Shakira impresses and dazzles: this is what Gabriel García Márquez said about her
In 1999, Cambio magazine published a profile of the Colombian artist written by one of the most brilliant authors of the 20th century.
By the end of the 1990s, Shakira was already a rock star with international projection. By the age of 22, she had released four albums and was receiving critical and public acclaim, both in Colombia and abroad. Her most recent albums, ‘Pies descalzos’ (1995) and ‘¿Dónde están los ladrones?’ (1998), were among the best-selling Latin albums in the United States. Most of her songs had been written by the artist herself, which gave her more credit.
At that time, as it is now, the singer was the focus of the press. There was always some journalist waiting for his or her turn to interview her and the ever insistent paparazzi who chased her to get any image they could use. There was one man, however, who earned his right to talk to the artist from the moment he expressed his interest.
Suffering from a lymphoma that threatened to put an early end to his literary craft, Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez was constantly traveling to Los Angeles, in the United States, for treatments. In the midst of his medical agenda, the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” found space to ask the singer for an interview and the meeting ended up taking place in the Colombian capital.
What he wrote as a result was a deep profile that appeared in Cambio magazine, in June 1999. The text praised her and presented a journey from her childhood to the present, always highlighting her struggles and the maturity with which the singer from Barranquilla took on each new obstacle.
García Márquez spoke not only of her qualities for music and dance, but also of what characterized her as a person and which, according to him, enhanced everything else.
“It is difficult to be what Shakira is today in her career, not only because of her genius and judgment, but because of the miracle of a maturity inconceivable at her age,” he wrote. “You can see that she is as she wanted to be: intelligent, insecure, demure, evasive, intense. Barranquillera de hueso colorado”.
In his profile, the author of “El coronel no tiene quién le escriba” highlighted Shakira as a woman who took charge of herself on every stage, and whom the hustle and bustle of concerts, tours, and recordings, instead of exhausting her, empowered her.
“She takes care of everything herself. She can’t read music, but in rehearsals she is attentive to every instrument, with a severe critical sense and a privileged ear that allows her to interrupt a rehearsal to coordinate the exact note with her musicians. Not only does he collaborate with them on stage, but he worries about the personal fate of each one.”
The text is a true sample of journalistic writing, as well as one of the most beautiful portraits that have been made of one of the most outstanding artists of Latin America in recent times.
After their meeting in 1999, Shakira and García Márquez continued to see and share. The two forged a friendship based on mutual admiration. She was for him the ultimate expression of talent and work, and he was for her a teacher.
The writer and the singer worked once again during the shooting of the film adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera”. Shakira was in charge of the soundtrack, along with Antonio Pinto and Pedro Aznar. Shakira composed two of the songs that appear in the film: ‘Hay amores’ and ‘Despedida’. The latter received a Golden Globe nomination in 2008, in the category of Best Original Song.
At the express request of García Márquez himself, the film also included a version of the song ‘Pienso en ti’, from the album ‘Pies descalzos’, which the writer loved so much.
In Gabriel García Márquez’s archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin in Texas, there is an obituary written in 2001 by the Colombian author that sums up the pride he always felt for Shakira: “Nothing that is said or not said about Shakira can change her course as a great and unstoppable artist”.
In April 2019, five years after the death of the writer, the Colombian singer-songwriter made a post on her Instagram account in which she recalled some memorable moments of the interview they held in their first meeting and how the years brought them together again.
Here’s what she wrote:
“Trying to sum up such a great person in a few words as Gabo is a very difficult task, but trying to remember someone like him is really very easy. We all know, millions of us know, the magic of his books and his stories, but few of us have been fortunate enough to know the magic he himself was made of.
In this sense I can consider myself lucky when at the age of 21 – I think I was 21 when I met him in his house in Bogota – why he wanted to write about me. The truth is that I had no idea why someone like Gabo wanted to write about me because I never thought I was that interesting….
Actually, I was the one who was captivated in that meeting and yes, I was captivated by his sense of humor, by his warmth, by his humanity and by his way of speaking adorned with so many costumbrist airs that only belonged to him.
Really talking with Gabo was like entering another dimension alien to the rest of us mortals. It was to see a man grown up exploring the world of others as if he were a child, with an inexhaustible curiosity, with a thirst to know and to invent as well… I remember when he used to say to me: “Shakira, if you don’t tell me, I’ll make it up” … So for me it was an honor when he asked me to write for the film that tried to cover Love in the Time of Cholera and yes, I wrote two of my best songs to date which were “Hay Amores” and “Despedida”… How could I refuse such an honor and luxury of being able to participate in a project in which Gabriel García Márquez was involved?
He once said: “Remembering is easy for those who have a good memory and forgetting is difficult for those who have a heart”. May you know Gabo that we keep in our hearts everything you left in them and we keep remembering you to keep you alive” – Shak.