On the Anniversary of García Márquez's Death, a New Book Asks, 'Was Gabo an Irishman?'

My husband is convinced that there is a website called “wiki-paddy-a,” which I use to prove that my beloved homeland, Ireland, has given the world many great things. Like Halloween, for example, or the discovery of America.

That’s right. You heard me. Researchers are certain that there was a colony of Irish folk living in what is now South Carolina, when Christopher Columbus “discovered” the New World. Fact. Look it up.

Anyway, despite the force of the evidence, my Colombian husband balks when I make these kinds of assertions. So, I can only imagine what his reaction will be to my latest theory: Gabriel García Márquez, or Gabo as they call him in Colombia, was Irish.

Wait. Just hear me out. I’m not crazy. I promise. 

He left behind the place of his birth

Just like many great Irish writers (such as Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, and O’ Brien—Edna, that is, not Flann), Gabo lived most of his adult life abroad, but he returned to the place of his birth again and again in his work. 

He lived in Paris, Mexico and elsewhere, and yet his most memorable stories are set in the Colombian Caribbean coast.

Gabo himself admitted:

All of my books have loose threads of Cartagena in them. And, with time, when I have to call up memories, I always bring back an incident from Cartagena, a place in Cartagena, a character in Cartagena.”

This ability to write about home only from a distance is something with which many Irish writers are familiar. Joyce is perhaps the greatest example. He left Ireland as a young man, and yet his fictional universe is Dublin, through and through.

Gabo didn’t come up with the idea for One Hundred Years of Solitude sitting on a bench in a dusty Caribbean village; it came to him as he drove with his family on the road to Acapulco. And yet, as we all know, Macondo is not Acapulco. Only by leaving was he able to write his way home.

He turned the Spanish language into sorcery

Speaking about the great Irish writer Brendan Behan, in 1979, T E Kalem wrote in TIME Magazine:

The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man’s fate and man’s follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth. Rarely has a people paid the lavish compliment and taken the subtle revenge of turning its oppressor’s speech into sorcery.”  

Now, swap “English” for “Spanish” and “Irish” for “Colombian” and he could well have been talking about Gabo who created magic with his words. In doing so, he paid the conquistadores the great compliment (or perhaps exacted the ultimate revenge) of creating what is, without doubt, the finest work of literature in the Spanish language since Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

He wrote about reality

Many people on the Colombian coast tut unkindly and say that Gabo did not create anything, he merely recorded what was going on around him. That, of course, is to under-appreciate his genius. Yet Gabo would be the first to admit that he was, principally, a chronicler of his immediate world. So I sometimes like to imagine what his work might have been like if he had not grown up in Colombia but somewhere else.

Would his stories have been so magical if he’d lived in Sweden or Canada or Korea? I don’t know. But I like to believe that if he’d lived in Ireland he would still have found inspiration aplenty. Because Ireland, like Colombia, is a place where magic is treated as real and where the real is almost the stuff of myth.

He might have found inspiration in the 1916 Easter Uprising, in which a ragbag of volunteer “soldiers” led by a schoolmaster, a shopkeeper, and a polio sufferer, rose up against the mighty British Empire. Of course, they were doomed to failure, and the uprising was initially met by a mixture of bewilderment and hostility amongst the very Irish people that the rebels were trying to liberate. However, all that changed when the British executed many of the leaders. The British killed them hoping to make an example of them and quash for good all talk of rebellion. Instead, what might have otherwise been recorded in history as a minor skirmish on the streets of Dublin became a battle of mythical importance, making heroes out of its martyred leaders. Just imagine what Gabo would have done with a story like that. 

 In a 1984 interview with NPR, Gabo said his writing was forever shaped by the grandparents who had raised him as a young child:

"There was a real dichotomy in me because, on one hand…there was the world of my grandfather; a world of stark reality, of civil wars he told me about, since he had been a colonel in the last civil war. And then, on the other hand, there was the world of my grandmother, which was full of fantasy, completely outside of reality."

What if he had been brought up by a grandfather who told him stories of the Easter Uprising, the fight for freedom from the British, and the bloody civil war that followed when a large portion of Ireland eventually achieved independence?

And what if he’d been brought up by a grandmother who, like mine, regularly visited a mystic “healer” and believed that burying a Child of Prague statue in the back garden could stave off the ever present Irish rain? If he’d grown up in Ireland, would he still have gone on to become the Grandfather of magic realism? It’s quite possible. Of course, his tales would have been a lot less hot and humid and a bit more rainy and windswept—but they still would have been both magical and political in equal measure.

The above is an excerpt of the title essay of the anthology Was Gabo an Irishman? – Tales from Gabriel García Márquez’s Colombia.  The collection was compiled and edited by Wild Geese member and County Tyrone native Caroline Doherty de Novoa. She has lived in Bogotá since 2012. Doherty de Novoa is also the author of the novel Dancing with Statues, which is set in Ireland and Colombia. Both books are available from Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Caroline-Doherty-de-Novoa/e/B00BT0R1KW

Views: 596

Tags: Americas, Arts, Diaspora History, Irish Freedom Struggle, Latin America, Literature, Mythology

Comment by Michael Quane on April 13, 2015 at 9:33pm
Very illuminating, Catherine. And welcome to the Global Irish Tourist Group. I look forward to seeing more of your contributions.
Comment by Caroline Doherty de Novoa on April 15, 2015 at 8:01am

Thanks Michael for the warm welcome. Caroline. 

Comment by Ann V Quinlan on April 19, 2015 at 8:41am

Caroline,

This is a most interesting idea.  I suspect, if anything, Gab was channeling from our original home - the sea.  Next time you go, taste your skin, then dip a different part of your body in the sea.  Same taste :)

All the best and welcome Caroline.  I bring small groups to my native Ireland. Next one - Autumn In Ireland - 12 people/12 days.  We stay in Hidden Ireland places.  All the best!

Comment by Caroline Doherty de Novoa on April 21, 2015 at 2:45pm

Thanks Ann. Your idea is also a very interesting one! All the best, Caroline. 

Comment

You need to be a member of The Wild Geese to add comments!

Join The Wild Geese

The Wild Geese Shop

Get your Wild Geese merch here ... shirts, hats, sweatshirts, mugs, and more at The Wild Geese Shop.

Irish Heritage Partnership

ZenBusiness:
Start a Business Today!

Adobe Express:
What will you create today?


Adverts

Extend your reach with The Wild Geese Irish Heritage Partnership.

Congrats to Our Winners

© 2024   Created by Gerry Regan.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Privacy Policy  |  Terms of Service