“No hay historia muda. Por mucha que la queman, por mucho que le rompan, por mocho que la mientan, la historia humana se niega a callarse se boca” ~ Eduardo Galiano

– Eduardo Galeano nació tal día como hoy en 1940

Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015)

BY: ALAN WEST-DURÁN

Eduardo Galeano was a man of letters who lived a life of resistance.

Sometime in 1986, I did a reading with Eduardo Galeano and Mauricio Rosencof in New York City. The dictatorship of Uruguay had recently ended, but the pain of those memories was still raw and the civil wars raging in Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua) gave the evening both urgency and an air of hope that events in Central American would eventually lead to revolutionary outcomes.

Galeano had escaped military rule in Uruguay and fled to Argentina, only to flee again to Spain when the military junta overthrew the government of Isabel Perón in March 1976. Rosencof, aside from being a poet and playwright, was one of the three top leaders of the MLN, the urban guerrilla movement known as the Tupamaros. He was not as fortunate as Galeano: he had been captured by the military, imprisoned, tortured savagely by his captors, and spent eleven of thirteen years in solitary confinement.

He shared with the audience that while in prison he would smuggle poems out written on cigarette paper tucked into dirty T-shirts his family would collect, wash and return to him clean. He called them his “poemas de la camiseta” (t-shirt poems) and he read many of them that evening. They were short, sharp, and devastating.

Galeano took the stage, thanked Rosencof, and spoke of the difficulty of the democratic transition, quoting soccer player Obdulio Varela (“We have grown selfish. We no longer see ourselves in others.”). He then remembered how Uruguayan culture had survived during those dismembering years in large and small ways, which he described using the words of Martín Fierro: “the fire that really heats comes from below.” Galeano then read texts from his monumental trilogy Memory of Fire (three volumes 1982–1986), short texts or vignettes that captured the poetry, joy, and resistance of Latin America and its torturously beautiful history.

For me, what remains from that night is a sense of community built not only through the power of the word but also through “[creative] shit, grit and mother-wit” (to quote Ralph Ellison), a community of pain, solidarity, creativity, and hope that stretches from New York City (or Los Angeles) to Tierra del Fuego.

Galeano, through his words, was a builder of communities, a true pan–Latin Americanist, whether he was talking about religions in the favelas of Brazil, the bewildering intricacies of Peronist populism in Argentina, genocide against the Maya in Guatemala, the social violence of Caracas, a festival in Mexico, a soccer game that led to war (between El Salvador and Honduras), or the beauty of Nicaraguan poetry.

As an aspiring poet-revolutionary, I was awed to be in the same room with Galeano, by then a renowned author throughout Latin America, with a growing reputation in the US. His Open Veins of Latin America (1971) and his two Casa de las Américas Awards (in 1975 for La canción de nosotros, a novel, and in 1978 for his Days and Nights of Love and War, a testimonial essay) made him one of Latin America’s most read and admired writers.

But those were my days of connecting to my Cuban revolutionary roots, of being a comecandela, a word in Spanish that conveys a total revolutionary commitment, and this must have tempered my nerves. Comecandela literally means fire-eating, which in English would be best rendered as fire-breathing.

Fire is the image that recurs when thinking of Galeano and his trilogy Memory of Fire, which captures both the urgency — and yes, warmth — of both his imagination and indignation. This fire was one of intelligence, curiosity, and rebellion, the fire of resoluteness, Martín Fierro’s fire from below.

A precocious writer, Galeano was already an editor at Marcha, Uruguay’s prestigious weekly paper at age twenty. He then worked for Epoca and as director of publications at the University until he fled the dictatorship in 1973, moving to Buenos Aires, where he founded the journal Crisis. In 1976, because of the Argentine dictatorship, he fled to Barcelona, where he lived until 1985, when he returned to Montevideo. Along with Juan Carlos Onetti and Mario Benedetti, they founded Brecha in 1985, a weekly meant to continue in the tradition of Marcha; it continues to appear thirty years later.

In the late eighties he formed his own small publishing house Ediciones del Chanchito (Little Pig Editions), which issued his book on soccer. In 2005, he joined the advisory committee of Tele Sur, the Pan-Latin TV station based out of Caracas, Venezuela. In 2007, he successfully underwent surgery for lung cancer, but eventually it would claim him.

Galeano’s great obsession was memory and history, as he wrote in the Guardian in 2013: “My great fear is that we are all suffering from amnesia.” It terrified him that human beings, ever more distracted by the velocity and depredations of consumer culture, would lose our sense of culture, rootedness, and identity.

He was fond of saying that every time an old person dies in Latin America, it was like having a library burn down, because that person’s life was an enormous repository of living history and culture. One could argue that his work was dedicated to at least capturing some of those voices, of building a library to ward off the ravages of oblivion.

Even his best-known work, The Open Veins of Latin America, could be seen as an attempt to chronicle the forgotten or domesticated history of capitalism in Nuestra América (Our America), as Martí put it. Aware that capital wants us to see the glittering skyscrapers and forget its slums, crime, and plunder, Galeano was a consistent critic of capitalism and neoliberalism.

He took Adorno’s “all reification is a forgetting” to heart and his other books build on what he laid out in Open Veins, offering not only a critique of capitalism, but glimpses of alternatives to it based on values of solidarity, anti-authoritarianism, dignity, creativity, and selflessness.

In this the New York Times’s obituary only had it half-right in merely describing him as anti-capitalist. Galeano had a gift for making social realities come to life, as in the following about the poor: “They sell newspapers they cannot read, sew clothes they cannot wear, polish cars they will never own, and build homes where they will never live . . . They build Brazil each day and Brazil is their land of exile.” After being a clandestine book in many countries during the 1970s, Open Veins experienced a resurgence in sales when Hugo Chávez recommended it to President Obama in 2009.

Much has been made of Galeano’s subsequent criticism of Open Veins in 2014 when he said, “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me the prose of the traditional left is extremely leaden and my physique can’t tolerate it.”

Galeano did not say that he regretted having written the book, but that he was unprepared to have taken on such a major work on political economy in his late twenties. (The book was published when he was thirty-one.) Compared to his other writings it is the one book that most reads like a social science text, unlike the more poetic or writerly language that characterizes The Book of Embraces (1989), The Memory of Fire, We Say No (1989), and Soccer in Sun and Shadow (1995).

Despite having written and published short stories and a novel, Galeano is best known for a hybrid style that is uniquely his own: using vignettes he either tells a story (or anecdote) that usually has a point (political, moral, philosophical, historical, cultural).

The language can vary from poetic musing to philosophical aphorism, or plain sentences with a hint of irony or outright sarcasm. His style effortlessly combined storytelling techniques, aphorism, chronicle, dream narratives, historical citations, lists, and snippets of dialogue. Most of these vignettes last less than half a page.

In the case of Memory of Fire, Galeano proceeds chronologically, with Volume I (Genesis) starting with indigenous myths, then going from 1492-1700; Volume II (Faces and Masks) from 1700 to 1900 and Volume III (Century of the Wind) covering the twentieth century up to 1986. Each text is followed by a number (or numbers), which refers to a bibliography of hundreds of sources at the back of the book should the reader want to follow up on the vignettes.

The three volumes, running over a thousand pages, are a collage of history, a rich amalgam of indigenous myths, letters, chronicles, historical documents, poems, dialogues, speeches, diaries, quotes from novels, newspaper clippings and more. Galeano claims he undertook the project because growing up he found history textbooks unbearably boring, and Memory of Fire is a beautiful and captivating response to history as a dry recitation of facts.

Galeano was equally gifted as an essayist, with an omnivorous curiosity, often with a different style, less expansive but always honing in on an image or idea. Among his most memorable are “God and the Devil in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro” (1969), “In Defense of the Word” (1976), “Ten Frequent Lies or Mistakes About Latin American Literature and Culture” (1980), “The Blue Tiger and The Promised Land” (1987), “Salgado: Light is A Secret of Garbage” (1990), on Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, and “Othercide: For Five Centuries in the Rainbow Has Been Banned from America’s Sky” (1991). (Fortunately, all are in We Say No, Chronicles 1963–1991).

His essays show the same wit and incisiveness, often using the vignette style to string together an argument. And despite some of the grim subjects he covers (dictatorship, social violence, racism, imperialism), Galeano always tries to leave his reader with a note of hope.

In “The Blue Tiger and The Promised Land,” which deals with indigenous genocide and current injustices, he concludes with the following:

And perhaps in this way we could get a bit closer to the day of justice than the Guaraní, pursuers of Paradise, have always been awaiting. The Guaraní believe that the world wants to be different, that it wants to be born again, and so the world entreats the First Father to unleash the blue tiger that sleeps beneath his hammock. The Guaraní believe that someday that righteous tiger will shatter the world so that another world, with neither evil nor death, guilt nor prohibitions, can be born from its ashes. The Guaraní believe, and I do, too, that life truly deserves that festival.

While Galeano reserved most of his criticism for the Right and conservatives, he was not above criticizing the Left, albeit constructively, since he remained on the Left until his death. Sometimes, he could do both at once, as when he wrote about soccer.

First, he deals with the conservative position and its “conviction that soccer worship is precisely the superstition people deserve. Possessed by the ball, working stiffs think with their feet, which is entirely appropriate, and fulfill their dreams in primitive ecstasy. Animal instinct overtakes human reason, ignorance crushes culture, and the riffraff get what they want.” A fairly conventional argument that equates sporting skill with animality and the abandonment of civilized mores.

But the Left comes under equal scrutiny: “In contrast, many leftist intellectuals denigrate soccer because it castrates the masses and derails their revolutionary ardor. Bread and circus, circus without the bread: hypnotized by the ball, which exercises a perverse fascination, workers forget who they are and let themselves be led about like sheep by their class enemies.”

Here, aside from the puritanical sentiment expressed, is a real blindness in underestimating the intelligence of working people as well as their ability to distinguish between a sporting event and the realities of their lives. Galeano reminds us that there are progressive elements in South American soccer, ending with a quote by Antonio Gramsci describing soccer as “this open-air kingdom of human loyalty.”

In one of Galeano’s most delightful books, Las palabras andantes (The Walking Words), his vignettes are accompanied by the woodcuts of José Francisco Borges, one of Brazil’s most brilliant folk artists. The book begins with a quote from Bahia’s Caetano Veloso, singer and songwriter extraordinaire: “Visto de cerca, nadie es normal” (“Seen close up, no one is normal”).

Under the vision and pen of Galeano, Latin America’s history and culture, with all of its cruelty and beauty, was always seen close up, with an appreciation for the region’s exciting diversity, always resisting neoliberal cultural homogenization and the bland platitudes of the status quo. https://jacobinmag.com/2015/04/eduardo-galeano-obituary-open-veins

Eduardo Hughes Galeano (Montevideo, 3 september 1940 – aldaar, 13 april 2015) was een Uruguayaans journalist en schrijver. Zijn bekendste werken zijn De aderlating van een continent (Las venas abiertas de América Latina, 1971) en Kroniek van het vuur (Memoria del fuego, 1986). In zijn boeken combineert Galeano fictie, journalistiek, politieke analyse en geschiedschrijving. Hij was een uitgesproken criticus van de globalisering vanwege de effecten voor de minderbedeelden. Hij was een beroemdheid in Latijns-Amerika en bij zijn dood beschreven de kranten hem als een van de belangrijkste anti-kapitalistische stemmen van dit continent.

Biografie

In 1940 werd Galeano geboren in een katholiek middenklassegezin van Europese immigranten. Als tiener werkte hij in fabrieken, als typist en als kassier bij een bank. Op veertienjarige leeftijd verkocht hij zijn eerste politiek getinte cartoon aan het weekblad van de Socialistische Partij van Uruguay, El Sol.

Als kind wilde hij een beroemd voetballer worden: “Ik wilde voetballer worden, en ik werd de allerbeste, de nummer één, beter dan Maradona, beter dan Pelé, zelfs beter dan Messi – maar alleen ’s nachts, in mijn dromen. Als ik wakker word, realiseer ik me dat ik houten benen heb en dat ik gedoemd ben schrijver te zijn.”

Al op 20-jarige leeftijd werkte hij als redacteur bij Uruguays meest vooraanstaande weekblad Marcha. Daarnaast was hij twee jaar redacteur van het dagblad Época. Galeano zegt dat hij verhalen heeft leren vertellen in de cafés van Montevideo: “Zij waren mijn universiteit. Ik ben gek op dit soort plaatsen, waar anonieme mensen, die alle tijd van de wereld hebben, de meest geweldige verhalen kunnen vertellen.”

In de jaren zestig steeg de politieke spanning in Uruguay door de strijd van de regering tegen de Tupamaros. De terreurcampagne van president Juan Maria Bordaberry leidde tot censuur van de media, verdwijningen van dissidenten, dwangarbeid en moordpartijen. Na een militaire staatsgreep in 1973 belandde Galeano in de gevangenis en later moest hij Uruguay ontvluchten.

Hij vluchtte naar Argentinië, waar hij het culturele tijdschrift Crisis oprichtte. Maar ook daar was hij niet veilig, want zijn boek De aderlating van een continent was door de rechtse regeringen in Uruguay, Chili en Argentinië verboden. Na de staatsgreep van Jorge Videla in 1976 werd Galeano ter dood veroordeeld. Hij kon vluchten naar Spanje waar hij bleef tot in 1985. Terug in Montevideo lanceerde hij in 1985, samen met Juan Carlos Onetti en Mario Benedetti het tijdschrift Brecha, dat nog steeds bestaat.

Eind jaren tachtig zette hij zijn eigen uitgeverij op, Ediciones del Chanchito (Uitgeverij Het Varkentje).

In 2004 won Tabaré Vázquez met de linkse beweging Frente Amplio de Uruguayaanse verkiezingen. Galeano schreef vervolgens voor het Amerikaanse politieke maandblad The Progressive een stuk onder de titel Where the People Voted Against Fear. Daarin uitte hij zijn steun voor de nieuwe regering en concludeerde dat het Uruguayaanse volk voor het gezond verstand (“common sense”) gekozen had omdat het zich bedrogen voelde door de traditionele partijen, de Partido Colorado en Blanco.

Een jaar later werd Galeano adviseur van de door Hugo Chavez gefinancierde televisiezender TeleSUR.

Eduardo Galeano overleed aan longkanker op 13 april 2015. Meteen na zijn overlijden werd Galeano opgebaard in het parlementsgebouw te Montevideo, waar president Vázquez en honderden familieleden, vrienden en politici afscheid van hem namen.

Galeano was drie keer getrouwd, met Silvia Brando (1959-1962), Graciela Berro (in 1962) en ten slotte met Helena Villagra in 1976.

De aderlating van een continent

Galeano maakte naam met De aderlating van een continent. Tijdens een pan-Amerikaanse top in 2009 overhandigde de toenmalige president van Venezuela, Hugo Chavez de Amerikaanse president Obama een exemplaar van het boek. Het was meteen de internationale doorbraak van Galeano. Wat hem daarbij hielp, was dat in de eerste jaren na de publicatie het leger de macht greep in zowel Uruguay als Argentinië en Chili. De rechtse militaire machthebbers genoten hierbij de steun van Washington, dat hun dictaturen zag als nuttige buffer tegen het vermeende oprukkende communisme. Ook verdedigden de militairen de Amerikaanse economische belangen in de zuidpunt van Zuid-Amerika beter.

Galeano’s historische verhandeling bleek naadloos aan te sluiten op de actualiteit. In linkse kringen groeide De aderlating van een continent de volgende jaren uit tot een bestseller. In de straten van La Paz worden in boekenstalletjes nog steeds illegale kopieën verkocht. Galeano inspireerde tal van opstandige groeperingen, zoals de mijnwerkers in Bolivia die dynamietstaven gooiden naar politici. Daar lijkt het kolonialisme na vijf eeuwen nog steeds te bestaan.

Thematiek

Eduardo Galeano schrijft vooral over thema’s als macht, onrechtvaardigheid en uitbuiting.

Andere terugkerende thema’s zijn de voortdurende onderdrukking van de vrouw, de geschiedenis van de slavernij en het racisme, waaraan volgens Galeano nooit een einde lijkt te komen, maar ook de voortdurende verspilling van de natuurlijke hulpbronnen. Een van de favoriete doelwitten van Galeano was Coca-Cola: “Dankzij hen drinken de arme kinderen in de sloppenwijken geen melk meer maar cola.”

Hij had zijn hart verpand aan heel Latijns-Amerika. Zo schreef hij over de verschillende godsdiensten in de favela‘s in Brazilië, het peronistische populisme in Argentinië, een voetbalwedstrijd die tot een oorlog zou leiden (tussen El Salvador en Honduras) en de schoonheid van de poëzie uit Nicaragua.

Stijl

Zijn stijl wordt elegant genoemd, nooit een overbodig woord, alles staat precies op zijn plek en als het even kan maakt Galeano ook een grap. Hij gebruikt vaak het vignet als literaire vorm. De taal kan variëren van dichterlijk, filosofische aforismen tot zinnen met een ironische of sarcastische toets.

De rijkdom van veel mensen op deze wereld is het resultaat van de armoede van anderen. Het wordt tijd dat we de kloof tussen rijk en arm kleiner maken.

Ik realiseer me dat praten over de machtigen en de underdogs absoluut niet in de mode is. Maar ik ben dan ook een prehistorisch mens.

Bibliografie (selectie)

Jaar	Titel	Vertaling	Opmerkingen
Bibliografie
1970	De aderlating van een continent		5 eeuwen uitbuiting van Latijns-Amerika door Europa en de Verenigde Staten
1978	Dagen en nachten van oorlog en liefde		over het dictatoriale regime in Uruguay in de jaren zeventig
1986	De kroniek van het vuur		lijvige historische trilogie over Latijns-Amerika met stukken biografie, fictie en poëzie
1993	Woorden op de loop	Walking Words	folkloristische verhalen van het Latijnse-Amerika platteland en de stad
1995	Glorie en tragiek van het voetbal	Football in sun and shadow	allerlei aspecten in het internationale voetbal
1999		Am Rich Potosí: The Mountain that Eats Men	over de zilvermijnwerkers in Bolivië
2008	Spiegels, verhalen over bijna iedereen	Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone	de geschiedenis van de wereld in 600 korte episodes
2012		Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History	in de vorm van een kalender met een verhaal voor elke dag.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Galeano