I do not remember when I first encountered the term Magical Realism, but I do know that it came to me like home, like it does with so many latin american authors. However, I was wary to immerse myself in such a vast and complex genre. The 60s prose seems to be too antiquated for me, the problems of white latin men too alien, and the volumes were too thick, heavy, scaring my whirlwind of a mind. Still I yearned to know more about this genre that feels as sweet as hot chocolate. I wanted my words to dress the canvas of shelves that read “Magical Realism” at libraries. When I stumbled into “When the Moon was Ours”, the genre that I had existed at the periphery of, opened its doors and welcomed me in, hugging each and every single part of my stitched self. I had never been terrified of pumpkins before, I felt the phantom pains of a rose being cut from my bones, I learned about limpias de huevo which my parents had failed in introducing me to. I discovered that transness could come in a flurry of butterflies and how to look it in the eye. I cowered at the evilness of sisters and melted at the love of young romance. I wanted more, and luckily Anna-Marie McLemore had countless more tales: Lakelore, which confronted my bullies, Mirror Season, that taught me we don’t have to heal alone, Wild Beauty, which reminded me of the pains lands harbor, Blanca & Roja, which main characters dissected myself, The Weight of Feathers, which families showed their teeth and bite hard, Self-Made Boys, which is the reason why now I can technically said I read the Great Gatsby. McLemore’s prose took the experiences of being latine and trans and queer and mixed and human, used them to create ink and then wrote poetry with it. Never had I thought we could be magic until I read: We survived to whisper our names to each other even if we could not yet confess them to anyone else. & Gatsby and I may have been nothing to men like Tom Buchanan, but men like that did not know that we were as divine as the heavens. We were boys who had created ourselves. We had formed our own bodies, our own lives, from ribs of the girls we were once assumed to be. & It was the name of a girl who had not died because she had never quite lived. She had never truly existed. She was a life that did not belong to Sam but that he’d tried too hard to belong to. I wanted to forge magic through my words and their work gave me the courage I lacked to finally submerged myself in this genre that they and I now call ours. Magical realism, for the magic is found in the reality of people that no matter how much they’re hurting, they keep dancing. Ari Ochoa Petzois a Mexican-Venezuelan bi genderfluid writer. They like dancing to old music and history. In their free time you can find xem trying to coerce their friends to participate in another of their crazy projects.
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