LThe torrential and energetic voice of Manuel Zapata Olivella shakes me from the burning lethargy of summer in 1987, and tells me that he will pass by the newspaper’s headquarters at noon The universal, in San Juan de Dios street. As he climbs with his firm and determined steps up the wooden staircase of the old headquarters where he brought the boy García Márquez to work in the nascent newspaper, Zapata greets everyone, even people he does not know. The deep timbre of his voice is unmistakable, like his broad and contagious smile, and his emphatic sideburns that recall General Padilla or some of the precursors of our Independence. (Read here: Manuel Zapata Olivella Award for plastic and visual creation)
Zapata Olivella laughs out loud when something touches his deep sense of humor, his sensitivity and his humanist mettle. He is a memorable creature who has devoted his life to listening to those who have no voice in this country. He has listened to the illiterate of the swamps and the Sinú Valley to write Oral tradition and conduct in Córdoba. (1972). And he went to live with them to wisely inventory a lost memory with more than four hundred years of history under the waters of Sinú. But that’s how he wrote everything: listening to his ancestors.
To write your epic novel Chango the great whores (1983), he had to go through the African villages and enter the old port naked, from where the Africans left who would be enslaved in America. That morning he cried with them and implored for the inheritance of their founding culture in the world and for the freedom of their spirits. To write Chambacú, black corral (1962), he lived where his aunts, who had their house in Chambacú, and wrote this first urban novel of Cartagena, with its social and racial conflicts. To write Wet earth (1947), his first novel at the age of 27, prefaced by Ciro Alegría, toured all of Sinú in order to get to know in depth the social drama of the dispossessed of the lands sown with rice and the conflict with the landowners. To write your novel A saint is born in Chimá (1963) studied the magical-religious miracle of this Sinuana region and the superstitions inherited from the indigenous and European world. To narrate its splendid chronicle China 6 a. m. (1954), he traveled to China in 1952 as a guest at the Peace Conference of the Peoples of the Asia and the Pacific, in Beijing in 1952. And, upon returning to Colombia, he was persecuted and accused of being a traitor to the country, declared a communist and subversive and imprisoned for three days.
To write the autobiographical account I’ve seen the night. The roots of black fury (1952) he had to cross the border with Mexico to enter the United States clandestinely, after his visa was denied. There he met Langston Hugues, who lent him his bed so that he could sleep and touched his chest to know that he was not a ghost when he confessed that he wanted to write the total novel about the epic of Africans not only in the United States but in America, there he deciphered in everyday life, with his vision of acute and insatiable tracker of secrets, the pulsating social and cultural universe of Harlem, always sensing and listening to the call of his African ancestors in the voices of social leaders, poets and thinkers like Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Leon Damas, among others. To write your essay The Colombian man (1974), traveled the country very young, on foot, in its four cardinal points, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the Andean Zone and the rest of the nation, by canoe, by boat, by bus, ascending mountain ranges, valleys, going up rivers and crossing mountains. An adventure that continued through Central America, Mexico and the US No one undertook such an intense and excessive journey before that man who now climbed the stairs with his voice, which resounded like a sea at dawn. To write his memoirs of travel and the decantation of his Americanist thought and the synthesis of his worldview of the African universe in America, he had to embody every metaphor and every thought that he wrote in Get up mulatto! For my race the spirit will speak (1987), which ranges from their ancestors, under the influence of totems, the walled ancestor, the mulatto Cartagena, the scientific adventure, the footprint of the transhumant, the experience in Harlem and the United States, ritual medicine and the call of the ancestors. Those memoirs paved the way for the creation of other books in which he broadened the vision of his thought in essays that establish him as the greatest thinker of the 20th century in Colombia. Those books are The magic keys of America (1987), Our voice. Contributions to the popular Latin American speech to the Spanish language (1987), The rebellion of the genes. American miscegenation in the future society (1997), The witch tree of freedom. Mythical historical essay (2002). In these books the African philosophy and its current and unavoidable contribution to Western culture are deciphered.
The roots of Western culture cannot be understood without beginning with Africa. It is incredible how Zapata Olivella, in addition to writing these essays of great lucidity and wisdom, also wrote a book of stories for children: Tamalameque’s Fables. Animals speak of peace (1990), very timely for the times we live in. And to write them he had to listen to them in the voices of the elderly traveling through the towns of Cesar, as a doctor and researcher. He also surprised us with an unusual and masterful novel: Hemingway, the hunter of death (1993), a monologue that puts forward the thesis that an animal predator, like the American writer Ernest Hemingway, who went from safari to safari killing lions, tigers and buffalo, is in essence a predator of himself, therefore Thus, a suicide, as the hunter writer finally ended his life, shooting himself in the palate. In this novel, Zapata Olivella returns to Kenya and to the scenes of his trip to Africa to research and write It changed. (You may also be interested in: Tribute to the 100 years since the birth of Manuel Zapata Olivella)
In this monumental reissue of all his narrative, essay and dramaturgical work, his stories by Vagabond passion (1948), his plays Homeless hotel (1954), The steps of the Indian (1958), Charon liberado (1959), his novel 10th street (1960), Tales of death and freedom (1961), the novel Behind the face (1962), The submerged galleon (1962), Who gave Oswald the rifle? and other stories (1967), The execution of the devil (1986), and the compilation of Essays, articles, interviews. His novel is still unpublished Itzao, the immortal, which culminated shortly before his death and whose edition his heirs are preparing probably for 2021.
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The broad hands of Manuel Zapata Olivella greet me on the threshold of the newsroom of The universal. “Let’s go to lunch,” he tells me. It is incredible that this giant of letters and thought in the Caribbean and the country has time for everything, even to take a young journalist out of the newsroom and invite him to lunch, with the simplicity and humanity of a writer who does not he boasts about nothing. But he is like this: his magazine Letras Nacionales was the interlocutor of new literary talents from all regions of Colombia.
Zapata Olivella loves to eat at the lunch stands of the walled Center. He stops at the basins of the palenqueras and greets them with endearing effusiveness and with the joy of a brother. He takes out a couple of bananas and puts them in a bag. We will have a homemade, ordinary lunch with soup, meat, lentils and vegetables. And he will add to our plate that banana that he will leave for last. And on the way he has run into his friend, Capi Zúñiga, and he has also invited him to lunch. (Also read: Manuel Zapata Olivella Workshop on cultural and narrative journalism)
The mulatto girl who serves us at lunch – last week she had a huge afro that looked like ferns falling down to her shoulders – now her hair is straightened and cut, like strands that are left dancing without touching her shoulders. Zapata Olivella has looked at her with perplexity: What did you do with that beautiful afro? Manuel has whispered to her standing up that beauty does not have to be homogenized. Thus, with her afro, she had a charm of her own, but she has straightened her hair to look like someone other than her. Manuel has sat at the table sighing and has told him that he hopes to return to see his afro recovered.
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Life gave me the privilege of traveling with Zapata Olivella from Cartagena to Bogotá and Bogotá to Havana, in a tribute to Colombia in Cuba. I was always by his side on the plane and, when we descended to Havana, at the hotel where we stayed, he stayed in the next room, so we had breakfast, lunch and dinner together. In that proximity I told him that once he traveled with Honorio, my father, to Bogotá and he took him to see the other side of the city and the deep poverty of its neighborhoods at 2,600 meters above sea level.
Zapata Olivella has just been vindicated in his immense greatness as a novelist, doctor, anthropologist, folklorist, essayist and researcher, thanks to this reissue of his books, whose promoter was the historian Darío Henao, dean of the Faculty of Humanities of the Universidad del Valle , with the endorsement of the Ministry of Culture. The University of Cartagena (Alfonso Múnera), the University of Córdoba (Mauricio Burgos Altamiranda), the Universidad del Valle (Luis Carlos Castillo Gómez), the Technological University of Pereira (César Valencia Solanilla) participated in this three-year editorial feat, but , in addition, the unconditional support of Harlem, daughter of Manuel Zapata Olivella; her grandchildren Karib and Manuela, children of Edelma, who died, and Gustavo Gómez, her husband.
There is no doubt that Zapata Olivella, the greatest Colombian thinker of the 20th century, with all the vast literary and essay work that he left us, would have deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is the opportunity to read all his work. And feel that we are before the magnitude of an illuminated giant.
Manuel collects the shells of the banana. He says goodbye with a smile to the girl who served us. His wide smile is more than a smile. It is the grace of his spirit, the dignity of the warrior, the nobility of the guardian of the ancestors. He whispers this phrase that I said while having lunch. Tells me: It’s my second christening: Guardian of the Ancestors.
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