The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir

Novelist Rojas Contreras (Fruit of the Drunken Tree) returns with a lyrical meditation on her family’s history and the legacy of colonialism in Colombia. Though guerrilla and drug warfare forced Rojas Contreras’s family to leave Colombia in 1998 when she was 14, the specters of their past remained present. After a bicycle accident in Chicago nine years later rendered Rojas Contreras amnesiac for eight weeks, she slowly recovered her memory with the help of her family. “They say the amnesias were a door to gifts we were supposed to have,” Rojas Contreras muses as she offers readers a gift of another kind, recounting in mesmerizing prose family stories of magic and survival, starting with that of her grandfather, Nono, a curandero who could tell the future, heal the sick, and change the weather. While his powers were passed down to his children, Rojas Contreras writes, they were diluted by the inherited traumas of Colombia’s brutal colonial history: “We were a damned people, and not by God but by white people.” In grappling with the violence embedded in her family’s DNA, Rojas Contreras affectingly reveals how darkness can only be vanquished when it’s brought to the light. Fusing the personal and political, this rings out as a bold case against forgetting in a forward-facing age. (July)