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

Gabo himself admitted:

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:

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