In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

148 My meeting with Héctor Abad Faciolince (henceforth Abad) was short. We had tea at a place next to his bookstore Palinuro, located close to downtown Medellín. When I explained the reason for my visit, he showed some lack of enthusiasm about my research work. What would my visit to Medellín and my conversations with local writers add to the analyses of their literary works? Was mine a sociological approach to his novels? Somehow his skepticism about my project reminded me of the attitude César López Cuadras showed when I asked him about his literary production and narco traffic. Only months later, when I was going over my notes on his work, I understood Abad’s lack of interest. Despite his reservations, however, he was generous in talking about his work. He told me why he had decided to return to Medellín after his long stay in Italy. He confessed that writers of his generation—unlike the ones who preceded them—did not have to define their literature in relation to the enormous stature of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. Abad mentioned his good relationship with García Márquez and contrasted it with the tensions that some of his critical essays published in newspapers have caused with authors such as Fernando Vallejo. Those stories not only revealed the remaining implicit influence of García Márquez, as well as the conflicts within the local literary field, but also gave a hint of Abad’s own position within that field. When commenting on Angosta, the book I analyze in this chapter, Abad told me that he moved to the Hotel Nutibara while writing the novel and confessed that the majority of its stories and characters are not invented. “I have little imagination,” he claimed. “The events are taken from my own experiences, and from the experiences of people I know.” And although we had an open and pleasant conversation, I did not dare ask him about the death of his father. He is an important figure 8 Gender and Genre in Héctor Abad Faciolince’s Angosta GenDer anD Genre In hÉCtor aBaD FaCIolInCe’s ANGOSTA 149 in the author’s life and appears in several of his books, but I lacked the time to broach such a painful and personal subject. Héctor Abad Gómez, the writer’s father, was a well-known Antioquian doctor who worked extensively as a professor of public health and contributed in the design of local public policies. He was also engaged in various projects for the World Health Organization and traveled around the world. During the last years of his life (1980s), when the violence in Medellín grew extreme, especially against the poor, union leaders, intellectuals, professors, neighborhood activists, and grassroots members, Abad Gómez became a staunch human rights activist, exposing numerous crimes committed by the paramilitary forces. Abad Gómez ’s transparency and compromise became a nuisance for the church and the local conservative elite. In 1987, while attending the funeral of a recognized teachers’ union leader, Héctor Abad Gómez was shot at the hands of two sicarios. Within a few months of his death, the people who worked with him in the Human Rights Defense Committee were also killed as well as those who paid tribute to him at his funeral. Among them, only three men survived, Alberto Aguirre and Carlos Gaviria, who left Colombia right after Abad Gómez’s death, and his son, Héctor Abad Faciolince. After receiving several threats, Abad sought asylum in Spain and ended up living in Italy for several years. Héctor Abad Gómez’s public commitment to the causes of the underprivileged , his human rights activism, and his horrific murder are part of the aura that surrounds his son. Abad is a survivor, as are many Colombians, not only because he had to flee the country after receiving threats from his father’s assassins, but also and most importantly because he had to live with the burden of the murder of a loved-one, left— as most are in Colombia—in absolute impunity. Every person I talked to in Medellín mentioned Héctor Abad Faciolince’s name with respect, with great admiration, and even with solemnity. But Abad is anything but solemn. He speaks with simplicity about his work and insists that he is a writer with no imagination—an assertion with which I do not agree...

Share