Oh, my friends, magical realism is not a trope, and it is not a story that happens to have magic in it. It is a literary movement of the colonized.
–Ann Dávila Cardinal, Jan 17, 2022
This tweet from January was the closest I’ve come to going viral. Someone had posted about magical realism as a “trope,” and after a series of elaborate and rather colorful expletives in Spanish shouted at the screen, I decided I had to publicly respond. I had a lot of feelings about this, as I’m sure most Latine people did. Mainly? The idea that someone reduced the literary movement that is so important to all Latine cultures and was the foundation of my life as a writer to a trope just made me tired. I’m not going to define magical realism here. Definitions vary and it is often an emotional and hot button topic (hence the need to scrape myself off the ceiling after seeing the original tweet). Plus, about a gazillion undergrads have written about it ad nauseum. No. I want to talk about what it means to me, a writer of Puerto Rican heritage, and why my new novel, The Storyteller’s Death, took a magical realist form.
I was raised by a Puerto Rican architect who loved to read. My mother’s bookshelves were bursting with works by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, Cuban Alejo Carpentier, and my favorite, Isabel Allende from Chile. At the time, the other girls in school were reading teen romances, or classics like Little House on the Prairie or Anne of Green Gables. I tried, I really did, but the problem was that I didn’t see myself in those books, a girl who straddled two worlds, two cultures, never feeling truly at home in either. A girl who spent the first eight years of her life watching her big strong father wither and die from ALS and her mother seek refuge in a bottle of Bacardi. A girl with a much darker life than most of those characters.
I did find some literary comfort in those difficult times, but it was on my mother’s shelves. I would pull those worn paperbacks down and dive headfirst into worlds where sisters curse brothers (there were many times when I wished I had that skill), characters play pianos with the covers closed, and priests levitate. In other words, the worlds of these novels were as unexplainable as my own. Like the main character of my novel, Isla, after my father died, my mother began to ship me off to spend the summers with her great aunt in Bayamón, a suburb of San Juan. It was once I started spending extensive time there—by myself instead of in my mother’s shadow—that I began to relate to those magical realist tales I loved so much. As I stood in my aunt’s steamy jungle of a backyard, I could see and feel Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s mythical town in Colombia where it rains for four years, eleven months, and two days. The stories were full of families that were large and rambling, like the de Valle family in Allende’s The House of Spirits. Wherever my Tía Ana and I went, we ran into someone who was a cousin, or a distant aunt, and I began to realize the Dávila family had tendrils that reached across the whole island, like the interweaving of a net that could catch you should you fall.
But it wasn’t until college and my first Puerto Rican literature class that I was introduced to Puerto Rican magical realism. I’ll never forget the first time I read “The Youngest Doll,” a short story by Rosario Ferré. It is a haunting tale about a woman who is bitten and infested by a prawn while swimming in the river, and therefore deemed unmarriable. She becomes a doll maker, and when her youngest niece marries a social climbing doctor, the aunt makes her a life-size porcelain doll filled with honey. Locked away in their apartments for years, the niece fades away and is replaced by the doll, that sits on the porch as a showpiece for her husband’s status in the community. By the time the husband realizes, the doll’s body is filled with prawns, the honey devoured. The story was about sexism and forced industrialization of the island by its colonizers, with threads of dark feminist magic that stick out like prawn antennae from the doll’s eyes. It was in that class that I remembered fighting with my great aunt because she insisted I wear a long skirt to the open air market, that young ladies from “good families” didn’t show their legs. Or that I had to pay more attention to my appearance, or I will be, like the dollmaker, unmarriable (and I wasn’t even infested by prawns!). I had no interest in marrying at that age and didn’t even know what “good family” meant, but that struggle to reach that undefined and, for me, unattainable goal set by my aunt was reminiscent of the women of Ferré’s story.
It wasn’t until later in my life when I spent time on the island as an adult and got to know it outside of Ana’s tight and conservative grip, that I realized all these magical realist tales I had been reading throughout my life were about that feeling of not owning your destiny, of your rights and ability to survive being dictated by a colonizing force. Like in Julio Cortázar’s incredible short story “Axolotl,” where the narrator becomes obsessed with the Mexcian salamanders kept behind glass in a Parisian aquarium. He talks of the creatures’ “Aztec faces” and “golden eyes,” and that he “knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together.” By the end of the story the narrator is in the tank and has himself become an axolotl, looking out through the glass. Cortázar was Argentinian, another Spanish colony, which linked him to the Mexican salamanders. For me, the tank and those captured creatures within represent the colonized, behind glass with no rights or freedoms of their own. These stories made me think about how I was hearing Spanish less and less in Puerto Rico, and seeing American chain stores taking over the locally owned ones in Bayamón. Of why I heard Spanish less and less and saw American chain stores taking over the locally owned ones in Bayamón. And why, by the late nineteen eighties, my aunt’s land was an overgrown and sad postage stamp in the middle of a maze of high-rise office buildings. You see, magical realism is the literary movement of the colonized, and Puerto Rico is the longest lasting colony in the history of the world.
Did I set out intending to add to this canon with my new novel The Storyteller’s Death? No. But when I was telling Isla’s story, the magic just…came, and it seemed a wonderful way to honor these books, the island I love so deeply, and the family that saved my life. My healing began on that small square of fertile earth in the middle of Bayamón. There’s a parking lot there today, but when I was writing Isla’s tale, I could feel the thump of my Keds sneakers on the packed soil as I ran, hear the skittering of dried seed pods from Tía’s flamboyán tree. This sensory experience also happens when I read Allende or Ferré, with their lush, descriptive language. This is why reducing this movement to a “trope” is so harmful. This is why there are so many deep feelings related to magical realism. Because in the colonized countries of these tales though no one is left untouched from trauma, personal and political, there is in the often-plain fabric of day-to-day life, woven in—do you see it?—a silver, glistening thread of magic that runs throughout, making it seem that though there is death and pain and loss, there’s always hope, and the chance that something completely marvelous can happen. Something…magical.
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The Storyteller’s Death
Ann Dávila Cardinal is a novelist and Director of Recruitment for Vermont College of Fine Arts where she also earned her MFA in Writing. She comes from a long line of Puerto Rican writers, including father and son poets Virgilio and José Antonio Dávila, and her cousin, award-winning fiction writer Tere Dávila. Ann’s first novel, Sister Chicas, was co-written with Jane Alberdeston Coralin and Lisa Alvarado, and was released from New American Library. Her next novel, a horror young adult work titled Five Midnights, was released by Tor Teen on June 4, 2019. The story continues in Category Five, also from Tor Teen, released on June 2, 2020. Ann lives in Vermont where she cycles, knits, and prepares for the zombie apocalypse.
