World Literature Today

Abstract:

Days after a bicycle crash that would erase her memory for two months, Ingrid Rojas Contreras answered her phone and heard the voice of a woman she presumably didn't know, but who sounded oddly familiar—her mother. Curiously, her mother had suffered a similar physical accident and extended memory loss decades earlier in Colombia and, as she recovered, began to see ghosts, empowering her to join a previously all-male family line of curanderos, or indigenous healers. This story, tinged with a García Márquez–like magical realism, lies along a border between fictional truth and documentable mystery that Rojas Contreras is now exploring in her memoir-in-progress, The Man Who Could See Clouds, which centers on her curandero grandfather. Her 2018 novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree also treads that border, drawing on her family's life in Bogotá against the backdrop of Colombia's politically tumultuous 1980s and '90s. In a December 2020 Zoom conversation, we compared how truth and fiction play together between memoir and novel.