The National Library of Colombia and the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Knowledge will carry out several tributes at different literary meetings and book fairs.
2024 will be the year of Arnoldo Palacios. The National Library of Colombia and the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Knowledge will carry out several tributes at different literary meetings and book fairs.
As an appetizer to these celebrations, we reproduce below a review by Professor Francisco Flórez, who was appointed director of the General Archive of the Nation, about The Jungle and the Rain, a novel that was published in Russia more than 60 years ago and that It was only published in Colombia until 2010.
2024 is a year to celebrate Arnoldo Palacios, the Chocoano writer who was born 100 years ago in Certegui. He is a very important figure for literature and culture in Colombia: author of novels such as The Stars Are Black (1949) or The Jungle and the Rain (1957), and one of the most important Afro-Colombian intellectuals of the 20th century, who denounced the structural racism of Colombian society and proposed ways to promote inclusion.
The Ministry of Culture, Arts and Knowledge not only declared 2024 as the year of the writer Arnoldo Palacios, but will develop, together with the National Library of Colombia, training activities, an academic agenda and spaces for reflection around the life and work of the writer. One of these spaces will be the photographic exhibition He who lives or has lived in Chocó can live anywhere in the world, which begins its journey in Cértegui, in February 2024, and will then travel throughout the country.
In addition, The Stars Are Black and Looking for My Mother of God, another work by Palacios, can be found for consultation starting in the first quarter of the year in 1,480 public libraries in the country, in 80 popular and community libraries, and in 600 itinerant rural libraries, in the framework for updating resources led by the National Network of Public Libraries – RNBP.
As an appetizer to these celebrations, we reproduce below a review by Professor Francisco Flórez, who was appointed director of the General Archive of the Nation, about The Jungle and the Rain, a novel that was published in Russia more than 60 years ago and that It was only published in Colombia until 2010.
A new destination for the work of Arnoldo Palacios
By Francisco Flórez
“The book is a living being,” says the writer Arnoldo Palacios in the preamble to the recent reissue that Intermedio editors made of his novel The Jungle and the Rain. When talking about the trajectory assumed by a text once it is published, Palacios does not hesitate to say that, after being “begotten, it not only develops,” but “sets out to fulfill its destiny.”
This Chocoano writer, born on January 20, 1924 in Cértegui, seems to have developed such a conviction from his experience as the author of The Jungle and the Rain, a novel originally published by the Editorial Progreso of Moscow, in 1958.
These were the times of the Cold War and the world was read through the dichotomous prism of communists and capitalists. Since his days as a student in Bogotá – the city where he finished his high school studies in 1942 – Arnoldo Palacios had been seduced by the Gaitanista ideology of social, economic and political justice. He captured accurate insights into his concern for the social conditions of the most humble in The Stars Are Black, a work published in 1949 that paved the way for him to access a scholarship with which he began language studies in France.
Arnoldo Palacios’ progressive visions led him to join the World Council for Peace among Peoples in Paris, an organization made up of intellectuals with leftist ideas. The stigmatization of this organization as pro-Soviet, promoted by the United States, led Palacios to be branded as an agent of international communism. Denial of visas by the United Kingdom and the cancellation of the scholarship granted by the Colombian government, apparently, were some of the prices paid by this writer in defense of his convictions.
In the midst of political and economic obstacles, combined with the health difficulties caused by poliomyelitis that accompanied him since he was a child, he wrote The Jungle and the Rain, a novel that takes place between the years of the Liberal Republic and the months following the murder of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán. In 1957, with no possibility of publishing it in Colombia, he traveled from France to the Soviet Union and came into contact with the editors of Editorial Progreso, who, in September of the following year, published the work. According to some of his biographers, among more than two thousand titles in Spanish published by this publishing label, between 1931 and 1986, The Jungle and the Rain was the only one belonging to a Colombian author.
None of these efforts and merits were enough for the novel to circulate or have readers in its country of origin. “The jungle and the rain did not enter Colombia,” Palacios would point out years later. Although late, fate (mentioned by him again and again in his reflections) conspired so that his novel finally made its way in Colombia.
In May 1959, in Warsaw, Palacios gave a copy to fellow writer Germán Arciniegas, who in 1985 donated his personal library to the National Library of Colombia. Among these books appeared The Jungle and the Rain, a copy used by Intermedio Editores to republish the work in 2010. It took fifty-two years for The Jungle and the Rain to be published for the first time in Colombia!
Read in a past/present key, The Jungle and the Rain, like The Stars Are Black, contains elements not only to interrelate the racisms of the past with those of the present, but also to illustrate historical paths of inclusion proposed by racialized subjects.
In 2024, one hundred years since the birth of Arnoldo Palacios, there is a new opportunity to carve out a better destiny for The Jungle and the Rain in the Colombian literary world.
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The books of Arnoldo Palacios
‘The stars are black’
Arnoldo Palacios began writing this novel, the most recognized of his work, when he came from Quibdó to Bogotá, to finish his high school studies and enter university. Its protagonist, Irra, is a young Chocoan who dreams of killing the mayor of Quibdó, and who tells a story in which he takes the reader through marginalization, hunger, racism and the few opportunities that existed in Chocó in the middle of the century. twentieth century.
When Palacios was writing this novel, the Bogotazo broke out and in the midst of the riots the original manuscripts were burned. He had to rewrite the novel from memory and with the help of some friends. It was published at the end of that same year, 1948, by Editorial Iqueima. A few years ago it was reissued by Seix Barral, an imprint of the Planeta publishing house.
‘The jungle and the rain’
The success of The Stars are Black led to Palacios receiving a scholarship to study in France. However, because he joined the World Council for Peace among Peoples, an organization made up of leftist intellectuals, he ended up being stigmatized as a communist and lost several of the economic benefits he had obtained. In the midst of these difficulties, and surviving in Paris with the help of some friends, he wrote The jungle and the rain.
It is a journey that goes from the days of the Liberal Republic (1930 – 1946) to the months that followed the Bogotazo (April 9, 1948). A story narrated by several characters that range from the thickest of the Chocó jungle to the most arid of Bogotá life. The novel appeared in the Soviet Union and did not reach Colombia until 2010 thanks to Intermedio Editores.
‘Looking for my mother god’
This novel, published in 2009 with the sponsorship of the Ministry of Culture, is a kind of autobiography of the Chocó writer, focused on his childhood years and the time he spent in Certeguí, before going to study in Quibdó. As he explained at the time of publication: “Looking for his mother of God, his mother of God, is an expression used daily by us, the blacks of Chocó. It means dedicating your energies and all your holy patience to obtaining daily bread, to someone pursuing your good luck.”
The book was republished in 2019, four years after Palacios’ death, by the Seix Barral label, from the Planeta publishing house.
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