An Exercise In Magic Realism
Being a parent is like an exercise in magic realism. The little person who starts out as a clump of fertilised cells inside you, glued together by glycoproteins, whose embryological term ’morula’ derives from the Latin word for mulberry, is, before you know it, an assembled aspect, your blood and bones transformed into new gestures. She is a voice that echoes but isn’t quite yours; a partial copy; a karyotyped resemblance, one which resists and manipulates the prototype, being carried by its own synchronicity; a figure from the past and the ever-evolving, unpredictable, karmic future. The embodied genes, all twenty five thousand, from the twenty three pairs of chromosomes in the hundred-or-more trillion cells are randomly assorted, hybridised, watered down and contaminated by what is yours and not yours. So that what flowers strikes you, suddenly, tenderly, in a manner that the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier might have described as “lo real maravilloso”, or to put it another way, the most terrifyingly beautiful living thing you have ever seen.
