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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 pájara 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:
The assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948,
The massacre of National University students in 1954,
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.
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.
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.
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".
Feminism
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.
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.
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.
Currently, the writer lives in California, visits Colombia occasionally and continues to be a critical voice on political and social events in the country.
Links used and suggested
֎ La máquina del tiempo - parte 1
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