Manuel Zapata Olivella

Manuel Zapata Olivella (Lorica, Córdoba, Colombia, March 17, 1920-Bogotá, November 19, 2004) was a Colombian doctor, anthropologist and writer. He is considered one of the most important representatives of Afro-Colombian culture for his work to disseminate, record and preserve it in the form of literature, social research, press articles, academic events and television and radio programs. He published eight novels, three short stories travels, an autobiography, and hundreds of essays, articles, chronicles and reviews in newspapers, magazines and academic publications. He is especially recognized for literary works such as "Changó, el gran putas", "Chambacú, corral of blacks" and "A saint is born in Chimá.

Biography

Manuel Zapata Olivella was a Colombian writer, doctor and anthropologist raised in the city of Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia.

He was born into a family related to the study of literature, music, culture and popular religiosity of the Colombian Caribbean. His childhood was spent in rural environments, surrounded by musicians, educators and artists, which very early led him to become interested in the cultural and ethnic diversity of his family and the people of the region.

His parents, Edelmira Olivella and Antonio María Zapata Vásquez were, respectively, a mestiza (of indigenous Zenú and Spanish ancestry), and a mulatto (of European and Spanish ancestry). African), which instilled in the children a feeling of pride and commitment to rigorously explore the extension and dimension of their own cultural origins. In Manuel's words: "In my family all the grandparents were born in the womb of Indian or black woman. My parents, my brothers, my cousins have indigenous hair, blue eyes or a body charred by the African sun.

As a child, his father – who worked as a teacher and was recognized as a philosopher – moved with part of his family (his wife and some of his twelve children) to Cartagena de Indias. There he refounded the College 'La Fraternidad', whose previous headquarters, in Lorica, had had to close. In this institution Manuel came into contact with a humanist and scientific education, while witnessing the difficulties that his father faced with the Ministry of Education of the conservative government of the time, which refused to officially recognize the institution because it considered it a disseminator of &# 34;free-thinking ideas.

At the beginning of the 1940s, Manuel began studying Medicine in Bogotá, at the National University of Colombia. The records of his first published writings date back to those years, from 1942, with the column 'Genio y figura', in the Cartagena newspaper Diario de la Costa, where, for For the first time, he puts in writing his interests in making Afro-Colombian culture visible. In "Genio y figura", Manuel refers to the publication by RCA Victor of a series of albums with the A No. 1 orchestra of Bolivarian music, where some of the first compositions and arrangements by Lucho Bermúdez, Santos Pérez, Planeta Pitalúa, Joaquín Marrugo, among other musicians, who Manuel valued early and constantly, and who would only come to be recognized towards the end of the decade. According to Alfonso Múnera, "they are abundant Manuel Zapata's articles, published between 1940 and 1965, in newspapers and magazines, whose central theme is Colombian folklore.

Another interest that he showed from the beginning of the 1940s was that of activism against racism against Afro-Colombians: for example, in June 1943, together with Delia Zapata Olivella, Natanael Díaz and Marino Viveros, he organized, in Bogotá, Negro Day, an initiative that had great detractors from representatives of the Liberal and Conservative parties, who considered it "racist" and "separatist".

After suspending his studies, between 1943 and 1947, Manuel traveled through Colombia, Central America, Mexico and the United States practicing various jobs, including that of doctor, journalist and boxer. In Mexico City he worked at the Dr. Ramírez Psychiatric Sanatorium; at the Orthopedic Hospital of the singer Alfonso Ortiz Tirado; in Time magazine and in Sucesos para Todos magazine. In this period, as a result of his experiences as a traveler, he began to write and publish several of his first narrative and journalistic works: a series of collaborations on music and popular culture with the magazines 'Sábado' 3. 4; and "Cromos"; the novel Tierra mojada (1947)—"<<one of the first novelistic outbreaks of black sensitivity in our America>>, as noted, in his prologue, the Peruvian novelist Ciro Alegría"—;Pasión vagabunda (1949), a novel in which he gives an account of his reflections on racial discrimination in the United States; and, finally, Drums of America to awaken the old world and Bitter rice, unpublished novels resulting from his long walk. During these years, Manuel also traveled to Mao Tse Tung's China, where he met Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado.

During the 1950s, Manuel was married to María Pérez, with whom he had his children Harlem and Edelma.

Between the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, Manuel began to explore his role as a researcher: very interested in ethnography, he managed resources to travel and publish his studies on the cultures of black people in Colombia; He began as a professor at several universities in the United States, Canada, Central America and Africa; and promoted the organization of the first congress of Colombian culture and the National Folklore Board. At the same time, he published the books I've seen the night (1953), 10th Street (1960), Tales of death and freedom (1961), Behind the Face (1963), The Submerged Galleon (1963) and Chambacú, corral de negroes (1963). In 1957, he met Rosa Bosch, his second wife, in Barcelona. After corresponding for two years, on December 23, 1960 they married in Bogotá.

In 1965, with the support and encouragement of Rosa Bosch, Manuel founded the literature magazine Letras Nacionales, where he had the occasional collaboration of writers such as Óscar Collazos, Germán Espinosa, Policarpo Varón, Roberto Burgos Cantor, Ricardo Cano Gaviria, Luis Fayad, Umberto Valverde, Darío Ruiz Gómez, Fanny Buitrago and Alberto Duque López. The magazine lasted 20 years, with 46 issues published and constant interruptions due to financing difficulties. In his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez remembers it this way: "Manuel acted as a charity doctor, he was a novelist, an activist politician and promoter of Caribbean music, but his most dominant vocation was to try to solve problems for everyone.

In the 1970s, Manuel continued to promote the creation of research communities and organize spaces for meeting and discussion about Afro-Colombian culture and blackness movements in Africa, Latin America and the United States: in 1973, he created the Colombian Foundation of Folklore Research, under the idea of primarily orienting the investigation of a vast area of Colombian culture, generally outside the interest of the country's academic entities: the creativity of the illiterate and semi-literate layers that constitute more of 80% of our population" In 1975, he organized the first week of black culture at the National Library of Colombia; in August 1977, he organized the I Congress of Black Culture of the Americas in Cali. The second Congress of Black Culture of the Americas took place in Panama, on March 17, 1980, and the third, in São Paulo, Brazil, in August 1982. Among his approaches to politics, during those years Manuel was elected councilor of Lorica, Córdoba, in 1974, as a result of what which received the nickname "Gallo tapa'o". During the 80s, in the same town he promoted the organization of the Radio Foro Popular station, with the purpose of making visible the causes of the inhabitants of the region. The archive of all these years of work is currently located at Vanderbilt University, where researchers can access documents on Colombian oral tradition, dance and music, pharmacopoeia, gastronomy and other Colombian cultural manifestations.

On May 29, 1982, on a regional flight in which Manuel Zapata Olivella was with six other people from Barranquilla to Corozal, his plane collided shortly after takeoff with a Colombian Air Force fighter plane. The Tavina pilots managed to land in the Malambo Lagoon while the military plane managed to land at the Barranquilla airport. None of the occupants on board were injured, so Manuel and the rest of the passengers and crew were rescued by astonished local fishermen.

In 1983 he published his most recognized work, Changó, written between 1962 and 1982, and continued his dissemination work on the Radio Nacional de Colombia station, through the programs "Colombian Identity", "North and South of Vallenato" and the "Audiovisual Encyclopedia of Colombian Identity"; the latter earned him a Simón Bolívar Award for best radio program. In 1990 he published Fábulas de Tamalameque , a narrative dedicated to the popular traditions of the departments of Magdalena and Bolívar.

During the 1990s, Manuel underwent several surgical interventions, which made his mobility difficult and, added to economic difficulties, affected his health. However, towards the end of the decade he continued making trips to Colombia, the United States and Europe. The Colombian singer Lucía Pulido remembers her meeting with Manuel during those years, at Penn State University, on the occasion of a congress of Colombianists where both artists participated:

"I went, by chance, with Ian Betancur, his grandson or nephew grandson, and with another guitarist, to play in threesome. At the end of the concert, Manuel went on stage and translated in words what I had just done. Because I was very... I don't know if I was scared, but I was in the middle of monsters... scholars, Colombian intellectuals and writers. Then I said, "I am going to go in to kill, because they are going to kill me. Then I didn't know how to lower all that intensity, I remember. And of the things that Manuel said to me... of the most sympathetic pyropos that have thrown me into life... is: "You are like a mangosta." The mangosta kills snake, cascabel.... After that, he was as a cultural attaché in Trinidad & Tobago, then I sent him my album to listen to him, and, if he liked it, he made the presentation, liner notes. Unfortunately, the conversations were deleted because they were by fax, but he wrote a text and gave the name to the album, which is called Religious and pagan songs of Colombia[...] Afterwards we met in Bogota and I said to him, "I am working with tradition, but I do it with a lot of respect and morals, and he said the first thing he said to me was: "Take the respect, because it is the only way for the music to be transformed. [...] And then he asked his daughter to copy cassettes with field work done by him... especially the Pacific. [...] And he said to me, "I do not give you this material because you are very sympathetic, but because you have the responsibility to do something with this educational."

In general, throughout his life, Manuel maintained extensive correspondence with different academics, writers and intellectuals interested in Afro-descendant culture, such as Roy Simón Bryce-Laporte, Eulalia Bernard, Olivia Sera Avellar, Wände Abimbola, George List, Laurence Prescott, Marvin A. Lewis, Yvonne Captain-Hidalgo, William Luis, Antonio D. Tillis and Jonathan Tittler.

In 2002, he received the Life and Work award from the Colombian Ministry of Culture. After his death on November 19, 2004, his ashes were scattered in the Sinú River.

Works

Narrative

Since the mid-1950s his narrative would increasingly focus on the history and culture of the inhabitants of the Colombian Caribbean, especially the experience of black and indigenous people. Thanks to this, he exchanged correspondence and met different figures in the Afro-descendant cultural sphere, such as Langston Hughes (American poet); Abdías do Nascimento (Brazilian sociologist); Nicomedes Santacruz (Peruvian poet and folklorist); Aimé Césaire (Martinique poet and essayist); Nicolás Guillén (Cuban poet); Léopold Sédar Senghor (poet and president of Senegal); Frantz Fanon (Martinique thinker); Alejo Carpentier (Cuban novelist and musicologist); León Goutran Damas (Guyanese poet); Édouard Glissant (poet and essayist from Martinique), among others. Manuel, however, was not the only Colombian interested in the vindication of Afro-descendant rights and culture, as the development of a movement, not always homogeneous, is recorded. but representative of the interest and fight for the recognition and inclusion of blacks in Colombian society. For example, Delia Zapata Olivella, Juan Zapata Olivella, Rogerio Velásquez, Aquiles Escalante, Sofonías Yacup, Natanael Díaz, Jorge Artel, Arnoldo Palacios, Carlos Arturo Truque, Diego Luis Córdoba and Valentín Moreno Salazar, among others, stand out.

Later, in 1965, with the support of Rosa Bosch, he founded and directed the literature magazine Letras Nacionales, whose interests, regarding the defense of literary nationalism and the criticism of cultural colonialism, are synthesized in the editorial of its first issue:

"There is a Colombian literature. Theatre, poetry, novel, story, essay. National letters It will be a magazine to show it, judge it and exalt it. We take a responsibility that no one has ever wanted to assume in our country. Some look embarrassed how much you write. Others do not understand the national meaning involved in the publication of a book. There are those who think that the act of writing must be conditioned on the realization of a universal work."

In this same period he wrote his work In Chimá a saint is born (1964), considered by critics as the closing of a first creative period, and chosen as a finalist in two competitions: the Esso de 1963, in which she was defeated by Gabriel García Márquez with La mala hora; and the Seix Barral Short Novel Prize, whose first place went to The city and the dogs of Mario Vargas Llosa. His most important work is the novel Changó, el Gran Putas (1983), an ambitious story about the African American origins and the stories of the black maroons in Cartagena, Haiti and also about the opposition to segregation in the United States. About his writing process, the Colombian academic Darío Henao remembers that:

"One afternoon in front of Santa Marta Bay, Manuel told me that while he wrote Changó, the big whores, He felt the need to go to Africa, the starting point of that brutal diaspora that pushed millions of human beings as slaves to the Americas. The creative process asked him to travel to the land of the ancestors, because he urged him to tie many loose ends on the saga that he had been investigating for more than twenty years for his novel."

This trip to Africa took place in January 1974, when Manuel received the invitation from the poet, and then president, Léopold Sédar Senghor to visit Dakar, Senegal, and participate in the colloquium Negritude and Latin America There he was taken to the island of Goré, where he saw the ruins of a prison to which Africans hunted in the ancient kingdoms of Niger were taken, waiting for the slave ships that would take them. would lead to the <<journey of never return>>". Moved, Manuel asks Senghor to allow him to spend the night in one of the vaults facing the sea:

"I've been writing a novel for several years about the epicness of blackness in America, which starts precisely here, in this House of the Dead. I would like to spend the night naked on the rocks, plunge into the ulcers and tears of my ancestors during the long wait of the ships to be led to Cartagena de Indias, where I was born and where we preserved their breath and memory."

According to Darío Henao, "this was the vital experience that he lacked to provide a poetic solution to the world that he would recreate in the novel", since it allowed him to design what the narrative structure should be like and conjure the mysteries of his writing imagining a world 'guarded by the gods of his African ancestors'. The novel has been re-published several times (1983, 1985, 1992 and 2010), translated into French, English and Portuguese.

His works fundamentally deal with oppression and violence. In his long career as a narrator two tendencies can be distinguished, one of a realistic nature and social denunciation and another of a mythological nature in which the magical vision of black people prevails.

Prizes

• 1963 - "Behind the face." First Novela National Prize "Esso", of the Colombian Academy of Language. Bogota.
• 1985 - "Changó". Premio Literario "Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho" Latin American fiction, awarded by Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho Cultural Center. St. Paul, Brazil.
• 1987 - "Arise Mulato. The spirit will speak through my race." "New Human Rights" Literary Award awarded by the Association of New Human Rights. Paris, France.

Works

Novels

• 1947 Earth wet
• 1953 - I've seen the night
• 1958 - The Indian Steps
• 1960 - 10th Street
• 1963 - Behind the face - Esso prize winner.
• 1963 - Chambaco, Black Corral - Mention at the Casa de las Américas Award 1963
• 1964 - In Chimá a saint is born
• 1983 - Changó, the big whores
• 1983 - History of a Black Youth
• 1993 - Hemingway, the death hunter

Theatre

• 1955 - Hotel de vagabonds
• 1958 - The steps of the Indian
• 1971 - Released caron

Short story

• 1949 - Vagabon passion
• 1955 - China 6 a.m.
• 1961 - Death and freedom stories
• 1962 - The jungle surgeon
• 1962 - The submerged galleon
• 1967 - Who gave the gun to Oswald?
• 1990 - Tamalameque Fables

Autobiography

• 1988 - Get up mulatto! "For my race will speak the spirit." Bogotá: Rei Andes.

Tests

• 1972 - Oral tradition and conduct in Córdoba
• 1974 - The Colombian Man
• 1997 - The Rebellion of Genes

Press articles

• 1962 - Popular rhythms
• 2010 - On the paths of his ancestors: chosen texts (1940 - 2000)

Centennial of Manuel Zapata

On March 17, 2020, the centenary of Manuel Zapata Olivella was celebrated.