International BusinessV V: Eduardo Galeano's histories from below
Until lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter —African proverb
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Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan novelist, is also a leading historian who smashes the linear narrative of history and arranges the shards into a new pattern to reveal the past in a radically altered form. His canvas is huge, Latin America and the landmarks of world history, but it is history not of kings and emperors but history from below; the lives of those who have been overlooked by traditional histories: the artists, the servants, the gods and visionaries, the black slaves who built the White House, and the women who were bartered for dynastic ends, very simply, the story of the common man who has disappeared into the dust of history. Combining vast knowledge with irresistible story-telling skills (reminds you of Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Galeano’s world history is spun out in little cameos that make a mosaic of ordinary lives lived on our “sorry, sparkling planet”.
First, the historian’s credentials. Galeano is the author of the acclaimed trilogy, Memories of Fire, and other works like Days and Nights of Love and War, Book of Embraces, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Upside Down, Voices of Time: A Life in Stories and Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, and others. In his latest book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Portobello paperback, special Indian price Rs 599), Galeano brings the story down to the present times. Like all Latin American writers, Galeano is obsessed with remembering but memory works in a different way from what we are used to: the future — the future of that which is yet to happen — is set at the back of the speaker. The past, which he can see because it has already happened, lies all before him. He backs into the future unknown; memory moves forward, hope backwards.
Begin with three little cameos because that will give you the tone of the whole book.
1. In a short piece, “Mark Twain” (they are all short pieces and hence very readable), Galeano reveals how George W Bush’s model for invading Iraq was the “war to liberate the Philippines”. Both Bush and President William McKinley (1843-1901), who supported US expansion into the Pacific that colonised the Islands, were ordered by God to act. And here Galeano quotes McKinley: “God told me that we could not leave the Filipinos to themselves. They were unfit for self-government. There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate them, and uplift and civilize them and Christianize them.”
2. In “Father of the Bomb”, on Robert Oppenheimer, Galeano tells us that “three months after the explosion at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer said to President Harry Truman: ‘I have blood on my hands.’ And President Truman told Secretary of State, Dean Acheson: ‘I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.’”
3. In “Hollywood Heroes They Were Not”, Galeano talks about the Soviet Union’s contribution to the dead “on which the Second World War statistics agree.” Here is a small part of the scorecard “in round figures”:
“In the siege of Leningrad, half a million dead of hunger. The battle of Stalingrad left a mountain of eight hundred thousand Soviet dead or wounded. Seven hundred thousand died defending Moscow, and another six hundred thousand in Kursk.”
Galeano hasn’t offered a connected history of the world as in a textbook but of its turning points and leading personalities around whom myths and legends have been built up over the years. But, he remains first and last a storyteller and tells us that the Mother of All Storytellers is Scheherazade, the female narrator in Arabian Nights. This is how Galeano spins it out:
“To avenge a woman who betrayed him, the king kills them all.
At dusk he married and at dawn he widowed.
One after another, the virgins lost their virginity and their heads.
Scheherazade was the only one to survive the first night, and then she continued trading a story for each new day of life.
Stories she heard, read, or imagined saved her from decapitation. She told them in a low voice, in the darkness of the bedroom, with no light but that of the moon. In the telling she felt pleasure and gave pleasure, but she tread carefully. Sometimes in the middle of the tale, she felt the king’s eyes studying her neck.
If he got bored, she was lost.
From fear of dying sprang the knack of narrating.”
In Gerontion, Eliot had said, “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions/Guides us by vanities.” Galeano exposes the cunning of history and its half-truths; he merely states what he sees or chooses to see that many of us otherwise overlook. And that is “as true as truth’s simplicity.”