{"id":56620,"date":"2015-04-20T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T11:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=56620"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:25:50","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:25:50","slug":"eduardo-galeano-a-prophet-who-looks-backward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/04\/eduardo-galeano-a-prophet-who-looks-backward\/","title":{"rendered":"Eduardo Galeano: A Prophet Who Looks Backward"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Eduardo<\/a>

Eduardo Galeano (AP Photo\/Ginnette Riquelme)<\/p><\/div>\n

Eduardo Galeano, one of Latin America\u2019s most beloved<\/a> writers, died<\/a> on Monday [April 13, 2015] in a hospital in Montevideo, after a long battle against lung cancer. His first book, Las venas abiertas de Am\u00e9rica Latina<\/em><\/a>, which the late Hugo Ch\u00e1vez famously presented to Barack Obama as a present, appeared in 1971 (published in English by Monthly Review Press in 1973 as Open Veins of Latin America<\/em><\/a>). In 1973, Galeano was driven out of his home country of Uruguay following a US-supported coup. Then, after yet another US-supported coup in Argentina, he found exile in post-Franco Spain, where, in 1978, he published D\u00edas y Noches de Amor y de Guerra<\/em> (Days and Nights of Love and War<\/em>, in English) and began his famous trilogy, Memory of Fire<\/em>. These books are the highest expression of a genre that Galeano perfected. He somehow managed to be at once fragmentary and meta, impressionistic and expansive, weaving together fact, pre-Columbian myth, and snippets from everyday life into sprawling people\u2019s epics.<\/p>\n

Galeano\u2019s death comes just a few days short of the first anniversary of the passing of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. Galeano, born in 1940, was younger than Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. But the works that made each of them famous came out in Spanish within years of each other. Cien a\u00f1os de soledad <\/em>appeared in 1967; Las venas abiertas <\/em>four years later. Both were translated into dozens of languages, and sold millions and millions of bonafide copies, along with the countless bootlegs hawked by street vendors from Santiago to Mexico City.<\/p>\n

One Hundred Years of Solitude <\/em>is a work of dense allegory operating on a bewildering array of levels and could be mistaken for something other than political. But for the artists, writers, and activists of Galeano\u2019s and Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s generation, whatever else that storm was that wiped away Macondo, it was also capitalism<\/a>. As if to underscore the point, Galeano subtitled the preface to Open Veins<\/em>: \u201c120 Million Children in the Eye of the Tempest.\u201d<\/p>\n

As they did with Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, English-speaking audiences tended to like the sentimental Galeano, the Galeano who wrote of quixotic dreams and forgetting, who spoke in enigmas and historical metaphors. Me, I prefer the Galeano who used poetry to leaven an analysis of \u201cmodes of production\u201d and \u201cclass structure,\u201d of \u201cendless chains of dependency that have been endlessly extended\u201d and of a Latin America that had been force-fitted into the \u201cuniversal gearbox of capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Galeano himself came to think<\/a> his early writing was too pessimistic and schematic, when last year an off handed remark was amplified<\/a> into a New York Times’ <\/em>headline: “Galeano Disavows his Book.” But economic reductionism possesses its own kind of lyricism: \u201cThe more freedom that is granted trade,\u201d Galeano wrote in 1971, \u201cthe more prisons are needed for those who suffer from that trade. . . . The massacres caused by poverty (miseria<\/em>) in Latin America are secret: every year, three Hiroshima bombs explode, silently, over its communities that are used to suffering with clenched teeth. This systematic violence, unseen but real, increases: the crime is covered not in the sensationalist press but in the statistics of the United Nation\u2019s Food and Agricultural Organization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within a year, then, with the deaths of Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and Galeano, we have lost two embodiments of Latin America\u2019s irrepressible Hegelianism, a refusal (as I put it in a Times <\/em>review<\/a> of Galeano\u2019s last book, Children of Days<\/em>) to give up on the idea that, despite all the tortures and terrors from the Spanish Inquisition to the death squads and disappearances of the Cold War, that history is redeemable. Centuries of repression and struggle have had an effect opposite of despair, searing into the region\u2019s political culture an ability to both recognize the dialectic lurking behind the brutality and answer every bloody body with ever more adamant affirmations of humanity.<\/p>\n

And like all good dialecticians, from Paulo Freire to Sartre, Marx and Hegel, Galeano\u2019s histories were histories of being and becoming: \u201cAt the end of the day,\u201d he said, \u201cwe are what we do to change who we are.\u201d That\u2019s an expression that, if abstracted from Galeano\u2019s larger social criticism, could sound maudlin, reproduced ad nauseum on twitter feeds and FB pages. And indeed, with Gabo and Galeano gone, we are left with the insipid Paulo Coelho<\/a>, who, though he got whatever talent he has from a Jesuit-educated leftist youth, now apparently thinks<\/a> that \u201cindividuals are the true catalysts for historical change.\u201d God help us. If Latin America ever finally loses the concept of what Galeano\u2019s generation called realidad social <\/em>\u2013 social reality \u2013 the world is in real trouble.<\/p>\n

Galeano\u2019s influence can\u2019t be overestimated. I can\u2019t think of any other book that Ch\u00e1vez could have handed<\/a> Obama that would, in a single gesture, convey so much meaning, instantly transmitting to millions of Latin Americans years of imperial depredation. When Subcomandante Marcos of the Mexican Zapatistas (who since last June goes by the name Subcomandante Galeano<\/a>) described, in one of his first communiques, oil wells as a \u201cthousand teeth sunk into the throat of the Mexican Southeast,\u201d he was echoing Open Veins<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Latin America\u2019s current generation of left politicians came of age reading Galeano, and they are offering loving tributes<\/a>. One of the most thoughtful<\/a> is from Uruguay\u2019s former president Jos\u00e9 Mujica. Mujica, born five years before Galeano and a leader<\/a> of the Tupamaro insurgents in the 1970s, referenced the \u201cold argument about whether art is form or content.\u201d \u201cSurely,\u201d Mujica said, \u201cart is both, and so was Galeano.\u201d<\/p>\n

The source of that content and form in Galeano was Marxism. In an interview he gave<\/a> in 2005, Galeano talked about an epigraph from Marx he used for D\u00edas y Noches de Amor y de Guerra<\/em>: \u201cIn history, as in nature, decay is the laboratory of life.\u201d It was, Galeano said, a \u201cperfect definition of the dialect.\u201d But when his German publisher asked where, in Marx, he had found the epigraph, he couldn\u2019t remember. Galeano looked and looked: \u201cI dedicated my life to finding that phrase.\u201d No luck.<\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t find it in Marx either, even with Googlebooks. But Galeano might have gotten it from the French theorist George Bataille, who also used it as an uncited epigraph in this essay<\/a>, written around 1929. That actually would make sense, for Bataille was (like Galeano would become) a mystical, or surrealist, Marxist. Galeano probed history\u2019s inner logic, trying to make sense of its eternal recurrence, why the past in Latin America seemed inescapable, why it kept intruding into the present. Why the spirits of the past seemed so easy to conjure up, why it was necessary to play out each new scene in world history in venerable disguise and borrowed language, to paraphrase Marx\u2019s Eighteenth Brumaire. <\/em>Even his first book, Open Veins, <\/em>which Galeano himself described as economistic, reveals<\/a> itself to be not just influenced by the dependency economists of the time but also by Walter Benjamin, whose Angel of History\u2019s<\/a> \u201cface is turned toward the past.\u201d Benjamin\u2019s Angel contemplates history as a \u201csingle catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Galeano wrote in Open Veins that:<\/p>\n

The ghosts of all the revolutions that have been strangled or betrayed through Latin America\u2019s tortured history return as new experiences, as if the present had been predicted and generated by the contradictions of the past: history is a prophet who faces backwards: because of what was, and against what was, it announces what will be. And that is why in this book, which aims to provide a history of the looting and an account of how the current mechanism of plunder operate, there appears both the Conquistadors and the jet-setting technocrats, Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s and the Marines, agents of colonial Spain and the International Monetary Fund, dividends from slave trade and profits from General Motors. Also, defeated heroes and today\u2019s revolutionaries.<\/em><\/p>\n

To think historically, Benjamin wrote\u2014 that is, to think like the rearward facing Angel\u2014was “to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.” When you think about it, that\u2019s a nice description of what Galeano tried to do.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eduardo Galeano, one of Latin America\u2019s most beloved writers, died on Monday [April 13, 2015] in a hospital in Montevideo, after a long battle against lung cancer. His first book, Las venas abiertas de Am\u00e9rica Latina (Open Veins of Latin America), which the late Hugo Ch\u00e1vez famously presented to Barack Obama as a present, appeared in 1971.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}