Anika Fajardo on Magical Realism and Reclaiming Her Colombian Roots

Anika Fajardo discovered magical realism at sixteen — the same summer she mailed her first letter, "Dear Dad," to the Colombian father she had never known. In a personal essay, the author of The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore (Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster) traces both her literary sensibility and her sense of origin to that double discovery.

Fajardo was born in a city in the southwestern Colombian Andes, at the end of a one-lane bridge, in a rented house with a courtyard where she toddled among huge banana leaves. When she was nearly two, her mother — exhausted from trying to live as a Colombian wife — took her back to the United States. An acrimonious divorce followed. Fajardo grew up entirely removed from her birthplace, inside her single mother's family in the mainly white suburbs around the Twin Cities, spending summers at her white American grandparents' isolated cabin in northern Minnesota.

By high school in the 1980s and early 1990s, she knew her father only as a faraway artist. Her image of Colombia came from terrifying news stories of kidnappings and guerrillas, from an era she describes as when the country was the most dangerous on earth. She studied grainy Kodachrome photos from her mother's albums — her parents, both smiling broadly but inscrutably — and examined her father's crinkled eyes and black mustache, looking for what she had inherited.

What does reading have to do with finding a father?

Fajardo says the same forces that pushed her to write to him drew her to Latin American literature. She read those novels the way she studied her father's face in old photos: searching for something familiar, hoping to learn about the place she was born — and maybe who she was.

The reading list came fast. Isabel Allende's Of Love and Shadows captivated her teenage heart with journalist Irene Beltrán and photographer Francisco Leal, but she also saw herself in Allende's Evangelinas, two daughters switched as infants whose lives were shaped more by upbringing than birth. Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate let her taste the sadness of wedding cake. Then came One Hundred Years of Solitude, where she found a family stranger than her own — the Buendías, with ice in the middle of the jungle, a sickness that put a whole town to sleep, and girls who became witches.

Magical realism, explained

Fajardo is precise about the term. Magical realism is often mistaken for a genre or a subtype of fantasy, but it is neither, she writes. It's a literary tool that adds fantastical elements to otherwise ordinary, realistic settings.

Her artist father told her the mode emerged from the visual tradition of post-World War II surrealism. Writers then began mixing the ordinary and the imaginary, blending politics, history, social justice and art — and using the tool to push back against oppressive governments or strict social norms. Across the twentieth century, writers such as Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges employed it in overt and subversive ways. "Magical realism allowed writers to capture truth — truth as they understood it," Fajardo writes.

Letters across three thousand miles

The first thin blue airmail envelope from her father arrived in her suburban mailbox as she was reading Allende's House of the Spirits. She moved on to García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, then back to Allende's Eva Luna. As the letters crossed the three thousand miles that had separated them her entire life, his words — "the phrases and sentences and paragraphs meant to replace a childhood" — and the novels of food and family, love and regret "seemed to come alive around me."

In her imagination, the Buendías' courtyard became the gardens of her toddlerhood; the creaking floors of the Truebas' spirit house became the wide boards she had crawled on. Truth as she understood it.

The epistolary relationship eventually moved beyond airmail. Fajardo traveled to Colombia in her early twenties, preparing by rereading those novels — books where death and birth are dots on an endless loop, where the terrifying becomes harmless, and where the ordinary, like fathers and daughters, turns into magic. When she later began writing her own stories, magical realism seeped in, an echo of both her voracious reading and her lived experience.

She had found a way to understand the truth — or a truth — about who she was and where she came from. And when father and daughter finally met, she writes, the wilderness surrounding the airport hummed like the jungle of Macondo, and their eyes crinkled in the same way as they embraced. That inheritance, not the geography, is what her fiction carries forward.