Interview with Gonzalo Márquez Cristo

Nathalie Handal interviews Colombian poet, editor, and writer Gonzalo Márquez Cristo. An interview about his city Bogotá.

I have always believed that Bogotá is a city afflicted by rain, a troubled widow under the storm, a red city without a sky, and since I was a child I was faced with its most devious, and also its most feverish poetic possibilities. The Colombian capital is a city of 8 million people where chaos is opposed to a great life force that keeps you from succumbing. One graffiti emblematic of the seventies, written by an anonymous hand in a salsa bar said: “el país se derrumba y nosotros de rumba” (The country is falling apart and we are celebrating).But it is this playful and delirious state founded by the nocturnal exorcism of dance and celebration that collectively frees the harsh reality of a people who have not solved the most basic experiential problems. Bogotá, therefore, to many sensitive people, is a city built during the night and destroyed with the wound of dawn.

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