Regardless of the a long time which have handed since they have been conjured into existence, not all the things has modified in Macondo or in Umuofia.
The denizens of Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional Caribbean city stay condemned to solitude and questionable realities, whereas the individuals of Chinua Achebe’s allegorical Nigerian village are nonetheless coping with the fallout from the issues that fell aside.
Each locations function in a brand new Spanish anthology referred to as Regiones imaginarias (Imaginary Areas), which makes use of texts, maps and images to discover 10 of probably the most well-known areas in fiction and the true locations that impressed them.
In addition to Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude and Umuofia from Issues Fall Aside, the e-book units out in the hunt for areas together with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county, Juan Rulfo’s Comala, Abdul-Rahman Mounif’s Hudayb, Andrea Camilleri’s Vigata, and RK Narayan’s Malgudi.
The mission emerged from conversations between the e-book’s creators, the journalists Bernardo Gutiérrez and Luis Fernández Zaurín.
“Luis and I are fascinated with how, within the works of some authors, actuality and concrete locations on planet Earth are defined, formed, and typically even modified, by way of imaginary areas,” says Gutiérrez.
“These locations should not that far faraway from actuality; in a method, they serve to interpret that actuality.”
The pair got here up with an authentic listing of 40 or so fictional locations, together with purely imaginary areas similar to Center-earth and Lilliput, earlier than alighting on 10 locations rooted in actuality.
The e-book – printed by Menguantes, which specialises in uncommon journey writing – dispatches 10 writers and photographers on 10 quests and in addition makes use of a cartographer to map the fictional areas. Its fundamental intention, in keeping with Gutiérrez, is to discover the extent to which fiction helps us to interpret actuality and to deal with points from battle and racism to historical past and reminiscence.
Gutiérrez made two journeys to hunt out Macondo and to doc it in his epistolary contribution to the anthology. He was additionally fortunate sufficient to fulfill García Márquez and to verify his suspicions that Macondo was not solely primarily based on Aracataca, the city within the Colombian Caribbean the place the late Nobel laureate was born in 1927.
Though Aracataca went so far as holding a referendum on altering its identify to Aracataca-Macondo 16 years in the past, Gutiérrez additionally factors out that when you take a look at the close by municipality of Ciénaga on Google Maps, it says ‘Capital of magical realism’.
“I spoke to Gabo for about quarter-hour at a dinner in Havana a few years earlier than he died. We talked about politics but in addition about Macondo. He requested me if I’d discovered Macondo in Aracataca and I mentioned: ‘Sure. But in addition in Ciénaga.’ And he mentioned: ‘Sure. It’s in Ciénaga too.’”
On his travels, Gutiérrez noticed for himself how totally the imaginary has come to infiltrate the true. Whereas most of the individuals Gutiérrez met had by no means learn One Hundred Years of Solitude, its episodes have been as acquainted to them as their very own household lore – proof, it appears, of the enduring power of the Caribbean oral custom.
“With Macondo, it’s not nearly an interpretation or a modification of actuality: Gabo’s personal fiction has ended up interfering with actuality and altering it in very attention-grabbing methods,” says the journalist.
Take, for instance, the notorious Ciénaga banana bloodbath of 1928, which seems in fictionalised type in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“Within the e-book, 3,000 individuals are killed, however I investigated it and obtained maintain of a recent report and not more than 100 individuals have been killed,” he says. “A type of fable was constructed with Macondo that type of ended up spreading by means of the entire area.”
Not all of the items in Imaginary Areas are reportage or semi-fictitious. For her journey again to Umuofia, the Nigerian author Chika Unigwe selected to jot down a brief story specializing in the great-granddaughter of Okonkwo, the doomed protagonist of Issues Fall Aside.
Achebe’s e-book, which she learn when she was comparatively younger, opened Unigwe’s eyes to a model of the previous that differed radically from the one she had been taught.
“[It] confirmed me that my individuals had a historical past, a civilisation, a lifestyle that was scuppered by colonisation,” she says. “For the primary time, colonisation was introduced to me, not as this benign, benevolent mission, however as a violent invasion that pressured the suicide of considered one of Umuofia’s most outstanding males. That's wild.”
Whereas Unigwe’s protagonist, Obiageliaku, lives in a special Umuofia to her great-grandfather, she bears the burden of the household’s disgrace, and the society she inhabits stays painfully patriarchal and nonetheless struggles with its colonial legacy.
“I wished it to go in dialogue with Achebe’s novel, increasing that dialog and inserting a lady at its centre in a method that will have triggered Umuofia,” says the author. “I hope that it teaches us that the imaginary – not simply imaginary areas – will be platforms for having trustworthy, related conversations.”
Gutiérrez agrees that fiction is usually a extra supple and delicate materials than historic or geographical reality when tackling the large questions.
“Whereas the e-book is a type of bridge or dialogue with fiction, the concept wasn’t simply to speak about these imaginary areas from a tutorial or theoretical standpoint, but in addition to truly go in the hunt for them by means of journey and expeditions,” he says. “And that’s what provides the e-book its actual heft.”
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