Michael and the Magdalena

‘Michael and the Magdalena’

City Paper, February 2011

Edward Davey

Michael Jacobs is an immediately recognizable and much-loved figure at the Hay Festival in Cartagena: a giant, white-haired, benevolent and ebullient author whose erudite, illuminating books on travel, culture, history and society in Spain and Latin America have won him widespread acclaim. 

Fresh from the success of his most recent book, ‘Andes’, which recounts his six-month journey in Humboldt and Bolívar’s footsteps across the Andes from Venezuela to Patagonia, Michael is about to embark on his latest project: an account of his forthcoming voyage along the Magdalena River.

“What I hope to write would be a failure if it failed to capture the sheer beauty and sensuality of the Caribbean Coast”, asserts Jacobs, describing how the book will begin with chapters on the coast before he travels inland towards Mompox, Barrancabermeja, Honda, San Agustín and beyond. 

Jacobs speaks with eloquence about the symbolism of the Magdalena and the place it occupies both in the Colombian popular imagination and the country’s history.  In a meeting with García Márquez at last year’s festival, the elderly author’s eyes lit up with nostalgia and warmth on hearing of Jacobs’ plans.  “I can remember every single stretch of that river”, said Márquez, with characteristic, perhaps tongue-in-cheek exaggeration. 

The night before our interview, Jacobs had danced the night away to the sound of ‘champeta’, the emblematic Afro-Caribbean music of the coast, and was moved by the end of one song which closes with an impassioned ode to the Magdalena. 

He also recalls, more somberly, having read that half of the dead bodies resulting from the period of ‘La Violencia’ in the mid- twentieth century are said to have ended up in the river; and that the area of the river in San Agustín which he hopes to travel through may still be off limits due to fighting.

Rich though the explorations of the Colombian context in the book will be, Jacobs notes that ‘this will also be a book about memory’, with the river providing the allegorical context for an exploration of the richness and frailty of human memory, and more specifically an exploration of his own family’s experience of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. 

Jacobs explains how his father, a keeper of impeccable diaries throughout his adult life, suffered from the disease in his later years and how, more recently, his mother has begun to suffer from dementia.  The book will interweave reflections on memory and on this personal experience with the progress of his discoveries as he travels down the river.

For this purpose, Jacobs plans to take a detour half way through the trip to the area of ‘Angostura’ outside Medellin, home to the highest incidence of Alzheimer’s patients in the world and to the celebrated doctor, Francisco Lopera, whose research on the matter has been internationally recognized and whom Jacobs will interview and accompany for a few days. 

But after the explorations in Angostura, it will be back to the river and to the author’s quixotic quest to travel all the way along its several thousand miles, spanning through eight Colombian departments, multiple ports, wide stretches and narrow, silted tracts. 

Jacobs smiles as he thinks through the practicalities, asking precise logistical questions and noting down numbers of friends and acquaintances along the way. 

All methods of transport are foreseen: ‘three days on horseback’ near Honda, laughs Jacobs, ‘the chug to Barrancabermeja’, other boats thereafter, and the occasional day’s bus ride too.  The river is low in parts at this time of the year, and the floods of recent months further complicate the situation.

All being well, the book is set to be published by the end of 2011 and, as you read these words, Jacobs is likely to be on the dilapidated chug boat heading down the river towards Mompox.  It will be fascinating to read the resulting work from this most special, knowledgeable and humane writers on Colombia and Latin America.