The Reader Travels

My last stop on the magical realism tour of the world is South Africa. Andre Brink’s Imaginings of Sand is an epic tale of several generations of white women living in rural South Africa. As in most of the Latin American tales, the political climate plays like a soundtrack to the magic that happens throughout the characters’ lives.

In Latin America, we see the disparity between the haves and the have nots, and like South Africa, the distinctions are often drawn on racial lines. But in Latin America those lines have blurred as blood lines commingle. In Africa things seem a little more black and white.

When I think of South Africa, I think of racism. It’s just something the media has drilled into me. And in my own prejudice, if I meet a big white man with a South African accent, I assume instantly that he doesn’t care for people of color. Of course, my own southern US accent could afford me the same assumptions in someone else’s ears.

But regardless of politics and racial intolerance, there is real life happening in Imaginings of Sand. The “real” lives. The individuals hidden behind the stereotype. The details. That’s where the magic happens.

When I think back on it, I really don’t know what to believe about things my ex-boyfriend told me. His brother said to me after we broke up, “S- is the biggest liar I know.” Of course, at the time I was dating S-, I believed everything; I was under his spell. His youngest brother would look at us and say the word, “Svengali,” over and over. I had to look it up, and even then, I had no idea what he was talking about until the spell was broken many years later.

Regardless of truth, he lived in a haunted apartment in Dallas. Apparently there had been some sort of family murder suicide in the two story studio, and S- would see the father and the children’s ghosts in the upstairs rooms and along the stairs. It didn’t matter that the place was built in the 1970s. A violent act had taken place, and the former tenants were confused and sad, and somehow bound to this building.

Later, after we broke up, he moved to Colorado and returned for a visit to tell me of his further adventures with the spirit world. Colorado was a beautiful place, and he was getting in touch with nature. But he felt the spirits there too. He would be walking through the woods and suddenly pass through a spot, and just know he was in the presence of ghosts. Whether it was a chill or a tingle, a vision or a smell, I don’t remember. I just remember looking at him and believing it was true.

The beauty of these ancient spirits was that instead of being tied to a man-made structure, they were tied to the land, to nature. Perhaps they had died in battle or on the hunt. Or perhaps this was a place where the old and infirm were sent to sit and die, alone, but with…

Oh my gosh. There’s babies poppin’ out everywhere!

I slip back to northern Mexico with The Hummingbird’s Daughter where Teresita Urrea was a mid-wife and a healer. The book starts with Teresita’s own birth, and we see so many babies born through her eyes and her gentle, but strong hands. She brought life wherever she went, and even defeated death in her own miracle resurrection.

For each of the past two Sundays there is a new baby boy. Alex came on Father’s Day, an American boy born to Chinese parents. His grandparents are here from China to care for him and connect him back to his roots, but his is a whole new world.

Isaac came this morning, three weeks early. His father is part Mexican, part viking, a powerful combination, and his mother is warm and thoughtful, energetic and funny. He was turned upside down, so they had to cut him from his mother’s belly, but he is healthy and strong as a viking should be.

May they both be blessed by the grace and wonder of Santa Teresita.

Like Amy Tan herself, her main characters are Americans. They lack any insights into the spiritual world because their land is shiny and new, whitewashed and sometimes superficial. It is only back in the old country that we see spirits come to life, in a land with centuries of custom, tradition and ancestors who watch over their families on earth.

I’d like to keep traveling west from China, all the way to England, another place with a long, long history and their own connections to the new world of America. Although Henry James pre-dates magical realism, I can’t help but think of his novella The Turn of the Screw, when we talk about the fuzzy borders between the “real” and the spiritual.

Many a college literature course asks students to answer the question, is James’s ghost real, or is it simply a product of a disturbed mind? It’s funny to watch the different film adaptations of the book to see which took the ghost angle, and which was from the crazy school.

I like to think James’s ghosts were real, and here’s why. James was born in the US, but moved to England and claimed it as his home. An anglophile to the core, James would have rejected the shiny newness of his birthplace and embraced the fact that more people take their ghosts seriously in old England.

Who knew Henry James was a magical realist?

We write together, me and my man. The way we’ve worked so far, he writes the first draft, the bones of the novel, and I come back behind and fill in the flesh, bring it new life. It’s kinda the way Banky and Holden create comic books together in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy. Holden does the initial drawings and Banky gives them color and life, ink as life blood. I could be ridiculed for being a “tracer,” but I don’t think of it that way.

In Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Ruth Young is a ghost writer. This is a different concept of collaborative writing. Ruth takes another person’s stories and ideas and puts them in words, infusing them with a spirit, making them live. The name “ghost writer” would have you think she’s like a poltergeist moving furniture and type in the night, while her mother thinks it means she talks to the spirits, for such is her experience in life.

Again, we’re teetering between East and West, and throughout this novel, the western world Ruth lives in seems but a skeleton of a life comparing to the richness of the eastern world where her mother came from. In Ruth’s skeletal blindness she reduces her mother’s rich spiritual past to mere superstition and delusion. But all she has to do is blow on the bones, and they come to life around her.

We arrive in China by way of San Francisco following Olivia and her half-sister Kwan in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses. Living on a sphere, it is sometimes easier to travel West to arrive in the East; and halfway around the world is a further destination than all-the-way around the world.

East and West are worlds apart, yet there are always consistencies in the human condition. Kwan’s father had to leave her behind in China to start a new life for himself. He longed for her and wanted to give her the connection of family as he lay dying.

Many years ago, my own cousin had to give up her child when she was struggling just to take care of herself. The baby girl traveled west from Florida to Texas to California to the Middle East with relatives who would claim her as their own and love her forever.

Kwan has “yin eyes” — she sees ghosts and hears their stories. She sees more than the blood connection with her young American sister. She sees love and both the strength and the sadness of humanity.

When we left our travels, we were in Northern Mexico, skirting the border to the US. We travel now to New Mexico, where the people live north of the border, but share a culture with their family to the south.

We’ve been here before with Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. Like Teresa Urrea in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Ultima is a curandera. She knows plants, and she knows the spirits around her. She knows healing.

Life is hard, but for some it is unbearable. There is pain and sadness in every family, but most of us hold it together by sharing the burden with those we love. One peripheral character I remember from Bless Me, Ultima was cousin Lupe, who went to the war and came back with “war disease.” After the gruesome bloodshed of war, he would never be the same again. I have a picture of him in my mind, running wild through the arroya, the men in his family chasing behind to keep him from hurting himself.

I see this kind of war disease in some of my beloved friends and family members. For most it is not a literal war, but some gruesome life experiences they can’t seem to recover from. May they all find peace and balance in their lives.

Another story that takes place in Northern Mexico is Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. It’s a tale of being enslaved by tradition, and the quiet and not-so-quiet rebellions against the chains that bind.

It’s Cinco de Mayo weekend, with lots of festivities happening around town. It’s not a huge tradition in Mexico, but here in the US, we love any excuse to party. Believe it or not, Cinco de Mayo is not the Mexican independence day. You have to wait until September for that one.

Regardless of what Cinco de Mayo is all about, it represents fighting for what you believe, like Esquivel’s Tita quietly fights for the man she loves, like her sister Gertrudis fights in the Mexican Revolution. For Tita and her family, let’s eat a burrito and drink a few margaritas. Viva Mexico!

_________

*Cake, Prolonging the Magic, “Mexico”

In The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea takes us on a journey more than a thousand miles north of Colombia. We start in the state of Sinaloa in Mexico with the Urrea family and The People. From there we travel north again to Sonora, follow holy men into Chihuahua and even venture beyond the Rio Grande into Texas and Arizona.

There is magic in this family history, with miracles and visions, births, deaths and resurrections. But there is also truth. Luis Alberto Urrea researched the story of his ancestor Teresa Urrea in fine detail, seeking texts, interviewing family members and modern day curanderos for secrets of the healing powers and truths about Mexican history.

I loved that this was based on a true story. And the magic made it that much more real.

My brother visited Colombia several years ago, and his journey was almost as exciting to me as my father’s trip to Peru in the late sixties. As a sheltered American, it’s hard for me to step out of my comfort zone to explore places of such wildness and danger. And though I may never visit these beautiful countries myself, I want to know more about them.

Since my brother was in the US Air Force at the time, and his visit to Colombia was work-related, he went with the safety and structure of a well-planned government venture. Of course, being US military, he could easily be a target, but he was well prepared before he ever stepped onto the plane bound for South America.

This type of traveling reminds me of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, the story of a man who writes guides for business travelers. His whole philosophy is that if you surround yourself with order, structure and routine, then you can handle the uncertainty and chaos of life and world travel.

The one thing that stands out in my memory of my brother’s trip to Colombia are his photos of the stations of the cross along a hillside, leading to a cross at the top of the hill. With my Catholic upbringing, this is the one thing that connected me to Colombia, this image of a shared spiritual history, and the safety and structure of repeated ritual.