Gabo's world of magic

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the all time great authors of fiction, the master of magical realism, died at the age of 87 last week leaving the permanent mark of sadness in everyone's heart. His people own him as their Gabo, a nickname that they affectionately call him with.
Born in a coastal town of Colombia in 1927, Marquez wrote about love, war, poverty, politics, oppression, and so many other things that all people of the world can associate themselves with. The passion, craziness, corruption and superstition of the people of Latin America found place in his work. The most significant part of his writings is his voice against oppressive dictators that go against humanity; he as a writer stood by humanity.
Marquez's remarkable position as a writer in the contemporary world is magical. Most of the great writers of the world have some specialities that have influenced nations into reshaping  their direction. They have also been misunderstood, but the genius of the great writers has always outshone the power of the state. Marquez was vociferous against incongruities in his society and state. That would infuriate the state, but he, like all other great writers, continued to side with beauty and humanity. His grandfather, who planted the seeds of fantasy and imagination in him, shaped Marquez's life, particularly his literary career, as he used and reused the elements of both reality and fantasy in his work.
Marquez began his career as a journalist, and would write only short stories. No one would know that this ordinary journalist would one day become the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book that changed the history of Latin American literature, that made Colombia proud as a nation, that made Marquez known worldwide. As soon as the book appeared in 1967, readers began to feel attached to the characters and the place as the setting of the novel emotionally. Marquez swam in the sea of love with his place and people; he had strong bonds with them, or else such a groundbreaking book would never come from an author.
Marquez once said, “I write mostly about the reality I know, about the reality of Latin America.” The reality of Latin America was not the reality of most other places of the world; it was and still is different. Life had been very difficult in Colombia during the years Marquez wrote and in the times before him. He would listen to his grandfather about the transition of the nation through trials and tribulations from time to time, and so he would feel sad, but his grandmother had him fly with the wings of imagination that he would design with materials from the folktales told by his grandmother.

Marquez raised his boisterous voice for those who cannot speak for themselves, who stumble in every phase of their life from the atrocities of oppressors and dictators, who don't get any space to register their complaints against tyranny. He observed strange but cruel things happening all around in the streets of Colombia, and he used those incidents in his stories and novels. Many incidents seem bizarre to readers. Again, some readers take them for granted as part of real life. Life reaches a stage when people cannot distinguish between magical incidents and reality. When people live their everyday life with continuous threats, tears, blood and deaths, they don't complain much against anything, and magic remains usual for them and becomes the part of their daily living. Hence Marquez's success in employing magical elements in his fiction. Writers like Salman Rushdie think Marquez's world is not fantastic in any way, for magical incidents happen in the streets of Latin America everyday. Rushdie considers Marquez's world, like his own, to be “bedeviled by dictators and corruption”.
One day two people came to a school in Colombia with a truck; they told the principal that they had come to take the furniture. The principal nodded. The two people loaded the truck with all the furniture in the school. Then they left the place with a truckload of school furniture. Later it was known that they were thieves. Gabo was asked to comment on this incident. He said it is usual. Such incidents are happening in Latin America everyday. This is the understanding of Marquez about Latin America. Many take pleasure in placing this stealing incident as an example of magical realism, but it really happened in a certain school in Colombia.
Most of Marquez's books document the crucial events in his personal life as also the social and political life of Colombia in particular and Latin America in general, and later his second life in exile in Mexico, a country he loved with his heart. There are many images and incidents in Marquez's writings that seem to be implausible, but a sincere exploration of his world may make a reader believe whatever seems to be implausible. The gap between plausibility and doubt would diminish if a reader made an extensive discovery of Marquez's world.
Marquez's power of imagination as an author of fiction surpasses many in the history of world literature. Gabo used his unbridled imagination to portray the fairly familiar but unbearable realities. He is now acclaimed as the greatest writer of the Spanish language after Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.
When Marquez was chosen winner of the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, it was declared that “the image of dynamite and dynamiting belongs to Garcia Marquez's own resourceful imagination.” It is aptly claimed that “only the Bible sold more copies than his book”. The Times of India reports that “his flamboyant and melancholy fictional works, among them Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and Autumn of the Patriarch, outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages”. This scenario attests to the writer's popularity and his presence in the literary world.
Marquez's favourite authors were Faulkner, Kafka, Hemingway, Dostoevsky. He was on good term with his friends Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton. A flurry of reactions came up instantly after the news of his death spread around the world. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982, the Nobel committee noted that in Marquez's work “the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts”. The committee emphasized the writer's successful use of magical realism in his fiction for which Marquez remains a legend.
Chilean writer Isabel Allende very fondly acknowledged Gabo's contribution: “I owe him the impulse and the freedom to plunge into literature. In his books I found my own family, my country, the people I have known all my life, the color, the rhythm, and the abundance of my continent”. It's the same feeling that most people in the world hold in their hearts. The places he portrays in his novels relate to the places inhabited by real people. Like Allende, a person from any corner of the world may relate his or her own story with the one told by Gabo, one can see his or her own image in a character drawn by this literary giant.

Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, at present doing his Ph.D at Assam University, India, teaches English at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet. E-mail: msijewel@gmail.com