Eduardo Galeano: in celebration of contradiction.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Uruguayan writer

The lyrical pen of this Uruguyan writer and social critic sings across the continents

IN RECENT YEARS, it has been almost impossible to follow contemporary events in the Americas and not encounter the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano. Despite his quiet, unassuming manner he seems to be everywhere--on a lecture tour of North American universities; publishing a perceptive commentary on the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado; keynote speaker at Chile Creates, an international meeting in support of democracy in Chile; and addressing the American Booksellers Association in Los Angeles on the occasion of the publication of his new book, We Say No.

Why the sudden interest in this avowed socialist? Ironically, with East-West tensions subsiding, Galeano is enjoying an ever greater audience even in those regions of the Hemisphere and sectors of society he has criticized most. After all, this journalist, essayist, and historian has been trafficking in words for nearly forty years. Although respected for his hard-nosed scholarship, sharp eye for detail, and majestic style, Galeano has been assailed for his strident tone and impassioned subjectivity. However, in recent books he has turned down the volume a bit, learned to smile through tears, and philosophically admit that it takes patience to change opinions. In the post-Cold War era his audience, too, has changed. Grave societal problems everywhere have demanded a renewed search for solutions even when it means reconsideration of ideas once blindly defined as antithetical for reasons of dogma. There has been a meeting of minds: both Galeano and his readers have come of age.

Many believe that Galeano found a new voice while writing Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire), his sweeping trilogy which The New Yorker described as "nothing less than a unified history of the western Hemisphere." In taut, episodic chapters, which he has carefully sourced, Galeano marches through five centuries, illuminating events large and small from before the European Conquest to the present day. The project and its practical format suggested themselves in 1973 amidst the rubble of a novel that wouldn't come ("it was like making love without desire"), and the trauma of life in exile. Having escaped arrest on political charges in both Uruguay and late Argentina, Galeano was living in Calella de la Costa, south of Barcelona. Reflecting on the birth of Memoria, he comments, "It occurred to me that history could talk about itself. 'Story windows' or spaces open to time could help the reader relate to events as if they were happening now. That's why I wrote it in the present tense. I was reading some verses by the Greek poet Constantin Cavafis, and it was there that I discovered the form, the idea of seeing the whole of history as if through a keyhole.

Soon, with no preconceived notion of what he was looking for, Galeano was mining the rich holding of Spanish libraries. "Exile gave me the time, even a measure of objectivity that can only come from looking at familiar things from a distance. Sure, often it was boring work, drudgery, hard on the backside, and yet just as one person can inexplicably shine in a crowd, so too even the dullest of books can yield some nugget or magical turn or phrase that in miniature captures the essence of larger forces at work." In one musty volume Galeano spotted the words piel de dios (skin of god), a Chiriguano Indian term for the first sheets of paper introduced by the Europeans. Elsewhere, typical of cultures "talking past one another," he learned that Molucca Indians truly perceived small boats launched from Spanish ships as infants, born and suckled by the mother vessels. He identified the moment the first Americanism, canoa (canoe), entered a Spanish language dictionary (1495), also the moment when Pope Paul III, in his bull of 1537, said Indians are human beings, "endowed with soul and reason." The prominent figures of the Conquest--Pizarro, Cauthtemoc, Balboa, Malinche--certainly receive their due, but Galeano delights the reader most of all by highlighting that which is small and obscure: a slave owner who, in his will "thoughtfully" lowers the price of freedom for one Fabiano Criolla from 200 to 150 pesos (1618); dogs introduced by Spaniards which multiply into wild packs to maraud the island of Tortuga until they are fed the poisoned carcasses of horses (1668); and rats over-running the New world, God's punishment for sins committed in the Americas according to a sermonizing priest newly arrived (1622 and one of the funniest entries).

The first volume of epic work, Los naciminetos (Genesis), was published in Spain in 1982. Two years later, Galeano returned to Montevideo intent on applying his eclectic, microcosmic method to more recent centuries. Numerous Latin American libraries, as well as the new York City Public Library, became his haunts and with an uncanny nose for hidden truths and the discipline of a German soldier, he assembled the other two volumes. Las caras y las mascaras (Faces and masks), equally rich in its lore of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, appeared in 1984. El siglo del viento (Century of the Wind), which deals with the twentieth century, followed in 1986. The trilogy reached English-speaking...