Latin America

While events in these three books echo the history of their respective countries, events are not the only occurrence from which inspiration is drawn. The main characters in stories also represent their countries in post-colonial and civil war ages. The Buendia family in 100 Years of Solitude represents different parts of Columbia as the family cycles through life and death. All members of the Buendia family are solitary in some way, which is a representation of the solitude of Latin America. Their solitude is “symbolic of . . . their culture, their continent . . . unable to relate to the world outside on terms other than those of a deeply felt and crippling inferiority” (Turgeon 406). At the time of the novel's writing, Latin America was disconnected …show more content…
Newly independent from foreign rule, the country is unsteady on its feet: unable to go back to how it once was but unable to progress. Azaro too is stuck in a state of limbo. As a spirit child, he exists somewhere between the land of the living and the land of the dead. He lives and dies in a series of short cycles, just like the cyclical nature of Nigerian history. The country of Nigeria is also described as a “spirit nation,” one that “keeps being reborn and after each birth come blood and betrayals.” In this way, a magical novelty (spirit children) is used to represent a reality (the violent cycles of Nigerian history). At one point, Azaro decides to stay in the world of the living, and the characters in the novel can only hope that their nation will do the same: break out of a vicious cycle and mature into a full …show more content…
Azaro, a spirit child, chooses to die as soon as he is born. He has repeated this cycle more times than he could know, and in the opening pages of the novel, begins to question his existence by asking himself: “How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had no idea” (Okri 10-11). However, in this lifetime, he chooses to stay. Azaro, in choosing to live, represents Nigeria moving on from cycles of political discord. The cycles of his rebirth echo the violent cycles that Nigeria moves through. The country is blasted with violence, only to reawaken to be brought to its knees again in another violent struggle. In choosing to live, Azaro is consciously breaking his cycle, an action that Okri hopes that Nigeria can take as well. Okri uses magical realism to describe his hopes for his home