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reality of the senses and that of the imagination. It takes a certain kind of person, like Tituba or her mentor, Mama Yaya, to be able to see and hear them, as well as to listen and talk to them.
Besides physical survival, surviving slavery also implies keeping the real story alive, the one that re-creates past traumatic events by attaching them to present affects and making them matter to the modern consciousness. Remembering the horrors of the past amounts to more than paying homage to the memories of their victims: it is also an identity-forming and healing act that entails confronting the unspeakable and coming to terms with trauma.
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Chapter 5 focuses on images of colonial and postcolonial trauma incorporated in the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980). A brief analysis of la violencia (the period in Colombian history between the late 1940s and the mid 1960s) reveals it as the historical result of a much older shock chronotope: Spanish colonialism. Considering that García Márquez has not directly experienced any of the traumatic events that he re-presents in One Hundred Years of Solitude, I posit that his secondary witnessing and attempt at working through a vicariously induced trauma found expression through a traumatic type of imagination. On April 9, 1948, when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Liberal politician, was assassinated, García Márquez was a law student at the National University in Bogotá, and eventually he spent the years of la violencia in Colombia’s Caribbean region. The author’s vicarious traumatization (by second-hand witnessing) may explain the frequent allusions to death through unnatural signs or persistent smells in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Besides analyzing different magical realist images in the novel, I focus on those indicative of psychic numbing, repressed memories, and the impossibility of telling. Among these, one scene of extreme violence stands out and projects the suggestive potential of magical realist writing: the massacre of three thousand striking workers of the banana company by government soldiers. The historical