A woman without ties
Albalucía Ángel Marulanda, also known as Albalu, Colombian writer and poet, was born on September 7, 1939, in the city of Pereira, state of Risaralda. She studied high school at the Colegio de las Madres Franciscanas in Pereira. In 1955 she moved to Bogotá to pursue her university studies in a less provincial environment. She studied art and literature at the Universidad de los Andes, where she met Marta Traba, an art critic, and Gonzalo Arango, a writer and creator of the Nadaist Movement.
Albalucía has always been a free writer, but a woman who was silenced for telling the truth in a country with closed ears. Beginning in 1964, she traveled to Europe to continue her art studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. She also studied cinema at the University of Rome.
She lived an academic, cultural, and musical pilgrimage through Rome, Barcelona, and Paris, at the time of the student revolution of May 1968. In the 1970s he moved to Barcelona where he met and frequented the houses of writers of the Latin American literature boom, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and José Donoso, among others.
Her first novel written in Europe was Winter Sunflowers (1970), a story about the different aspects of love; that of a couple, that of letters and that of amorous hallucinations. She has also published Twice Alicia, a science fiction novel based on Alice in Wonderland and The Double Face of Alicia as her alter ego.
In 1972, she was the victim of an attempted robbery in Madrid that left her with serious injuries to her head and spine. She returned to Colombia disillusioned. After a few months of convalescence and recovery, she returned to Europe and did a deep historical investigation into the violence of the 1940s in Colombia. In 1975, in Barcelona, she wrote her most important book.
Estaba la pajara pinta sentada en el verde limón
The novel Estaba la pajara Pintura sit en el verde limón (There was the painted bird sitting in the lemon green) does not have just one narrator. The narration is an encounter that gives voice to people who are very different from each other in Colombian society. The novel is divided into three specific moments in Colombian history:
1. The assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948,
2. The massacre of National University students in 1954,
3. The murder of Camilo Torres in 1966.
One of the purposes of Albalucía is that literature was very close to reality. That's why she got involved with tools like press clippings: in her book of short stories, Oh Gloria Inmarcesible (Oh Unfading Glory), there is also an extensive collage of headlines that reaffirm the unusualness of Colombian reality.
"They killed Uriel...! a student shouted like a madman as he took off his tie and soaked it in the blood of his dead comrade, and little by little the others approached in amazement, unable to believe their eyes. Soaking their ties and handkerchiefs in Uriel's blood and witnessing how they were hoisted like flags, they covered the remains with the tricolor flag, and many of them, unable to contain themselves, began to cry, screaming like children. Justice! Justice! They began with one voice when they saw the truck enter with army officers, while the police watched from afar with rifles on guard, their firsthand the triggers, their bodies restless with nervous attention and their cold, indifferent gaze." Narration of one of the characters in the novel who witnessed the events of 1954 |
The most terrible thing was that you couldn't read the press. They banished us. What is happening now has happened. They showed some horrible photos. It was an extraordinarily tabloid press. You have not seen or heard anything but deaths, says Albalucía.
With this book she won the Experiences in Cali Award. The winner would have the work published; however, the publisher refused to print the book because the names of politicians of the time linked to the period of violence in Colombia were mentioned in it. Furthermore, women had little credibility in the literary field, dominated mainly by male writers.
The Colombian Institute of Culture (Colcultura) printed the book as part of the collection of the Colombian Cultural Library, with a print run of 100,000 copies. The work was published amid the struggle to represent the aesthetic, historical and political sense of a violent past and present.
Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, a contemporary writer from Albalucía, who directed the television program Páginas de Colcultura and the magazine Gaceta, remembers that the book circulated very well, that collection was sold throughout the country and the newspapers gave them free news.
Some factors that influenced the poorly read novel Estaba la pajara Pintura sit en el verde limón have to do with the fact that Albalucía was branded a “crazy” or “brazen” woman for being a revolutionary in a tradition of men and few women.
"I really don't know what I believe. How do you expect me to know with so much confusion? If I could say that I do not believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, with the same innocence with which I said it when I was eight years old, maybe I would save myself. But if today they are telling me that the Alliance for Progress is the only way to save these countries that are up to their necks in shit, and I start doing numbers like someone who knows how to add and divide and I realize that no, that this is just a trap for underdeveloped rats, and that's what you say. People no longer know where the table is going." Excerpt from the novel Estaba la pajara pinta sentada en el verde limón |
Also influential was the fact that Albalucía wrote in an experimental register, in the style of Virginia Woolf, that very little had been practiced in Colombia and with which readers were unfamiliar.
Once the editions of Colcultura were sold out, she waited for new editorial proposals for the book to be printed again in Colombia, which did not happen.
The book There was the painted bird sitting in the lemon green is composed of chapter zero and four numbered parts. The first part has five chapters; the second, eight; the third, nine; the fourth, two.
In twenty-five chapters, seven small stories are built, articulated in two great narratives: Ana's personal account (childhood in the province and years in Bogotá) and the history of violence in Colombia, Bogotazo, political violence during the conservative and dictatorship governments Muñoz Sastoque, from the National Front.
"Two days after Fabio's death, birds attacked the Venadillo region. The newspapers reported that even the animals had been killed and there were photos of the bodies of women and children with their stomachs ripped open: all swimming in huge pools of blood." Narration by one of the characters in the novel. |
Albalucía's literary style
Researchers and scholars of the Colombian and Latin American novel have been inspired by its social themes, the expressiveness of the language, the autobiographical technique, and the female literary influences that come from Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir.
The writer did not dedicate herself only to romance, she also ventured into texts for theatre, essays, and poetry. Many of her works have a feminist perspective and deal with issues such as women's rights. She has also written several articles for newspapers and magazines such as Diario del Caribe, La Nueva Prensa and El Espectador. Her independent style is divided into three periods:
1970 to 1972, between reality and fiction;
1973 to 1979, more investigative about Colombian reality and history;
1980 to 1984, with an emphasis on feminism and a postmodern approach.
In 1979, Ángel published a collection of short stories entitled: ¡Oh gloria imperecedera! (Oh, imperishable glory!). The articles published there make up a collection of black humor stories about the country's politics, its protagonists and drug trafficking. The book was vetoed for being classified as "pornographic".
Estaba la pajara pinta sentada en el verde limón (1975)
Estaba la pajara pinta sentada en el verde limón (1975) is an autobiographical novel that portrays Albalcía Angel's childhood and youth in Colombia in the 1940s and 1950s, marked by political violence. With a fragmented structure and stream of consciousness, the work breaks with the linear narrative by mixing memories, history, and culture.
The experimental and poetic language reflects the subjectivity of memory and the sociopolitical chaos of the time. In addition to the political context, the book addresses patriarchal oppression and the search for identity, a landmark in Latin American feminist literature. Challenging and innovative, the novel is an intense testimony to memory, violence, and resistance. It consolidated its relevance in Colombian literature. |
Feminism of Albalucía
Around the 1980s, she addressed feminism in two other narratives of extraordinary quality: Misiá señora, published in 1982 and Las Andariegas, published in 1984, an epic poem that explores the sensorial perception of female characters who transit between different spaces and times.
Misiá Señora recalls Albalucía's childhood with the women who accompanied her: her mother, her grandmother and the unequal voices of other women destined to confinement by the patriarchal world. The book represents a relentless journey through the history and geography of humanity. A cry against censorship and injustice against women always.
The book inspired researchers to propose the concept of wandering chronotope, wandering without direction or destination, to illustrate the importance of women and history from a female point of view. She stands out as an author with a strong political conscience in relation to gender literature, subordination, and repression.
Cronotope is a Greek word that means space-time, it represents the fundamental interconnection between the Kantian categories of space and time assimilated in an artistic way. The term was initially used in mathematical sciences and later introduced and based on Einstein's theory of relativity.
Although few people recognize her today in Colombia, she continues to carry the labels of "crazy" or "rebel" for having been a free woman at a time when very few were. |
The lack of recognition from literary peers in Latin America has spread to the entire publishing universe. Because of her female condition and the historical truths narrated in her novel. She was marginalized by the big publishing houses that every year reprinted the novels of renowned writers from Latin American nations, but not hers. Honored by European universities as one of the main writers of the Latin American boom, little is known about her in her own country.
Albalucía Ángel’s strategy was to denounce the systematic repetition of censorship and violence in Colombia as ways of perpetuating power, which was already a very bold stance. But to all that was said, she added her nature: that it was a woman who said it. A woman who made a name for herself with her own writing, without being the daughter or wife of powerful people.
“I do not care if I was a woman, if I was a man, because since I was born, in my city, they disqualified me. I am a woman who has been disqualified since birth, so what do I care about the basins?” Albalucía Ángel. |
An admirer who became her friend
"What happened to Albalucía's work is really a femicide," says Alejandra Jaramillo, a Bogota-based female writer and Professor at the National University of Colombia. Alejandra studied literature at Universidad de los Andes, where female Professor Paulina de San Ginés showed her and other literature students Albalucía's novels in the early 1990s.
“How is it possible for a culture not to understand the importance of this? ” It was the question that motivated Alejandra to do her graduation thesis on Albalucía's work.
What do we talk about when we talk about Albalucía?
That was the title of Alejandra's lecture, given on October 5, 2019, at the launch of the complete narrative of Albalucía Ángel, published by Pereira's Secretariat of Culture during the Coffee Axis Book Fair. Six republished narrative works were presented at the fair.
In 1997, when Alejandra was studying for a master's degree in New Orleans, Paulina, her professor called to inform her that Albalucía was in the United States and recommended that Alejandra look for her. Thanks to that, she realized her dream of meeting her favorite writer. In New Orleans, with her master’s colleagues, she organized an event about Latin American character.
After twenty-two years of friendship, Albalucía and Alejandra are united by the same struggle: to resist as free female writers. To hear Albalucía talk about Alejandra and Alejandra talk about Albalucía is to witness a sisterhood that allowed them and other female writers to come to the fore because of the genre's generosity.
Late recognition
In 2006, in Colombia, she received a tribute from the Ministry of Culture, which included several Colombian writers, and in 2015, when her book La pajara Pintura celebrated forty years of publication, the publishing house Ediciones B made a commercial publication. As a result, her work became better known in the country. In October 2019, Pereira's Secretary of Culture re-edited the complete work of Albalucía Ángel, presented as a collection during the Coffee Axis Book Fair.
Main works by Albalucía Ángel
Estaba la pajara pinta sentada en el verde limón (1975) |
Her best-known novel, with a fragmented and experimental narrative, addressing political violence in Colombia and patriarchal oppression. |
Girasoles en invierno (1970) |
The author's first novel, with a strong existentialist influence and questions about identity and freedom. |
Las andariegas (1984) |
A novel that explores exile and the search for belonging, also using a non-linear structure. |
Misiá señora (1995) |
A work that mixes prose and poetry to explore the female condition in society. |
Oh, gloria inmarcesible (2006) |
A novel that revisits the history of Colombia from a critical and fragmented perspective. |
Currently, the writer lives in California, visits Colombia occasionally and continues to be a critical voice on political and social events in the country ֎
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