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Realism without magic

Milia Au
// A s soon as Jose Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, .... made a right angle at the Buendia house, went in under the closed door,... and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack 36 eggs to make bread.
'Holy Mother of God!' Ursula shouted.
She followed the thread of blood back along its course... straight down the street...went into the door of a house where she had never been and she pushed open the bedroom door and was almost suffocated by the smell of burned gunpowder, and found Jose Arcadio lying face down...."
The passage is from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Year of Solitude and illustrates Marquez's great ability to transport his readers to a realm where fantasy and facts are so skillfully entwined that it becomes difficult to distinguish one from the other. And, what could be a more poignant description of a mother's discovery of her son's death than that of the flow of his blood stopping at her feet to announce his demise?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who passed away last month, was a master of the literary genre "magic realism," in which the miraculous and the real converge. His novels are full of miraculous occurrences like a plague of insomnia and forgetfulness, a Spanish galleon marooned in a jungle, or a levitating priest. Yet Marquez combined fantasy and reality with such mastery and skill that despite the frequent flights of fancy, the reader always remains grounded.
As I salute Gabriel Marquez'soutstanding contributions as a writer and a journalist, I am also humbled by the realisation of how relevant his tales of fantasy are in our world of today, especially in the context of Bangladesh. Like many Latin American intellectuals, Marquez expressed his opinions freely on the political issues of his times and was vocal against inequities and injustices. Hence I wonder if he would have written another great story of magic realism on Bangladesh had he been familiar with the country. A country of vanishing politicians, murders committed by invisible hands, rivers of floating dead bodies and conjured images of bearded men in the moon. Except that this story would contain very little magic -- but quite a bit of realism. The ordinary men and women, priests and revolutionaries, politicians and soldiers portrayed inMarquez's novels may have been figments of his imagination - but they exist in Bangladesh.
Let us consider the opening passage... I could rephrase it in the following way (with due apologies to Marquez):
"A trickle of bloody water flowed from the river Shitalakhya into the street, continued in a straight line across the uneven pavements, turned a corner and made a right angle at the Islam house, and flowed into the kitchen, where Selina Islam was cooking the afternoon meal.
“Ma go, Hae Allah," Selina cried out.
She followed the thread of blood along its course, arrived at the river bank, was almost suffocated by the putrid smell of rotting bodies until she found her dead husband, Nazrul Islam, floating with his hands and feet tied."
Dramatic as it is, would you believe the story if you read it in the newspaper? Yes. Because something quite similar happened. Accounts of kidnapped children, parents murdered by adolescent daughters, charred bodies in public buses, 3-year old girls raped by policemen are a reality in today's Bangladesh - like the events in Marquez'simaginary village Macondo.
There is, however, a subtle difference. The overriding emotion that dominates most of Marquez's characters, despite their bizarreness, is love. They may be capable of hate but they also have an intense capacity for love that persists for decades and blossoms even when faced with life's hardships and rejections. In Bangladesh love and compassion seem to have been lost in the quagmire of revenge and counter revenge. People angrily protest against crimes, TV talk shows analyse the "whys and whats," but few mention love as the guiding force that can dilute these acts of hate and change the trajectory of our lives.
It seems we too are suffering from a disease - an amnesia that makes one forget the true worth of human life. Not just "life" that breathes oxygen but a complete existence encompassing much more. When the loss of life means a daughter will never know the love of a father, a mother will never again feel the soft caress of her son. And the remedy for this disease is to reinstate love and compassion in our society. Only then can our nation be rescued from the continuing decadence.
We need Marquez's magic realism - but with a touch of magic that will heal the deep wounds created by hatred and animosity....
The writer is a renowned exponent of Rabidra Sangeet and a former employee of the World Bank. E-mail: shiftingimages@gmail.com