History made into list of heroic acts
By Greg Grandin |
July 27, 2013, Saturday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
ONE would think that Latin Americans, after all they've suffered, from the tortures and terrors of the Spanish Inquisition to the death squads and disappearances of the Cold War, would have given up on the idea that history is redeemable. But it seems that centuries of repression and struggle have had the opposite effect, searing into their political culture a kind of irrepressible Hegelianism, an ability both to recognize the dialectic lurking behind the brutality and to answer every bloody body with ever more adamant affirmations of humanity.
Eduardo Galeano is among the best executors of this tradition. Driven first out of his own country, Uruguay, in 1973, after a military coup, and then from Argentina, after yet another coup, he found refuge in post-Franco Spain, where he began to pioneer a new literary genre.
In such books as "Open Veins of Latin America" and the trilogy "Memory of Fire," Galeano wove together fact, pre-Columbian myth and snippets from everyday life into not so much people's histories but sprawling people's epics. Think of Pablo Neruda crossed with Howard Zinn.
Galeano's new "Children of the Days" is for those who feel that history has become too much of a burden to bear - a collection of inspirational wisdom, its 366 entries, one for each calendar date in the (leap) year, keeping alive the memory of courage and beauty amid the carnage. Well-known horrors born of the conquest of America, slavery, the Holocaust and European colonialism take their place alongside lesser-known events and people: the founding of a Brazilian community by escaped slave women, for example, or Simeon Stylites, a Syrian Christian saint who apparently lived for 37 years atop a column, a feat that, for Galeano, functions as a symbol for the more than one billion people who today live without decent housing.
Galeano's best entries reconcile opposites, like the one titled "The Left Is the University of the Right," which notes that Rupert Murdoch's youthful admiration of Karl Marx helped him master the "inner workings of capitalism." Galeano is no Pollyanna. History tends not to move in the direction he would like: in 1837, Nicaragua's Conservative Party partially legalized abortion; 170 years later, the leftist Sandinistas outlawed the practice "'in any circumstance,' and thus condemned poor women to prison or the cemetery." But sometimes defeat creates the possibility for future victories: Having lost their country to Franco, Spanish Republican exiles were there among the first liberators of Nazi-occupied Paris.
For all of Galeano's appreciation of history's absurdities, he has chosen a format leading to an ahistoric, almost medieval experience of time, a liturgical calendar in which days don't move forward into the future but pile up into an eternal present.
Eduardo Galeano is among the best executors of this tradition. Driven first out of his own country, Uruguay, in 1973, after a military coup, and then from Argentina, after yet another coup, he found refuge in post-Franco Spain, where he began to pioneer a new literary genre.
In such books as "Open Veins of Latin America" and the trilogy "Memory of Fire," Galeano wove together fact, pre-Columbian myth and snippets from everyday life into not so much people's histories but sprawling people's epics. Think of Pablo Neruda crossed with Howard Zinn.
Galeano's new "Children of the Days" is for those who feel that history has become too much of a burden to bear - a collection of inspirational wisdom, its 366 entries, one for each calendar date in the (leap) year, keeping alive the memory of courage and beauty amid the carnage. Well-known horrors born of the conquest of America, slavery, the Holocaust and European colonialism take their place alongside lesser-known events and people: the founding of a Brazilian community by escaped slave women, for example, or Simeon Stylites, a Syrian Christian saint who apparently lived for 37 years atop a column, a feat that, for Galeano, functions as a symbol for the more than one billion people who today live without decent housing.
Galeano's best entries reconcile opposites, like the one titled "The Left Is the University of the Right," which notes that Rupert Murdoch's youthful admiration of Karl Marx helped him master the "inner workings of capitalism." Galeano is no Pollyanna. History tends not to move in the direction he would like: in 1837, Nicaragua's Conservative Party partially legalized abortion; 170 years later, the leftist Sandinistas outlawed the practice "'in any circumstance,' and thus condemned poor women to prison or the cemetery." But sometimes defeat creates the possibility for future victories: Having lost their country to Franco, Spanish Republican exiles were there among the first liberators of Nazi-occupied Paris.
For all of Galeano's appreciation of history's absurdities, he has chosen a format leading to an ahistoric, almost medieval experience of time, a liturgical calendar in which days don't move forward into the future but pile up into an eternal present.
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