world had to a political saint.

Sainthood, of course, suggests a religious dimension, and while people argue over how much his faith informed his actions, Mandela’s willingness to pursue truth and reconciliation instead of revenge or simply burying the past has religious undertones. It reminds us of religious figures like King and Gandhi; the formal process in South Africa was headed by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Religious people don’t have a monopoly on forgiveness, but most faiths place an emphasis on its virtues, and the moral authority of faith can compel people to transcend base desires. In that sense, it’s easy to see why modern South Africa’s founding father came to be more than just a popular politician.

My first reaction to someone upheld as a political saint, however, involves a healthy dose of skepticism. It’s not that I think politicians are naturally depraved, or doubt the goodness of many of Mandela’s actions; I’m just not one to elevate any one person too high up. Anyone who’s read my political coverage on this blog knows this; I’m often critical of people I agree with, and I’m also the sort of person who could probably find a smidgen of common ground with Pol Pot. (I hasten to add that an instant of shared humanity in no way excuses crimes against humanity.) For everything he achieved, there are things about Mandela that give us pause, from flirtations with communist-backed revolution to adultery.

These critiques, however, miss the point. Sainthood is not and never has been earthly perfection; to say so ignores the biographies of most saints, and is also a horrible misreading of Christian theology, in which everyone is fallen anyway. Dividing the world into sinners and saints is useless, because saints are sinners, too. Traditional saints attain that status by giving themselves up before God; secular saints give themselves to their country, or to the greater good of humanity.

This can be a dangerous road. Commitment to something higher can come at the neglect of the immediate, and leads to painful choices, or choices that should be painful but get short shrift due to revolutionary devotion. We want to believe in causes greater than ourselves, but how far dare we go in fighting for those causes? Are we willing to put our loved ones in danger, and will there be collateral damage? Noble as their causes may be, many freedom fighters battle on without ever stopping to examine their consciences; there is no time for dithering, nothing to be gained from second thoughts or examinations of moral complexity. Mandela, perhaps during those terrible years on Robben Island where he was alone with his thoughts, did not fall into that trap when his time came.

That time was the early 1990s, when the international order that had propped up the Apartheid regime—the dualism of the Cold War—broke down. Stripped of its anti-communist clients, the regime had to change, and though his motives may not have been all that idealistic, President F.W. DeKlerk’s willingness to accept reality took uncommon resolve, and he deserved the Nobel Prize he shared with Mandela. And so he passed the torch to South Africa’s first black president, and Mandela managed to allay the fears of those who predicted further fracture and violence. “The great valley of Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also,” Paton wrote in his novel’s closing lines. “For it is the dawn that it has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.” Mandela gave Paton, who died just before his prison release, the answer he’d awaited.

Elevation to sainthood also takes an intense toll on the saint, as anyone who’s read of Mother Teresa’s crises of faith will know. Greatness is often akin to loneliness, and some of the more poignant Mandela memorials revealed the isolation of his later years. He was beloved by his people and genuinely loved them back, but he’d led such a different life from all of them that he was left with a certain emptiness. Some found it a bit odd that the third wife of this champion of the people was the ex-first lady of Mozambique, but as someone who had known and loved another revolutionary figure, Graça Machel was probably one of the few people on earth who could actually relate to the thoughts going through the aging Mandela’s mind.

This loneliness was no sign of weakness, but instead seals Mandela’s greatness. He could have remained a revolutionary to the end, but he was too self-conscious for that, and rather than fight the unending fight, he also sought acceptance, comfort, and assurances that everything he’d done was worthwhile. It was, and his ability to recognize that in spite of his doubts is one of the greatest gifts a person can possess. Humans are neither gods nor beasts, but they can channel both, and at his best, Mandela reached for the former with a rare combination of humility and moral clarity. Both in his triumphs and his complexity, he became larger than life, and his ability to make peace with that role should stand the test of time.