Magic Realism for Rebels
by Lauren Elise Daniels
How much do people really change? We destroy as avidly as we create. We envy and sacrifice. We toil and gripe and still—when we unite, we can do anything.
As we love and rage, all these colours of our humanity drill their way into our best stories and these days, we are particularly colourful. The 2020 world grapples with monumental threats and every one of us is affected. Our world struggles to breathe—from COVID, climate change, violence.
What saves the writer—and we know this is true—is crafting a place to channel our questions as we make artful shapes from our humanity. ‘Slow down where it hurts,’ a writing professor once told me. We writers must be brave enough to slow down…or we miss it.
Enter magic realism. Its roots officially trail to 1950’s Latin America, but we know they stretch farther in all directions. Magic realism is the voice of the colonised, of trans-generational trauma, of the grown children of war, and of those who have known terror in their own homes.
As the human story endures, so does the wilful writer. We determinedly witness and capture seams of gold so they are not forgotten; seams of human wisdom, compassion, resilience, all beheld under great duress.
Magic realism is grounded in the every day. This is not an alternate reality. It’s like seeing a ghost on a Tuesday night and returning to work on the Wednesday, knowing something inside us has changed. Whatever do we do with that ghost, especially if we didn’t believe in them before?
Somehow, the golden seam, the magic of magic realism, challenges readers to bear witness to the truest contours of the human heart. A dash of magic drives memory into story, where the real at once intersects with the supernatural, before returning to the real again.
Magic realism thrives on the language of metaphor—sometimes a safe, perhaps disguised way to reveal the motives of those in power, those who dictate what’s true. For those conditioned to be cooperative, complacent, and silent, magic realism shows us not only a door, but all the windows where the light streams in.
Magic realism is far more than escapism. It’s the translation of experiences nearly crushed out of existence. It’s the genre of those left standing to tell the tale. It is an act of courage, of rebellion, to slow down where it hurts and share the gold that belongs to all of us.
Join Lauren for her workshop, Magic Realism for Rebels, this Saturday 19th September:
