22. On Eduardo Galeano

Access May 2015 What Do You Think Geoffrey Cannon on Eduardo Galeano here
Access this issue What Do You Think Geoffrey Cannon on Eduardo Galeano here

Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano (left) with Uruguay president, veteran urban guerilla José Mujica (right). There have been so very many reasons for their mutual rejoicing, admiration and solidarity

Claudio Schuftan writes:

This is in response to your celebrations of Eduardo Galeano (WN last month and this, access them above). I came rather late to his writings. I was first attracted to his short essays and his poetry rather than to his epic books. An inveterate clipper of key ideas, my folders are replete with him, and especially quotes that I use frequently in my writings, because they fit what moves me. Here is a sample:

• Every day as I read the newspapers, it is as if I am attending a history lesson. Newspapers teach me by what they say and by what they do not.
• In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.
• It would be a revolutionary step forward if recipient countries would challenge donors when offered aid that goes against their conscience or violates the rights of their people.
• Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress.
• At the end of the day, we are what we do to change who we are.
• If nature were a bank, they would have already saved it.
• The walls are the publishers of the poor.
• Underdevelopment is not a phase on the road towards development — it is the historical result of somebody else’s development.
• Is democracy a luxury that not everybody deserves?
• The vast majority of humanity just has the right to see, to hear… and to remain silent.
• The militant French revolutionary Olympia de Gouges proposed The Declaration of the Rights of Women including civic rights. In 1793 the guillotine chopped her head.

Being Chilean by birth and thus a native Spanish speaker, I find them in this my first language and translate them into English. Little did Eduardo Galeano ever know that I have been spreading his seeds to other audiences in other tongues, and will continue to do so. More recently I thoroughly enjoyed his short videos, a whole series of them made by Spanish TV in Madrid. Being the clipper I am, I always watched them with a pen at hand.
The news that he was suffering from lung cancer seems to have been kept low key. Thus the great surprise and sadness to learn about the passing of the giant. Much has been written about his style, a renaissance mix that so brilliantly puts facts and feelings fittingly together in a truly universal context. Add to this that his prose and verse are accessible and not for-intellectuals-only and you get at his genius.

The Uruguayan ethos

He was born and grew up in Uruguay and lived most of his life there apart from exile in Spain during its military regime. Thinking now also of the remarkable life of José Mujica, the Tupamaro ‘Robin Hood’ urban guerrilla who has just ended his term of office as President of Uruguay (see picture above), I wonder if there is something in the Uruguayan ethos that points to the essentials of life in our embattled planet?

Three times I watched President José Mujica’s moving address to the UN General Assembly in 2013[

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw-9XvcoHXo

]. He began by saying ‘I am from the South’ and spoke of Uruguay’s rise from being ‘the bastard child of the British Empire’. (Britain’s imperial power in Latin America before and after independence from Spain and Portugal is a theme of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America). He then said ‘we have abandoned the immaterial gods and now worship the god of money’. He also warned of conferences ‘that only benefit hotel chains and airlines’. I was bound to wonder if Eduardo Galeano supported him as he drafted his speech. Maybe he did. But in any case, José Mujica and Eduardo Galeano both grew up and learned about life in Uruguay. Their vision, forged from their hard times, adventures and courage, shows us what some of us are, and what others of us are not, in this cruel world.

Eduardo Galeano was and will remain through his writing, a Latin American giant, and a universal Lemuel Gulliver. Here is a longer quote that speaks to me of him:
Every person shines with her/his very own light. There are no identical inner fires. There are big fire and small fire people; others have fires of all colours. There are people with serene fires and those with wild fires that fill the air with sparks. Some fires are dull; they do neither shine nor burn. But yet other fires burn life with such determination that you cannot look at them without blinking. Those who come near get their light turned on.

Claudio Schuftan
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Email: cschuftan@phmovement.org

Schuftan C. Reasons to be courageous. Eduardo Galeano
[Feedback]. World Nutrition June 2015, 6, 6, xxx-xxx