Eduardo Galeano on Open Veins of Latin America . . . and other stories
by CYNARA MENEZES
Journalist/author Eduardo Galeano PHOTO/Wikipedia
As you may know, Larry Rohter of the New York Times spun this story as if it were a “God That Failed” episode. So, here it is in English, for the record. — Ed.
In 1998, I interviewed the writer Rachel de Queiroz (1910-2003), and she confessed to me that she felt “mortal antipathy” for O Quinze [The Year Fifteen], a classic of Brazilian literature that she had published at age twenty, in 1930, which, thenceforward, would become her “most important and most popular” work (the book is so referred to in every encyclopedia). The same is true of Open Veins of Latin America and the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. Published in 1971, when Galeano was thirty, the work haunts him to this day. He is always characterized as “the author of Open Veins . . . ,” which seems to trouble him as he has written more than thirty books since then.
At the collective interview on Friday, April 11, in Brasília, which he was visiting as an honored writer of the 2nd Biennial of Books and Reading, Galeano heard the probably millionth question about Open Veins. “It’s been over forty years since you wrote Open Veins of Latin America. What are the open veins of today?” And he, in quite decent Portuguese, replied: “It would be impossible for me to answer such a question, especially since, after so many years, I don’t feel as attached to that book as when I wrote it. Time has passed, I started to try other things, to get closer to human reality in general and political economy in particular — for Open Veins tried to be a book of political economy though I didn’t have necessary training. I don’t regret having written it, but I’ve gone beyond that stage. I wouldn’t be able to read that book again — I would keel over. For me, that prose of the traditional left is too heavy, and my body can’t take it. I would have to be admitted to an emergency room. The question would be: ‘Got any open bed?'” Laughter.
I seize this opportunity and change tack: But what do you make of Chávez’s gift of the book to Obama? Would Obama understand Open Veins . . . ? “Neither Obama nor Chávez,” Galeano answers, to general mirth. “To be sure, he gave it to Obama with the best intentions in the world — Chávez was a saint, never met a kinder guy — but he gave Obama, as a present, a book written in a language that he doesn’t know. So, it was a generous gesture, but a little wicked.”
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The Open Veins of Eduardo Galeano
by JORGE MAJFUD
In a recent Washington Post article entitled “Latin Americans Are Embracing Globalization and Their Former Colonial Masters,” written by a political science professor from the University of Colorado, the author begins with the following sentence: “Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano recently renounced his 1971 classic, Open Veins of Latin America, one of a few books admitted into the Latin American left’s pantheon.” Some days before, the New York Times had fired off an article entitled “Eduardo Galeano Disavows His Book The Open Veins,” etc.
Similar examples abound in several languages, above all in the Spanish-language press. For some days and weeks, gloomy articles and commentaries were popping up. It seemed that we were witnessing, along with the corresponding euphoria of conservatives, the suicide of radical Latin American literary criticism. Clearly, too much was being read into all of this.
When I read the first articles about the author’s recent statements in Brazil, I had a few words with Galeano himself about them. I never was particularly crazy about that book, and I even wrote a pretty harsh paper on it, but in my view it was nonetheless still one of the most courageous books of its era, if not the most. I feel that it is a crime to interpret it out of context, and I never dreamed that its own author might be capable of doing such a thing, as can be inferred from each of the opportunistic articles that followed.
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