“Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone” by Eduardo Galeano

I’m thankful to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, not only for his tremendous leadership in leading his country and the world in new wave of egalitarian revolution, but in particular for introducing me - and millions of other people around the world, to the great poet, Eduardo Galeano. I’m amazed daily by the re-realization about the degree to which my formalized schooling has thus far been wholly inadequate. Of course I shouldn’t find it surprizing, understanding the real role of formal schooling, but it continually does. I was with my friend John on a rainy day in the East Village. We were visiting several bookstores in New York’s East Village. I picked up a bunch of used books - books by Herbert Marcuse, Freud, and Erich Fromm. We spent a while in St. Mark’s Books, where I noticed Galeano’s new book: Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. I opened the book, not knowing what to find, and I was immediately taken in. Under the dust jacket, the gorgeous red hardcover book is 400 pages long, and contains around 500-700 vignettes - short scenes which convey powerful lessons - each between half a page and a page in length. The stories draw from history, mythology, legend, religion, spiritual stories, parables, fairy tales, and social movements, each turning classic stories on their heads in imaginative ways to leave debunk the authoritarian myths we’re told about history and society. As my words are far too weak to do Eduardo Galeano’s poetry justice, here are two of his stories:

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How Could We?
by Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, pp. 4

To be mouth or mouthful, hunter or hunted. That was the question.
We deserved scorn, or at most pity. In the hostile wilderness no one respected us, no one feared us. We were the most vulnerable beasts in the animal kingdom, terrified of night and the jungle, useless as youngsters, not much better as adults, without claws or fangs or nimble feet or keen sense of smell.
Our early history is lost in mist. It seems all we ever did was break rocks and beat each other with clubs.
But one might well ask: Weren’t we able to survive, when survival was all but impossible, because we learned to share our food and band together for defense? Would today’s me-first, do-your-own-thing civilization have lasted more than a moment?

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Guernica
by Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, pp. 293

Paris, spring of 1937: Pablo Picasso wakes up and reads.
He reads the newspaper while having breakfast in his studio.
His coffee grows cold in the cup.
German planes have razed the city of Guernica. For three hours the Nazi air force chased and machine-gunned people fleeing the burning city.
General Franco insists that Guernica has been set aflame by Asturian dynamiters and Basque pyromachiacs from the ranks of the Communists.
Two years later in Madrid, Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German forces in Spain, sits beside Franco at the victory parade: killing Spaniards was Hitler’s rehearsal for his impending world war.
Many years later in New York, Colin Powell makes a speech at the United Nations to announce the imminent annihilation of Iraq.
While he speaks, the back of the room is hidden from view, Guernica is hidden from view. The reproduction of Picasso’s painting, which hangs there, is concealed behind an enormous blue cloth.
UN officials decided it was not the most appropriate backdrop for the proclaimation of a new round of butchery.

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I’ll certainly be picking up more of Galeano’s books soon. I’m thinking about getting Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent next.