OBITUARY:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (27 March 1927- 17 April 2014)
By
Barbra C. Manyarara The news of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s passing on Thursday 17 April 2014 quickly filtered down to me although I was far away from media access. Two of my undergrads sent me messages of condolences, followed by another two from family overseas. They had been purchasing most of my study material on this writer, seeing as Amazon will not deliver to Zimbabwe. Each of the messages started with, “Mama, mudhara wenyu afa.” (Mom, your old man is dead.) Another of my callers was my own hubby telling me, “Your old man is gone,” to which I retorted, “I thought you were my old man!”
To
all these concerns I made the gentle reminder that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has
only been promoted to a better place without pain because authors do not die,
they live on through our reading of their works. All these messages recognise
the special relationship I have with Gabriel Garcia Marquez for I have spent
the last three years studying his representations of sexualities in several of
his works.
Literarily,
I first met Gabriel Garcia Marquez when I was recovering quite unsatisfactorily,
(according to my doctor), from a life-saving op and running out of satisfying
reading material. In the end it was a choice between a lame copy of Garcia
Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967) or Voltaire (without the
benefit of even schoolgirl French). My copy of One Hundred Years clothed with the usual Penguin austerity starts
with page 377, so I meet Jose Arcadio at a moment when he has taken up with
children in a relationship whose significance at this point, I have no idea of
at all. Still I am intrigued and flip through to discover that after page 422,
there is page 41. From page 41, I could now read through to the end, that is, back
to page 422 again. Despite missing that poignant first sentence, “Many years
later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember
that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” I was fascinated!
Once
I was back on my feet, it was imperative that I find a complete copy and was
fortunate enough to be loaned a Harper Perennial, complete with the Buendia
family tree. Finally able to satisfy my curiosity and typically an academic mercenary
at heart, I did a quick paper on a linguistically determined understanding of
the concept of time in the novel One
Hundred Years. It did not stop there. With quiet but steady fascination, I
began to “eat, drink” and “sleep” Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The result: I am
studying for a D. Litt et Phil on this man’s representations of sexualities in
some of his novels. Studying Garcia Marquez’s works privately was just not
possible. All good things become better when shared; I soon introduced the
author to undergrads.
It
was at the Catholic University in Zimbabwe that I sneaked Garcia Marquez’s The incredible and sad tale of innocent
Erendira and her heartless grandmother (1972) into the course, African
American and Caribbean literature, and got away with it. Although I would have
liked Isabel Allende to keep Garcia Marquez company, geophysical specificity of
the course boundaries prevented such an adventure. I have yet to design a
course that can justify the inclusion of the two magical realists and those of
Africa and the rest of the world, that is, where the magical exists alongside
the ordinary. This tale made the students rather sad, perhaps they over-concentrated
on the sadness of the story’s title, the grandmother’s cruelty and perhaps the
reality of commercial sexual exploitation of children but they still enjoyed it
and were talking of hunting down its film version(s).
For
me, the value of Garcia Marquez’s work will always lie in his metaphoric
representations of thematic concerns in modes that are accessible
linguistically and stylistically. His use of metonymy balances his expression
of ideas that ordinarily might be thought offensive in some way. From this
point, Garcia Marquez’s works regularly grace my reading lists for literary
theory or any other courses open to his inclusion whether on the basis of
period, region or any other category. Thus Garcia Marquez ignited my fascination
for Latin American literature and in turn, a better appreciation of literatures
from nearer home and from rest of the developing world.
And
for this gift I say, “Rest in eternal peace Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”++Barbra C. Manyarara is Lecturer in 'English Language and Literature Teaching' at the University of Zimbabwe.
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