​​Fish littered the dock the next morning, thin bones poking through matted silver scales, carcasses licked clean by the rolling tide. As Belén’s eyes sailed over the legion of fish cracked open like oranges, she imagined massive arms plucking sábalos, boquerones, and dorados out of the sea and flinging them, useless, onto the shore, where they could do nothing but rot and smell as the townspeople loaded empty nets back into their skiffs. Mami made a half-cross over her breast with lazy fingers. It was, apparently, too early in the morning to bother God with such things.

•••

A few weeks ago, I asked a friend to name a literary trope she was tired of. Her first answer was magical realism — more specifically, a particular breed of magical realism, especially prone to overwrought prose and on-the-nose metaphors. Despite the fact that this was, objectively, an extremely reasonable thing to say, I felt my brow furrow.

This apparently personal stake in the defense of magical realism did not come from nowhere: between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, I was absolutely obsessed with the genre. I would read anyone whose work could even tenuously be filed under it: Cortázar, Esquivel, Borges, Kafka, Bulgakov, Murakami. The gritty atmosphere lent these stories a serious, respectable air, but it was laced with just enough magic to maintain a certain whimsy playfulness. A young man cannot stop vomiting rabbits. A wedding cake is poisoned by its baker’s bitter tears. A large cat teeters loudly along the streets of St. Petersburg, drunk on vodka. They made a case for the glorious indivisibility of realism and fantasy. I was repeatedly dazzled by what they could make me believe. 

At a particularly prolific moment in my writing career, I wanted nothing more than to emulate these stories. Four attempts at this ambitious task still float side by side in a folder buried deep in my documents tab titled Stormbringer.

The real: The story always took place in the same fishing town, “a breathing, creaking mass of waterlogged wood and rusting zinc dangerously close to tumbling face-first into the bay’s deep green embrace.” This idealized bayfront was inspired by the cluster of huts and skiffs I saw in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, next to the dockside restaurant where I had the best dorado of my life. 

The magical: With some variation from draft to draft, a young girl named Belén had to contend with a peculiar condition afflicting either herself or a family member — chronic stomachaches that correlated almost perfectly with the arrival of thunderstorms to pseudo-Cabo Rojo. It was unclear whether the relationship between the pain and the thunder was causal or merely predictive, which contributed to the apprehension with which the rest of the town regarded the seemingly-cursed family.

A certain atmospheric resemblance to another fishing village-set tale, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings — an iconic short story by magical realism giant Gabriel García Márquez — was far from incidental. After all, I had first been introduced to magical realism in my tenth grade Spanish class. I learned about the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s, when authors like García Márquez, Juan Luis Borges, and Juan Rulfo’s phantasmic tales made them some of the region’s first representatives fully embraced within Western literary academic circles. 

Even as my insatiable appetite for stories led me all the way to frigid street corners in St. Petersburg and lush forest cabins in Kochi, I remained convinced that the true value of magical realism was as a phenomenological study of Latin American existence. A group of disgruntled motorists could form a small city state by the side of an infinite traffic jam only in the type of place where, for instance, a pigeon could explode into an electrical transformer and leave an entire small town powerless for two weeks. In the sticky heat of Puerto Rico, life often felt like an exercise in absurdity.

In the graceless body of a fourteen year old girl, this absurdity was only compounded — to the point that Stormbringer’s central metaphor felt like just a slight exaggeration. I was moody, dramatic, and extremely sensitive, prone to very old-fashioned fits: sometimes frantic hysteria, other times languid malaise. These came as involuntarily as stomachaches and proved as unintelligibly destructive as the tropical storms that followed Belén. 

As my friend’s wariness could suggest, however, it might no longer be the time to crusade for magical realism. In a New York Times article, Mexican author Silvia Moreno-García describes magical realism as a vague stereotype that has often “strangled rather than liberated Latin American literature.” Several recent articles echo this sentiment, and with good reason. For over sixty years, magical realism has hung like a hulky cloud over the continent. From the outside, it is impossible to see past it. The refusal to see Latin American authors as anything but “traditional” magical realists has both blocked the ascent of those who do not fit the mold and bulldozed over the nuances of those whose work can be reduced to the label. 

Reading through lists of commonly miscategorized authors, I was horrified to realize I might be part of the problem, having committed terrible sins against the likes of Borges and Quiroga. Nevertheless, I remain certain that neither “surrealism” nor “naturalism” nor “modernism” can account for the viscerally magical realist way their stories move me. I realize now why my friend’s completely valid opinion offended me so, and why, as I worked on version after version of Stormbringer from my childhood bedroom, the seemingly played-out genre still felt enlightening to me. My magical realism was never a shelf in a bookstore or a collection of recurring tropes — that massive cloudlike thing invariably seen but never apprehended from the outside. Instead, it describes a certain sensibility. A familiar frustration, a familiar beauty. And a reliable language through which to express my experience in the world without succumbing to insincerity or complete insanity.

I never intended for Belén to figure out what the nature of her condition was. I intended for the citizens of pseudo-Cabo Rojo to forever glare at her with the same half-swallowed resentment. A melancholy ending felt more mature. After all, using her as an unsubtle literary device for my own frustrations did not really help me understand anything better either. But it did help me feel less alone. In a funny twist of fate, I have since developed a hiatal hernia that causes me chronic stomach pain. Perhaps now I would write Belén a different ending. One where she is able to do more than barely cope with the destiny imposed on her, and instead manages to take refuge and comfort in the absurdity of what she cannot fully wrap her mind around.