Hagabula

Hagabula is a utopian alternate history of the West. Set in the early 16th century, it follows Hernan Cortes’s expedition to a mystical black mountain, the navel of the Earth, somewhere in the West Atlantic, beyond the “meridian of fear.” The protagonists traverse an enchanting, dreamlike reality, which leads them to unpredictable discoveries and an ending of cosmogonic scale. The story takes on the nostalgia for the original forces and meanings of life—the painful longing that defines the modern condition—from an ecological, feminist, and postcolonial perspective. Playing with genres, Hagabula encompasses magical realism while employing adventurous, mythical, and surrealist narratives. It often utilizes a fictional, counterfactual history or geography, introducing a simultaneously familiar and unexpected reality. The novel subverts and reverses the factual history of the conquest of the New World bringing a new understanding of the destiny of the Western civilization with its progressist projects of power and domination over nature and life.