Minnesota Women's Press: Magical Realism for Non-Believers

Interview with Anika Fajardo author of Magical Realism for Non-Believers

A young woman from Minnesota searches out the Colombian father she’s never known in this powerful exploration of what family really meansIn “Magical Realism for Non-Believers,” Anika Fajardo writes of discovering the family she did not know she had, and the heritage she had yet to discover. 

Fajardo’s parents separated when she was young. The story from her Minnesota mother was that her father loved Colombia — where Fajardo was born — too much to leave it. At 21, her curiosity led her to fly to Colombia to meet a father she did not know and a country she knew nothing about. The memoir that resulted from that experience is about her search for a definition of family and roots that are beyond genetics. 

In the book, Fajardo writes about Colombia’s civil war, which has been ongoing since 1964. “Like my parents’ marriage, Colombia’s embrace of communism and socialism had been a good idea in theory. […] It had been born out of poverty and frustration, inequality, and inattention. Revolution so often gets tainted by the idealism of ideologies.” 

 

Read the whole interview.