Magic Realism in Laura Restrepo’s The Dark Bride
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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.