I’ve used Francesca Lia Block’s Witch Baby in my English methods course for many years. I’ve taught it in my own ELA classrooms (Here are some ideas I’ve used introducing the book to students). As a teacher educator, I use it to model and provide guided practice in curriculum development. As we talk about lesson plannings, students and I also talk about the novel. I lead demonstration lessons, and students workshop group lesson plans. Invariably students home in on the novel’s magic realism as an area of instructional focus. There are always a few students who don’t like the novel because of its magic realism. To them, it comes across as unrealistic and even juvenile. 

I’ve written academically about magic realism. I’ve also tried my hand at the genre when writing about my life. Earlier drafts of How to Care for a Giraffe moved between magic realism and fantasy only to become more fantastical as it neared its current form. I have a draft of another novel that is decidedly magic realism. I’m not an expert by any means on or in magic realism. However, I believe we need more of it in our lives, regular doses of it, as a matter of fact. Magic realism is a way to counter creatively the sociopolitical reality of the present day.

Trauma experts believe the words needed to describe traumatic experiences often elude us because of the trauma we’ve experienced or are experiencing. The trauma silences us. Without words to describe individual and collective traumatic experiences, we risk not only remaining silent but also falling into an abyss of depression, pain, and hopelessness. Magic realism provides access to the words needed to climb the abyss by bypassing chronotopes of time and place associated with traumatic experience. It proffers alternative realities not as fantasies but as legitimate reflections of experience and possibilities for future existence.

Mostly associated with Latin American literature, magic realism is often understood as a post-colonial genre that casts historical happenings as fantastical and, for some readers, metaphorical. The narratives are understood as neither accurate nor true but as a character’s or author’s internalized, and often suspect, perception of reality. Understood in this way, magic realism is a trope, or a literary device that can be interpreted along a continuum from quaint to absurd to pure fantasy. 

This continuum may work for literary analyses, but it fails to capture the therapeutic power of magic realism. Writers of magic realism strive to counter the narratives of colonialism, racism, and oppression to reclaim protagonists’ histories and identities. Their narratives convey a world recognized as real in the eyes of the teller, regardless of its fantastical nature. For readers, recognizing these realities requires an empathetic leap, or a living out as it were of alternative possibilities—the magic realm—that challenge recorded history.

American author Toni Morrison captures the idea of magic realism as a portal through which trauma is named and laid bare. In her classic Beloved, the ghost Beloved helped ex-slaves tell their stories to create a counter-reality to White slave owners’ narratives. The former-slave Sethe’s spiritual hauntings revealed the enduring trauma of American enslavement, thus conveying a world of truth to people outside this experience. Through these haunting, characters reclaim and affirm their identities.

At its best, magic realism juxtaposes the real and the magical, reality and irreality, creating language or images to name and to show, respectively, what otherwise would be un-nameable and invisible. It is, as suggested by Native American writer Gerald Vizenor, a “language game” through which the world is deconstructed and recast anew to reflect not a historical reality but a felt reality. 

Magic realist scholar, Eugene Arva, believes magic realism has the unique ability to turn “what resists representation into an accessible reality.” He writes that magic realism “is not an escape from reality but an enhancement of a ‘real’ reality which tends to escape us—more often than not as a symptom of trauma.”

For those of us looking for a way to counter the present-day barrage of trauma-inducing events, whether the trauma is directed at us or others, magic realism can offer solace and possibility. Magic realism novels can be read as historical truths, depicting a reality felt deeply by protagonists and authors. That is what Witch Baby has done for me for over thirty years. But beyond seeking out magic realism novels, we, too, can recast our experiences through a prism of magic realism. Our felt realities can be narratively shaped and given voice in written form or verbally. 

To be sure, magic realism alone will not fix institutional, social, or individual damage by outside forces. It will not squash the ennui created through dysfunction. Community organizing and advocacy, government policies and laws, and democratic and just action are, among other things, needed. Magic realism, though, can prepare and sustain us in these efforts.

That which is now being denied—climate change, systemic racism, subjugation, and hucksterism, even the pandemic, and more—can be only righted with good leadership and policies. Until those arrive, the reality in which we experience these issues and the trauma they induce can be transformed through access to a language that reflects our felt experiences. That is the role of magic realism.