Informant38

A Zapatista Reading List
by Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez & Subcomandante Marcos

The following remarks are excerpted from a longer interview between Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez, representing the Mexican magazine Cambio, and the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. The full text appeared in Cambio earlier this year.

Garc�a M�rquez/Cambio: Do you still have time to read in the middle of all this mess?

Marcos: Yes, because if not...what would we do? In the armies that came before us, soldiers took the time to clean their weapons and rally themselves. In this case, our weapons are our words, so we have to depend on our arsenal all the time.

Garc�a M�rquez/Cambio: Everything you say--in terms of form and content--demonstrates a serious literary background on your part. Where does this come from and how did you achieve it?

Marcos: It has to do with my childhood. In my family, words had a very special value. The way we went out into the world was through language. We didn't learn to read in school but by reading newspapers. My mother and father made us read books that rapidly permitted us to approach new things. Some way or another, we acquired a consciousness of language not as a way of communicating with each other but as a way of building something. As if it were more of a pleasure than a duty or assignment. When the age of catacombs arrives, the word is not highly valued for the intellectual bourgeoisie. It is relegated to a secondary level. It's when we are in the indigenous communities that language is like a catapult. You realize that words fail you to express certain things, and this obliges you to work on your language skills, to go over and over words to arm and disarm them.

Garc�a M�rquez/Cambio: Couldn't it be the other way around? Couldn't it be this control over language that permits this new era?

Marcos: It's like a blender. You don't know what is thrown in first, and what you end up with is a cocktail.