Colombia’s War with language

Colombia’s war with language

By Pedro Pizano

Paternostro, Silvana My Colombian War: a journey through the country I left behind 310pp. Holt and Company $16.00
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When Silvana Paternostro, a Colombian-born journalist and one of 50 Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium, went home for a writing seminar with the most renowned of all Colombian novelists and a former journalist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, she realized that the “magical realism” of Colombia had become an imaginary world of horror stories. “I am here as the journalist who went to Colombia to move between the magical and the real—and sometime actually the awful…. except I like to call my stories non-fiction magical realism,” Paternostro said once in L.A.

My Colombian War is a moving and horrifying account of how Paternostro tried to recover the magical realism of her childhood by trying to be a war reporter in that forsaken land. It is written in short bursts of beautiful heart-wrenching prose that makes one (or me at least) cry at the despair and hope her words and phrases convey.

“To them [Colombians], Colombia might not be at war,” Paternostro says in the book, “But I am at war with Colombia. I am going back because there is a war, brutal war, a war full of horror. I am going to tell them that each and every one knows it, allows it, and hides it. Everyone has blood on their hands. I want everyone to plead guilty.”

The only way to fight any war is through words. As Paternostro says, “Magical realism is perfectly suited to a country like Colombia, where the truth is often so terrible and unspeakable that it needs to be told as if it were a fantasy,” and therein lies her strife.

My Colombian War tells the tale of Paternostro’s journey through her childhood on an assignment from the New York Times. Her initial intent was to write about Colombia’s war by visiting her grandfather’s farm, El Carmen. Through a personal experience and personal history she sought to recreate the country’s fight over land that has been reenacted by different groups since the birth of the modern Colombian Republic in 1820. At first it was a blood bath between Liberals and Conservatives, then it was genocide between Liberals and Conservatives, then it was a massacre between the FARC, the ELN, the Army, the Police and the AUC. And so it will go on forever if no one is willing to stop the vicious cycle of fighting for land in Colombia.

For some, the history of Colombia becomes the background in which Paternostro self-aggrandizes her emotions and they write off the book as a narcissistic but brilliant fictional narrative, for others the local becomes the universal and through her life we understand the whole; “Blending superb reportage with poignant personal stories, she offers stunning, comprehensive narrative of Colombia’s complicated past and present,” as the back cover explains.

In the end no one else could have written this book: her qualities as a reporter, her emotional grandeur and analysis could have only come from someone like Paternostro. Her story is in itself magical realism and her war with language and with life brings with it great literature in the making. I would put it next to Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Garcia Marquez: his best story and the one that has lived in my mind the longest and the most. Happy reading!