Around the World in 32 Countries: Colombia

Number of recognized regional languages: 68
Main languages: Spanish, (in the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina) English

Independence: 1810 (declared from Spain)

Colombia and Panama (and, for a while, even more states) used to be joined as the Republic of New Granada, the Granadine Confederation, and then the United States of Colombia, in the 19th century.

"[... T]he Republic of Colombia was finally declared in 1886. Panama seceded in 1903, leading to Colombia's present borders."

Laguna de la Cocha (El Encano)
Photograph by G. Parra (attr.), c. 2013
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

Capital City: Bogotá

Surface area: 1,141,748 km2 (larger than Bolivia, smaller than Peru)

Currency: peso
Driving side: right

Main trading partners: United States, China, EU, Latin American countries

Main exports that are food: fruit and other produce, sugar and sweets
Main exports that are not food: mineral fuel, oils, plastics, precious stones, metals, lumber, electronics, clothing, glass, etc.

Information taken from "Colombia" and "List of countries and dependencies by area" [Wikipedia]

***

For Colombia, I read two books.

A Hundred Years of Solitude requires little introduction! Of course it made Gabriel García Marquez one of the giants of world literature. I did not finish it because I objected to some of the content, but it is undoubtedly great literature and an absorbing world to sink into.

It is an epic of multiple generations who begin a backwoods life in the remote forests of Colombia and found a town. Their community is visited by itinerant eccentrics who pierce it, they see the fading traces of the conquistadores of long ago, and disperse at times amongst the men who (for whichever reason) linked up to civilization again by signing up to fight in its wars.

Rocas del abra Zipaquirá
- Landscape in the Zipaquirá archaeological zone, Colombia
Photograph by S. Iizarazo, c. 2012
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

Because Marquez's genre here is magical realism, magic rules his characters' existence, whether it is the magic of science or the magic of alchemy.

The descriptions of rural life are not the elite explorations of national history and culture that often characterize 19th century literature to which one is used. The choice of milieu, characters and themes feel symptomatic of the author's leftwing sympathies. There is a distrust of the faraway centres of national authority, which filters through to the attitudes of the characters.

The reason I stopped reading it is that an adult male character becomes infatuated with a 9-year-old girl; even the character recognizes that this is weird, but either way I thought 'I'm out of here.'

Pendants by the lost Tairona people
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Photo by R. Müller (2006)
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence

*

La Casa de la Belleza was written decades later, first published in 2015.

It transplants us to modern times in urban contemporary Colombia. Written by a journalist, Melba Escobar de Nogales, it explores Bogotá (a city of over 7 million people — more than Berlin's population) through the lens of a set of women who frequent the eponymous beauty salon. It looks pessimistically at gender relations, class, and racism, and the imperfections of the privileged class. Women and everyone else exploit others as they are exploited themselves. Not unexpectedly, since Colombia is still over 70% Roman Catholic, the book also casts a jaded eye on the rampant violence and moral corruption amongst the purported Christianity of the elite.

Of course the author's theme is the ridiculous juxtaposition of a society's obsession with beauty and material luxury, with the perpetration of ugliness and degradation.

The novel itself was a quick success internationally, translated into multiple languages from the original Spanish. I read it in Spanish and found the vocabulary quite specialized in parts; but now I know what sancocho, avena and aguardiente are.

Escobar writes this passage in La Casa de la Belleza: 

"Al ponerse en rojo, mendigos, desplazados, forajidos, drogadictos, tullidos, saltimbanquis, desempleados, analfabetas, maltratados, mutilados, niños y mujeres preñadas asaltan los vehículos en un performance diario tan repetitivo y predecible que ya a nadie sorprende. O a casi nadie."

(Rough translation: When the traffic lights turn red, beggars, displaced, outlaws, drug addicts, cripples*, charlatans, the unemployed, illiterate, and maltreated, children and pregnant women attack the cars in a daily performance so repetitive and predictable that no one is surprised any more. Or almost no one. [*I'm using this term as it appears to be the closest translation, but I am not sure if it is appropriate to use it in English.])

Karen is the heroine. She grew up in the seaside city of Cartagena as the daughter of a teen mother in the slums, or the barrio. A single mother, saving tips from her work in the Bogotá beauty salon to pay for a better life for her son, dark-skinned and attractive, her warm heart and capacity to care for others are badly repaid with betrayal and rape. A whole network of characters who all know each other begins having a noxious effect on her life. Eventually she becomes an ambiguous figure herself — or does she?

I think this book is a thriller rather than an elaborate literary novel, and it is also frankly just grim to read; I couldn't wait to have it over with and would only recommend it to someone who is neutral-about to fond-of reading about murder and violence against women. It treats its characters too strictly to gather the scope or insight of great literature.

I speak from little relevant experience, but my impression is that the book also splits and founders on a central paradox. It presents itself as critical, fearless and progressive. But the narrative voice complains about minor fishes, never landing real hits on the power figures who bear the most responsibility for the social/political/economic problems that face Colombia. Although she does try to portray individual members as pathetic and frail. In the end it feels more passive-aggressive than iconoclastic.

The book also 'borrows' grievances from Afro-Colombian women — the whole spectrum of racism from the daily torments of straightening hair to look 'respectable,' up to the more violent manifestations — when it might be better to read a book by Afro-Colombian women about this phenomenon instead.

(At the end, I'll note as a disclaimer that a Colombian woman, perhaps in her 30s, was once invited into my high school Spanish class in around 2001 — she was the friend of my teacher. She stressed that many people around the world had a totally wrong view of Colombia: it is not all drug lords and warfare.)

El Salto de Tequendama
Photograph by J. Cufiño (attributed.), c. 2013
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0 licence

January 2021 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

First of all, it feels appropriate to pay tribute to Jan Morris. An adventure-loving journalist and non-fiction author who broke the news of the ascension of Mount Everest in 1953, foe of political correctness and friend of many who admired her, host to pilgrimages to her rural home long into her old age, and a transgender woman in the public eye many decades before anti-trans bigotry became controversial, she died in Wales in November 2020. 

It feels strange to single out just one of the thousands of witty and insightful passages that she wrote for a good half century, but one that stuck with me was quoted by Jonathan Kandell, writing for the New York Times, in his obituary. Kandell summarized that "The more she was treated as a woman," (Jan Morris presented as a woman beginning in the 1970s) "the more she behaved — in her own estimation — as a woman."

“If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming,” she wrote. “If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.” She added, “I discovered that even now men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative, and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves; so I generally obliged them."

(Like Jane Austen's quotation in Northanger Abbey: "The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author;—and to her treatment of the subject I will only add in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire any thing more in woman than ignorance.")

Here is another passage, from a Tumblr blog for her book Contact! (2012):

I shared a taxi one day with a lady in a blue silk turban, who was visiting Washington and was about to meet her daughter for lunch at a Hot Shoppe. [...] it was as we passed the Capitol itself, and were deploring the state of the world in general, that she spoke the words I best remember: ‘I sometimes wonder, oh, what kind of a world are we bringing our children into, when you have to pay a quarter for a doughnut?’

Twenty-five cents for a doughnut.  Even Americans bleed.

*

Regarding daily reading, I am still hoping that sooner or later it will be safe to commute to the office again. In that case, The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane will shoot to the top of the list as the customary S-Bahn reading.

In January, the author of The Hate U Give and On the Come Up will release another book for young readers, Concrete Rose. It goes back in time to visit the early life of the father of the girl who was the heroine of The Hate U Give, and how he breaks free from a gang. While she was still writing it, Angie Thomas touted it on Twitter as her best book yet; so I am looking forward.

In the meantime, I am reading a whimsical and intelligent book about donkeys and humans, Esel (2013) by Jutta Person, in German. My godfather gave it to me for my birthday because I have a well-known weakness for donkeys. It comes in a nice grey hardcover binding, from an independent publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin!

Besides, more books from the NPR best books of 2020 list are tempting me to read them:

Cover of Blacktop Wasteland, via Flatiron Books

Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron Books, 2020) is a crime novel by S. A. Cosby, about a car mechanic in the southern US who is drawn into petty crime against his will. What really 'sells' the book for me is the way that Adam Lazarre-White narrates the audiobook and the suspenseful writing. Lazarre-White brings detail and life to the phrases, lending a little softening and gentler pace to the terser prose, which has a masculinely direct and clear-cut 'voice.' It's also a tribute to Cosby's literary judgment that I don't object to his metaphors (which in my view often descend into cliché or kitsch in prose) in for example this passage:

Seconds ticked by and Beauregard felt a hollow opening blossom in his chest. He could see the gears working in Warren’s head and for a moment he thought he was gonna pass. But Beauregard knew he wouldn’t. How could he? He had talked himself into a corner and his pride wouldn’t let him back down.

[Update: I didn't finish this novel because it quickly became too graphically violent for me, but literarily it still seemed great.]

Eat a Peach, a popular 2020 memoir by David Chang, was on NPR's list. It inspired me to look at Chang's other books. Momofuku, where the New York Times food writer Peter Meehan helped with the text, is of course a cookbook and was written in an appropriately chef-like, profane and macho style in 2009. Its biographical introduction traces the Korean-American chef's early years cooking in the US, then his journey to Japan where he yearns to learn the art of the ramen noodle, and back to New York City. There Chang opens up a no-frills restaurant featuring, mostly, noodles. His later restaurants were popular enough that I heard of them by following New York media in the early 2000s. Eat a Peach sheds a deeper, troubled perspective on the life that is lightly sketched in Momofuku.

More information: "Momofuku (restaurants)" [Wikipedia]

***

Barack Obama's A Promised Land needs no introduction. I bought a large hardcover edition at Dussmann Kulturkaufhaus here in Berlin; and I am glad to have made the 'investment' because the book is so insightful, humorous, and re-readable. It also requires no advertising: it was stacked everywhere on the ground floor even of this bookshop across the Atlantic.

Cover of Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You
via NPR

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America is an earlier work (2016) by Ibram X. Kendi, an American professor and anti-racism-expert who survived a stage 4 cancer to become a bestselling author and spokesperson against racism with the May 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the public eye. It has also been adapted for children in a new book collaboration with Jason Reynolds. How to Be an Antiracist (2019) — a book that argues that it is more helpful to be actively antiracist, than to simply declare one's self free of racism and hope for the best — was also especially popular in 2020.

Lastly, I began listening to an audiobook of an English translation of Cho Nam-Joo's novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. It is written in the third person, in straightforward, deadpan sentences. The titular character is a young mother who begins to fall apart in a perturbing, at times darkly funny, but understandable way, because of all of the pressures that are put on her by a sexist and generally dismissive social environment.