Fresh Off Worldwide Attention for Joining Obama’s Book Collection, Uruguayan Author Eduardo Galeano Returns with "Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone"
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We spend the hour with one of Latin America’s most acclaimed writers, Eduardo Galeano. The Uruguayan novelist and journalist recently made headlines around the world when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave President Obama a copy of Galeano’s classic work, The Open Veins of Latin America. Eduardo Galeano’s latest book is Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. We speak to Galeano about his reaction to the Chavez-Obama book exchange, media and politics in Latin America, his assessment of Obama, and more. [includes rush transcript]
Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist. He is one of the most celebrated writers in Latin America. He is author of many books, including Open Veins of Latin America and the trilogy Memory of Fire. His latest book is titled Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone.
Rush Transcript
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JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re joined today for the hour by one of Latin America’s most acclaimed writers, Eduardo Galeano. The Uruguayan novelist and journalist made headlines last month when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave President Barack Obama a copy of one of Galeano’s books during a brief encounter at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent soon shot to near the top of the bestseller list.
Hugo Chavez later told reporters, quote, “This book is a monument in our Latin American history. It allows us to learn history, and we have to build on this history.”
Since its publication in 1971, The Open Veins of Latin America has sold over a million copies worldwide, despite being banned in the 1970s by the military governments in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.
AMY GOODMAN: In 1973, a military junta came to power in Uruguay. Eduardo Galeano was briefly, then he went into exile. He lived in Argentina and then Spain until 1984, when he returned to Uruguay. While in exile, he began writing his classic trilogy Memory of Fire, which rewrites five centuries of North and South American history.
The writer John Berger said of Galeano, quote, “To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all of forgetfulness. Thanks to him, our crimes will be remembered. His tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness furious.”
Eduardo Galeano’s latest book is called Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. He joins us today in our firehouse studio.
EDUARDO GALEANO: Hello, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us, Eduardo.
EDUARDO GALEANO: Good for me.
AMY GOODMAN: Stories of Almost Everyone is the subtitle.
EDUARDO GALEANO: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: “Almost everyone,” what do you mean?
EDUARDO GALEANO: Well, it was—it sounded, I don’t know, so solemn and serious to say “a universal history” or something like this. I’m not a historian. It was such a mad project. It was really a crazy adventure, trying to go beyond all the frontiers, all boundaries, boundaries of maps and time. It comes from 600 short stories trying to rebuild, to rediscover the human history from the point of view of the invisibles, trying to rediscover the terrestrial rainbow mutilated by racism and machismo and militarism and elitism and so many isms. That was the intention, at least, to speak about nobodies from nobodies’ voices.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And why the short stories or the vignettes that you’ve increasingly gravitated to in recent decades? Why that form to express these huge stories?
EDUARDO GALEANO: I am fighting against inflation, not monetary inflation, but the inflation of words. So many words to say nothing. I am trying to say—to tell more with less. This is a challenge. And so, each one of the stories I tell has been written and rewritten ten times, fifteen times, I don’t know how many times, ’til I get the words that really deserve to exist, which are the words that I feel are better than silence.
