Gabriel Garcia Marquez, my Lola Minay, and Good Friday

Alvin B. Yapan

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, my Lola Minay, and Good Friday
Fictionist and filmmaker Alvin B. Yapan recalls experiencing the interweaving impact of the stories told by icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and his grandmother, Lola Minay

Intellectually orgasmic – that is how I would usually sell One Hundred Years of Solitude to stimulation-hungry or sensation-deprived students, so they would read it. The last few paragraphs are so dazzling in its kaleidoscopic, epic summation of the interlocking stories of the Buendia family, it could leave you hanging and gasping for breath. It is a climax. 

I talk of endings, but it is actually the beginning of the novel which attracted me to it. The first line is supposed to be one of the most perfect first lines ever written in literature: 

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

This is a line you could actually use to illustrate the difference between the sexy and the sensual. To appreciate this novel under the umbrella of magic realism could mean losing the point entirely. The effect is on the level of gut. At least for me. And so also with the news of the death of its author.

The news of the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez came only days after our family laid to rest my paternal grandmother, Maximina “Lola Minay” Caceres Yapan. Talk of coincidence happening in my creative life, because both of them have a heavy influence on my writing. 

There were stories of fear but also stories of healing and redemption: how to identify an aswang, how to ward off the evil eye, how to conduct an exorcism by holding a feast where spirits feed on the aroma of food. These are stories we usually forget when we grow up, stories we dismiss after being initiated into the realities, the “realism,” of adult life. 

To my Lola Minay, I owe a watershed of stories I use in my writing fiction and directing films: stories of creatures gifted with flight by leaving their lower bodies on the ground, tree ogres preying on beautiful women, elementals seeking vengeance on people encroaching on their kingdoms. These are characters that would fit perfectly in the literary universe of Marquez. 

Had it not been for Marquez, I would have also done the same, forgotten about these nonsense stories, these stories we have labeled “folk.” This is what I owe Marquez: His One Hundred Years of Solitude  introduced me to the possibility that Lola Minay’s stories had value in capturing the contradictions and ironies of human life and questioning prevailing realisms. 

It is the potent combination of these two inspirations, Marquez and Lola Minay, that led me to write “Nang Gabing Mamatay ang Nana Soling,” my first successful short story, which showed me the possibility of living a life of a creative writer in a country where literature does not sell, or no longer sells. In my story I tried to write my own Macondo patterned after the very real Barangay San Pedro Buhi, Camarines Sur. 

When I finally found the time to return to San Pedro, it was to attend the funeral of Lola Minay.  I came back to a town where time has stood still, as if nothing had passed, just like what Marquez described in his novel. I even took a picture of the spot where the narrator stood in my story, and it still looked very much the same from my childhood recollection of it. That experience was filled with nostalgia, but also a criticism, a loving sigh of relief that nothing was forgotten, but also an embarrassment that nothing much had really changed: contradictory experiences that we as Filipinos are very familiar with having gone through a history of colonialism, dictatorship, and corruption. 

I would not be surprised that other Filipino writers also owe having seen this possibility of writing their own realities by using their own narrative parameters through Marquez. Of course, others would protest that we have our own brand of magic realism. But that is not the point to make here, nor is this the right occasion. 

I would not be remiss to say that Marquez served as an inspiration to Filipino writers. Because we do understand the hesitation of Marquez each time critics call his work as magic realism. He would always answer that his writing style and sensibility were not his sole inventions but his grandparents – his own lolos and lolas. He was just passing on to the world their way of seeing things. 

I would often be surprised when students ask me what magic realism is, or its difference from fantasy. I would often be surprised because they are living it – they just don’t know it. In response, I would say in magic realism, we have no magical wardrobes through which we enter Narnia, we have no portkeys through which we enter the wizarding world. We live among manananggals and kapres and duwendes and multos. It is this very reality that we live in that is magical, or more appropriately, absurdly surreally magical. And it is because of this absurdity of our situation that we are called to action to bring about change, with no metaphorical mediations.

The news of Marquez’s death reached me on Good Friday, one of the most feared days in Lola Minay’s narrative universe: the day the Lord dies, the day when bad wins over good, when creatures of darkness come out with wanton disregard of the order of things; the day of superstition, when aswangs could listen to your every bit of conversation.

I was almost expecting something odd to happen, like a manananggal joining a group of penitents flagellating their backs bloody. The manananggal would want to join so when Easter Sunday comes it could also join in the Easter egg hunt. Perhaps to wish that their human prey do not wish them to extinction. Because what is reality without a manananggal? – Rappler.com

Alvin B. Yapan is a multi-awarded fictionist whose first novel, Ang Sandali ng mga Mata, won the 2006 National Book Award, and a filmmaker whose latest Cinemalaya film, Debosyon, tackles the hybrid character of the Bikolano devotion to the Virgin of Penafrancia


 

 

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