ErostrateDiscovering the world's cultures, one work at a time
My list 0

How the works were chosen

Countries / South America

Colombia

works
49
33 books · 16 films
period covered
1589–1994
language of writing
Spanish

In December 1928, the Colombian army fired on banana plantation workers gathered in a square at Ciénaga. The number of dead has never been established: the official reports count a few dozen, other sources far more. In 1967, a novelist born in the region wrote a scene in which three thousand bodies are loaded onto a train, and that is the figure Colombians have quoted ever since. The novel did not replace the archive by mistake: it occupied the place the archive refused to hold, and its author owned that.

Read moreShow less

It is a good way into a country where violence is a named object of historiography. La Violencia is the name given to the latent civil war from 1948 to 1958, set off by the assassination of a presidential candidate, and the conflict that followed lasted half a century. Colombian literature produced an entire genre about it, called the novel of the violence, and the country also has a geography that isolates: three cordilleras, a Caribbean coast, a mostly Afro-Colombian Pacific coast, an Amazon, regions that do not speak to one another.

From that dispersal comes a remarkable formal inventiveness. José Eustasio Rivera published in 1924 the journal of a man lost in the rubber forest, which ends with the sentence the jungle swallowed them. Jorge Isaacs had given in 1867 the most widely read love novel on the continent. Manuel Zapata Olivella brought African memory into the national literature. Álvaro Mutis invented a wandering sailor who runs aground everywhere. Cinema developed late but as early as 1927 a film, now recovered, accused the United States of having stolen Panama.

What awaits the reader is a prose of avowed abundance and a national memory that passes through fiction for want of reliable archives. The novel that opens this page announces a murder in its first line, then tells, as an inquiry, how a whole town knew and did nothing.

See on the map

BolivieBrésilCosta RicaRépublique DominicaineÉquateurGuyanaHondurasHaïtiJamaïqueNicaraguaPanamaPérouPorto Rico (États-Unis)Trinité-et-TobagoVénézuelaVoir sur la carte

A way to begin

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Gabriel García Márquez · 1981

A murder announced in the first line that a whole town lets happen: a million copies in the first printing.

The entry See the author

Bayardo San Román sends his wife back to her mother on their wedding night. Ángela Vicario's brothers make her name a man, sharpen their butcher's knives and tell anyone who will listen that they are going to kill Santiago Nasar. The whole village learns of it in a morning, and everyone believes someone else will warn him, or that no one will go through with it.

Timeline

  1. 1867MaríaThe great Romantic novel of Latin America, read everywhere in the nineteenth century.
  2. 1948–1960La ViolenciaA smouldering civil war, three hundred thousand dead, haunting all the literature that follows.
  3. 1967One Hundred Years of SolitudeGarcía Márquez gives the continent its book, and the world magical realism.

Reading keys

1Names and kinship
  • The Spanish usage of two surnames applies, and one classifies by the father's name.
  • The names of the Caribbean coast and those of the Andean interior differ by their accent more than by their form, and speech places a character socially more than the surname does.
  • The extended family, compadrazgo and godparenthood organise solidarities and obligations.
  • The Afro-Colombian communities of the Pacific have Spanish names and an organisation by family trunks that structures access to land.
2What is said and unsaid
  • La Violencia, the armed conflict and the massacres committed by every camp form a history in which every account is situated and in which writing has cost journalists their lives.
  • The banana plantation massacre of 1928 is a textbook case: the official figures and the collective memory diverge by a factor of a hundred.
  • The mass graves and the disappeared are the object of judicial work in progress.
  • Drug trafficking is an omnipresent subject that literature approaches while generally refusing the aesthetic of the heroic criminal.
3Religion and the unseen
  • Catholicism is very much in the majority and its political influence was considerable until the nineteen sixties.
  • The Afro-Colombian communities of the Pacific practise sung funeral rites, including the chigualo for dead children, and the currulao to the drum.
  • The Muisca cults have disappeared as a practice but their narratives, preserved by the chroniclers, found the imagery of El Dorado.
  • The Kogi of the Sierra Nevada have maintained a complete cosmology, with priests trained in darkness for years, and they call themselves guardians of the world.
4Colours, rites, mourning, feasts
  • The wake and the nine days of prayers organise the mourning, with specific songs on the Pacific coast.
  • Black is worn in mourning, and white for dead children, whose wake is sung and not wept.
  • The carnival of Barranquilla, listed as intangible heritage, mixes cumbia, congo dances and masks, and lasts four days.
  • The Holy Week of Popayán and the festivals of the Virgin of Carmen mark the religious calendar.
5Shared references
  • The Muisca narratives preserved by the chronicler Pedro Simón in 1626, with Bachué emerging from the lake and Bochica the civiliser, are the principal source on that vanished world.
  • El Dorado, the investiture rite of the Muisca sovereign on Lake Guatavita transformed by the Spaniards into a legend of a golden city, is a textbook case of a myth fabricated by the desire of the conquerors.
  • La Madremonte and el Mohán, spirits of the forests and the rivers, are a living bestiary in the countryside.
  • Macondo, a village invented in 1967, has become a common noun that Colombians use to designate their own country.
6Misreadings to avoid
  • Magic realism is not a way of making Colombia exotic: it is an answer to a country in which the facts themselves are implausible and badly established.
  • Colombia is not a homogeneous Andean country: the Caribbean coast, the Afro-Colombian Pacific and the Amazon are three distinct worlds.
  • El Dorado was not a city but a rite, and the legend is a European production.
  • The country has an old and learned literary tradition, with Bogotá nicknamed the Athens of South America in the nineteenth century.

Tales and mythologies 1

A selection to begin with 10 / 49

Show only

See all 49 works