The Mexican Standoff

Well, I've just finished reading Ignacio Padilla's award-winning Shadow without a Name.

A Mexican author and diplomat, Padilla is getting a lot of raves in his country for being one of the co-founders of a group that's trying to steer Mexican literature to new grounds.

An interesting interview can be found here:

As a writer, Padilla made his name as a co-founder, in 1996, of the "Crack" group. This gang of Mexican firebrands aimed to recover the grandeur and ambition of their literary grandparents – patriarchs such as García Márquez, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes – and to distance themselves from feeble, folksy imitators. He attended high school in Mexico City with his co-conspirator in Crack, Jorge Volpi (now cultural attaché in Paris). Even then, the young pretenders sensed that their newly urban continent required voices to reach out beyond the approved peasant idioms: "We wrote about cows, and we had never seen a cow."

For the Padilla and his group:

What they spurned was the whimsical "banana" fiction of the intervening years: levitating opera houses, flying señoritas, talkative toucans, secret love-potions and grandma's old recipes, rustled up with one eye on the airport bookstall and the other on Hollywood. Naturally, the Crack squad detest the vacuous label of "magic realism".

Should we bury this toxic cliché? "That would be a very healthy thing to do," purrs Padilla. "Magic realism should be buried because it should never have existed. Although it helped – it helped our fiction to become known worldwide. But it's a very dangerous concept, and a very patronising concept ... Novels that would be realistic in Latin America are considered magical by someone else. Suddenly, Latin Americans started to make this magic. They grew their iguanas to make them look like dinosaurs."

Interesting indeed, especially if placed in the context of what Dean notes as the stagnating Philippine literature. As he says:

Too long has Philippine "literature" been shackled to rules, modes and the zeitgeist of decades past. While it is important to give value to past writing, the Filipino body of work needs to grow. This is done by pushing against the boundaries and rules prescribed and defended by the powerful and established literati.

Anyway, in the context of the creation of such a fantastic literature, I particularly liked something Padilla said:

You're just as likely to find an igloo as an iguana in the fiction of Ignacio Padilla. He still insists he won't refuse to write about his native soil, "when I feel I have something to say about Mexico. And I will always be Mexican. But that doesn't restrict me from writing about any other place I find interesting."

Very true indeed. Just because Filipino writers don't write about things-Philippines doesn't mean they aren't Filipinos, right? And funny enough, Padilla could actually be talking about speculative fiction. I mean, seriously, who here has been to Middle-Earth anyway?