On the Other Shore: Water in Latine Illness Narratives

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative literary analysis through two texts: Isabel Allende’s Paula, a memoir inspired by her daughter’s death, and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Marquéz, a fictional novel that incorporates magical realism, to recognize the generative possibilities and power of water in illness narratives. The texts unfold in Chil, San Francisco, and the Caribbean coast of Colombia, situating the Latinx texts as coastal, place-based stories. Thus, I am interested in the implicit and explicit ways water functions as a sustaining lifeforce and a symbolic border between life and death. Given water’s duality, I am also interested in the generative relationship and tension between bodies of water and the human body, which is 75% water. I will explore how each text uses metaphors of water to explain, or conceptualize, loss and love related to illness. Each text deals with transition in illness – at times painful, transformative, heartbreaking, and revelatory – and I argue that in so doing they embody the fluidity and ambiguity of water.

Keywords

• illness narrative
• comparative analysis
• water
• transformation
• grief
• death