On Sat, 3 May 1997, Carol McBride wrote:
> re. Magic Realism... try Eduardo Galeano, Marquez, Borges, and almost any
> other major Latin American writer in the past 50 years for some insight
> into this misused term.
>
NH: I also suggest Miguel Angel Asturias, Robert Antoni, Maryse Conde',
Glenville Lovell, devorah major, Charles Johnson, Jewell Parker Rhodes,
Gloria Naylor and Amos Tutuola, which will take you further afield than
the Latin American writers. Tutuola cracked my thinking open when I was
a young teen. He wrote in an African-English creole and devised
creatures based on Yoruban belief systems.
Me, I still get confused by the term 'magic realism,' although I
understand intellectually what it means. When I think of the women whose
work I've mentioned (largely because there seems to be something in
common about the novels of theirs that I've read), there is a difference
between what they write and what normally gets placed on the fantasy
shelves in bookstores. "Magic" is different. All four novels are about
women or families of women who have stronger than usual connections to
the spirit world, but they don't exercise magic like a power to control
events. Rather, they see themselves as part of a natural system which
includes both seen and unseen worlds. They can occasionally influence
those systems, but at personal cost and with variable accuracy, because,
being part of the system, any change they make changes the system
itself.
I think I'd also add Canadian Shani Mootoo's novel _Cereus Blooms at
Night_ to that list. Have just finished reading it, and would be very
interested in hearing comments from anyone else who happens to read it.
Am not convinced that it's magic realism, but I was rivetted by the way
it explored sex roles, coming as it did from a Caribbean perspective
(Mootoo is Trinidadian background).
-nalo
"Proud to be flesh."
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