Author: Caroline Olsen-Van Stone
Freelance journalist and author Silvana Paternostro engaged students and faculty with stories of her unique experiences as a Colombian student at University of Michigan (UM) through excerpts from two of her books My Colombian War and In the Land of God and Man.
The event marks the beginning of the first annual International Students week, put on by the International Students Organization (ISO). “The Country I Left Behind” includes events designed to raise awareness about the varied experiences of being an international student.
Paternostro’s family sent her to America to get an education, and she was expected to return to Colombia to lead a Colombian life, she said. “I came back a little different,” she said.
“My mother calls me desubicada,” she said. She translates this to mean that she is “difficult, a little ridiculous and always out of place. I have bicultural schizophrenia.”She earned her bachelor’s of Political Science from UM, and went on to get a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University.
Her first politics class at UM was taught by a professor staunchly against US foreign policy with Iran and Vietnam. “His cursing scared me,” she said. The other students engaged in the class discussions, often arguing with the professor and each other, while she remained quiet.
Then she saw a documentary Hearts and Minds, which made her realize the power of literature and art. This eventually led her towards a career in journalism.
For 10 years, she worked in Central America, writing daily hard-hitting news. “I was a writer about Latin America, but I wrote in English,” she said. Understanding how problematic this sounds, she cites the danger that Latin American journalists face and the fact that her “mother can’t understand what I am writing about” as her reasons as to why she writes in English. Though she is still very close to her family in Colombia, she does not intend to return.
One of the stories she read was of a girl six years older than she who lived with her as a child until age nine. She mysteriously disappeared one day, and the memory has haunted Paternostro ever since.
When she visited Colombia in 1999, she wanted to find her. When she did, the woman invited her to move back to Colombia so she could again live with her. “But I had become a different kind of Colombian,” Paternostro said.
This story is from her second book, My Colombian War. In this book, she returned to Colombia “not as a journalist, but a Colombian daughter that became desubicada,” she said. Paternostro said the author James Baldwin has deeply inspired her. “For him, he had to write about being black first,” she said, “so I wrote about being a woman first.”
When her mother asked her about her second book-In the Land of God and Man, in which she criticizes machismo culture-she simply told her the title, to which her mother replied with a smile. Apparently, she would have been angry if she knew what the book was really about.
This book was met with much praise and success, resulting in the publishers sending her on a Latin America tour to promote it. She still receives letters from Latin American women expressing their support for the ideas she presents in this book. “It was a political manifesto in the wrong language,” she said. The book has been translated into Spanish, as much of her other work has been.
Paternostro continues to write freelance features for a myriad of publications, such as the New York Times and the New Republic.
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