Outsider art, potently naïve work by unselfconscious performers, has long been an attractive and controversial conceit. It may also be an elusive myth. In the end, audiences may not seek the work of the true outcast; readers are more likely to prefer something more delicate, the rare confluence of exceptional experience and untutored expression.
Historias de Vida y Muerte (Stories of Life and Death) falls into that elusive category. It is a remarkable, and possibly unique, collection of writings by students of Fundación Creando Cambio (the Creative Change Foundation) in Cazucá, Colombia. Students aged 11 to 16 have written short pieces and poems on a variety of subjects, collected by their teacher Alan Grostephan. The stories do not exploit the violence and poverty of their origins, but describe experience in a remarkably mature, inspired and abstract manner.
The bilingual volume is roughly divided into thematic sections, but several concepts recur throughout. Ineffable descriptions of daily events, expressed in dreamlike sequences, often decline into resigned disappointment. In "Acacias," by the 12-year-old Jorge Mogollón Castillo, an idyllic scene of children fishing becomes more sinister as night falls. Sand collectors transform into "invisible ghosts crying at the foot of the mango tree, scaring away the witches and ghosts until sunrise." In the end, the voices are exposed as the simple ravings of a drunken uncle.
Ghosts, witches and demons populate the stories, but only metaphorically; the students draw from a collective font of myth, seamlessly combining parable with literal observation. La Llorona, a weeping specter common to Latin American folklore, appears in several stories. In one of many reflections on Cazucá's stinking lagoon, the water is transposed into the figure of the crying woman, if only briefly; the myth is abandoned for "sewer water trash" as the malign illusion is displaced by a grimmer, if more tangible, image.
In a fugue on the theme of night, multiple selections by different students offer a range of evocative metaphors: Darkness "has black hairs and ears like a rat," "a toad with the face of a dog," the color of a mother's jacket, or the shade of the water that a family collects. The brief prose poems rarely evoke literary convention, turning to unmediated experience or pure reverie.
In his introduction, publisher Mark Stratman questions whether the book is redemptive. A final poem, "Dialogue of Peace" adds levity in closing, artificially imposing a coda on the darker, preceding visions. The earlier selections have already offered a less conventional mode of liberation; in their charged and suggestive language, the stories move beyond recorded experience into a cathartic, introspective realm of pure expression.
- Sten Johnson