El Cόlera and 'The Masque of the Red Death' by Edgar Allen PoeThe image above comes from a publication of the Colombian magazine Semana, which at that time (2007) was celebrating its 25th year anniversary. The image is of a Wayuu family from La Guajira, a rural region of Colombia, which during the 1990s was hit with an epidemic of cholera. This family in particular suffered the loss of many family members; they are not alone, however, as cholera claimed the lives of almost 230 people in this region. Due to extreme poverty and lack of help from the government many perished during this plague. Below, one an find a translation (by the presenter, Lucia Cadavid) of the article in which this image appeared.
Humans throughout time have had to deal with the concepts of illness and of death. However, it is not easy to deal with such abstract concepts. Death comes to all of us and robs us of life, and yet we cannot see it, touch, or even sense it. There is a necessity to give tangible shapes to things that we do not understand, and for this reason we personify death. It is through this personification that we are able to better understand and deal with such an abstraction. In both the article and Edgar Allen Poe’s story ‘The Masque of Red Death’ we see a striking similarity in language. The authors of both employ the use of a specter or a ghost to signify death walking around and haunting humans. There is a ghostly presence even in times of great revelry as in the story, or in times of great suffering as in La Guajira. The times might be different but the presentation remains the same.
Another striking similarity between both texts is the response that other people have to this specter. Once a person is ill or haunted by death, there is a call to marginalize them, and isolate either the person or ourselves. In the story, Prince Prospero sees all of this death around him, and encloses himself and other elites in an abbey, shutting out and isolating himself from the rest of the world. The Gouriyu Epinayu are isolated not only geographically from the rest of the country but also by other members of their tribe that view them as being cursed/haunted.
-Multimedia Content and Annotation Provided by Lucia Cadavid
Article Translation (by Lucia Cadavid):
"For the Gouriyu Epinayu, the mention of the word cholera is like mentioning the devil himself. This illness attacked all fifteen members of the family and ended the lives of three of their loved ones: an 81 year old grandmother, a youth of 19 and a 6 month old baby. These were the victims who died in 1994 in the rancheria wayuu (a small rural settlement) of Chopchosiraa, in the rural municipal area of Manaure, in La Guajira. Cholera, a word that wipes the smile off the face of Olga Epinayu, with the memory of the epidemic that to this day still keeps her family marginalized from the rest of the community.
There are very few who visit this Wayuu family, for their neighbors fear that the disease still haunts the household. They survive off of the goats and chickens that they raise and sell in the market of Riohacha, in order to buy rice, sugar, corn, coffee, oil, salt, platanos, and yucca. In La Guajira, between 1994 and 1995, cholera took the lives of about 230 people. The episode is thought of with much pain for the wayuu, due to the absence of their loved ones and by the constant neglect from the State, these things have left wounds that time has yet to heal.
The leader of the indigenous tribe Palacio Gouriyu has his own version of the facts: “Cholera is a curse from the arijunas (no wayuu) who sent it over to Alta Guajira so that the indigenous people would die. But we are a strong race that puts up a fight.”