You cannot use literature as a rifle

In an unpublished interview from 1994, Gabriel García Márquez talks extensively about the Caribbean, love, his ideas, but above all culture. The Colombian thought that music cannot be used as a gun “because it always goes wrong, it neither shoots nor is useful for dancing”. just as it happens with literature.

He also expressed his belief that it reflected reality Caribbean without giving the impression that he is trying to make a revolution.

These are some of the statements made by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 in an interview he gave at the age of 67 to documentarian Jon Intxaustegi with the participation of the recently deceased journalist Mauricio Vicente, and which was published this Monday by the Spanish magazine TintaLibre, following an agreement between the newspaper El País and InfoLibre.

Recorded on May 6, 1994 in Havana, writer, who died in April 2014 in Mexico City, He assured that “engaged art is a European invention, it is completely academic”.

“All authentic popular art naturally involves commitment, and up to that point it is valid,” García Márquez pointed out. “The bad thing is when it comes to using music as a gun because it always goes wrong, it neither fires nor is useful for dancing.”

And that – he added – happens not only with music, but also literatureIn other words, I claim to have expressed a reality with which I completely identify, which is the reality of the Caribbean, without giving the impression that I am doing political propaganda or trying to make a revolution, although I believe that this is a contribution to the progress of Latin America”.

Music and the Caribbean are two of the topics that the Colombian talked about the most in this extensive interview, who stated that for him the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was a 450-page vallenato, while “Love in the Age of Cholera” was a 380-page bolero . “And I mean that in all seriousness,” he continued.

In that music, at first “I was most interested in the story they were telling, not so much the music. But later on, the history, facts and practical life of the region always remained connected to the music. I have the impression that of all my books, the one that best sums up the Caribbean is ‘O love and other demons,'” he said.

The Caribbean about which he explained an idea that no one wanted to pay attention to: “the Caribbean It’s not a geographic area, it’s a cultural one: it doesn’t just cover the Caribbean Sea, but for me it starts in the southern United States, all of Louisiana and Florida, and extends to northern Brazil. That is, it is not a geographical territory, but a cultural territory.”

“With reality Caribbean “I identify myself completely, on all levels and in all activities of everyday life: food, music, way of loving, living, singing, existing, giving birth and dying,” he pointed out.

So, he explained, his Macondo of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”or it was a geographical location, but “a state of mind, it’s a state of mind that one lives in the Caribbean.”

As for love, he indicated that it is not the axis of his creation, but the axis of his life, well form who believed that “everything that can really be moved in art must be based on love”.

For literature and magical realism, he claimed that it was not magical. “For us, it’s simply realism, without adjectives.”

In his opinion, there was an invasion cultures of Latin America in the United States which was not planned “and it’s so effective that it’s really changing North American culture.” “We’re changing their music, we’re changing their lifestyle, their diet, we’re changing their lives,” he said.

And he pointed out about himself: “What if Great is to collect all the legends that exist about me, because maybe that is more interesting than my life.