Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat, Pedro Páramo and One Hundred Years of Solitude: Haunting Narratives and Magical Realism in Thailand, Mexico and Colombia
Abstract
Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat (2016) by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, Thailand’s first female who receives Southeast Asian Writers Award (S.E.A. Write Award) twice, is a novel on the overseas Chinese in Thailand that can also be classified as a work in the Magical Realism tradition. Inspired by the author’s own biographical elements along with her interpretation of masterpieces of Latin American literature, the author fictionalizes a tragedy based on Chinese “outsiders” in Thai society through the saga of the Tang family from a ghostly perspective, based on local beliefs that bring up the subject of memory derived from Pedro Páramo (1955) by Juan Rulfo and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez. This article uses Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat as a case study that exemplifies the influences of Latin American literature in Thai contemporary literature. The Thai novel is, therefore, studied through the dialogue and interaction with its Mexican and Colombian models: a fictionalization of the “forgotten” history of the ethnic “outsiders,” a creation of ghost characters, as well as a labyrinthic and “haunting” narrative. The analysis employs psychological and socio-historical dimensions to discover both parallelism and disparity in contemporary history and ancestral faiths between these two antipodes.