THE MAN WHO COULD MOVE CLOUDS

A novelist revisits the country of her upbringing to learn her family’s story.

When she was 23 and living in Chicago, Colombia native Rojas Contreras endured a bout of amnesia, “just a few weeks of oblivion,” when she “crashed my bicycle into an opening car door.” For eight weeks, “I had no idea where I came from or where I was going, what city I was in, what my name was, and I did not even know the year.” As horrifying as that episode was, she was luckier than her mother: At age 8, Mami fell down a well in Ocaña, Colombia, after she felt “a hand on the small of her back, giving her a gentle push.” When she recovered eight months later, Mami had “the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices,” a gift her curandero (Latinx healer) father, Nono, had also possessed. In this poetic memoir, Rojas Contreras writes of the return trip she and her mother took to Colombia in 2012 to disinter Nono’s bones and tell his story. As the author writes, he was a man who knew “instructions for talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the ill, and moving the clouds”—the “secrets” Mami had inherited. Though the author too often relies on platitudes—e.g., “No one is above suffering”; “Hunger shapes us into a wisdom we cannot yet know”—the book derives considerable power from both her reminiscences of growing up in a nation where guerrilla groups and paramilitaries left bombs throughout Bogotá and its portrait of a loving family filled with colorful characters. Strongest of all are sections in which Rojas Contreras plays on the theme of amnesia to note that it pertains as much to willful maltreatment on the part of a country’s oppressors—she writes of the “highly destructive and orchestrated oppression” of Black and Indigenous peoples—as to individuals saddled with a medical affliction, calamities endured through no fault of the victims.

A moving depiction of family and the power of healing.