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realeme took place in Ciénaga, on the night of December 5, 1928, after General Carlos Cortés Vargas was informed that the government had declared a state of siege in the banana zone. Historical records of the event each indicate a different number of casualties. In the novel, José Arcadio Segundo, one of the two survivors who can bear witness to the massacre, speaks of more than three thousand corpses; however, the exact number (even if an indicator of the size of the violence) loses its importance in the context of the overwhelming feeling of horror that traumatizes the survivors. What worsens the character’s trauma will be the eventual impossibility of telling about the violent death of so many: it is not so much the speech act, the utterance itself, that makes bearing witness impossible but the absence of a receptive audience willing to listen. In order to suggest the traumatizing effect of witnessing the shooting of thousands of people, García Márquez uses a kind of language that some have described as allegorical and others as poetic; I recognize in it the understated magical realist rendering of traumatic violence. Under conditions of overwhelming physical violence, language fails; and when it eventually tries to recapture the missed referent, it inevitably resorts to the traumatic imagination.
Similarly to García Márquez, Rushdie uses the voice of the colonized and the language of the colonizer embedded in magical realist images in his 1980 novel Midnight’s Children in order to give life to a chronotope he has not experienced directly. Any unacknowledged loss or absence (caused by historical or structural trauma, respectively) can be traced and reconstituted by the traumatic imagination and turned into narrative memory by authors and their readers. Saleem Sinai, the narrator and protagonist in Rushdie’s novel, sees himself as fatefully tied to—and endowed with special powers over—post-independence India’s history. In Rushdie’s postmodern reconstruction of history, Saleem’s birth at midnight on August 15, 1947, actually marks the emergence of modern, independent India. However, by the end of the novel, after having portrayed himself as an agent of history, Saleem ends up as one of its millions of victims. Saleem’s “handcuffing” to India’s history suggests precisely his lack of agency and, on a larger scale, the submission of