Una holandesa en América

"The Colombian classic of the Romantic era is María (1867) by Jorge Isaacs . It’s an extraordinary novel which we all read in high school, because it’s obligatory to read it. It was really good for me to read it. But, in those days, writers were building their ideal of a nation. What is the ideal man? What is the ideal woman? In Jorge Isaacs’s novel, the heroine is a silly girl. She doesn’t read. She’s proud because she only reads the book of prayers. She doesn’t disobey. As you’re growing up, that’s the model of the woman that they tell you is the ideal woman. But then I read Una holandesa en América by Soledad Acosta de Samper, which was written around the same time and set in the same era. It’s about a girl who reads and is clever. She doesn’t want to marry just because. She’s 27, so already a spinster (in those days) and a lady says to her, ‘Look, that widower over there, he wants to marry you.’ And she says, ‘Oh, no, he’s an old guy. I don’t want to marry him.’ And the woman replies, ‘You can’t aspire to a better man than that.’ And she says ‘Then I won’t marry and I will keep working on my farm. I’m happy as I am.’ I would have liked to read this novel in high school. It’s a great novel. I think it’s unfair that it’s not obligatory to read it, just like María. I think high schoolers should read both novels and see both sides of the story. For many years, we have privileged the voice of men, of male writers in Colombia, and only now are we looking back into our literature and finding other voices. This is another voice. She’s a little Dutch girl and her parents emigrate to Colombia. She lived in Holland and her parents have a farm in Colombia. When she is older, she travels in a boat to America and tells it from her point of view. That’s also interesting. In Jorge Isaacs’s book, María , Colombia is like a paradise and everything’s good. We know from the history books that it was not, that there was war. Soledad Acosta de Samper writes about that war. I was reading it during the pandemic in Colombia, when there was social unrest. Reading it, I felt that the country hadn’t changed that much. We still have the same social unrest for the same reasons and it’s having the same effects on our daily lives."