Eduardo Galeano: the open veins of McWorld

Interview by Niels Boel

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.

~ UNESCO ~



Writer Without Borders

By Scott Witmer

Eduardo Galeano disdains borders, both in life and in literature. Exiled from his native Uruguay after the 1973 military coup, he returned to Montevideo in 1985, where he continues to live and write. Galeano's books subvert the distinctions between history, poetry, memoir, political analysis and cultural anthropology. With a graceful sense of craft, he uses “only words that really deserve to be there” to convey a humanely moral perspective on matters both personal and political. His writing honors the experiences of everyday life as a contrast to the mass media that “manipulates consciousness, conceals reality and stifles the creative imagination … in order to impose ways of life and patterns of consumption.” By multiplying seldom heard voices, Galeano refutes the official lies that pass for history—his work represents an eloquent, literary incarnation of social justice.

His most recent book, Voices of Time: A Life in Stories (Metropolitan Books), combines 333 prose poems into a fluid mosaic of humor, despair, beauty and hope. During a recent visit to Chicago, Galeano talked with In These Times about his life and work.

Your book Open Veins of Latin America (1971) analyzes the brutal exploitation of Latin American resources by the U.S. and European powers. That book, now a classic, was published at the beginning of an especially turbulent period of Latin American history. What was your life like at that time?

I was working as a journalist, always in independent jobs, working for weeklies—the mad adventures of independent journalism. So I earned my living quite difficultly, writing other things or editing books on the sexual life of bees, or something like this. I was also working in the publishing department of the University of Montevideo. And at night I went home to work on the book. It took four years of researching and collecting the information I needed, and some 90 nights to write the book.

Did you ever sleep?

I suppose I did not. I remember now, I was drinking rivers of coffee. Later I developed an allergy to coffee, but fortunately I overcame it, and now I'm a very good coffee drinker. I love it.

You were then forced into exile in Argentina, where you edited Crisis.

In the beginning of 1973, I was in jail for a short period in Uruguay and I decided prison life was not healthy, so I went to Buenos Aires. The magazine was a beautiful experience. We invented it with a small group of friends, trying to open a new way of speaking about culture.

Did you continue to publish when the military regime initiated censorship?

For two or three months, and after that it was impossible to go on. We were obliged to choose between silence and humiliation. We could stay alive if we accepted the obligation to lie, or we could shut up. We decided to shut up entirely and not pretend to be free, because that would give an alibi to the military regime to say, “See, there is freedom of expression here.” Many members of our staff were killed or disappeared or jailed or went into exile, and so it was a good decision to go away and abandon it. We left behind a very good memory of an exceptional cultural magazine. We showed that it was possible to have a different conception of culture. Not culture made by professional people to be consumed by non-professional people, like workers or anonymous people. Instead, we were trying to hear their voices. Not only to speak about reality, but asking reality, “What would you tell me?” This conversation with reality was the key to our success. That's why one of the first decrees of the military regime was to forbid the diffusion of “non-specialized opinions.” We were trying to show that the best voices come from non-specialized mouths.

In the middle of 1976, I was obliged to fly away from Argentina because I was supposed to be on the death squad list to be killed. Many of my friends had been killed, and being dead is so boring, so I chose exile in Spain.

In Spain you began writing the Memory of Fire trilogy, an epic tapestry covering more than five centuries of American history and culture. What motivated you to undertake such a monumental project?

It scared me at the beginning. It was first conceived as a way to tell Latin American history. Then a close friend of mine, the Argentinian poet Juan Gelman, told me, “Why not go with all Americas, not just South America or Central America? We share a common origin and a lot of common stories interlinked, and we may perhaps have a common destiny. Not the official destiny built by the professional liars inside the sanctuaries of power, but a counter-history could help to find a counter-destiny.” He tempted me with his words and so I covered all the Americas as a way of promoting the fact that “America” is all America, from Alaska to Chile.

Immigration, which remains a crucial issue in the United States, recurs as an important motif in your new book, Voices of Time. Could you talk about how immigration is perceived in Latin America as opposed to how it is perceived here?

It always depends on your point of view. Immigration may be perceived as a menace, as intrusion, or as a legitimate right. We are all immigrants. Except for a few black people in South Africa, we all come from some other part of the world. We all come from Africa, which is not good news for the ignorant racists. I'm sorry, but we have all been blacks once upon a time. So we are all immigrants. This is our way of life since forever. It's the same with butterflies, with animals, with birds. We humans are the only ones that create borders for immigration, saying, “You cannot go inside this line. This is the end of a country, and here begins another one.” I'm afraid our time will be remembered as a sad period of human life in which money was free, but people were not.

Why are we seeing a resurgence of the left in Latin America?

This is the popular will, the will to change reality. They have been cheated by all those years of so-called liberal experience, which is not liberal at all. It's just liberal for money. And it won't be easy to get out of it, because we have become prisoners of what I call “the culture of impotence.” It's very difficult in Latin America to build a democracy after so many years of military terror and in a non-democratic world that will veto your attempt to change something. The experts will come. Not soldiers, now—experts. Sometimes experts are even more dangerous than soldiers. They say, “You cannot. The market is irritated. The market may be angry.” It is as if the market is an unknown but very active and cruel god punishing us because we are trying to commit the cardinal sin of changing reality.

Just look at Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia. Bolivia was the richest country in all of the Americas at the beginning of the conquest period. They were the owners of the silver, which made possible the enrichment of Europe. Bolivia is now the poorest country in South America. Her richness was her main damnation. Morales is now trying to break with this shameful and humiliating tradition of always working for another's prosperity. When he nationalized the gas and the oil, it was a scandal all over the world. “How could he? It's terrible!” Why is it terrible? Because recovering dignity is a cardinal sin. But he's also committing another cardinal sin: He's doing what he promised he would do. We in Latin America are suffering with special intensity the divorce between words and facts. When you say yes, you do no. When you say more or less, you do less or more. So facts and words are never encountering each other. When they pass each other by random accident, they don't say, “Hello, how are you?” because they have never met before. We are trained to lie. We are trained to accept lies as a way of life.

You have said, “Reality is not destiny; it's a challenge. … We are not doomed to accept it as it is.” How do we avoid becoming cynical when change seems impossible?

By keeping alive the memory of dignity. It's the only way. By telling and repeating that we are not born last year; we are born from a long tradition of betrayals, but also a long tradition of dignity. Here in Chicago, for instance, it is important to recover the memory of May First. The first time I came here, years ago, I was amazed that most people I encountered didn't know that this universal worker's fiesta—at once a tragedy and a fiesta, an homage paid to the Haymarket martyrs at the end of the 19th century—came from Chicago. And Chicago has deleted this memory, which is so important for the entire world. In present times, it's more important than ever, because each May First, crowds and crowds of people, different languages, different cultures, different continents, all celebrate the right to organize. Nowadays, the most important enterprises in the world, like Wal-Mart, forbid unions. They are deleting a tradition of two centuries of working-class fights. It's important for Chicago and for the entire world to recover memory. Not to visit it, like when you visit a museum, but to get from it fresh water for your thirst for justice, for beauty. It's a way of knowing that tomorrow is not just another name for today, because yesterday tells you that time is going on.

Scott Witmer lives in Chicago. He is currently working on a comic book about the life of socialist agitator Eugene Debs.

~ In These Times ~