Magic Realism in Laura Restrepo’s The Dark Bride

Abstract

In the novel The Dark Bride, Laura Restrepo interweaves the real and fantasies in such a way that it blurs the border between history and fiction, and the past and the present. This sort of admixture of real and fantasy is reflected basically in the portrayal of characters, settings and the incidents of the novel. Restrepo has used the technique of magic realism especially to raise the voice of silenced and marginalized ones by re-narrating the Columbian history in a fictionalized form. In the novel, the main character Amanda is shown as a traumatized character who hides her real identity at first and disguises as a girl. She comes to La-Catunga to make her new identity by engaging in prostitution. And she gets the name „Sayonara‟, which in Japanese means a „good-bye‟ or a „farewell‟. So symbolically it is a farewell to her traumatic past. The novel starts with the arrival of the mysterious girl Sayonara in La Catunga and ends with the departure of her with the hallucinated figure of the Payanes to whom she loves. But the personal story of Sayonara in the novel is embedded with the history of 1940s of the Columbia. Along with the use of the various elements of magic realism like sense of mystery, real-history-world setting, trauma and memory, post-colonial political critique, Restrepo also explores the border narrative through the technique of magic realism and succeeds in raising the voice of marginalized and colonized ones.