Tales from the Magical Menagerie: A Fauna Fable

The fauna fable pulsating with magic brings to mind a captivating world where animals possess extraordinary abilities and a whimsical aura surrounds their existence. In this enchanting tale, the fauna of the land come alive with vibrant colors, majestic forms, and a mystical energy that creates an atmosphere of awe and wonder. As we embark on this journey through the fauna fable, we are introduced to a myriad of creatures, each endowed with its unique charm and allure. From the graceful soaring of the phoenix to the mischievous antics of the playful fox, every animal exudes an enchanting energy that captures our imagination. The fauna fable pulsating with magic takes us into a realm where mundane become extraordinary and the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary. In this magical world, the animals possess the ability to communicate through telepathy, come to life at night to dance under the moonlight, and possess the power to heal with a simple touch.

The Frog and the Fly

I think we may claim with confidence that Loon Laughter represents a new and unique genre, and we are proud to be able to add such a timely work to our Canadiana Collection. So, it was that the ONLY created oceans and the stars; the flora and fauna, the heavens, the earth and all of the planets with the Words and a voice that rumbled with the power of creation.

In this magical world, the animals possess the ability to communicate through telepathy, come to life at night to dance under the moonlight, and possess the power to heal with a simple touch. The fauna fable is a realm where fantasy and reality merge seamlessly, blurring the boundaries between the natural and supernatural. Ancient forests whisper secrets to those who dare to listen, hidden meadows emanate an ethereal glow, and rivers sing melodic tunes that carry the essence of this enchanting place.

Does Every Latine Story Have to be About Magical Realism?

Magical realism has a complicated place in the stories Latine people tell about themselves and to others.

In the first week of my doctoral program at the University of Southern California, a senior professor greeted me by name. I was relieved, until he complimented my work: “I really loved the poems in your application, they have a real Latin American, magic realism feel.” The poems were about cultural alienation, mental illness, and childhood racial and institutional trauma—poems that would end up in my first book—and as a PhD, I’d planned to research state and medical archives to write about the mass sterilization of women of color in the United States. My work was concerned with colonialism, race, and institutions, not magic. But it wasn’t the first time I’d heard my work described this way—as Silvia Moreno-Garcia wrote in her op-ed for the New York Times, most Latine writers’ work is labeled “magic realism” no matter its genre, because that is the space carved out for us in the American imagination. The label is often a reductive essentialization of Latine (and global south) writing as imaginatively excessive, exotic, and primitive, from the mysterious expanse beyond the border to an older time, full of dark, magical people.

It's easy to assume the worst about this professor’s compliment, but in hindsight, perhaps he was picking up on some other vein of language pulsing through my work—a vein of magical thinking, written in the mythic language of fantasy. Back then, I just saw it as the language I used to access my intuition, the symbols in my subconscious that articulated buried feelings, half-forgotten memories, bodily data. That language had an embodied intelligence that looking back, was signaling something going on beneath the surface. Because in the year that followed, my life would fall spectacularly apart.

I needed a way to imagine myself out of it.

For the past few years, I’ve been obsessed with fantasy. I don’t just love it—I exist on a different plane because of it, far above the ravines of a lifelong, deadly depression. It began with bingeing Game of Thrones every day during my four year divorce. Then, I fell back in love with reading after my doctoral exams by revisiting old fantasy books before moving on to fantasy roleplaying video games. In that time, my son was a toddler while I was in the thick of my doctoral studies researching state and medical archives to write about the links between colonial science, mass incarceration, medical violence, and the involuntary sterilization of Latinas and other women of color in the United States and Puerto Rico. But doing that kind of labor in the midst of grief and single parenthood, alongside the Trump presidency, family separations at the border, migrant detention, uprisings for racial justice, white supremacist mass shootings, climate catastrophes, and finally, the COVID-19 pandemic, made it increasingly difficult to face the violence in my work. Reality had broken down into a series of world-shattering emergencies, both personal and global, and I was powerless to stop any of it.

After my marriage, I felt broken, unable to trust, and unwilling to try again. Once an avid reader of literary fiction and prestige tv and film buff, now, the psychological surgery of realism was nauseating. My life was unbearable, and I didn’t need to relive infidelity, conflict, or domestic misery. I needed a way to imagine myself out of it. Fantasy was the only kind of story that felt safe; it zoomed out, was about the powerless reclaiming power, made heroes out of regular people. It was a conduit to my imagination, where trauma was not the story but the source of evil that must be vanquished, told in symbolic language. It presented a way out of trauma, the fight for life, bypassing the sadness of my conscious mind to delve directly into the subconscious, allowing for deep narrative work to happen, especially through roleplay. In my self-imposed isolation, fantasy role playing games (RPGs) also filled the social gaps after trauma—my traveling companions felt like real friends when I had none; fantasy romances fulfilled me emotionally; immersive stories relieved obsessive overthinking and hypervigilance. And the block I was experiencing between myself and my academic work also began to lift—for all its flaws rooted in Western European colonial history, fantasy became a productive space to stage questions of race, gender, colonialism, prison abolition, and political revolution through coalitional organizing. For example, in fellowship/party-based games such as Dragon Age Inquisition and Baldur’s Gate 3, your traveling party is a coalition, made up of a group of fighters who are often from rival peoples and races (like the elves and dwarves in Lord of the Rings), each with a specialized power, who must join forces and become allies to fight overwhelming oppression against impossible odds. At first, it felt immature and unserious to draw these comparisons, but I so desperately needed out of misery, out of grief, out of fear, to reconnect with a sense of hope.

In order to be sane, I had to let go of my dead

In the last decade, American writing and storytelling has been marked by the “speculative turn,” most excitingly in works of nonfiction and memoir. From the rise of Black horror and surrealist fiction to speculative memoirs and imagined histories, such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds, the speculative is a mode that is in constant discourse with the silences of the past, addressing gaps in archival and collective memory, where the imagination is a mode of time travel that can excavate silenced accounts and reanimate erased histories to imagine radical futures. In the genres of Black and Indigenous surrealisms (like Atlanta and Reservation Dogs), comic book adaptations (not just Marvel movies, but The Watchmen and Wandavision), and most recently, even Barbie, the speculative mode has become a site of political rigor, where radical discourses about our ongoing oppressions are staged in allegory, symbolism, and the absurd. Rooted in Black feminist thought, Saidiya Hartman’s seminal essay “Venus in Two Acts” is often cited in these works, where she describes the encounter with the sparse records of enslaved girls’ lives as vast silences in the archive. The failure of the archive to ever provide an accurate account of history leads her to theorize the practice of “critical fabulation,” the attempt to tell impossible stories by writing with and against the archive to “illuminate the contested character of history … engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices … which weaves present, past, and future in retelling the girl’s story and in narrating the time of slavery as our present.” She identifies fabula as her guiding narrative mode—a speculative mode, the root of fables, myths, and fairy tales—as the connective tissue able to bind documented historical events into a narrative. Through fabulation, the spectre that haunts the archive becomes animated, embodied, the document now a site for what we can never know interacting with what we do know existed in their time, their world.

This, to me, is something like worldbuilding, and the imagined spectre coming back to life very much like the practice of magical thinking. In the realm of psychology, magical thinking is part of a diagnosis, a coping mechanism that emerges in the aftermath of trauma—the turn to spirituality, belief in signs, communion with ghosts. But for me, magical thinking is just reality, rooted in cultural identity and practice—what you might call magical realism—and pathologizing that reality as part of my “mental illness” is a colonial violence. The refusal of the supernatural toward a more reasonable, rational, scientific reality, was something I had to unlearn in adolescence—in order to be sane, I had to let go of my dead and ignore that feeling of inner guidance; animals did not communicate with me; I could not time travel; my grandmothers did not heal me with leaves and eggs. I had to leave magical realism behind for American realism, and attribute all the ways I saw the world as “magical thinking.”

Writers like Joan Didion have won awards for exploring magical thinking as the grief-consciousness of loss, but I’m interested in that grief-consciousness shared on a mass scale—what if that grief is an ancient, generational, epigenetic scar that is wounded and rewounded by state violence and empire? What does the constant state of loss after colonization, enslavement, and dispossession do to the collective imagination, how does it affect our stories? I look to novels I loved early in life like Beloved, Pedro Paramo, In the Time of the Butterflies, even The Bell Jar, and feel a connection in the very earth to those stories. Perhaps magical realism has always been connected to trauma, has always been the imagination trying to solve it. This, to me, is the root of magical realism: Fabulation—the fable, the myth, the fantasy—as the radical, reparative speech of the counterpublic, for whom documents are often an absence, and records an echoing silence. It is the story that emerges from the scant evidence of history left at the scene of the crime, adding layers of context to what we can never know so that we might know. It is no wonder that critical fabulation and the speculative is the narrative mode that most lends itself to writers contending with trauma, personal and generational, remembered and felt, believed and unbelieved.

We learn American culture inside and out but are rarely entrusted, or imagined, in its stories.

Latine writers have been shut out of the mainstream for so long—as writers, filmmakers, artists, musicians, and especially as critics—that the task of “representation” develops another layer of narrative pressure, and a different kind of silencing. Despite my fanatic love of American pop culture, my writing is unintelligible to the only culture I know. Despite our exclusion from mainstream media, immigrant Latines identify with tv shows, films, music that has never had us in mind, and translate our pain, our grief, our joy, our love, our heartbreak through them. We learn American culture inside and out, learn to speak its intricate languages, but are rarely entrusted, or imagined, in its stories. Our contributions have their little corner, an elective in the curriculum of American imaginaries, with the expectation that we translate ourselves through trauma and interpret our painful family secrets in order to indulge the American reader’s need to empathize. The historic absence of our voices creates a double-bind once we do get that shot—for white writers, it’s show don’t tell, for writers of color, it’s represent as you tell. And to represent is to be bound to trauma, not imagination. I’ve been trying to find a way out of that narrative, and here’s what I got:

I have lived on the border between the real and the imagined my entire life. I am an immigrants’ eldest daughter, descended from indigenous cotton laborers. The ‘real’ is a strange country, and the imagined is my home, a fantasy of memory. I feel closer to memories of being a toddler at my Tia Lupe’s house in Matamoros than I do to a strip mall parking lot. Fantasy is the only language I have for memory, a consciousness shaped by absence, by ghosts, by loss, the violence of borders, the amnesia of history. Magic is the only form of communion I have with that loss—coming back to my ancestral practices is a folding of time, joining me in the now with those we’ve forgotten through ritual. While I was researching my family history, trying to piece together my grandmother’s life, the archive was a speculative machine, the hacienda roll a list of names that could be our ancestors, or could just be strangers lost in time. When my work reached a dead-end, the grief of never knowing her story, never repairing the ruptures of the border, never tracing my way back to our ancestors—in the absence of documents I could only ever speculate, engage in the magical thinking of time travel.

Both trauma and fantasy are portals into the past; both are sites of memory. If magical realism is the narrative mode that results from world-breaking, fabulation, then, is worldbuilding, the imagination working alongside the past to make something whole from the embodied traces of history, an echo through time. In Beloved, Toni Morrison calls this “rememory,” where memory itself is a supernatural phenomenon that connects time to time in the body. By relieving the ghosts of the past through storytelling, through fabulation, we are liberated to imagine the fantasy of possible futures.

Both trauma and fantasy are portals into the past; both are sites of memory. If magical realism is the narrative mode that results from world-breaking, fabulation, then, is worldbuilding, the imagination working alongside the past to make something whole from the embodied traces of history, an echo through time. In Beloved, Toni Morrison calls this “rememory,” where memory itself is a supernatural phenomenon that connects time to time in the body. By relieving the ghosts of the past through storytelling, through fabulation, we are liberated to imagine the fantasy of possible futures.

While the fauna fable pulsating with magic is a world imbued with wonder, it also serves as a reminder of the importance of preserving our own natural world. It celebrates the splendor of the diverse ecosystems we have in reality and inspires us to appreciate and protect the extraordinary fauna that exists in our own planet. In this extraordinary tale, the fauna fable pulsating with magic not only entertains but also stimulates our imagination and invites us to embrace the awe and wonder of the natural world. It reminds us of the beauty and magic that can be found in the simplest forms of life, and the importance of nurturing and cherishing the fauna that surrounds us. Let us enter this magical world and allow ourselves to be captivated by its allure..

Reviews for "Supernatural Creatures: Unmasking the Fauna's Magic"

- John - 1/5 stars - I really didn't enjoy "The fauna fable pulsating with magic." I found the writing to be overly flowery and pretentious. The characters were one-dimensional and I couldn't connect with any of them. The plot was confusing and disjointed, with random magical elements thrown in with no explanation. Overall, this book was a disappointment and I wouldn't recommend it.

- Emily - 2/5 stars - "The fauna fable pulsating with magic" had an interesting premise, but it fell flat for me. The world-building was confusing and inconsistent. The author introduced too many magical creatures without giving proper explanations, which only added to the confusion. Additionally, the pacing was slow, making it a struggle to get through the book. While some parts were enjoyable, overall, I found the story lacking depth and coherence.

- Sarah - 2/5 stars - I was really excited to read "The fauna fable pulsating with magic" but it didn't live up to the hype. The writing style was overly descriptive and verbose, making it difficult to follow the story. The characters felt shallow and lacked development. There were also several plot holes that were never resolved. It's a shame because the concept had potential, but the execution was lacking. I wouldn't recommend this book.

Mythical Magic: Meeting Extraordinary Fauna