In 2010, five years before he died, a Colombian novelist named Arnoldo Palacios explained in a text that “the book is a living being.”
First he is engendered and given birth, says Palacios, and then he begins a path of storms, songs, sufferings, until he reaches the moment of immortalization.
It becomes “a black star, the one that does not go extinct but is eternal,” added the author of the novel
The Stars Are Black
.
Palacios, an Afro-Colombian novelist and chronicler born in a small municipality on the Pacific coast (Cértegui, Chocó), was an unknown writer for much of his life, and the immortality of his works was seen as a distant star.
But, as he anticipated, books do not die.
In recent years, he began to receive national recognition in dribs and drabs that was magnified this year, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
The government of Gustavo Petro has declared this the year of Arnoldo Palacios.
The announcement was made a few weeks ago, when the cabinet moved to the Pacific coast of the country, and the Ministry of Culture explained that it will promote different events throughout the year to better understand the writer's work: conferences, dissemination of his books in libraries public, or a photographic exhibition that will travel throughout the country
.
“Happy centenary,” wrote the minister, Juan David Correa, in a column explaining the Government's investment and citing paragraphs from
The Stars Are Black
in which racism against the protagonist, Irra, is denounced.
“We want no one to have to regret that statement that appears in his novel, and in his books, which will be printed and taken to all the public libraries in the country,” adds Correa, who was previously editor of Planeta and promoted the work there. of the novelist.
The cultural announcement would have gone unnoticed if it were not for the fact that a local media outlet,
El Colombiano
, questioned whether the value of Palacios' work was being promoted not because of its quality, but because the Petro Government feels aligned with the writer's ideology—because it denounces racism, discrimination against regions such as the Pacific coast, or the poverty experienced by millions of families.
“Petrism wants to consecrate him,” says the headline of an article that aligns Palacios with “the school of socialist realism” (the novelist sympathized with the liberal left).
Before being adjusted after the controversy, the note said "you don't have to be a Scotland Yard or DAS sleuth to realize that this position broadly coincides with trills and speeches by President Gustavo Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez."
Regarding the minister of culture, it is also said that “the minister conceives literary art as an almost ideological compass to understand reality.
In that sense, the richness of a narrative or poetic proposal is conditioned not by its formal and stylistic virtues but by the denunciation it makes of the gears of capitalism.”
Casting doubt on Palacios's literary quality, the article cites two negative reviews of
The Black Stars,
one of them by Gabriel García Márquez when he was a young reporter: he wrote that the novel was a “grinder of racial resentment.”
The suspicion that Palacios is receiving recognition because Petrism considers him related, and not because of his excellence, received criticism from several Colombian authors, such as the novelist Pilar Quintana or the journalist Mabel Lara.
“Reducing it to socialist realism is a very light reading,” Darío Henao, dean of Humanities at the Universidad del Valle and director of the doctorate in Afro-Latin American Studies there, tells EL PAÍS.
Henao, who has led contemporary literature seminars, says that seeing novels as resentment of a population or socialist activism is not knowing how to appreciate the literary richness of the universe that Palacios created.
“You have to read the novels, not pigeonhole them.
They consider them to be made by the poor people of Chocó, and they do not see, for example, that
The Stars Are Black
has an exceptional treatment of time, a Joycean one—the action is concentrated in two days.
They have not yet seen the poetics in the construction of Arnoldo Palacios' books,” adds Henao, who appreciates the Pacific words that Palacios added to Colombian literature, such as madredediós, in the title of the biographical book
Searching for my
motherdediós.
“Looking for your mother of God, your mother of God, is an expression used daily by us, the blacks of Chocó.
It means dedicating your energies and all your holy patience to obtaining daily bread, to someone pursuing your good luck,” Palacios wrote.
Velia Vidal, author and director of the cultural project Nuestro Motete, which promotes reading in the department of Chocó, speaks along the same lines as Henao.
“It seemed disrespectful to me to quote García Márquez when he was a young journalist.
The readings change over time,” says Vidal, who also values the achievements of the Chocoano writer on a literary level.
“There is something that seems very valuable to me in Palacios' work, and it is the elaboration of language: in
Las Estrellas son
Negras
the language of rural people is read at the same time that the formal structure of Spanish is maintained, and that was something very elaborate for its time,” explains Vidal (the novel was published in the middle of the 20th century).
“There is a great awareness of linguistics without being pejorative, and Palacios was not a linguist, nor was he trained in the large universities in the center of the country,” she adds.
Palacios suffered from poliomyelitis and said that this condition led him to be a dedicated observer of the Colombian Pacific.
“I find that very interesting about Palacios, there was no victimization of him in the face of polio, but rather a construction of an opportunity,” says Vidal.
Henao and Vidal agree that during his lifetime the author and the richness of his work received very little recognition for decades of the 20th century—partly because of discrimination against Afro authors, partly because Palacios lived in Europe for a good part of his life.
A review by historian Francisco Flórez, director of the General Archive of the Nation, says that one of Palacios' books written in Europe and titled
La Selva y la Lluvia
did not manage to enter Colombian publishers and was only appreciated by a publisher in the Union. Soviet called Progress.
But Palacios began to gain some attention long before the current Government of Gustavo Petro.
“I consider that this visibility began when the 20th century ended and the first lists of the best Colombian novels of the century were made, and there appeared
The Stars Are Black,”
recalls Vidal.
Then the Intermedio publishing house reissued the novel
The Jungle and the Rain
in 2010, and the Planeta publishing house republished
Las Estrellas
and publishedBuscas
mi madredediós
in recent years
.
In fact, it was during the right-wing government of Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) when the Minister of Culture, Paula Marcela Moreno, included Palacios in the Afro-Colombian Literature Library and the first reissue of Las Estrellas son negra was
published
in more than ten years.
The fact that Uribe and Palacios surely would not have been active in the same party today did not prevent the Afro-Colombian author from receiving that recognition.
Because the books of Arnoldo Palacios, regardless of the government in power, are alive and eternal like the black stars.
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