A comment on magical realism:

She died from washing her hair. It was the year after the students disappeared from the University in Chosica, and after the mothers screamed when Fujimori came to christen the roads, during tree-dusting season.

If you pardon my very rough diction and lack of stylistic grace, this could be a sentence in a magical realist novel. Through Western eyes it seems fantastic- you can’t die from washing your hair, the roads in Huascaran were christened before the massacre in Chosica, and you don’t dust trees. However, through Peruvian eyes, it doesn’t seem fantastic at all. My host mom firmly believes (as do many in the US) that wet hair causes “cholera” (it is worth noting here that all upper respiratory maladies, from a one-day mild common cold to the worst flu/ bronchitis/pneumonia you’ve ever had in your life can all be described using the same word in Spanish). She hasn’t let me shower in three days because I have a slight cough (don’t worry- I snuck in a sink hair-washing tonight after she left). There also was a massacre at the University of Chosica, back sometime in the mid-nineties, where the government came in and “disappeared” nine students and two teachers. This may be the stuff of nightmares in America, but it actually happens here, and everyone over the age of 8 in Peru right now lived it him or herself. It also so happens that Fujimori, the then president of Peru, did come to christen the roads in Huascaran, a small settlement of almost no national importance. I don’t know why, but it happened. As for the timing of things, it’s just not an issue here. My very own language and culture professor swore up and down the Chosica massacre was in 2006. I pointed out that Fujimori fled the country in 2000, and only then did she concede that the massacre must have been before that. The point is though, that if enough people think things happened in a different way than they did, and it becomes the collective memory, then it becomes true. I believe this happens a lot here, and accounts for many of the more fantastic moments of Latin American history. It doesn’t matter, however, what actually happened because the memories that people have, and the stories that they tell are the history that they continue to live, regardless of what “really” happened. And, as a final point, they actually do dust the trees in Huascaran. They need to because the trees are covered in dust and would die from lack of access to sunlight otherwise. (The air quality here is awesome- let me tell you.)

So, when I say that reading a magical realist novel is really like living in Latin America- that is what I mean. Perhaps it is true that they didn’t cut up the lake in Colombia and sell it various American businesses (as happens in One Hundred Years of Solitude), but in a country where things that were once considered basic human rights (like access to water) were sold to foreign countries, this concept suddenly seems much less fantastic. I’m sure that these observations will only become more apparent when I move to my site, which will most likely be dominated by more traditional thinking, and I am fascinated to learn more about how this creating of a collective fantastic memory affects every day life in the towns of Latin America.