He There is Cartagena Festival joined the celebrations for the hundred years of ‘The Maelstrom‘, novel written in 1924 by Jose Eustacio Rivera whose story takes place in the Amazon jungle and denounces border problems and the exploitation of rubber workers.
«’La vorágine’ is a novel that one does not need to read to know what it is», expressed the essayist Erna von der Walde in a talk about the book, of which she is an expert, with the historians Juan Carlos Flórez and Javier Ortiz Cassiani; the writer Juan Cárdenas and the editor Margarita Valencia.
In that sense, the essayist added that it is “A canonical novel is a classic novel in the sense that it goes back and forth.”
“Part of what La Vorágine is is the way it culturally lives with us, even if we don’t read it and academics say it’s rubbish, the novel is in us, we can’t live without it,” he said.
‘The Maelstrom’ and change
For his part, Cárdenas explained that ‘La Vorágine’ has had its “body constantly removed”, which is why he stated that it seems very good to him “that we are very committed to the climate change agenda, knowing what a treasure the Amazon is.” .
The jungle is a “treasure, which is a very tricky word because it precisely connects with several of the problems that appear in the novel and it is precisely this idea of thinking of the Amazon as a great commodity, as a good,” he added.
He also said that in Colombia it is a tradition that many very delicate topics are dealt with first by literature than by institutions.
«For example, all the documents that prove the massacres that are linked to economic projects of enclave, exploitation, and dispossession are hidden and It was only until (Gabriel) García Márquez put the massacre of the banana plantations in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ that it became known.«he explained.
The historian Ortiz Cassiani agrees and says that “the story of the massacres seems to be condemned to be told by literature” and recalled García Márquez’s phrase in the story ‘Los Funerales de la mama grande’ when he says: “I’m going to tell it before the historians arrive because they are going to tell something else.”
Finally the historian Flórez said that “’La Vorágine’ is one of the great novels of the global south because Anglo-Saxons see everything as global.”, they write a biography of someone and we all end up reading it but they always particularize ours: ‘ah no, that’s a novel from over there in the jungle.'” EFE
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