Eduardo Galeano: Death of enigmas

Just as ever so often, we encounter some people, the gift of whose being makes us wonder where they had been all our life, there are also a few writers whose words befriend you with an intimate immediacy that marks the beginning of a lifelong friendship. I encountered Eduardo Galeano's work relatively late in my reading life, and after years of my sensibilities suffering a slow death produced by joyless academic writing, reading him was almost a readerly rebirth of sorts. His writing immediately takes you back to some of your earliest memories of reading: short fables or parables, often less than a few paragraphs with a moral at the end, but with one significant difference, the moral mirror that Galeano held did not concern itself with individual but with political morality, with history and most of all with memory. And yet it is precisely his almost childlike tales (and what labour it must have have taken to perfect that form) that marks him as one of the sharpest political critics of the 20th century. Like the proverbial child who refuses to confirm the collective conspiracy of silence that saw in the sovereign the attire of respectability, Galeano calls the bluff of power, pointing to its nudity and to the complicity of those who do acknowledge this truth.

But if speaking truth to power is the most important responsibility of a writer, it is also the most hazardous, since it can often be at the cost of form and lightness. Mirrors rarely tell the truth slantingly, and Galeano was acutely aware of this, having started his career as a journalist. Galeano's mirrors by contrast then are rarely regular: His mirrors concave politics into puzzles and convex power into paradox. In them, the truth unfolds, not truthfully, but enigmatically. Laura Marks in her work on secrets argues that secrets confirm the power of those who possess them, but enigmas escape the control of anyone. For Marks, the enigmatic becomes a point of resistance and emergence capable of simultaneous expression on different registers of meaning, thus opening up an intermediate space that is not necessarily bound to be filled. The cultivation of enigmas thus becomes a radical strategy of remembering; and of forgetting. I can think of no better word to characterise Galeano than the word enigmatic, sample this:

"And of courage

One night, ages ago, in a small cafe in the Montevideo port, I was drinking all night with a whore friend, and she told me, "You know something? When I'm in bed with a man, I never look at his eyes, I work with closed eyes. Because if I look at them I go blind, did you know that?"

Apart from it being a parable of Galeano's own empathy laced honest, the story retains its enigma on several readings, not to mention the masterly phrase "whore friend".

Eduardo Galeano passed away yesterday, and all those who have read and been moved by his enigmatic vignettes will share a collective grief, and for those who haven't, we can take heart from Borges' sentiment that he is jealous of people who have not read his favourite writers since he knows that they will experience the frisson of reading them for the first time, a sentiment he can never recreate. Interestingly even if the two masters were brought together by their fondness of short allegorical stories, and despite many comparisons made of the two, Galeano himself was not the greatest fan of Borges. In an interview, Galeano said, "I don't feel the electricity of life in his work. I admire his style, his skill, his craftmanship. He was an intellectual, a man with only a head. No heart, no sex, no stomach - just a head. A brilliant, super smart head. But he was elitist, racist, very reactionary." Galeano's own life was a sharp contrast: Arrested after a military coup in Uruguay and forced into exile in Argentina, which he had to flee again after his name was added to the list of the death squads, landing up in Spain where he wrote his trilogy Memory of Fire documenting the history of Latin America.

If the "electricity of life" was Galeano's self-defined criteria for the worth of a writer, he certainly lived up to it, charging up his stories with a moral frisson that will continue to stir our ethical and political imagination for a long time to come.