Sometimes good things happen without any anticipation. Like surprise gifts, they come and give you a good mental jolt. You feel unprecedented joy that is specific to that occasion. Still, the feeling lingers on for long after the actual event.
Such a thing happened today to me. In fact, it was a mere interview on the BBC. But it was much more than that in terms of substance. The interview was with acclaimed Chilean-American author Isabel Allende as part of the BBC 100 Women series.
Here was a girl raised by a single mom, abandoned by the father when the girl was just 3. Here was a girl who would not remember her father and would not want to remember him because of his betrayal and irresponsibility in leaving his young family alone. Here was a woman who had to flee the political regime and persecution by the military regime. Here was an emigrant who had to live abroad for decades while wishing dearly to be in her own country.
Isabel Allende seemed to be living a life that was no less than a odyssey, a subject of an epic. And she narrated that story in different forms and formats in her much acclaimed books. Books about dreams, women's issues, issues related to migrants and books that mixed myth with realism for compelling stories. The stories she lived through. The stories of fear and uncertainty as she had to flee her country after military takeover. The stories of dreams and struggle as a migrant in Venezuela and US. The stories of grief and loss based on countless letters between Isabel and her mother, mostly when Isabel's daughter was bedridden in vegetative state before her death in 1992. Human stories in many forms. Stories that touch hearts and minds. In fact her stories have touched millions of hearts and minds. Her books have sold more than 70 million copies in various languages world wide. A truly global storyteller with her own life an incredible story.
Though I have not yet read any of her books, her interview has prompted me to delve into them. But more than anything, I was struck by two things that she said during the Interview.
First was about her writing and writing in her own native Spanish. Though fluent in English, she said she could write fiction only in Spanish as 'fiction comes from the heart and not from mind' and you have to write in the language of your dream, language of your swearing, language of your 'panting' to articulate the sentences of fiction. 'I can write technical or research stuff in English. I can give speeches in English. But I cannot write fiction in English. It has to be Spanish.', she clarified.
The second was about her profound loss. She lost her 29 year old daughter in 1993 to some medical complication. She said 'the one year that I spent on my daughter's bedside when she was in coma was like a single prolonged winter for me, with no sign of daylight or warmth.' More profoundly, she quoted her mother as saying, "Now that you have gone through the biggest tragedy in your life, rest of your life would be easy. No grief or sorrow or accident or loss now can be bigger than what you have gone through." So true. Literary figures are wizards of words. They can convey so much in a few words. For me, in those few sentences, Isabel conveyed the gravity of the biggest loss to a mother, a loss of her own child. Obviously, no other loss can come near that.
I also was struck by her forthright and candid attitudes and her ability to lighten up the moments with humor. A master articulator and storyteller. A genius and a source of inspiration. Indeed.
23 November 2018 (10:30 AM NST)
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