Is that person a superheroe?
No, is a cultural icon...
There are a lot of cultural icons in my country; one example can be our liberator Simon Bolivar, he fought so hard for our independence and he was the typical Venezuelan man. We have many known people who can represent our culture; we have musicians, performers, athletes, historical figures and politicians, but we also have all of these stories or legends and their characters. For me, the biggest representation of culture is a story told from generation to generation, the myths change according to the generation, and that's why at the end the story has blended years of culture but conserves the same core.
I chose a novel character for this project, her name is Barbara. She is the main character in the novel and she has the lead of the plot. Doña Barbara is a novel written by Romulo Gallegos and published in 1929; Gallegos was an important Venezuelan novelist and president. Doña Barbara is considered the most important piece of Venezuelan literature, and it is a classic of Latin-American literature; this novel was also famous in Europe by the twentieth century.
This regionalist novel is inspired on Venezuelan plain landscapes; it shows our traditions and beliefs, the shock of lifestyles in the same culture, and the fight for achieve your goals. Doña Barbara is a legend in Venezuelan culture, everybody in our country know almost a little about her and her story.
Barbara embodies the barbaric people and environment in that ages, she is Venezuela; she represents not only the savagery of the people who lived under dictatorship in 1920s but also the strength of Venezuelans, our uncontrollable hearts, our untamable nature, and the indomitable passion for our interests. Barbara Guaimaran is a courageous independent woman who obtains everything she wants by violence and corruption, Venezuela was like that, our ancestors had to battle so hard and be violent to find what they wanted: independence, liberty and sovereignty. Sometimes we are supposed to use corruption to gain what belong to us. This is not a way of excusing the violence and corruption, but is showing a reality that has surrounded us and is still surrounding us.
Barbara may seem like a villain or bad woman, but actually she is not. Something happened to her and this is why she behaves in that way; when she was sixteen year old she was a victim of abuse, six sailors abused her when she was a child so she was traumatized and hated men. Venezuela used to be like that, it used to be a country that suffered a lot because of the previous regimes. In our culture it means that you have to get away of the problems, you have to put the past in a second place and the future first because every generation is better than the other that passed. We cannot forget the past, but we must not get stuck in the past because we will never progress! That’s what happened with Barbara, she was thinking about the past every time so she could never be happy. In Venezuela, happiness means present and future.
Barbara represents our culture, hard working people, authentic people, the man of the Venezuelan plains, and the livestock. She is a woman but she behaves like a man because of the impression that men have in Venezuelan culture; nowadays it is not so important because we are in a kind of liberal age (and I’m glad because of this), but still in our culture the man has a determinant role, he is the family chief and he is supposed to take the reins of the family or community.
Finishing, this woman represents a really important point of Venezuelan culture:
love. When Barbara falls in love with Santos Luzardo she wants to do everything for him! And that’s what love in our culture is about: to do everything for the person you love and it does not matter how crazy can it be!
Doña Barbara became in a legend of the Venezuelan Arauca, she was known as
“the men devourer”. Nobody else had the strength she had, the determination she had, and the repentance and sadness she had; but in spite of her awful past she never gave up! She was like Venezuela:
“All horizons, all roads”…
Doña Barbara is definitely a cultural icon from Venezuela but she is not the one; I think we all can represent our different cultures in our own ways! We are all a part of our culture and we have to represent it wherever we are.
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