Eduardo Galeano, 1940-2015: A Voice, Not An Echo

"We are opinionated, yet we cannot offer our opinions. We have a right to the echo, not to the voice, and those who rule praise our talent to repeat parrot fashion. We refuse to accept this mediocrity as our destiny."

-----Eduardo Galeano, opening speech at "Chile Creates," an international meeting in support of Chilean democracy, July 11, 1988

In him was wedded the wonder of a child with the intellect of a sage.

In school, he hated history and was a lousy history student. He wanted to be a soccer player, a saint, and a painter. He abandoned the first two ambitions, and achieved the third only by learning to use words in place of paint.

He always took the side of the doomed, despised, and damned. Even at the height of the Cold War, with shrieking anti-Communist hysteria the norm, he was not afraid to befriend those Washington denounced as satanic. He praised Che Guevara as a man "who said what he thought and did what he said he was going to do," a rare example of moral and intellectual coherence in a world of near total hypocrisy, which in his view redounded to Guevara's perpetual glory. Galeano summed up just how rare an achievement this was by stating that, "In this world, when words and deeds run into each other in the street, they don't say hello, because they don't recognize each other."

He wrote not from duty but from joy, always waiting until "his hand began to itch." Immune to the obsessions of established literary critics, he casually combined literary styles and ignored the (alleged) border between journalism and literature. His most famous work, Open Veins of Latin America, (1971) only won honorable mention in the House of the Americas literary competition because the judges felt that a history book that wasn't boring couldn't be a serious work. Fat, dry tomes dominated the social sciences at the time (they still do), and Galeano's lush and lyrical prose was anything but boring, so he had to settle for a consolation prize.

The book was going nowhere on sales charts - even Galeano's family wasn't reading it - until Latin America's ubiquitous dictatorships did it the honor of banning it. The Uruguayan dictatorship, relatively unpracticed in the repressive arts, lagged behind its authoritarian brothers, mistakenly classifying the book as an anatomy text at first, before making up for lost time by jailing the author along with the book. Upon his release, Galeano fled to Spain, where almost ten years of intense research led to the publication of his magnificent trilogy on the history of the Americas: Memory of Fire. In these microhistories he found his permanent style - richly textured vignettes portraying historical characters and events in the present tense - as though glimpsed through a keyhole. Galeano's vividly creative prose was too much for the jealous guardians of literary boundaries, who classified the English translation of Memory of Fire as fiction, albeit with a bibliography and index.

Serious but never solemn, he wrote with a gentle, leg-pulling humor that forever had a smile playing at the corners of his readers' lips. In his masterpiece, "Upside Down - A Primer For The Looking Glass World," - he opened with a "message to parents" lamenting the loss of "virtue, honor, and truth" in the modern world. The message was from Al Capone. In a vignette about the death of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest man in the world at the time, he wrote that, "In the autopsy, no scruples were detected." Commenting on the fact that cigarette ads in magazines were required to carry the warning, "Tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide," whereas highly polluting automobiles were under no similar obligation, Galeano simply said, "People can't smoke. Cars can."

Even horrible scenes, all too familiar in history and politics, could not deflate his good humor, or cause him to avert his gaze. He once paid tribute to the "skill" of the torturers who worked for former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza by highlighting the precision of their work: "Armed with pincers and spoons, these lads can tear out fingernails without breaking the roots and eyes without injuring the lids." Simple denunciation would not capture the horror nearly as well as Galeano's detached irony.

Detached though he might sound, uncommitted he was not. With relentless application (he once re-wrote the entire manuscript of a book eleven times) he dedicated himself to revealing the most painful realities, drawing on a deeply thoughtful joy that became his trademark. Nevertheless, he shunned the title "thinker," as though he were merely a disembodied head, pointing out that he wrote with his whole being, not just from his neck up. He delighted in the name a Colombian fisherman once gave his work - "senti-pensante" - feeling-thinking, which was much more in line with how Galeano regarded himself and his writing. He recognized that, dualistic conventions notwithstanding, thought and feeling cannot ultimately be divorced, and was astute enough to avoid the twin dangers of sentimentality and frigidity, as all too many other writers do not.

The enemy of verbosity and inflated speech, Galeano was aghast at the ever increasing torrents of empty words, and rated "word inflation" even more dangerous than monetary inflation. Brevity became his natural style and irony his habitual tone. This preference for the concise he picked up from his mentor and friend, Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti, who helped Galeano early in his career. To lend authority to his literary advice, Onetti used to disguise it as proverbial wisdom: "There is a Chinese proverb that says" . . . or, "according to the Persians" . . . But in reality the sayings were all his. One of his favorites, which Galeano took to heart, was: "The only words that deserve to exist, are those that improve upon the silence."

Onetti taught Galeano to boil his writing down to pure "meat and bone." The immense struggle involved in learning to say more with less is nowhere better illustrated than in Galeano's effort to describe the 19th century love affair between a young woman of Buenos Aires high society (Camila O'Gorman) and her priest (Ladislao Gutierrez), a story he related to sociologist and philosopher Aurelio Alonso in a Havana interview some years ago. The young woman and her priest had fallen madly in love and fled the scandalized capital, only to be captured and executed for "the crime of love."

At the time Galeano was trying to describe the love that had impelled them to their deaths, he had a friend and literary critic living with him, a founder of the Tupamaros who had lost one lung to tuberculosis and most of the second one to the beatings he received after being taken prisoner. The man had a remote rural upbringing and knew nothing of formal literary training, but possessed a fine aesthetic intuition that Galeano greatly appreciated. When he showed him his description of the love affair between the young high society woman and the priest, his friend abruptly dismissed the effort with a gesture of contempt: "There are a lot of pebbles in the lentils. You've got to get those pebbles out of there." So Galeano wrote draft after draft, trying with mounting frustration to capture the scene in words, only to have his friend reject them all: "I still see pebbles in the lentils." Finally, Galeano reached the limit of his patience, and told his friend that the latest version would be the last: "If you don't like this one I won't ask you again, because this is abuse. I wrote six pages and all I've got left is a single sentence." His friend responded, "But what a sentence. You have me to thank for it, because without me you wouldn't have made it." And the sentence that described the love of the young high-society woman and the priest who fled with her to certain death was vintage Galeano:

"They are two by an error that the night corrects."

Now we mourn the man that gave voice to those moving words, a superb writer finally indeed reduced to an echo, though not that of a lickspittle parroting official cliches, but of a free man who spent his life telling the truth.

Let that echo sound long, and loud, and often.

Sources:

Most of the Galeano quotes are from an interview (in Spanish) with Cuban sociologist Aurelio Alonso on "Countercurrent," published on You Tube 1/7/13

On Somoza's torturers, see Galeano's "Memory of Fire" Vol. 3 (Pantheon, 1988) p. 249

On Galeano's quote regarding the right to a voice instead of an echo, see "We Say No," (Norton, 1992) p. 243

On the love affair between Camila O'Gorman and her priest, see Galeano's "Memory of Fire," Vol. 2, (Pantheon, 1987) pps. 163-4

"Senti-pensante" and "my hand begins to itch," see "Democracy Now," May 19, 2006

Israel Suggests Ways to Make Iran Nuclear Deal ‘More Reasonable’

JERUSALEM — Clearly unsatisfied with assurances from Washington, Israel on Monday listed specific requirements that it said it wanted in any final deal with Iran over that country’s nuclear program.

"We would feel much better if Tehran were bombed , along with Iranian oil fields, nuclear laboratories, food markets, prenatal clinics, schools and other places where future attempts to annihilate the total population of Jewish people on earth might take shape" said spokesperson and American political fundraiser Meyer Lansky Potemkin.

G.O.P.’s Israel Support Deepens as Political Contributions Shift

Jew hating moronic right wing conservatives suffer panic attacks while Jew loving parasitic liberals freak out over losing financial base.

Millennials More Accepting of Homosexuality Than of Abortion

March 30, 2015 2:09 pm March 30, 2015 2:09 pm

In a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, 42 percent of millennial respondents said sex between two adults of the same gender was morally acceptable, while 37 percent said the same of casual sex. Twenty-four percent said sex between minors was acceptable, and 21 percent said so of abortion.

When asked if they supported abortion for homosexuals, 58% said yes, but only if they were pregnant as a result of having sex with a heterosexual. 

42% favored aborting all millenials.

The Garlic: Items from the Crumbling Towers:

Iran still not satisfying the USA in guaranteeing Israeli security by promising to never ever ever ever create nuclear balance in the middle east by coming up with a nuke to counter Israel’s several hundred.

Convicted rapists refuse to honor USA request that they lecture on morals on college campuses and at military academies.

Washington warheads and other congressional chicken hawks unite in expressed outrage at another member of the military who thinks and expresses criticism for his country’s crimes against other nations: demand severe punishment for his individual courage shown in matter of war instead of practicing patriotic duty to kill and go shopping and shut the fuck up about anything else.

Congressional employees of corporate capital sign new law to bring in more cheap foreign labor than ever before by using airliners, boats, trains, autos and matter transformers to bring new workers in from Africa and Asia as well as potential new life forms found in outer space. Business Council praises new law, sadly accuses complaining displaced workers and newly crowded communities of racism, and cries, hysterically, all the way to the bank.

New generation of American “pet parents” vow to breast-feed their dog and cat families in protest against animal hair found in pet food.

AIPAC sponsors kiss-and-make-up meeting of Obama and Netanyahu at White House, but later protests that the president’s kiss was not as soulful as the Israeli’s and charges anti-semitism, holocaust denial and accuses Obama of planning annihilation of all jewish people not already employed by the administration. Rahm Emanuel leaves country.

To Avert Repeat of 2008, Clinton Team Hopes to Keep Bill at His Best

Bill Clinton wants to play a central role in his wife's presidential run, though he was often a frustrated and unpredictable presence in 2008, this time, advisers are trying to harness his gifts and rein in his impulses.

Advisers demand a "no open fly" zone when Bill is around women and warn against his smoking cigars while the political papparazzi are around.

"I will do everything in my power to get back into the white house, uh, get my wife back in, that is. That depends on what is is, of course, but that said, it is what it is."

Woman Initiates Gender Bias Suit Against Mafia

Gelcimina Carmela Rubinstein, long time adminstrative assistant to Mafia Don Carlo Vincenzi McBerger, is suing the crime cartel for gender bias. "They never allowed me to move up in the organization, always making coffee, ordering pizza and phoning funeral parlors. If women can advance on Wall Street, in Venture Capital and other criminal activities, why should we remain locked out of management positions in real, all american criminal endeavors like the Mafia?"

 Constitutional scholars, legal academics and other professional and student shysters promised to watch this case closely.