Isabel Allende
& an OleMiss sorority girl walk into a bar...
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Now on to the good stuff!
The following post is part of a semi-regular series that (loosely) reviews and ruminates about things I’ve recently read, listened to, watched, and/or consumed in any way that has had an impact on me.
I just finished reading Isabel Allende’s (pronounced ah-yen-day) A Long Petal of the Sea.
In the last 5 months, I’ve also read Allende’s Eva Luna, The House of the Spirits, and her memoir, Paula.
Have y’all figured out yet that I’m a little obsessive?
The Allende obsession began a few months ago when I was re-watching Jane the Virgin. Yes. Re-watching. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched it now, but it tracks with the aforementioned obsessive trait also illustrated by my Spotify wrapped, which told me that I’m a comfort listener—meaning listening to things on repeat is my jam, a habit that placed me in the top 1% of Lin Manual Miranda listeners due to *quite comfortably* listening to Hamilton approximately a hundred million times last year (I’m also always late to the party). And since I’m a creature of habit, that also means I’m a comfort reader AND a comfort watcher, which brings me back to Jane the Virgin.
Look, I could write a whole-ass dissertation on Jane the Virgin but for now I’ll just keep it to the show’s relevance to Isabel Allende: Jane (the virgin) is a writer, and her favorite writer is Isabel Allende. She brings her up multiple times throughout the series and in a sweet little twist of fate, runs into Allende at her own book party when she herself finally gets published.
Now, if you’re unfamiliar with Isabel Allende, the first thing you need to know is that she is the QUEEN of Magical Realism. Magical Realism is a literary genre that basically depicts real life with just a lil bit of magic that has been normalized. Meaning, in a magical realism book, it’s not weird for characters to regularly talk to ghosts or birth a baby that has a pig tail—not of the hair variety, an actual tail of pig.
Magical Realism became big in the 20th Century among Latin American authors who were more often than not living and writing under repressive military regimes that would kill for much less than writing a few critical words, so, Magical Realism became popular as a clever way to sling criticisms without outright challenging the generals. Which Allende—who is Chilean—does expertly.
I’m a firm believer that the world is dripping with magic. Like, you can’t tell me that lizard perched on the Mary statue in my Maw Maw’s garden didn’t wink at me that time after Maw Maw’s funeral when I was sitting there in the dirt right in front of Mary, crying about the fact that Maw and I would never work together in her garden again. So, magical realism has always felt like a natural fit for me, although I’ve never dug in like I should.
Prior to my Jane the Virgin days, I read some standards by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (the KING of Magical Realism), but 100 Years of Solitude shocked me so much (in a good way) that I put the genre down for a minute and I never picked it back up again. I never got to Allende.
I mean, I tried once. A while back, I ordered The House of the Spirits—her most famous book—with the best of intentions, but I was delusional and ordered it in Spanish and so, while I understood all the words I was reading, I knew I was missing the essence of Allende’s writing, and I stopped reading about 100 pages in.
But Isabel Allende’s name always seems to reach me and then hunker down in the back of my mind, poking me until I pay attention to her. Which is exactly what happened during my most recent re-watch of Jane the Virgin. After listening to Jane gush about her favorite author for another five seasons, Allende successfully cracked my cranium again—and this time, she wouldn’t leave me alone until I did her right and read her books all the way through.
********
I began with Paula, her memoir, because Jane (the virgin) said that was her favorite Allende book and it also ended up being my favorite. It was written during and after her daughter’s long and painful death and it was heartbreaking and beautiful and just as full of magic as any of her works of fiction and that’s what I love most about Isabel Allende. She never loses sight of the magic. Even when she was in political exile. Even when her marriage crumbled underneath her feet. Even when she lost a child. There’s a part of her that lives on a different plane. She exists on a different frequency.
It was also my favorite because I’m a memoir junky and DAMN has Isabel Allende had a life.
When she was 20, she got married, had children and settled into a fairly normal, conventional life where she played the good housewife in private, yet a bad feminist in public. Early on in her career, she got a job translating romance novels but got fired for changing the dialogues and happily-ever-after endings to make the heroines smarter and give them more independence, which set her on a path to becoming a public advocate of feminist ideals in a deeply patriarchal country—a disconnect difficult to maintain with her traditional private life.
When she was 31, there was a military coup d’etat in Chile that was aimed at unseating Chile’s first democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, who also happened to be Isabel’s second cousin on her dad’s side—a second cousin who was her only link to her father after he left.
The day of the coup—September 11, 1973—Salvador refused to leave the presidential palace. He broadcast his last words to the people, shouting Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers! as the walls were breached and the military entered. He died that day in the palace, either by suicide or by assassination, marking a successful coup and the beginning of a 17 year-long U.S. backed repressive regime that brutally disappeared and murdered thousands of Chileans.
In the beginning years of the dictatorship, Isabel clandestinely provided safe passage out of the country for those on the regime’s kill list until she herself was on the list, and then she fled with her family to Venezuela. In Venezuela, she wrote her first novel (The House of the Spirits) which became an international best seller, and the momentum of her awakening eventually grew too big and too fast to be contained within her traditional marriage. She got a divorce and finally left the roles she was expected to fill, which she considered a catalyst to her personal liberation–a theme that can be found throughout all of her work, along with unapologetic feminist thought, Latin American political upheaval, and popular resistance to oppression and inequality.
And the magic.
*****
When I was 20, I was living and studying in Argentina, traveling around and getting to know the rest of the southern cone with my friends whenever we could. One time, we bussed over the Andes to Santiago, Chile (the capital of Chile) for what was supposed to be a quick trip, but then there was a big snowstorm and the mountain pass closed and we stayed for a few extra weeks until the snow melted enough to let us back over. We didn’t even bother to check out plane tickets.
While in Santiago, I stood in front of the presidential palace and thought about what had happened there, not really all that long ago on September 11, 1973. Salvador Allende was the first Allende I had ever heard of, and that was the first September 11th that held any consequence for me. I had learned about it my first year of college in 2000 as an international studies major, a year before another September 11th would take over in prominence. At least for me.
I did the same thing in Argentina. I stood in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, watching the most recent generation of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as they repeated the names of their disappeared loved ones in Argentina’s Dirty War—another brutal military coup and U.S.-backed regime in the 70’s and 80’s that took the lives of tens of thousands.
That year—2003—was the year of my own political liberation, or at least the beginning of it.
Until then, I had had no reason or motivation to question my conservative upbringing here in Louisiana. But then the US war in Iraq began just weeks after I landed in Argentina, a country that did nothing but question the actions of their political leaders, and rightfully so, given their recent history. And so, the people of Argentina wanted to know where I stood. They wanted to know if I was for or against Bush. And then they wanted to know why. Two questions I had never been asked before—the answer to the first assumed, the second unimportant—but then couldn’t escape for the entire year I lived in Argentina, asked by every taxi driver, every professor, every cute guy at the club.
It was a long and mostly non-linear progression from there to here. There being a conservative Ole Miss sorority girl who voted for Bush in 2004 (there! I said it!) and here being the voice of Louisianahbrah and advocate for Louisiana progressive politics. It was a long, rough transition, and when I think about this journey’s origins, I am always brought back to 20-year-old me, standing in front of a palace in Santiago, Chile, pondering the fate of a man named Allende.