One Hundred Years of Solitude regarded from the Wayuu mirror sight

Abstract

In the Wayuu community, the quack doctors or shamans are those who have the ability to communicate with the beyond (the afterlife), cure diseases, interpret dreams, predict the future, read or interpret nature and establish relationships or bounds with the deads, who in the form of yoluja (the shadow of the Spirits), return and cohabit with the Wayuu. The previuos is a sign of the different cultures that García Márquez (Gabo) lived with. Since Gabo was a child or in his childhood, he experienced a bicultural (colombian and Wayuu) vision where the supernatural, the mythological and the ordinary life were part of his existence. Among these, the Wayuu culture stands out, an indigenous influence that deeply marks the writer's work, because, just as García Márquez feels close to the language of the “Guajiros”, some of his characters seek to communicate only in the Wayuu's mother tongue: Wayuunaiki. In this sense, this article establishes five categories to analyze the symbolic role of bones, life in death, the prediction of the future, the clairvoyance of the dream world and the role of some characters as shamans in that specific social group. These elements of the Wayuu’s culture, which are found explicitly and implicitly in One Hundred Years of Solitude, constituting a great dialogic fabric or unit, in which two cultures of the Colombian Caribbean intersect ways of living and thinking; and the characters do not fully fit into neither the common indigenous canon nor the Western ones.