“The Solitude of Latin America”

Biography: “Democracy Now” Apr 18, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzx1ms

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“Eleven years ago, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, one of the outstanding poets of our time, enlightened this audience with his word. Since then, the Europeans of good will - and sometimes those of bad, as well - have been struck, with ever greater force, by the unearthly tidings of Latin America, that boundless realm of haunted men and historic women, whose unending obstinacy blurs into legend.”

…Opposed to you I have seen the blood of Spain rise up to drown you, in a single wave of pride and knives! Generals traitors: consider my dead house, consider Spain, broken: but from every dead house burning metal flows in place of flowers, but from every hollow of Spain Spain rises, but from every dead child rises a gun with eyes, but from every crime are born bullets that will find you one day in the house of the heart.

You will ask why his poetry has nothing of the earth, of the leaves, of the grand volcanoes of his native country? Come and see the blood through the streets, come and see the blood through the streets, come and see the blood through the streets! Pablo Neruda “I Explain a Few Things” From: ‘Tercera Residencia’ http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/Neruda.htm

“…unearthly tidings” – Reality becomes unbelievable from Euro-centric perspective.

History then becomes conflated with legend. María de las Mercedes Barbudo Simón Bolívar José Martí Frida Kahlo Puerto Rico Argentina Cuba México

“I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”

“this outsized reality” Extraordinary suffering Extraordinary source of creativity

The context of Latin American lives is so tragically

unimaginable that it becomes nearly inexpressible and thus unbelievable to outsiders

Leaving the “creatures of that unbridled reality” isolated from those who are not part of the Latin American experience

“And if these difficulties, whose essence we share, hinder us, it is understandable that the rational talents on this side of the world, exalted in the contemplation of their own cultures, should have found themselves without valid means to interpret us. It is only natural that they insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest of our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them.”

Some Key Points: The validity of various means of interpretation is called

into question: “The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”

Euro-centric views of Latin America are often formed from selective memory – forgetting the span of time and bloodiness of their own historic struggles: “Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past.”

Some Key Points: Identity must be found by those who are to hold it

and experience it. The struggle for identity in Latin America is not the

same for everyone (the same as Europeans? …or the same for all Latin Americans?) but is nevertheless just as arduous.

“…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?”

A Question: To which “different methods” do you think García-Márquéz refers?

Los Madres de la Plaza de Mayo Fidel Castro & Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara Daniel Ortega

“…we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.”

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ…A Witch Writing A Biography In His Own Words. A Film by Yves Billon and Mauricio Martinez-Cavard 52 Minutes Produced by Les Films du Village Presented by Planet Group Entertainment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnNgjUWgrGQ