Abstract
As we enter the gallery, stumbling in the darkness, we become aware of the bunches of bananas swaying from the ceiling, permeating the room with their rotten fragrance. This first impression remains in the memory of anyone who has seen one of the many installations of Musa paradisiaca. In entering the exhibition we enter the labyrinth of a lost memory, one mythologized by being repeatedly erased from Colombia’s history: la matanza de las bananeras or ‘the massacre of the banana plantations.’ The matanza [slaughter, massacre], whose name only immortalizes its perpetrators and so redoubles the history of violence, violentology and oblivion that it paradigmatically represents, is one of the largest undocumented massacres in Colombia’s history, the mass murder of workers of the United Fruit Company and their families on the order of General Cortés Vargas during the night of December 5, 1928, at the Ciénaga train station in the Magdalena Medio region. This event is decisively marked by the history of its erasure, by the absence in official archives of evidentiary documents that could testify to its occurrence. Nevertheless, it has stubbornly survived from generation to generation, emerging more forcefully through the ambiguous but categorical inscription by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The following chapter has appeared previously in Spanish as ‘Tras los rastros de Macondo: Archivo, Memoria e Historia en Musa Paradisíaca de José Alejandro Restrepo,’ in Estudios de Filosofía 58 (2018), 41–64, and reprinted in an updated version as ‘La Resistencia de lo inarchivable: del mito a la historia en Musa Paradisiaca de José Alejandro Restrepo,’ in Dialogo: a Journal for Latin American Studies 22:2 (2019) 35–48. This translation is of the second version.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Although there are historical studies on the massacre, these all point out the absence of an official archive to verify its survival in collective memory (see White, 1978; LeGrand, 1983; among others). Significantly, Carlos Arango Z.’s Sobrevivientes de las bananeras, which gathered the testimonies of the few remaining survivors still alive at the time, calls A Hundred Years of Solitude the closest thing to a testimonial of the thousands of witnesses of the events (1981, 27).
- 2.
Before García Márquez’s book, Alvaro Cepeda Samudio experimented with the impossibility of reconstructing and narrating the massacre at La casa grande. I am grateful to Juan Diego Pérez for pointing this out to me. There is also Fanny Buitrago’s El hostigante verano de los dioses, and Carlos Arturo Truque’s short story ‘El Encuentro,’ which do not address the massacre as a spectacle, but rather from the perspective of a normalized, quotidian, structural violence (see Annie Mendoza’s work on both in 2015 and 2019). It makes sense that the latter is a result of a feminist and intersectional perspective.
- 3.
In a 1991 interview for British radio García Márquez acknowledged that his image of 200 train cars full of dead answers the need for literary imagination to produce a huge image that is faithful to collective memory, even if historically improbable (see García Márquez quoted by Palacios & Safford, 2002, 520). I am grateful to Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez for the reference to this interview.
- 4.
Angela Uribe has carefully analyzed how the two ‘official’ documents produced immediately after the massacre only confirm this ambiguity. One, the official report of General Cortés Vargas, officially declares 13 dead (see Cortés Vargas, 1979, 91), while Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s speech before the Congress of the Republic denouncing the massacre, mentions more than a thousand (see Gaitán Ayala, 1997, 24). Uribe points out how this ambiguity is aptly captured in García Márquez’s fictitious account of the events (see Uribe, 2010, 48, see also Uribe, 2009).
- 5.
The repeated installations of Musa perform and inscribe the historical repetition of the massacre of the United Fruit Company workers by later violence related to the oil and gas industry in Urabá (the Chiquita Brands case was brought before the Inter-American Court in 2007 and again in 2011, making it more well known, although after the work’s first installation in 1996). Documents in the artist’s archive not only suggest this continuity, but also record the invisibility of this later violence, the absence of these facts in official discourse, and the impunity that still surrounds the 30 years of massacres in Urabá.
- 6.
The Urabá banana plantation massacre occurred on March 4, 1988, when 21 workers suspected of being members of the EPL (The Popular Liberation Army, a guerrilla group) were massacred by a paramilitary unit with military and police support. [Trans.]
- 7.
This and the following paragraph quote from newspaper clippings that are installed in the gallery and compiled in the exhibition catalog. For the 2016 exhibition in FLORA ars+natura Restrepo added passages from Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s speech to the Congress of the Republic in 1928.
- 8.
In this sense, the archive that begins the exhibition is also an archive of Musa’s installations, and of the repeated denunciations it has made since 1996. The 2016 installation also reveals the gradual coincidence of the reports that initially gave rise to the work and the appearance 20 years later of the ‘hidden causes of this violence.’
- 9.
- 10.
For a more detailed analysis of the role of the unforgettable in Benjamin’s conception of history and memory, see Acosta López (2017).
- 11.
Benjamin elaborates this notion in ‘Convolute N, On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’ of the Passages project (Benjamin, 1999, pp. 456–88).
- 12.
This was a marginal comment made by Juan Diego Pérez as I revised the text for publication.
- 13.
The expression ‘horrible originality’ comes from Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the violence of the concentration camps as a crystallization of the logic of totalitarianism. Arendt struggles with the increasing number of testimonies about the camps, and the lack of ways to make them intelligible, ‘credible’ and ‘audible’ (see Arendt, 1967, 444–446).
References
Acosta López, M. d. R. (2017). Hacia una gramática del silencio: Benjamin y Felman. In C. de Gamboa & M. V. Uribe (Eds.), Los silencios de la Guerra (pp. 85–116). Siglo XXI editores.
Acosta López, M. d. R. (2018). Gramáticas de la escucha: decolonizar la historia y la memoria. In M. Moraña (Ed.), Sujeto, descolonización, transmodernidad. Debates filosóficos latino- americanos. Iberoamericana/Vervuert.
Acosta López, M. d. R. (2020). Gramáticas de la escucha como gramáticas descoloniales: apuntes para una descolonización de la memoria. Eidos, 34, 14–40.
Arango Z., C. (1981). Sobrevivientes de las bananeras. Editorial Colombia Nueva.
Arendt, H. (1967). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt.
Benjamin, W. (1968). The Task of the Translator. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations, Essays and Reflections (H. Zohn, Trans., pp. 69–82). Schocken Books.
Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project (H. Eiland, & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Cortés Vargas, C. (1979). Los sucesos de las bananeras. Editorial Desarrollo. (1st edition 1929).
Derrida, J. (1995). Archive Fever. The University of Chicago Press.
Gaitán Ayala, J. E. (1997). 1928 La masacre de las Bananeras. Editorial Cometa De Papel.
García Márquez, G. (1972). One Hundred Years of Solitude. Penguin.
García Márquez, G. (1982). The Solitude of Latin America. Nobel Lecture. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/lecture/
LeGrand, C. (1983). Campesinos y asalariados en la zona bananera de Santa Marta (1900-1935). Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, 11, 235–250.
Mendoza, A. (2015). Rewriting the Nation: Novels by Women on Violence in Colombia. Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica.
Mendoza, A., & Thomas, T. (2019). Literary and Visual Rememory at the 90th Anniversary of the Banana Massacre in Colombia. Zapruder World: An International Journal for the History of Social Conflict, 5. https://doi.org/10.21431/Z36K5P
Palacios, M., & Safford, F. (2002). Colombia: país fragmentado, sociedad dividida: su historia. Norma.
Restrepo, J. A. (1997). Musa paradisiaca. Banco de la República.
Restrepo, J. A., et al. (2016). Musa paradisiaca. Fundación FLORA ars+natura.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake. On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.
Uribe, Á. (2009). Perfiles del mal en la historia de Colombia. Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
Uribe, Á. (2010). ¿Pueden los hechos históricos resistirse a la mendacidad? Sobre la matanza de las bananeras. Revista Co-herencia, 7(13), 43–67.
Warburg, A. (2000). Atlas Mnemosyne. AKAL.
White, J. (1978). Historia de una ignominia: la United Fruit Co. en Colombia. Editorial Presencia.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
del Rosario Acosta López, M. (2023). The Resistance of the Unarchivable: From Myth to History in José Alejandro Restrepo’s Musa Paradisiaca. In: Zepke, S., Alvarado Castillo, N. (eds) Violence and Resistance, Art and Politics in Colombia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10326-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10326-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-10325-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-10326-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)