The man who was able to move the cloud: Memoir, Ingrid Rojas Contreras
In 2012, Ingrid Rojas Contreras visited Ocaña, Colombia, his mother’s hometown, to unearth the body of his grandfather Nono at the request of several spirits who said the family had appeared in a dream. rice field. While she was there, she was examining her ancestors, and she picked up a book that was so old that it crumbled into her hands and left only dust. “It’s like seeing history disappear,” she despaired, and she recalled failing to find documents for her family. Her mother laughed at her face. “Who do you think we are?” She ridiculed.
So, in order to complete the first memoir, “The Man Who Can Move the Clouds,” following his debut novel “The Fruit of the Drunk Tree” in 2018, Rojas Contreras instead relies on oral history and finally. It accepts its messy, unverifiable and disjointed nature. The story leap over time from 1984 to 2007, 1993, and the colonial era. The family is introduced as an adult and later appears as a teenager and then as a corpse. Spirits are lurking in every corner. There are spectrum treasure hunts, abusive men, alcoholic ghosts, and transforming witches. Paramilitaries set fire to family farms, bomb explosions became a normal event, and uncles were kidnapped four times separately by guerrillas. These are the kind of stories that Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have rubbed together.
This book starts with a mysterious parallelism. Both Rojas Contreras and her mother, Sojaya, were hit by an accident, leaving a temporary loss of memory. As a child of Ocagna, Sojaya fell into an empty well and was almost bleeding. Forty-three years later, Rojas Contreras collided with his open car door while riding a bicycle in Chicago. This event welcomes her into a ghostly whisper and shaman lineage — an uncle who can accept the spirits of the dead in his body, an aunt who “reads the embers at the end of the cigar and tells her fate”, and Sojaira herself. She trained herself to move her things in her mind. “
All of these supernatural gifts are inherited by Nono, the prestigious man at the heart of the book, the author’s maternal grandfather, whose full name is Rafael Contreras Alfonso.As Curandero, Or Sherman, he was respected in eastern Colombia for his ability to communicate with the world of spectrum. He was also a knowledgeable entrepreneur and fablist who, despite his lack of literacy and shunned by the Catholic Church, opened up a life of soothing and healing his sick neighbor. At his funeral, the townspeople packed his casket with a piece of paper demanding a miracle.
As she recovers from a head injury, Rojas Contreras reaffirms her family’s past and interweaves their stories with violence, macho, colonial personal stories, and unraveling heritage.She has another form of amnesia Mestiza, Or racial mixing, has gradually wiped out indigenous cultures from Latin America. When Rojas Contreras relearns her heritage, she is filled with a new understanding of childlike wonders, pedigree and memory.
Perhaps as a result of this trance, those sections of the memoirs that extend beyond the personal to the discussion of colonialism and Colombian history can be felt thin. Some reflections are vague, airy, and even in contact with the clinge. “We were the brown people, Mestizo,” Rojas Contreras spouts in words appropriate for Goya’s commercials. “A European man arrived on the continent and violated an indigenous woman. That was our origin. Neither indigenous nor Spanish, but a wound.” Others have a simple fact. I make a mistake. She claims that under the American caste system of the colonial era, “the whitest of the colored people were Mestizo and Castizo, a Spanish child.” However, according to 18th-century Casta paintings depicting the racial hierarchy of the Spanish colonies, Castizo (who has one indigenous grandparent) and white Spanish children are considered Spanish.
For a book that reveals such a deep collective truth, these are just a mess. Rojas Contreras, when “The Fruit of a Drunk Tree” is a non-fiction work “The Man Who Could Move the Clouds”, made the author’s actual experience of being kidnapped as a child fictional. Forced the collective identity of Claire Boyants and spiritualists into public records — starting with Nono — she spliced together from the past collapsed fragments of her family. In the process, she wrote a fascinating and contrary-genre history of her ancestors.
The man who was able to move the cloud: Memoir, Ingrid Rojas Contreras 306pp. Double Day | $ 30
Miguel Salazar is a book review researcher.
