Tomgram: Eduardo Galeano, Sacrilegious Women

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: There are few pleasures greater for me at TomDispatch than posting the writings of Eduardo Galeano, whom I worked with for years in my other life as a book editor, and consider one of the greats of planet Earth. Today, thanks to the kindness of the editors of Nation Books and in my official absence -- I’m on vacation -- here are selections from his latest book, just out in paperback, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. If you’ve never tried Galeano, then believe me, your life is missing a piece. Tom]

His book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent came out in 1971 and proved to be the first vampire thriller of our American imperial age. Its blood-sucker of a plot was too outrageous not to be mesmerizing: a country called the United States declares a “good neighbor” policy for those living in its hemisphere because they just look so tasty, and then proceeds to suck the economic blood out of country after country. Hollywood never topped it. “True Blood” and “The Vampire Diaries” couldn’t hold an incisor to it; Buffy was a punk by comparison.

In 1995, when his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow came out, he won the World Cup of sports writing. No one was ever quicker on the page; every sentence, a goal. Next to him, Pelé and Diego Maradona were second stringers.

The Pentagon invented the Internet for its own ends (and the NSA has used it just that way), but compared to him they were latecomers to techno-wizardry. After all, in writing his Memory of Fire trilogy about the Americas, he rediscovered the long-lost time machine of H.G. Wells, brought it up to date, and used it -- talk about interconnectivity -- to weave the most vibrant lives in North and South America over thousands of years into an unforgettable tapestry of humanity. Thirty years later, he dusted that machine off again, souped it up, stepped in and, like Odysseus on his voyages or Orpheus entering Hades, ventured into the human experience from ancient Ur to late last night. The result: his monumental history of everything and everyone: Mirrors.

Back in 2000, in his book Upside Down, he proved a wizard of prediction. Years ahead of the climate change movement and before the full-scale rise of the BRICS countries, which meant a vast new middle class married to the car and a North American version of the good life, he reminded his readers that, for the South to live like the North, humanity would need not one fading planet but many.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking, of course, about the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. He was, early in his professional life, a cartoonist and never lost the lightness of spirit that went with that role. Still, the world he observed and experienced in prison, in exile, year after year, decade after decade, especially through the eyes of the poor and those denied their voice, was anything but light. Yet he approached the underworld of history with an empathy and understanding which is almost indescribable. His friends died in struggles across Latin America and yet, in an act of wizardry, he was capable of bringing them back to life on the page. He heard voices no one else could hear and similarly brought them to life and so to our attention.

He has only to appear -- I’ve witnessed this personally -- and people he’s never met have the sudden urge to tell him stories they would tell no one else. And he was and remains, among so many other things, a man who always had an eye for the particular trials (and terrors and losses and triumphs) of women in a world that generally preferred to ignore whatever they did or dreamed of doing. He has nothing of the “mansplainer” in him. And so, today, thanks to the editors of Nation Books, here are passages on women from his most recent work, just out in paperback, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. Think of it as a secular prayer book for any year. Tom

A World of Violence

On Women Who Refused to Live in Silence and Be Consigned to Oblivion

By Eduardo Galeano [The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s book Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, just out in paperback (Nation Books).]

The Shoe

(January 15) In 1919 Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary, was murdered in Berlin. Her killers bludgeoned her with rifle blows and tossed her into the waters of a canal. Along the way, she lost a shoe. Some hand picked it up, that shoe dropped in the mud. Rosa longed for a world where justice would not be sacrificed in the name of freedom, nor freedom sacrificed in the name of justice. Every day, some hand picks up that banner. Dropped in the mud, like the shoe.