November 9, 2023 | Story by Kristine Villarroel | Illustration by Alvin Lalanne
Growing up in a coastal town in Venezuela, I would often hear a story about an elderly woman known by others to be a witch. At night, she transformed into a large white bird and sneakily hid in the trees, waiting for dawn to break before returning to its human form.
People in our communities, aware of what such a bird meant, violently attacked them whenever they were in sight, hoping to protect their family and neighbors from the presumed conjurer and the evil she’d bring to their communities. Whenever these attacks happened, the elderly woman would appear with fresh bruises the next day, revealing her sin.
More than a fairytale or a moral lesson, this story was a common local anecdote shared by and passed down generations like intangible, communal heirlooms. My mom grew up passively hearing the same story, just situated on a different side of town. My dad even recalls his friends attacking one of the birds.
“That’s just what they always say about witches,” my mom told me.
I remember wondering how common witches were or how everyone in our towns first discovered them as birds. I even felt bad for them, condemned to hide as animals, to face the rage and brutality of those with too much love (for their families, for their towns) to lose.
I never questioned the existence of the witches, for they were ordinary and sometimes even beloved members of our communities. The Mother, a Catholic occultist I grew up visiting, would read tarot cards and see visions in crystal balls while faithfully praying for miracles to St. Michael on behalf of her children, of whom I was one. The problem came, elders would tell us, when one went against God’s rules or refused to show humility in his face. One was to pray for miracles to come, not to make them oneself.
The point wasn’t to question how the miracles happened in the first place or how the witches physically transformed into birds. Those stories aren’t meant to evaluate reality but to simply portray what we, as a community, know and understand.
During frequent 45-minute drives from our nearly rural town to Caracas, the well-developed capital city, my mom would often tell me a story about her college years. In it, her friends plucked a colorful live coral from the sea and brought it back to their hotel room, to the coral’s displeasure. The then-dying coral, kidnapped from the sea, became so upset at the college kids that it stank up the entire building as revenge. The hotel then had to be evacuated because of the odor’s magnitude.
I remember asking my mom to retell that story time and again. As an elementary-school-aged kid, the details, the plot and the storytelling were my favorite form of entertainment, mostly for its comedic element. I giggled endlessly at the irony of a violently stinky dead sea animal disturbing unsuspecting hotel guests who just hoped to have a relaxing vacation. Instead of having a moral lesson embedded in its meaning, the story simply aimed to make me laugh — at most, the only thing I learned from it was to respect marine wildlife. But that wasn’t the point.
I can rarely tell these stories now without facing doubtful looks and skeptic ears. How could a person turn into a bird? Or how could a coral seek revenge? Often, my American peers don’t seem to understand that these stories are meant to connect, not inform, and I wonder if that’s just a side effect of trying to contextualize local anecdotes that were never meant to be exported beyond the bounds of local communities.
Gabriel García Marquez opens “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a canon of magical realism and a core curriculum reading in most of Venezuela, with the scene of a character remembering a moment in his childhood while facing his imminent death:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Reaching high school in our school system was indicated by two things: wearing beige-colored polo shirt uniforms, in contrast to middle school’s light blue and elementary’s crisp white, and enduring the enforced reading of the 400-page novel.
Immigrating at 14, however, meant that I never got my beige polo shirt despite continuing my education far beyond 9th grade, and I was never forced to read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Instead, I was given the Gatsby’s and Tom Sawyer’s of true American public schools.
In a sense, it felt like losing a connection with the place and the people who raised me, like I was missing out on a story that everyone else knew.
Desperate to cling onto my community, even from across the Caribbean Sea, I stretched my time out to whatever Spanish literature class offered me a way to pick up where I had left off back home. Flexible to my high school teacher’s preference, my reading curriculum on the Latin American side quickly filled up with the magical worlds of Garcia Marquez and Quiroga and Cortázar and Borges and all those names that if I dropped in a conversation with an aunt they might possibly recognize, all while keeping up with a foreign curriculum of American classics.
I quickly realized I was reading two different worlds, far and distant from each other. One was rigid, industrial and “developed,” while the other was fantastic, vividly colorful and untamed. One described a world with four defined seasons that constantly change, where the time when the sun goes down can tell you exactly what stretch of the year it is, if the color of leaves isn’t enough, while the other described an everlasting tropic where the 75-degree-weather temperature rarely fluctuates, the sun always rises at 6 a.m. and goes down at 6 p.m., and where the days are rarely different from one another.
Whenever I hear my American peers struggle to define what magical realism means or try to find logic within that fiction, I think about time and how it differs for us. How can you explain such a thing? How do you defy a set conception of time?
Rather than structured narratives, the meaning of our stories hides in the intergenerational continuity of cultural inheritance, the passing down of retellings and the preservation of life through storytelling. The elements aren’t the stories themselves; whether they are metaphors, superstition, or fact doesn’t matter. It’s the act of telling the stories themselves that matters.
Throughout time, Latin American history has been archived almost exclusively through the eyes of colonial records and foreign explanations of our realities. When foreigners first heard the stories of the “New World,” the idea of El Dorado, a glorious golden city, was enough to drive them to ransack through the Amazon — a two-billion-year-old wilderness so vast and majestic it would rather face being eternally misunderstood than fall prey to whatever anyone has ever wanted it to be — looking for the mythical town where everything was gold.
I wonder what story El Dorado once belonged in before it was bastardized and taken out of context. I imagine, whatever the story was, that the gold wasn’t supposed to be the focus. Maybe it was a god. Maybe it was the magic.
When Aureliano Buendía, many years later and facing a firing squad, remembers the moment when his father took him to discover ice, the point isn’t to question the physics, timeline or politics. In the tropical realm of surreal narrative legacies, ice is a wonder to discover, firing squads are threats to face, and distant afternoons are memories to be recalled years later just as much as time is a mere background element of a story.
Back in high school, when my American classmates misunderstood my words (usually because of the mispronounced words and slightly broken grammar of a recent immigrant who had just started communicating in a foreign language), I took refuge in the magical worlds that they didn’t understand either. Broken time and mispronounced physics were part of what I was. It didn’t belong to them.