The EconomistAugust 22nd 2020 Books & arts 692 garded black Americans not as displaced
Africans but as wholly and irreducibly
American—not merely partakers of Ameri-
can culture but its creators and, as much as
anyone else, its proprietors.
The literary corollary of that stance was
a dislike of protest fiction. Murray approv-
ingly quoted James Baldwin’s assessment
of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: a book “not intend-
ed to do anything more than prove that
slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly
horrible. This makes material for a pam-
phlet but it is hardly enough for a novel.”
But Murray castigated Baldwin himself for
failing to fulfil his promise, and for writing
about Harlem’s woes without its wonders.
“Sometimes he writes as if he had never
heard the comedians at the Apollo The-
atre,” Murray teased, chiding Baldwin for
leaving material untapped. “Life in Harlem
is the very stuff of romance and fiction,
even as was life in Chaucer’s England, Cer-
vantes’ Spain, Rabelais’ France.”
He seemed to esteem Thomas Mann
and James Joyce highest among novelists,
and, like some of theirs, his four novels are
in essence coming-of-age tales—beautiful-
ly written, replete with memory and detail,
but lacking his essays’ spark and thrust.
Like his poems, in their richness they make
an implicit argument against what he
called “the folklore of white supremacy
and the fakelore of black pathology”.
Those last four words are more impor-
tant than they may seem. The “fakelore” is
not that some black people are disadvan-
taged; it is that they are responsible for that
disadvantage, and defined by it. Murray did
not downplay whites’ role in black Ameri-
cans’ plight. As he averred in “The Omni-
Americans”: “The deliberate debasement
of the black image has been so viciously
systematic...that the scope of white malev-
olence is hard to exaggerate.” But he did not
end in outrage or despair. The glory of the
blues man, Murray wrote, is his gift for elic-
iting beauty from sorrow and struggle, thus
becoming “an agent of affirmation and
continuity in the face of adversity”.
Reading Murray now is exhilarating, as
great writing always is. It is also poignant.
Today America is less racially stratified
than during his formative years in the early
20th century, but it remains much more so
than it ought to be. Fixing that is the work
of policy, which did not seem to interest
Murray much as a writer. What concerned
him was a proper reverence for self-defini-
tion: for judging people first as individuals,
rather than members of a group.
The novels of William Faulkner were
his lodestar. Faulkner’s fiction took in the
struggles of African-Americans, even mak-
ing them heroic. But his underlying point,
for Murray, was not “that the meek shall in-
herit the Earth. His point was that no man
could inherit the Earth, that the only thing
worth inheriting is humanity.” 7
F
ora countryof50mpeople,Colombia
has been strangely overlooked and of-
ten misunderstood. A generation ago it was
a pariah nation, synonymous for outsiders
with drug-trafficking and violence. Yet Co-
lombia has gradually moved towards inter-
nal peace, disarming right-wing paramili-
taries and left-wing guerrillas, while
maintaining a vibrant civil society and
finding a place for indigenous peoples and
environmentalism in its democracy. Co-
lombians are characterised, writes Wade
Davis, not just by their resilience but also
by “an enduring spirit of place, a deep love
of a land that is perhaps the most bountiful
on Earth, home to the greatest ecological
and geographical diversity on the planet”.
Its heart and soul is the Magdalena riv-
er. It defines Colombia rather as that other
great river that empties into the Caribbean,
the Mississippi, does the United States. It
bisects the country, from its source in a
high-altitude bog not far from the southern
border with Ecuador, to the vast tropical
wetlands and lagoons of its lower course.
Four out of five Colombians live in its
drainage. For centuries it was their main
transport artery. It is, too, “the wellspring
of Colombian music, literature, poetry and
prayer,” Mr Davis argues. “Colombia as a
nation is the gift of the river. The Magdale-
na is the story of Colombia.”
The author and his subject make an ide-al match. Mr Davis, a Canadian writer, an-
thropologist and explorer, fell in love with
Colombia on a school trip at the age of 14,
and returned often. In this book he travels
the thousand-mile length of the river, on
foot, horseback, by car or—often—by boat.
What lifts his account far above a run-of-
the-mill travelogue is that he organised
some remarkable and knowledgeable com-
panions. They start with William Vargas, a
botanist who grew up on the river’s upper
course and has discovered more than 100
plant species. Mr Vargas is the perfect
guide to the country’s extraordinary wealth
of flora and fauna.
The Magdalena’s middle course was the
bloody backyard of Colombia’s long inter-
nal conflict. Its riverside towns were an in-
ternal frontier terrorised by guerrillas and
paramilitaries, its waters a graveyard for
victims. Mr Davis meets survivors and
hears harrowing stories of horror and loss.
What comes through is the determination
of many to forget the past and move on. The
river’s lower course, celebrated in the writ-
ing of Gabriel García Márquez, is home to
many zambos(of mixed African and Amer-
indian descent) who have created much of
Colombia’s rich musical tradition of cum-
bia, vallenatoand tambora.
As an anthropologist, Mr Davis is sym-
pathetic to Colombia’s indigenous cul-
tures, and sensitive to the often tragic clash
of belief systems—a theme of his previous
work, “Into the Silence”, on British expedi-
tions to the Himalayas. His prose has an in-
cantatory timbre, which occasionally cloys
but often carries the reader deep into Co-
lombian ethnography and ecology.
For the most part, he is admirably judi-
cious in his treatment of the country’s
complex conflicts. He skilfully weaves into
his journey themes and episodes of Colom-
bian history, from the Spanish conquest to
the battles of Liberals and Conservatives
and the tragedy of the volcanic eruption of
the Nevado del Ruiz. Twice that difficult
balance eludes him, in long detours on
Pablo Escobar and the fall and rise of Me-
dellín (the city that was home to Escobar’s
cartel), and on Símon Bolívar, the Venezue-
lan who led the struggle for independence
from Spain. Here Mr Davis has nothing
original to say. Like many good tourist
guides, he sometimes over-embroiders:
some of what he claims as uniquely Colom-
bian applies equally to other Latin Ameri-
can countries.
But these are minor blemishes. “Magda-
lena” is a revelatory and often enchanting
book, enhanced by fine photographs and
good maps (though some readers might
have wished for a glossary). Mr Davis also
has a message. In recent decades the river
has become a sewer, to the extent that it
faces partial ecological death. Its cleansing
and redemption could and should be a
matter of national pride. 7ColombiaA river and a
nation
Magdalena: River of Dreams.By Wade
Davis. Knopf; 432 pages; $30. Bodley
Head; £25