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Coloniality and Solitude in García Márquez’s Public Speeches and Newspaper Articles

Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realist narrative mode has been criticized by some scholars and by younger Latin American writers of resorting to a certain tropicalism that exoticizes Latin America as a region where violence and sensuality dominate every aspect of daily life, thus selling a magical Third World underdevelopment full of superstitions, mythical legends, popular folklore, and distortions of time for the Global North’s reading markets that is quite different from everyday reality in the region. Yet whether or not one agrees with this assessment, there is undoubtedly a different image of Latin America when one reads García Márquez’s journalism and public speeches. This article contrasts the author’s novelistic, magical realist image of Latin America in some of his works with the typically more realistic one (there are some exceptions) presented in his speeches collected in the volume I’m Not Here to Give a Speech (2010). Thus, in his 1982 speech “The Solitude of Latin America,” given during his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance, as well as in his 1995 speeches “Latin America Exists” and “Dreams for the Twenty-First Century,” one finds an anti-Eurocentric stance, in which he demands that Europe try to conceive of Latin America in a different, less paternalistic way. He demands that non-Eurocentric, Latin American worldviews and ways of being in the world be respected in equal terms. Moreover, a sober, realistic denunciation of injustice, infant mortality, disappearance, genocide, imperialism, the abundance of forced exiles and refugees, and other social evils pervades many of these speeches.