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In 2018, I wrote a general essay about magical realism as a genre, with the intent of clarifying why it is deeply bothersome, and even problematic, for white folks and colonizers to claim the label for their own fiction. I grew up with magical realism in my home, even growing up with atheist skeptics, and in my communities in Puerto Rico. It was an integral part of my education and the development of my way of thinking and believing.
In 2019, I read several threads (now deleted) by Silvia Moreno-García about magical realism, the general thrust of which was that magical realism is a dead, historical genre. It’s the result of a time and place that can’t be repeated. This notion has warred inside me with my deep-rooted love of the genre, and with the very fact that magical realism is just the way certain things are understood in the communities I grew up in. How can it be dead?
Magical realism has been rife with categorization problems from the start, ever since Cuban author Alejo Carpentier published his conception of lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real) and bifurcated the genre in ways that were, and still are, elided over, ignored, or simply impenetrable. Do “realismo mágico” and “lo real maravilloso” refer to the same concept, or not? Whether they do or not, it’s this historical, ongoing confusion that underscores how much we have moved on from a classic understanding of and conversation about magical realism. Hurtado Heras (1997) even offers as one reason for the confusion that magical realism was (emphasis his) “a type of literature that characterized Latin American aspirations post-World War II, in a continual search for identity.
The distinctions between lo real maravilloso and magical realism have flattened into a purely historical discussion, as instead Latin American authors must argue for their speculative fiction to receive labels other than “magical realism”. To an English-speaking, English-publishing audience, this second label of marvelous real has never even existed; the tension and criticism that went on for decades post-WWII in Latin American critical circles, particularly during the Boom of the 60s, has never been present in this modern public market. Instead, publishers lean on the little thrill that everyone gets when reading the words “magical realism”: maybe, perhaps, you can find the magic in your regular, mundane, everyday life too.
To some extent, I agree with Moreno-García: Latin American magical realism, as we understand it, is a historical literary genre and way of thinking that cannot be replicated in Latin America anymore because of the sociopolitical and technological changes that have come to pass. Urbanization and Westernization have affected concepts of time and realities of nature, both of which are gateways to the magical*. Nothing written in the current day can be purely magical realism anymore.
But I don’t know that I would describe magical realism as dead. That feels improbable, knowing how much it still influences writers from colonized countries around the world today. Even just knowing how much it still thrives in my own household.
In 2018, I attended the Association of Writers & Writers' Programs Conference in Portland on a whim, buying tickets literally the night before. At that conference, I attended a panel called "The Cultural Responsibility of Magical Realism." It was a moving, clear-sighted panel that came back to me when I initially began grappling with the idea of death of a genre.
"It's not a genre," Ana Dávila Cardinal, young adult fiction author from Puerto Rico, said, "it's a movement...and it's not just Latinx. It belongs to many post-colonial authors."
Perhaps what seems like death is just movement. Magical realism has moved: flown to the pastures it is needed now, a platform for people oppressed by colonizers, whose ancient traditions and stories need to take form and fight in their languages and their histories. And I know, myself, that realismo mágico can easily wend a tendril or two into our fantasies, a gentle thread keeping us tethered to the past -- so that we don't forget. So that we can tell our children. And so that we can fight another day.
Hurtado Heras, Saúl. "El Realismo Mágico: génesis, evolución, confusión." (1997) Convergencia: Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 14, pp. 261-277.
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