Recorded live on stage in Toronto in 1988, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano - a wholly unique writer that could only have come out of leftist Latin America in the middle part of the 20th century - shows us in this reading from his trilogy, Memory of Fire, snippets of the lives that he spent his entire career spotlighting. Whether he’s showing us stories of the lives of the poor, the downtrodden, the uneducated, mestizos, the descendant of slaves or slaves themselves, Galeano showed how the “big men of history” made their names and carved out countries from the green verdant jungles of the Amazon but always on the backs of others and with consequences that are still present to this day. The audio recording of Eduardo Galeano, recorded on stage at the Harbourfront Reading Series in 1988, is used with the permission of the Estate of Eduardo Galeano c/o Dr. Eduardo de Freitas and Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York City and Lamy, NM. All rights reserved. The recording is also used by permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more at festivalofauthors.ca.
Works by Eduardo Galeano
Memory of Fire Volume One: Genesis
Memory of Fire Volume Two: Faces and Masks
Memory of Fire Volume Three: Century of the Wind
Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History
Las venas abiertas de américa latina (ebook)
Other Related Books or Materials
The Pan American: The World of Eduardo Galeano (link opens an August 2018 article from The Nation)
Women of the Mine - Les Mujeres de la mina - 2006 Film
My Hero: Eduardo Galeano by Tariq Ali (link opens an April 2015 article from The Guardian)
Eduardo Galeano (photo) "His vivid survey of the Latin American past is an impressive achievement." (link opens a photograph by Reg Innell in 1988 from TPL’s Special Collections, part of the Toronto Star Archives)
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About the Host
Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.
Music is by Yuka
From the Archives
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA
Season One, Episode 22
Eduardo Galeano: Memory of Fire
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, produced by the Toronto Public Library. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Eduardo Galeano surprises us with the smell of a newborn child ...
Eduardo Galeano: When night comes, Rosa bathes her daughter. Putting her to bed, she smells a milky, sweetish smell on her. And so, she bathes her again, and again, but however much soap she uses, there is no way to wash off the smell. It's an odd smell, and suddenly Rosa remembers, "This is the smell of little babies when they finish nursing." Tamara is 10, and tonight she smells like a newly born infant.”
RANDY: A few years ago, I remember listening to Salman Rushdie describing one of his novels. When he finished, he was asked a question about the Satanic Verses. He sighed, answered, and then, a little pointedly, noted just how many novels he’d published since that one. In other words, there was more to him and his work than the one book that most everyone immediately associates with his name. I wonder if the Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and political dissident Eduardo Galeano has had similar experiences over his writing and public life, at least outside Latin America. In 1971, he published Las venas abiertas de America Latina, or, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of the Continent, one of more than thirty books. Banned in Latin America upon its publication, while the author himself was imprisoned in his native Uruguay before going into exile, the book was an incendiary polemic about the historical and ongoing despoliation of Latin America by the United States and European powers. Nearly forty-years later, Hugo Chavez, the then-ruler of Venezuela, gave a copy of this book to Barack Obama, then-President of the United States. Five years later, with the book now invested with unexpected geopolitical currency, Galeano disavowed it. It was a book he wrote in just ten weeks, about which he said: “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over. For me, this prose of the traditional Left is extremely leaden, and my physique can’t tolerate it.” In what you’re about to hear — selections from Galeano’s three-volume opus about Latin American history and life — you’ll notice, I am sure, just how light and vital his prose is, certainly by comparison to the ideologically-driven writing that so captivated the likes of Hugo Chavez. This isn’t to say that Galeano doesn’t still care about politics and the effects of politics on ordinary people. Rather, using humour and lyricism, and wishing once that “Magical Marxism” could be a literary style, he brings to life the situations of ordinary people separated from each other by State powers, and by everyday violence, corruption, and deeply-set inequality. Tamara’s search for a sense of herself in relation to others, as you're about to hear about, is in a way hard to reckon with, insofar as a great rift exists between the languid beauty of Galeano’s reading voice and what he’s describing. This remains the case until an unexpected moment of rebirth, near the end, which confirms Galeano’s great gift was to be more than the sum of his Leftist parts.
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Eduardo Galeano (EG): Good evening. I'll read some chapters or vignettes or short stories from a trilogy I recently wrote called Memory of Fire. Mainly text from the last volume, which is called in English, Century of the Wind. This is the first text open in the trilogy and this is the first part of my reading will be in English, or Spanglish, because my pronunciation is not [laughter] always perfect.
EG: “The Creation. The woman and the man dreamed that God was dreaming about them. God was singing and clacking his Maracas as he dreamed his dream in a cloud of tobacco smoke, feeling happy, but shaken by doubt and mystery. The Makiritare Indians know that if God dreams about eating, he gives fertility and food. If God dreams about life, he is born and gives birth. In the dream about God's dream, the woman and the man were inside a great shining egg, singing and dancing and kicking up a fuss, because they were crazy to be born. In God's dream happiness was stronger than doubt and mystery. And so dreaming, God created them with a song, "I break this egg and the woman is born and the man is born. And together they will live and die, but they will be born again. They will be born and die again, and be born again, and they will never stop being born, because death is a lie." Now I'm going to read some...[applause] Some texts about women. [laughter] That wasn't my goal.
[laughter]
EG: This is... It happened at the beginning of 18th Century in Dutch Guiana and it's called They Carry Life in Their Hair. For all the Blacks that get crucified or hanged from iron hooks, stacks through the ribs, escapes from Surinam's 400 coastal plantations never stop. Deep in the jungle, a black lion adorns the yellow flag of the Runaways. For lack of bullets, their guns fire little stones or bone buttons, but the impenetrable thickets are their best ally against the Dutch colonists. Before escaping, the female slaves steal grains of rice, corn and wheat, seeds of bean and a squash. Their enormous hairdos serve as granaries, and when they reach the refugees in the jungle, the women shake their heads and thus fertilize the free land.”
EG: This is placed in 1770 something, '76 or '77 in Philadelphia. It's called If He Had Been Born a Woman. [laughter] Let's read it. [laughter] “Of Benjamin Franklin's 16 brothers and sisters, Jane is the one most resembling him in talent and the strength of will. But at the age when Benjamin leaves home to make his own way, Jane marries a poor settler who accept her, without dowry, and 10 months later, births her first child.
EG: From then on for a quarter of a century, Jane has a child every two years. Some of them die and each death opens a wound in her breast. Those that live demand food, shelter, instruction, and consolation. Jane spends whole nights cradling those that cry, washes mountains of clothing, bathes the stacks of children, rushes from market to kitchen, washes piles of dishes, teaches ABCs and chores. Toils elbow to elbow with her husband in his workshop and attends to the guests whose rent helps to fill the stew pot. Jane is a devoted wife and exemplary widow. And when the children are grown up, she takes charge of her own ailing parents and of her unmarried daughters, and her orphaned grandchildren. Jane never knows the pleasure of letting herself float in a lake, drifting over the surface, hitched to the string of a kite as Benjamin enjoys doing, despite his years. [chuckle] Jane never has time to think nor allows herself to doubt. Benjamin continues to be a fervent lover, but Jane doesn't know that sex can produce anything except children.
[laughter]
EG: Benjamin, founder of a nation of inventors is a great man of all the ages. Jane is a woman of her age, like almost all women of all the ages who has done her duty on this earth and expiated her share of blame in the Biblical curse. She has done all she could to keep from going mad and sought, in vain, a little silence. Her case will awaken no interest in historians.”
[applause]
EG: This is 1916 in Buenos Aires. "Barefoot, naked, scantily draped in the Argentine flag, Isadora Duncan dances to the National Anthem in a students' cafe in Buenos Aires. [laughter] And the next morning, the whole world knows of it. The impresario breaks his contract. Good families cancel the reservations at the Colón Theatre, and the press demands the immediate expulsion of this disgraceful American who has come to Argentina to soil the patriotic symbols. [laughter] Isadora cannot understand it. [laughter] No Frenchman protested when she danced at the Marseille [laughter] in nothing but a red shawl. [laughter] If one can dance an emotion, if one can dance an idea, why not an Anthem? [laughter] Liberty offends. This woman with shining eyes is the declared enemy of the schools, matrimony, classical dance and everything that cages the wind. She dances for the joy of dancing, dances what she wants, when she wants, how she wants. An orchestra's hash before the music that is born of her body.”
[applause]
EG: This is 1979 in Granada, Nicaragua. “Behind them an abyss, ahead and to either side, unarmed people on the attack. La Polvora barracks in the city of Granada, last stronghold of the dictatorship, is falling. When the Colonel in command hears of Somoza’s flight, he orders the machine guns silenced. The Sandinistas also stop firing. Soon, the iron gate of the barracks opens and the Colonel appears waving a white rag, "Don't fire." The Colonel crosses the street, "I want to talk to the Comandante." A kerchief covering one of the faces drops. "I am the Comandante," says Monica Baltodano, one of the Sandinista women who led troops. "What?" [laughter] Through the mouth of the Colonel, this haughty macho speaks the military institution defeated but dignified, virility of the pants, honor of the uniform. [laughter] "I don't surrender to a woman," [laughter] roars the Colonel, and he surrenders.”
[laughter]
[applause]
EG: This other story happens in... All of them are true, of course, I mean, they are all based on true documents and reliable sources. [laughter] Sometime the protagonist of the... of history, like Monica for instance, who told me this, what happened with this macho altivo. [laughter] This is about the granny detectives, and I heard it also from the protagonists. It happened in 1983, in Buenos Aires and Lima. “You know about the Grannies of Plaza de Mayo who are looking for disappeared children in the... during the years of the military dictatorship. Tamara Arze who disappeared at one and a half did not end up in military hands. She is in a suburban barrio, in the home of the good folk who picked her up where she was dumped. At the mother's appeal, the Grannies of Plaza de Mayo undertook the search for her. They had only a few leads, but after a long complicated sweep, they have located her. Every morning Tamara sells kerosene from a horse-drawn cart, but she doesn't complain of her fate.
EG: At first, she doesn't even want to hear about her real mother. Very gradually the grannies explain to her that she's the daughter of Rosa, a Bolivian worker who never abandoned her. That one night her mother was seized at the factory gate in Buenos Aires.”“Rosa was tortured under the supervision of a doctor, who indicated when to stop, and raped, and shot at with blank cartridges. She spent eight years in prison without trial or explanation, and only last year, that is 1982, was expelled from Argentina. Now, in Lima airport, she waits while her daughter Tamara flies over the Andes toward her. Accompanying Tamara on the flight are two of the grannies who found her. She devours every bit of food she's served on the plane, not leaving a crumb of bread or a grain of sugar. In Lima, Rosa and Tamara discover each other. They look in this mirror together and they are identical. Same eyes, same mouth, same marks in the same places.
[foreign language]
EG: When night comes, Rosa bathes her daughter. Putting her to bed, she smells a milky, sweetish smell on her. And so, she bathes her again, and again, but however much soap she uses, there is no way to wash off the smell. It's an odd smell, and suddenly Rosa remembers, "This is the smell of little babies when they finish nursing." Tamara is 10, and tonight she smells like a newly born infant.”
[applause]
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RANDY: Eduardo Galeano was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1940. He was self-educated for the most part and became a journalist after a very brief time in high school, during which he was already publishing cartoons in newspapers. While working variously as a bank teller, journalist, and painter of public signs, he came into permanent prominence – both positively and negatively – following the 1971 publication of Las venas abiertas de America Latina, or, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which went on to become a canonical work for Leftists intellectuals and activists. Galeano himself was imprisoned in the years after its publication, went into exile in Argentina and then Spain, and returned to Uruguay in the 1980s. He lived and wrote from there on topics including war and soccer and exile, in addition to publishing a multi-volume novel sequence, Memory of Fire, about Latin American history and experience. After publishing more than thirty books, Eduardo Galeano died of lung cancer, in his home city of Montevideo, in 2015.
The audio recording of Eduardo Galeano, recorded on stage at the Harbourfront Reading Series in 1988, is used with the permission of the Estate of Eduardo Galeano c/o Dr. Eduardo de Freitas and Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York City and Lamy, New Mexico. All rights reserved. The recording is also used by permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more at festivalofauthors.ca.
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Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou and Michelle De Marco, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library's podcasts series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA.