Spanish / Colombia
Era como mi sombra
(He was like my shadow)
Lozano, Pilar
(text)
Bogotá: Ed. SM, 2015. – 86 p.
(Series: Gran Angular)
ISBN 978-958-773-558-1
Civil war | Guerrilla | Child soldier | Poverty
Reading age: 12+
White Ravens issue: 2016
Well-known author and journalist Pilar Lozano conveys the intense childhood and youth of a boy in this less than one-hundred-page-long narrative. The nameless protagonist grows up in a secluded village somewhere in the Colombian highlands. The people there are, like in innumerable other places, pawns in the long-enduring civil war or participants in the fight between government troops, guerrilla fighters, paramilitary forces, police and drug dealers, all of whom keep the land hobbled. The first-person narrator and his friend Julián, inseparable since their childhoods, join a guerrilla group at thirteen because life offers them no other alternatives. In brief chapters using concise language, the book paints an oppressive picture of an everyday life in which children and teenagers confront violence and death; it also conveys the protagonist’s feelings of love, friendship, loss, grief and his attempt to find a place to live as well as a place in life.