Map Doll

Since the topic at hand in the AP Lang class is memoirs, I am currently reading My Colombian War by Silvana Paternostro. This memoir is about the author being a journalist abroad and deciding that she want to understand the country she calls home but has been away from physically and emotionally for years. The story alternates between different periods of the authors’ life but always expanding on the idea of what she thought about Colombia in these different times.

Being Colombian, I know what it is like to try and explain Colombia to others. There is this image about Colombia that gives us a reputation around the world. Paternostro finds ways to explain conflicts. that only people from Colombia would understand clearly. with ease from the beginning of the book. As she keeps writing about her experiences she manages to add her research into her own story without it sounding out of place. This gives great insight into what I believe is a topic that only Colombians understand and foreigners pretend to know about: Colombias internal struggles.

A part that stood out to me was when Paternostro was describing the different regions of Colombia through the metaphor of a doll. One would expect her to describe it as a good looking doll but instead she opts for demonstrating how even Colombias geography has its part in the countries struggles. She assigns each region a body part and through this logic came to this conclusion:

 “Each one of those deformed organs has built its own defense mechanism, its own immune system. Each one of those parts is independent and fierce. It has to overcompensate for what is missing.” (pg 8)

Instead of the doll being united and each organ having a function for a whole, Paternostro shows how the doll is deformed because of ideas and not exactly geography. It goes beyond what is on the outside of the doll but rather into a division that has only grown through time. A country that excludes its own self through its organs, imagine that!