Eduardo Galeano
At the border between Mexico and the U.S.
Beijing has not escaped McDonaldization.
October 12, 1999: Ecuadorians protest the legacy of Spanish colonialism.
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Galeano:
the joy of storytelling
Even when
he is compiling painstakingly detailed accounts of social discontent, the pleasure
Eduardo Galeano takes in telling his story is palpable. The Open Veins of Latin
America (1971) is a point of reference for anyone who wishes to understand the
past and present of Latin America. It starts with a puzzle: why, he asks, has this
continent so abundantly blessed by Mother Nature had such an unfortunate social and
political history? The book, as gripping as a police thriller, tells with passion,
lucidity and indignation the history of what he describes as the looting of Latin
America, first by the Spaniards and the Portuguese, and then by the rest of the West
and the ruling classes of the countries themselves.
Galeano fearlessly breaks through divisions between literary genres. His books, in
which narrative and essays, poetry and reportage all mingle, assemble voices from
people’s souls and the streets to form a compound of reality and reminiscence.
Galeano was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, 60 years ago. There he became editor-in-chief
of the weekly magazine Marcha and the newspaper Época. In Buenos
Aires, he founded and ran the magazine Crisis. He went into exile in Argentina and
Spain in 1973 and returned to Uruguay in early 1985. His books have been translated
into various languages and his journalistic output has also been prolific. As well
as The Open Veins of Latin America, he has published:
Memory of Fire trilogy (Genesis, 1982; Faces and Masks, 1984; Century
of the Wind, 1986)
The Book of Embraces (1989)
Walking Words (1993)
Soccer in Sun and Shadow (1995)
Upside Down: a Primer for the Looking Glass World (1998)
We Say No (1989), a collection of articles and essays
Galeano received the Casa de las Américas book award in 1975 and 1978. His
Memory of Fire trilogy won the American Book Award from the University of
Washington and was honoured by Uruguay’s Ministry of Culture in 1989.
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The
Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano likes nothing better than to unmask hidden truths.
In a wide-ranging interview with Danish journalist Niels Boel, he takes his scalpel
to globalization, memory, cultural identity, indigenous rights—and football
Globalization
This is not a new phenomenon, but a trend that dates back a long while. Globalization
has considerably accelerated in recent years following the dizzying expansion of
communications and transport and the equally stupefying transnational mergers of
capital. We must not confuse globalization with “internationalism” though. We know
that the human condition is universal, that we share similar passions, fears, needs
and dreams, but this has nothing to do with the “rubbing out” of national borders
as a result of unrestricted capital movements. One thing is the free movement of
peoples, the other of money. This can be seen very clearly in such places as the
border between Mexico and the United States which hardly exists as far as the flow
of money and goods is concerned. Yet it stands as a kind of Berlin Wall or Great
Wall of China when it comes to stopping people from getting across.
The
right to choose one’s own food
The
perfect symbol of globalization is the success of firms like McDonald’s, which opens
five new restaurants around the world each day. For me there is something more significant
than the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was the queue of Russians outside McDonald’s
on Moscow’s Red Square as the so-called “iron curtain”—which turned out be more like
a “mashed potato curtain”— was coming down.
The “McDonaldization” of the world is planting plastic food in the four corners of
the planet. But the success of McDonald’s has at the same time inflicted a kind of
open wound on one of the most basic human rights, the right to choose our own food.
The stomach is part of the human soul. The mouth is its gateway. Tell me what you
eat and I’ll tell you who you are. It’s not about how much you eat but what and how
you choose to do so. How people prepare food is an important part of their cultural
identity. It matters greatly to poor or even very poor people, who have little or
no food but who respect traditions that turn the trivial act of barely eating into
a small ritual.
Against
standardization
The
best side of the world is that it contains many worlds within itself. Such cultural
diversity, which is the heritage of all humanity, appears in the different ways people
eat, but also in how they think, feel, dream, talk and dance.
There’s a very marked trend towards the standardization of cultural behaviour. But
there is also a backlash by people who endorse differences that are worth preserving.
Emphasizing cultural differences, not social ones, is what gives humankind its many
concurrent faces instead of just a single one. In the face of this avalanche of forced
standardization, there have been very healthy reactions alongside the odd crazy ones
springing from religious fanaticism and other desperate attempts to affirm identity.
I don’t think we’re at all doomed to live in a world where the only choice is between
dying of hunger or dying of boredom.
Identity
on the move
Cultural
identity isn’t like a precious vase standing silently in a museum showcase. It’s
always moving, changing and being challenged by reality that is itself in perpetual
movement. I am what I am, but I’m also what I do to change what I am. There’s no
such thing as cultural purity, any more than there is racial purity.
Luckily, every culture is made up of some elements that come from afar. What defines
a cultural product—whether it be a book, a song, a popular saying or a way of playing
football—is never where it comes from but what it is. A typical Cuban drink like
a daiquiri has nothing Cuban in it: the ice comes from somewhere else, just like
the lemon, the sugar and the rum. Christopher Columbus first brought sugar to the
Americas from the Canary Islands. Yet the daiquiri is considered quintessentially
Cuban. The churro fritters of Andalusia originated in the Middle East. Italian pasta
first came from China. Nothing can be defined or derided on the basis of its origin.
The important thing is what is done with it and how far a community identifies with
something that symbolizes its favourite way of dreaming, living, dancing, playing
or loving.
This is the positive side of the world: a constant intermingling that produces new
responses to new challenges. But because of forced globalization, there’s a clear
trend these days towards uniformity. This trend comes largely from the ever-greater
concentration of power in the hands of large media groups.
Hope
for the future: the Internet and community radio
Is
the right to freedom of expression, which is written into every country’s constitution,
being reduced to nothing more than the right to listen? Is it not also the right
to speak? And how many people have the right to speak? These questions are very closely
connected with the battering that cultural diversity is currently suffering.
Opportunities for independent activity in the world of communications have been greatly
reduced. The dominant media groups are imposing doctored and distorted news along
with a vision of the world that tends to become accepted as the only one possible.
It’s like reducing a face that has millions of eyes to the standard two.
What does seem promising is the dawn of the Internet, one of those paradoxes that
keeps hope alive. It sprang from the need to coordinate global military strategy—in
other words, to serve the cause of war and death. But it is now the forum for a myriad
of voices that were barely noticed before. Today they are heard and networks can
be created using this new tool.
It’s true that the Internet can also be used towards commercial ends or to manipulate
people. But the network has definitely opened up very important areas of freedom
for expressing independent views, which tend to be ignored by television and the
print media.
Good things are happening in radio too. The growth of community radio stations in
Latin America is encouraging a much wider spectrum of people to express themselves.
Talking to people about what is happening is not the same thing as listening to their
own voices recounting their lives, when this is possible and when freedom of expression
is respected.
End
and means
In
Ancient Greece, knives were convicted along with the murderer. When a knife was used
in a crime, the judges threw it into a river. We must not confuse the means with
the end. Latin America’s misfortune is that the U.S. model of commercial television
has taken root. We’ve learned nothing from the European television model, which is
geared towards different ends. In countries such as Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands,
television still plays a very enriching and important cultural role thanks to a degree
of public ownership—even though it’s not as strong these days. Here in Latin America,
by virtue of the North American television model, anything that sells is good and
what doesn’t is bad.
The
indigenous struggle
One
of the great hidden strengths and energy sources in Latin America is the people,
who have expressed themselves through the revival of indigenous movements and the
tremendous force of the values they stand for. These values are about harmony with
nature and sharing lives in communities not focused on greed. They are values drawn
from the past but which speak for the future and are relevant for all of us today.
They are widely shared because they are values everyone needs to grasp in a world
where compassion and solidarity have been seriously wounded in recent years and in
some cases destroyed. Ours is a world focused on selfishness, on a belief in “everyone
looking out for their own self.”
People
and land
Five
centuries ago, people in Latin America were taught to separate nature from Man—or
so-called Man—which in fact meant men and women. Nature was placed on one side, human
beings on the other. The same divorce took place the world over.
Many of the indigenous people burned alive for worshipping idols were simply the
environmentalists of their time who were practising the only kind of ecology that
seems worthwhile to me—an ecology of communion with nature. Harmony with nature and
a communal approach to life ensured the survival of ancient indigenous values despite
five centuries of persecution and contempt.
For centuries, nature was seen as a beast that had to be tamed—as a foreign enemy
and a traitor. Now that we’re all “greens,” thanks to deceitful advertising based
on words rather than deeds, nature has become something to be protected. But whether
nature is to be protected or mastered and exploited for profit, it’s still seen as
separate from us.
We have to recover this sense of communion with nature. Nature is not a landscape,
it’s something inside us, something we live with. I’m not just talking about forests,
but about everything to do with the reverence for the natural that the indigenous
people of the Americas have and always have had. They see nature as sacred in the
sense that every harm we cause turns against us one day or another. So every crime
becomes a suicide. This can be seen in the large cities of Latin America, which are
bad copies of those in the developed world where it’s just about impossible to walk
or breathe clean air. We’re living in a world whose air, water and soil are poisoned.
But most of all, our minds are poisoned. I truly wish that we could manage to summon
up enough energy to heal ourselves.
Memory
as a catapult
In
my book Days and Nights of Love and War, I’ve asked myself whether our memories will
allow us to be happy. I still have no answer. There’s a North American novel in which
a great-grandfather meets his great-grandson. The old man remembers nothing because
he’s lost his memory. He’s senile. His thoughts are as colourless as water. The grandson
doesn’t have any memories because he’s too young. As I read the novel, I thought:
“This is bliss.”
But this is not the happiness I’m after. I want happiness that comes from both remembering
and from fighting against remembering. A happiness that includes the sadness, pain
and injury of experience but also goes forward. Not memory that works like an anchor,
but like a catapult. Not a memory that you just arrive at, but one that’s a launch
pad.
There’s an American indigenous tradition found in the islands of the Pacific, in
Canada and also places like Chiapas, in Mexico. It goes like this: when a master
potter gives up his trade because his hands are no longer steady and his eyesight
is failing, there’s a ceremony at which he presents his best pot, his masterpiece,
to a young potter just starting out. The apprentice takes the flawless pot and smashes
it into a thousand pieces on the ground. He then picks them up and mixes them into
his own stock of clay. That’s the kind of memory I believe in.
Self-portrait
I
find it hard to categorize any of the books I’ve written. It’s difficult to draw
the line between fiction and fact. What I like best is telling stories. I feel I’m
a storyteller. I give and take, back and forth. I listen to voices and transform
them through the creative act into a story, an essay, a poem, a novel. I try to combine
genres to go beyond the standard divisions and convey a complete message because
I believe you can create such a synthesis with human language.
There’s no divide between journalism and literature. Literature is the totality of
written messages that a society produces in whichever form it chooses. You can always
say what you feel like saying, whether as a journalist or a writer. Good journalism
can also be fine literature as José Marti, Carlos Quijano, Rodolfo Walsh and
many others have shown.
I’ve always been a journalist and want to continue because once you enter the magic
world of newspaper offices, who can pull you out again? You are taught how to be
brief, to summarize—an interesting exercise for someone who wants to write about
so many things. You’re also forced to come out of your little world to face reality
and dance to the tune of others. You have to get out and listen to people. But there’s
a downside, mainly the urgency. Sometimes when I’m writing I get stuck on a word
and spend three hours looking for another. That’s one luxury journalism couldn’t
afford to give me.
Dreams
and vigilance
My
only task is to try to reveal a masked reality, to write about what we see and what
remains hidden. It is a reality that comes from being on watch, a false reality,
sometimes a deceptive one, but also one capable of telling unknown or rarely heard
truths.
There’s no magic formula for changing reality unless we start by looking at it as
it is. To transform it, you have to begin by accepting it. This is the problem in
Latin America. We still cannot see that. We are blind towards our own selves because
we have been trained to see through the eyes of others. The mirror only reflects
an opaque glint, and nothing more.
And
football...
All
Uruguayans are born shouting “goal” and that’s why there’s always such a tremendous
racket in our maternity wards. I wanted to be a football player like all Uruguayan
boys. I started playing when I was eight years old but I was no good at it because
I was so clumsy. The ball and I never got along. It was a case of unrequited love.
I was also a disaster in another way. When an opposing team played a good game, I’d
go and congratulate them—an unforgivable sin in the rules of modern football. |
