For García Márquez’s legacy, look to his newspaper journalism

Long before "One Hundred Years of Solitude," the novelist found myth and magic reporting on the Colombian coast

García Márquez said that he always identified more as a reporter than a novelist. But amid all the remembrances, the assessments of his magical realism and his politics, his newspaper journalism is the one corner of his canon that has remained mostly untouched. He spent decades in journalism. His first newspaper job was at El Universal, in the coastal city of Cartagena; in 1950, he moved to Barranquilla to write for El Heraldo, and finally, he worked as a reporter for El Espectador, a national newspaper in Bogotá, the Colombian capital. Since he had few readers abroad until at least the ’70s, for a long time his main job was to interpret the coast for his urban readers in central Colombia. My senior year of college, I decided to write my thesis on García Márquez’s newspaper journalism, which required spending many hours in the company of yellow volumes of his untranslated newspaper columns that were lodged in the mustiest recesses of the campus library. But I loved them. In his newspaper reporting — often about jungly prehistoric outposts being rudely encroached upon by modern society — Macondo had never seemed so real.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Credit: Reuters/Fredy Builes)

There was his 1954 series in El Espectador about the obscure Atlantic Coast region called La Sierpe, a community bound by the collective worship of a sorceress called La Marquesita who was said to have the power to send snakes into the jungle to kill enemies. The hierarchy of La Sierpe was built around the families who had been granted access to supernatural secrets, and then passed their social rank on to their descendants. For García Márquez, too, mythology was inescapably hereditary. Born in Aracataca on the Colombian coast, he famously grew up listening to his grandmother’s stories — for instance, the one about an electrician who always left the house full of yellow butterflies. (“I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face,” he told the Paris Review in 1981.)

Courtesy: salon.com

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