The Culture of Magical Realism

"Culture is like an iceberg." Maybe it is, but in the times of global climate change, at least my iceberg has been melting. "Icebergs melting? It must be magic!" -my grandma would have said. Reality has met magic today.

I was born and raised in Mexico, that was my Reality. Magically, I never felt part of the culture I grew up in, I questioned it too much. My upper-middle class Mexican life never made sense to me. My parents, my sister, and I are all Mexican, no background questions are asked. We are mestizos in case a Canadian asks. Inside us, I don't think we have ever fitted in the Mexican stereotype.

My sister and I lived the (superficial) "globalization" of our little city. NAFTA brought about McDonald's, unemployment, accute class polarization, and foreign TV. Yet, we could not afford that globalized -rather developed-worldesque- life style. I did not grow up with main-stream pop culture, be it Mexican or foreign. As opposed to many of my friends, I guess you could call me a confused and contradictory teenage nerd. I hanged out with the Mexican version of the popular junior-high girls. However, most of the time Latin American literature was my real best friend. They called the genre "Magical Realism" for expressing the Latin American 20th Century reality mixed with magical scenes, situations and characters. By the time I was 15 I had travelled and been shaped by Latin America without ever taking a plane heading to the South.

Contradictions.... that is my culture, a culture of Realismo Magico, for how can it be Magical and yet remain Real?

I had an enviable life in Mexico, great family, loyal friends, good school, did not need anything else. That, my upper-middle class life always felt like a cage. I was happy but not satisfied. Every time I am there I cry when I say good-bye but I am always so eager to go back.

I went to Canada when I was 18, leaving my 'perfect life' behind. A life of contradictions, indeed. I proudly hold a Mexican passport and love my country; but every time I go back I feel frustration, anger, happiness, excitement, and sadness ALL at the same time. Am I really Mexican? In paper I am. In practice, I have not fitted in the Mexican society for quite a while. I have been in Canada for four years. No, I refuse to become Canadian. However, I know more about the country than many citizens that I've met who do not yet understand my rather emotional defence for bilingualism. After four years I have not been able to have anglophone close friends; yet I am always hesitant and afraid to speak in French to my Quebecois friends.

I think multiculturalism is overrated, ironically only when I am in Toronto I feel like I can be both Magical and Real. Talking about France gets me nostalgic, I miss my life there, I know if I had stay I would be someone else. I miss the life in Montpellier, I fantasize about going back to Europe; at the same time I can't cope with the supremacism and discrimination disguised under the (real) freedom of expression. Nothing compares to Egypt, but I can't go back without sharing it with my best friend trying our best not to impose our undefined cultures while stealing an incomparable culture ourselves.

Who am I? Je suis qui? ¿Quién soy? I am definitivamente un mélange. That cannot siquiera encontrar une response dans un même langue. On peut toujours hear the thick accent of my native español.

I have been six hours in Argentina, four sitting at a little restaurant in Palermo writing and sipping white wine trying to answer that question that I have refused to even ask for a while.

What is my culture? I have been writing about that without knowing where to start. The more my iceberg melts, the less I care to even ask, the more I enjoy not thinking about that.

Magically, the reality is that I am obsessed with cultures. Other contradiction of my life. I cannot stop thinking, studying, reading, overanalysing, experiencing, ad trying to understand cultures. The more I do, the less I identify my own.

I have been the Numbian girl in the little village along the Nile delta, the Algerian immigrant in Montpellier, the latina in Toronto, the enriched Mexican exploiting the indigenous and at the same time fighting against the system where I belong. Today I am the girl with the unidentifiable accent absorbing everything she can from sitting in this corner in Palermo writing in English, on a question that confuses everything of my life.

No, I am not a global citizen. I find the term pretentious and unrealistic. I am just a girl whose Real life has been shaped by the powerful Magic of culture, resulting in identifying her culture as one that is only about contradictions. Appropriating other's Magic identifiable culture without creating a real one for myself