Title & author
The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Synopsis
The theme of buried memories is integral to The Man Who Could Move Clouds, as Rojas Contreras reflects on her personal history of medical amnesia alongside the forced identity loss that comes with westernization, colonization, and assimilation. Through her writing, Rojas Contreras brings her personal and familial truth to light, forcing readers to reevaluate what we have been taught to be reality, to be history.
Who should read this book
Fans of The Fruit of the Drunken Tree and Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer
What we’re thinking about
The power books possess to reclaim history.
Trigger warning(s)
Physical violence, sexual violence, substance abuse, eating disorders, sexism, mental health, racism
“There are many types of hunted treasures, secrets long buried, come to light,” Ingrid Rojas Contreras writes in her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds (Doubleday, 2022). The theme of buried memories expands throughout the memoir as Rojas Contreras reflects on her personal history of medical amnesia alongside the forced identity loss that comes with westernization, colonization, and assimilation. Through her writing, Rojas Contreras brings her personal and familial truth to light, forcing readers to reevaluate what we have been taught to be reality, to be history.
Lost memory establishes itself quickly within the memoir. In the opening author’s note, Rojas Contreras writes: “This is a memoir of the ghostly—amnesia, hallucination, the historical specter of the past—which celebrates cultural understandings of truth that are, at heart, Colombian.” After losing her memory during a biking accident, Rojas Contreras seeks to retell her family’s history. She comes from a line of curanderos; Such individuals might be healers, seers, or possess other beneficial skills. Through both her own childhood and her mothers’ stories, we see how widely fundamental curanderos are, as well as the shame and doubt colonization, its spread of Christianity, and whiteness have placed on curanderos and those who place trust in them. Westernization (with its roots in white supremacy) has dismissed their practice as the work of the devil or as fabricated—claiming curanderos are a sign of an “undeveloped” society. “Knowledge long lost, which I try to remember, which Mami says I should try to forget” (83).
In a blurb for the book, author Luis Alberto Urrea writes that Rojas Contreras is “talking about the real stuff…Tell yourself as you read, this is nonfiction. You will believe.” Historically, publishing has labeled any stories beyond white, western understandings of reality as one form of magic or another, and “magical realism” is often slapped onto the descriptions of any story from Latin America. Yet Rojas Contreras’s is specifically a memoir, a move that reclaims her history, her family’s history, and, in many ways, her ancestors’s history. Memoir, memories…these words are linked for a reason, and in writing a story so personal, in enshrining her family’s legacy by recording them, Rojas Contreras rewrites history. She rewrites the stories that colonizers have forced upon her country, reclaiming the past, exposing generational trauma, and creating a new map for our society to recognize as truth.
“And so, in those places left vacant by the erroneous reassembly of our selves, the remnants of our amnesias lived like a brood of wasps.”
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How did The Man Who Could Move Clouds encourage you to revisit history?
What other books, whether fiction or nonfiction, have encouraged you to rethink the way history is documented?
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