Chilean-American novelist Isabel Allende talks about memory, outsidership and belonging, the possibility of truth, and the on-going struggle for gender equality.

INTERVIEW BY TOBIAS GARNETT  PHOTOGRAPHY BY AMY HARRITY

Isabel Allende is one of the most widely read and best- loved authors in the Spanish language, having sold over 67 million books in 35 languages. 

The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to your dying grandfather back in Chile, and you have said of your book Paula that: “as long as it is written, it will be remembered”. What is the point in all of this remembering?

First of all, it grounds me because I am always moving. My parents were diplomats, so as a child I moved around; I was always changing schools, changing friends, changing languages. Then I became a political refugee and now I’m an immigrant and I don’t feel that I belong anywhere. I have started from scratch several times and I don’t have such a good memory, so I feel that my past will be blown away by oblivion if I don’t document it, and my way of documenting it is the daily letter to my mother. I have a closet filled with boxes filed by year with the letters. Despite my efforts to keep them as best I can, they are deteriorating, so I’ve started to archive them. For the first time since I began this project decades ago, I am going through the boxes and I realise how much I have forgotten. There’s no time to read them in full and I don’t think that I will ever, as an old person, go back and read them to remember my life, but in a way having the letters is like having roots that give me an identity. When you belong in a place, when a lot of people have witnessed your life, you have a sense of who you are because other people give you that sense. That is not the case for me, so where do I get that feeling that my life has been witnessed? These letters – and in my books, of course, although the books are not about me.

Memory can also be a form of testament. Do you also see remembering as a political act?

Yes. I don’t know why I write the books until they are written – and usually until I read the first review, but every book that I have written has an echo in my own life, and my own life has an echo in what’s happening around me. So, I have written about absolute power, about the military, about torture, about death, about assassination and disappeared people in more than one book – The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, My Invented Country, Paula, etc. – because I witnessed those events and they changed my life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people completely…

Do you think certain realities might be more ‘magical’ than others? For example, you, García Márquez, and a number of other Latin American writers have been labelled with this style, but then there is also Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and so many others from a range of countries and cultures who use it too.

It’s reality. Alejo Carpentier, in Cuba, was the first one to put together the two words “magic” and “real”, he called it “lo real maravilloso” and then it changed into magic realism. He was living in Paris as a young man, and he saw the surrealist movement there trying to put two unlikely things together to create a surrealist event – for example, the dissecting-table with a sewing machine and an umbrella and a goat – and he said: “well in Cuba, you don’t have to put them together, they are together.” So what is surrealism for the French is our life here in Cuba. In most of the world: Asia, all of Latin America, Africa, for sure, the crazy events of life, the contrasts and the ironies, allow you to believe anything. The whole wonderful trick of García Márquez is to describe ordinary things like ice with extraordinary words, and extraordinary events, like someone rising to heaven in body and soul, in the most ordinary language.

The last thing I want to talk to you about is time. Do you think time works linearly or cyclically?

Not linearly, I don’t know if it’s cyclical or not, but it is not linear. Sometimes I have the feeling that everything happens simultaneously, that there are several dimensions of reality and what’s happening here is maybe happening in Chile in the future, I don’t know. When I write, it’s confusing. Usually my books are chronological, but as I feel the book, as I feel my life and as I feel the world, I can’t say that time is linear: it’s all together, moving in a whirlwind, a tornado of stuff. How can time be linear in the same way for someone who lives in Denmark and someone who lives in Syria? It’s completely different. Now, cyclical in the sense that, if you live long enough, things tend to find closure, you come back to things, and I have lived long enough for that. I think historically that happens too – as a nation, for example, you have to be very careful of what you do, because you will pay for it. Take the United States, they are now paying for the horrors of slavery: they have an African-American community that, from the very beginning, had its idea of the family broken. The men were studs, in the best case, or not allowed to live with their families. You were not allowed to sell a child before the age of seven (which, of course, nobody respected) but, that meant that the core of the family was always the mother, or the grandmother, and what’s happening today with young men and with fathers in the African-American community comes from a long time ago, and the country has to deal with. You can’t go around the world damaging everything and then expect things to be ok for you.