May 4, Master/Class: Eduardo Galeano with Jessica Hagedorn
Last Saturday, May 4 Jessica Hagedorn introduced a man whose name made the packed Tishman Auditorium at The New School whoop and applaud with shouts of “EDUARDO!" echoing across the seats. Clearly, no one could be hushed in his excitement for this “chronicler of the silenced, scorned, and oppressed.” Eduardo Galeano, historian, journalist, and poet, took the stage humbly as a storyteller first and foremost. Renowned for his Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire) series, which takes primary documents from American history and breaks, edits, and erases them down to reveal what the original authors most likely wanted to hide, Galeano consistently tries “to recover colors, fragments of the [lost] human rainbow.”
When prompted by Hagedorn to speak about “the liars” of history, Galeano, with characteristic simplicity concluded, “Art is a lie telling the truth.” This idea flowed through the rest of the hour as Galeano touched on the words: Terrorism and Immigration. Words that are “very useful in the United States, no?” The possible utility of the words and the stories of buried individuals was obvious in the irruptions of irrepressible applause (and some foot stomping) as Galeano read from his newest book Children of the Days (trans. Mark Fried, Nation Books). Schooled in the art of storytelling in the bars of Montevideo, Galeano haltingly shared the story of his first challenge as a writer: describing and bringing the sea to a landlocked, coal-mining Bolivian community that would not survive the toxic repercussions of its livelihood, and would certainly never see the ocean. Children of the Days tells such stories one lost anecdote, or one blotted out individual (Rosa Luxemburg and Roque Dalton among them) for each day of the year, working off of the Mayan tradition that we are shaped by the days in which we live.
Questioned later by an audience member about what he would suggest writers do to bring a much ignored issue such as climate change to the forefront of their work, Galeano answered much like he had answered other questions that evening (to the dismay of his clamorous crowd), “Depends. I cannot speak about writers as [a] unity.” His refusal to generalize and shrink a group of individuals into a single command called back to earlier when Galeano explained that he wrote because “I equals we.” It’s not for Galeano to direct our individual actions, as much as we would like him to do just that. “We [writers] are not selected by the finger of God. I don’t feel any finger pointed at me.” His one clear piece of advice to writers was to “hear twice before speaking once” with the two ears and one mouth we were given. We listened, and can listen still.