In Spring of 2006, my freshman year of college, I was selected to join the Centennial Scholars Program at Barnard College: it is a grant and mentorship program through which several students in each year receive a budget and support to develop an independent project of their choosing, to be presented in the senior year in an alternative manner to what is traditionally done in the student's thesis work.
Using grant funds from the program, I studied abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina for 6 months in the Spring and Summer of 2008, and travelled to Valparaiso, Chile and Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. My original intention was to study magical realist literature in Latin America, and develop a creative writing/research project based on my reading and travels: what is it that has made so many writers and artists from different countries use such a similar type of logic in their writing, I asked? Magical realism is a logic in which ghosts and past generations populate the same spaces as people, time flows as slow as eternity or jumps and skips decades; in which a well cooked meal can cause anything from spontaneous tears, to unstoppable laughter; in which a house can begin to take over the lives of its inhabitants; in which two people can occupy the same body at different times in history. How would I, by placing myself in a South American country for half a year, be effected by a culture and landscape that has produced so much magical realist writing?
These are questions I still may not be able to answer, but I have held on to one of the ideas that is central to magical realism as I have pursued this exploration further: unlike surrealism, magical realism takes odd occurrences and treats them as if they were natural, or which creates an unexpected, strange situation out of normal, unassuming elements. In the fiction of argentine poet Julio Cortazar, it is nearly impossible to tell exactly where you are headed until it suddenly and simply becomes clear that there is a tiger living in the house, or that the man has become a fish, or that the protagonist’s nightmare hallucinations are actually his reality, and the dream is what we thought was real. With a simple, nearly missable sentence, the situation becomes something wholly unexpected and different.
Context and presentation are everything, I realized: In Buenos Aires, where by the end of 6 months my Spanish had become quite fluent and relatively authentic sounding, my body and identity were still anamolies, stared at and commented on constantly as I made my way each day through a city whose inhabitants are 88.9% of European descent, 7% mestizo, 2.1% asian and only 2 percent black. Upon visiting Brazil, especially Salvador da Bahia, one of the first ports of entry for African slaves and now considered the capital of Afro-Brazilian culture, the racial/ cultural make up was completely different: I felt suddenly at ease as I fit in and people assumed (as they had also done in Argentina) that I was a fellow brazilian, and yet I spoke little to no Portuguese, and communicated almost entirely in Argentine spanish. Buenos Aires had become a second home to me by then, and yet people there still assumed at first glance I was a total foreigner, while the reverse occurred in Brazil: and yet I belonged to neither place.
I went into the experience of living abroad planning to have a 6 month extravaganza of artistic genius, to be suddenly and constantly inspired to write and create. Instead, I realized that the experience of simply being there was actually the most dynamic and fascinating aspect of living in Buenos Aires. Themes of space, place, and location versus the unavoidable sense of dislocation became my focus in pursuing this project: is dislocation the state of not being in any place, or of being in the wrong place, or of being out of your own place? Is being thrown off kilter and out of order, as the word suggests, a destructive or productive experience?
Distance was another concept that became central: space between parts and objects people and buildings, people and other people, as well as people and countries, people and their homes. Space and the parts that inhabit them are precious, to be regarded carefully and with attention, as their order and logic may be disrupted at any moment, but that chaos of displacement and dislocation is also constructive and reminds us to regard things carefully in the first place.
