Carribean and Columbian Writers

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (American Spanish: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɣaɾˈsi.a ˈmaɾkes]
(About this soundlisten); 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story
writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo [ˈɡaβo] or Gabito [ɡaˈβito]
throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century
and one of the best in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International
Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education
that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no
inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes
Barcha; they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short
stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The
Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have
achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for
popularizing a literary style known as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in
otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in the fictional village of
Macondo (mainly inspired by his birthplace, Aracataca), and most of them explore the theme of
solitude.

Upon García Márquez’s death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the President of Colombia,
called him "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."

Novels

In Evil Hour (1962)

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
The General in His Labyrinth (1989)
Of Love and Other Demons (1994)

Novellas

Leaf Storm (1955)

No One Writes to the Colonel (1961)
The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1972)
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)
Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004)
Short story collectionsEdit
Big Mama's Funeral (1962)
The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1972)
Eyes of a Blue Dog (1974)
Collected Stories (1984)
Strange Pilgrims (1993)
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (1955)

Non-fiction

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970)

The Solitude of Latin America (1982)
The Fragrance of Guava (1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza)
Clandestine in Chile (1986)
Changing the History of Africa: Angola and Namibia (1991, with David Deutschmann)
News of a Kidnapping (1996)
A Country for Children (1998)
Living to Tell the Tale (2002)
The Scandal of the Century: Selected Journalistic Writings, 1950-1984 (2019)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad, American Spanish: [sjen ˈaɲoz
ðe soleˈðað]) is a landmark 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells
the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía,
founded the town of Macondo, a fictitious town in the country of Colombia.

The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it
as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and
1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the
Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.

Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One
Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 37 languages and sold more than 30 million
copies. The novel, considered García Márquez's magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is
recognized as one of the most significant works in the Spanish literary canon.

Love in the time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera (Spanish: El amor en los tiempos del cólera) is a novel by
Colombian Nobel prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez. The novel was first published
in Spanish in 1985. Alfred A. Knopf published an English translation in 1988, and an English-
language movie adaptation was released in 2007.

Plot summary

The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Florentino and
Fermina fall in love in their youth. A secret relationship blossoms between the two with the help
of Fermina's Aunt Escolástica. They exchange several love letters. However, once Fermina's
father, Lorenzo Daza, finds out about the two, he forces his daughter to stop seeing Florentino
immediately. When she refuses, he and his daughter move in with his deceased wife's family in
another city. Regardless of the distance, Fermina and Florentino continue to communicate via
telegraph. However, upon her return, Fermina realizes that her relationship with Florentino was
nothing but a dream since they are practically strangers; she breaks off her engagement to
Florentino and returns all his letters.

A young and accomplished national hero, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, meets Fermina and begins to court
her. Despite her initial dislike of Urbino, Fermina gives in to her father's persuasion and the
security and wealth Urbino offers, and they wed. Urbino is a physician devoted to science,
modernity, and "order and progress". He is committed to the eradication of cholera and to the
promotion of public works. He is a rational man whose life is organized precisely and who
greatly values his importance and reputation in society. He is a herald of progress and
modernization.

Even after Fermina's engagement and marriage, Florentino swore to stay faithful and wait for
her. However, his promiscuity gets the better of him. Even with all the women he is with, he
makes sure that Fermina will never find out. Meanwhile, Fermina and Urbino grow old together,
going through happy years and unhappy ones and experiencing all the reality of marriage. At an
elderly age, Urbino attempts to get his pet parrot out of his mango tree, only to fall off the ladder
he was standing on and die. After the funeral, Florentino proclaims his love for Fermina once
again and tells her he has stayed faithful to her all these years. Hesitant at first because she is
only recently widowed, and finds his advances untoward, Fermina eventually gives him a second
chance. They attempt a life together, having lived two lives separately for over five decades.

Urbino proves in the end not to have been an entirely faithful husband, confessing one affair to
Fermina many years into their marriage. Though the novel seems to suggest that Urbino's love
for Fermina was never as spiritually chaste as Florentino's was, it also complicates Florentino's
devotion by cataloging his many trysts as well as a few potentially genuine loves. By the end of
the book, Fermina comes to recognize Florentino's wisdom and maturity, and their love is
allowed to blossom during their old age.

The Autumn of the Patriarch

The Autumn of the Patriarch (original Spanish title: El otoño del patriarca) is a novel written by
Gabriel García Márquez in 1975.

A "poem on the solitude of power" according to the author, the novel is a flowing tract on the life
of an eternal dictator. The book is divided into six sections, each retelling the same story of the
infinite power held by the archetypical Caribbean tyrant.

García Márquez based his fictional dictator on a variety of real-life fascists, including Gustavo
Rojas Pinilla of his Colombian homeland, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain (the novel
was written in Barcelona), and Venezuela's Juan Vicente Gómez. The product is a universal story
of the disastrous effects created by the concentration of power into a single man.

Plot introduction

The book is written in long paragraphs with extended sentences. The general's thoughts are
relayed to the reader through winding sentences which convey his desperation and loneliness
alongside the atrocities and ruthless behavior that keep him in power.

One of the book's most striking aspects is its focus on the God-like status held by the protagonist
and the unfathomable awe and respect with which his people regard him. Dictators and
strongmen such as Franco, Somoza, and Trujillo managed to hold sway over the populations of
their nations despite internal political division. García Márquez symbolizes this with the
discovery of the dictator's corpse in the presidential palace.

Sir Derek Walcott

Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint
Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the
University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught undergraduate
and graduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex
from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many
critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott
received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for
his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society
of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for
Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the
Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.

Themes

Methodism and spirituality have played a significant role from the beginning in Walcott's work.
He commented, "I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up
believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation." Describing his writing process, he wrote, "the
body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That is the
ecstasy...Ultimately, it's what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at
everything and everything we look upon is blessed.' That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a
transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his
nature."[6] He also notes, "if one thinks a poem is coming on...you do make a retreat, a
withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on
is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity."[6]

Influences

Walcott said his writing was influenced by the work of the American poets, Robert Lowell and
Elizabeth Bishop, who were also friends.

Playwriting

He published more than twenty plays, the majority of which have been produced by the Trinidad
Theatre Workshop and have also been widely staged elsewhere. Many of them address, either
directly or indirectly, the liminal status of the West Indies in the post-colonial period. Through
poetry he also explores the paradoxes and complexities of this legacy.

Essays

In his 1970 essay "What the Twilight Says: An Overture", discussing art and theatre in his native
region (from Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays), Walcott reflects on the West Indies
as colonized space. He discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of
truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: "We are all
strangers here... Our bodies think in one language and move in another". The epistemological
effects of colonization inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers. Mi-Jean, one of the
eponymous brothers, is shown to have much information, but to truly know nothing. Every line
Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is unable to synthesize it or
apply it to his life as a colonised person.
Walcott notes of growing up in West Indian culture:

What we were deprived of was also our privilege. There was a great joy in making a world that
so far, up to then, had been undefined... My generation of West Indian writers has felt such a
powerful elation at having the privilege of writing about places and people for the first time and,
simultaneously, having behind them the tradition of knowing how well it can be done—by a
Defoe, a Dickens, a Richardson.[6]

Walcott identified as "absolutely a Caribbean writer", a pioneer, helping to make sense of the
legacy of deep colonial damage. In such poems as "The Castaway" (1965) and in the play
Pantomime (1978), he uses the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture and
what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge to
begin again, salvage the best of other cultures and make something new. These images recur in
later work as well. He writes: "If we continue to sulk and say, Look at what the slave-owner did,
and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels
that glorify a non-existent past, then time passes us by."

Omeros

Walcott's epic book-length poem Omeros was published in 1990 to critical acclaim. The poem
very loosely echoes and references Homer and some of his major characters from The Iliad.
Some of the poem's major characters include the island fishermen Achille and Hector, the retired
English officer Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, the housemaid Helen, the blind man Seven
Seas (who symbolically represents Homer), and the author himself.

Although the main narrative of the poem takes place on the island of St. Lucia, where Walcott
was born and raised, Walcott also includes scenes from Brookline, Massachusetts (where
Walcott was living and teaching at the time of the poem's composition), and the character
Achille imagines a voyage from Africa onto a slave ship that is headed for the Americas; also, in
Book Five of the poem, Walcott narrates some of his travel experiences in a variety of cities
around the world, including Lisbon, London, Dublin, Rome, and Toronto.

Composed in a variation on terza rima, the work explores the themes that run throughout
Walcott's oeuvre: the beauty of the islands, the colonial burden, the fragmentation of Caribbean
identity, and the role of the poet in a post-colonial world.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, two years after publishing
the epic poem "Omeros." He was known for writing about "the harsh legacy of colonialism and
the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds." His poetic voice reflected a blend
of his ear for the English language and his sense of his own people.

Stephen Breslow explained that he and the Swedish Academy chose Derek Walcott for the Nobel
Laureate in Literature because his work had "a strong regional voice that transcends its topical
locality, through the depth and breadth of its poetic resonance and through its global human
implication." It was Walcott's ability to be more than just "exotic" that brought his work critical
attention. Breslow explains that "Walcott has merged a profound, rhapsodic reverie upon his
remote birthplace – its people, its landscape, and its history – with the central, classical tradition
of Western civilization." This ability shows the importance of multiculturalism and literary
mastery to the Swedish Academy. Walcott's works represent how different cultures can enrich
one another to produce even more compelling works.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Walcott describes life on Antilles and what it means to discover
identity. He describes all of the "broken fragments" of his "diasporic" identity. People need
books, he says, but they are not enough to encompass all that a culture is. Walcott says that "the
visible poetry of the Antilles, then. [is] Survival" because "all of the Antilles, every island, is an
effort of memory; every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog." He
encompasses the diasporic identity found in Caribbean Literature by looking at how insignificant
he feels because he cannot, alone, fully bring together a cultural identity.

Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid (/kɪnˈkeɪd/; born May 25, 1949)[1] is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist,
gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St John's, Antigua (part of the twin-island nation
of Antigua and Barbuda). She lives in North Bennington, Vermont (in the United States), during
the summers, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard
University during the academic year.

Her novels are loosely autobiographical, though Kincaid has warned against interpreting their
autobiographical elements too literally: "Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true.
You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence." Her work often
prioritizes "impressions and feelings over plot development" and features conflict with both a
strong maternal figure and colonial and neocolonial influences. Excerpts from her non-fiction
book A Small Place were used as part of the narrative for Stephanie Black's 2001 documentary,
Life and Debt.
One of Kincaid's contributions according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr, African-American literary
critic, scholar, writer, and public intellectual, is that:

She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility.
She assumes them both. I think it's a distinct departure that she's making, and I think that more
and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does. So that we can
get beyond the large theme of racism and get to the deeper themes of how black people love and
cry and live and die. Which, after all, is what art is all about.

Themes

Kincaid's writing explores such themes as colonialism and colonial legacy, postcolonialism and
neo-colonialism, gender and sexuality, renaming, mother-daughter relationships, British and
American imperialism, colonial education, writing, racism, class, power, and adolescence. In her
most recent novel, See Now Then, Kincaid also first explores the theme of time.

Tone and style

Kincaid's unique style has created disagreement among critics and scholars, and as Harold
Bloom explains: "Most of the published criticism of Jamaica Kincaid has stressed her political
and social concerns, somewhat at the expense of her literary qualities." As works such as At the
Bottom of the River and The Autobiography of My Mother use Antiguan cultural practices,
some critics say these works employ magical realism. "The author claims, however, that [her
work] is 'magic' and 'real,' but not necessarily [works] of 'magical realism'." Other critics claim
that her style is "modernist" because much of her fiction is "culturally specific and
experimental". It has also been praised for its keen observation of character, curtness, wit, and
lyrical quality. Her short story Girl is essentially a list of instructions on how a girl should live
and act, but the messages are much larger than the literal list of suggestions. Kincaid makes a list
of motherly orders a piece of literature. Derek Walcott, 1992 Nobel laureate, said of Kincaid's
writing: "As she writes a sentence, psychologically, its temperature is that it heads toward its
own contradiction. It's as if the sentence is discovering itself, discovering how it feels. And that
is astonishing, because it's one thing to be able to write a good declarative sentence; it's another
thing to catch the temperature of the narrator, the narrator's feeling. And that's universal, and not
provincial in any way". Susan Sontag has also commended Kincaid's writing for its "emotional
truthfulness," poignancy, and complexity. Her writing has been described as "fearless" and her
"force and originality lie in her refusal to curb her tongue". Giovanna Covi describes her unique
writing: "The tremendous strength of Kincaid's stories lies in their capacity to resist all canons.
They move at the beat of a drum and the rhythm of jazz…" She is described as writing with a
"double vision" meaning that one line of plot mirrors another, providing the reader with rich
symbolism that enhances the possibilities of interpretation.
Novels

Annie John (1985)

Lucy (1990)
The Autobiography of My Mother (1996)
Mr Potter (2002)
See Now Then (2013)

Short story collections

At the Bottom of the River (1983)

Non-fiction books

A Small Place (1988)

My Brother (1997)
Talk Stories (2001)
My Garden Book (2001)
Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005)

Annie John

Annie John, a novel written by Jamaica Kincaid in 1985, details the growth of a girl in Antigua,
an island in the Caribbean. It covers issues as diverse as mother-daughter relationships,
lesbianism, racism, clinical depression, poverty, education, and the struggle between medicine
based on "scientific fact" and that based on "native superstitious know-how".

Plot summary Edit

Annie John, the protagonist of the book, starts out as a young girl who worships her mother. She
follows her everywhere, and is shocked and hurt when she learns that she must some day live in
a different house from her mother. While her mother tries to teach her to become a lady, Annie is
sent to a new school where she must prove herself intellectually and make new friends. She then
falls in love with a girl by the name of Gwen. She promises Gwen that she will always love her.
However, Annie later finds herself admiring and adoring a girl that she called the "Red Girl".
She admires this girl in all aspects of her life. To Annie this girl is the meaning of freedom
because she does not have to do any daily hygienic routines like the other girls.

Annie John is then moved to a higher class because of her intelligence. For this reason, Annie is
drawn away from her best friend Gwen and the Red Girl, while alienating herself from her
mother and the other adults in her life. It later becomes clear that she also suffers from some kind
of mental depression, which distances her from both her family and her friends. The book ends
with her physically distancing herself away from all that she knows and loves by leaving home
for nursing school in England.

A Small Place

A Small Place is a work of creative nonfiction published in 1988 by Jamaica Kincaid. A book-
length essay drawing on Kincaid's experiences growing up in Antigua, it can be read as an
indictment of the Antiguan government, the tourist industry and Antigua's British colonial
legacy.

The book, written in four sections, "combines social and cultural critique with autobiography and
a history of imperialism to offer a powerful portrait of (post)colonial Antigua."

Tourism as a neo-colonial structure

In the first section of A Small Place, Kincaid employs the perspective of the tourist in order to
demonstrate the inherent escapism in creating a distance from the realities of a visited place.
Nadine Dolby dissects the theme of tourism in A Small Place and places Kincaid's depiction of
tourism in a globalized context that justifies Kincaid's strong feelings toward it. Dolby
corroborates Kincaid's depiction of the tourist creating separation by "othering" the locale and
the individuals that inhabit it. Furthermore, the tourist industry is linked to a global economic
system that ultimately does not translate into benefits for the very Antiguans who enable it.

The tourist may experience the beauty on the surface of Antigua while being wholly ignorant of
the actual political and social conditions that the Antiguan tourism industry epitomizes and
reinforces. Corinna Mcleod points out the disenfranchising nature of the tourism industry in its
reinforcement of an exploitative power structure. In effect, the industry recolonizes Antigua by
placing locals at a disenfranchised and subservient position in a global economic system that
ultimately does not serve them.

Racism and legacies of colonialism

While Kincaid expresses anger towards slavery, colonialism and the broken Antiguan identity
that it has left in its wake, she avoids retreating to simple racialization in order to explain the past
and present, for doing so would further "other" an already marginalized group of people.[6]
Kincaid sheds light on the oppressive hierarchical structures of colonialism, which is still evident
in the learned power structures of present-day, post-colonial Antigua.
While she indeed acknowledges the justifications of oppression based on race in England's
colonization of Antigua, she also attempts to transcend the notions of an inescapable racialized
past. In doing so she attempts to shape readers’ view of Antigua by creating a sense of agency.

Edward Brathwaite

Edward Kamau Brathwaite (/kəˈmaʊ ˈbræθweɪt/; born 11 May 1930) is a Barbadian poet and
academic, widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. Formerly a
professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite was the 2006
International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses.

Brathwaite holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the
Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright
Fellowships in 1983,[3] and is a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature,
the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall
Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum.

Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the
African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970);
The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens
(1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of
which established him as the authority of note on nation language.

Brathwaite often makes use of a combination of customized typefaces (some resembling dot
matrix printing) and spelling, referred to as Sycorax video style.