"The Solitude of Latin America" () is the title of the speech given by Gabriel GarcÃÂa Márquez on 8 December 1982 upon being awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Prize was presented to GarcÃÂa Márquez by Professor Lars Gyllensten of the Swedish Academy.
GarcÃÂa Márquez gained fame for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, first published in 1967. According to the Nobel Foundation, GarcÃÂa Márquez was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature for âÂÂhis novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continentâÂÂs life and conflicts". The style of prose to which the Nobel Foundation refers is known as magic realism, a broadly descriptive term critics use to describe GarcÃÂa Márquez's work.
Several themes GarcÃÂa Márquez addresses in his speech mirror those of his short stories and novels. GarcÃÂa Márquez touches on the conquest of the Americas, colonial legacies, deterritorialization of the Latin American culture, and he specifically addresses Latin American countries that have been affected negatively by foreign policy.
Another colonial legacy addressed, indirectly, in this speech is the concept of modernity in regards to European and Western colonialism. Initially, during the Enlightenment Era, the Europeans came up with the idea of modernity to compare themselves to the âÂÂothersâ of the world. Europe calling themselves modern automatically placed unknown cultures in the inferior, or un-modern category. Márquez addresses this in his speech when he uses the example of the United States using a, âÂÂyardstick that they use [to measure] themselves,â to measure those in Latin America.
Once GarcÃÂa Márquez addresses the colonial legacies and their lingering effects, he then goes into the ongoing process Latin America is currently going through, de/territorialization, or, the process of weakening the ties between culture and space. The process of deterritorialization itself involves the two separate processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In simple terms, this can be thought of as rejecting the dominant colonial power legacies while at the same time reclaiming your own culture. In his speech, Marquez mentions the Central American civil wars of the 1970s and the influx of refugees that left their homeland as a result. To get an idea of the mass number of people displaced by these wars, Marquez gives us this comparison, âÂÂâ¦the country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway".
GarcÃÂa Márquez wanted to raise awareness, with this speech, to the ongoing struggle of the Latin American people to have cultural respect from the rest of the hegemonic world. In his speech, Marquez addresses how Europeans are so readily accepting of Latin American culture in the form of art and literature, yet they are so mistrustful of Latin American social movements. For example, in Central America, when people wanted to simply change things within their country to make it better, they were confronted with military authorities and the mistrustful eye of the north. An example of how much this social unrest affected these small Latin American countries is given in the speech, âÂÂâ¦Uruguayâ¦has lost to exile one out of every five citizensâ¦the Civil War in El Salvador has produced one refugee every twenty minutesâÂÂ.
In this quote, GarcÃÂa Márquez addresses the ongoing relationship between Latin America and the dominant western powers.