- Theses and placement reports Faculty of Arts

A Hijacked Memory
Memoria del fuego by Eduardo Galeano and the possibility of a Latin
American identity
Research Master thesis in Literary and Cultural Studies
University of Groningen
Helena Valdivia
Student number: s2448912
Supervisors: Dr. Jeanette den Toonder
Dr. Brigitte Adriaensen
Date of submission: August 19, 2015
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ........................................................................................................................................... 4
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................... 4
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 6
I. Memoria del fuego: Critical Reconstructions ................................................................................ 13
II. Collective Memory and Latin American Identity ......................................................................... 29
1. Collective memory .................................................................................................................... 30
2.
1.1.
Collective memory or cultural memory? ...................................................................... 32
1.2.
Maurice Halbwachs: the putative father ...................................................................... 33
1.3.
Collective memory and identity formation ................................................................... 36
1.4.
“Constituting” memory ................................................................................................. 39
1.5.
History and memory ...................................................................................................... 40
Identity: a general characterization ...................................................................................... 44
3. Latin American identity. Where from? Where to? ................................................................... 51
3.1. Latin America as an imagined community ......................................................................... 53
3.2. Populism ............................................................................................................................. 56
3.3. The search for a Latin American “essence”........................................................................ 57
3.4. Three “novel” conceptions of Latin American identity ...................................................... 58
III. The Recovery of a Hijacked Memory ......................................................................................... 61
1.
Re-presence, communication and collective memory .......................................................... 61
1.1 Collective memory as communication ................................................................................ 62
2. Aesthetic and discursive strategies ........................................................................................... 65
2.1. Fragmentation .................................................................................................................... 65
2.2. Orality ................................................................................................................................. 69
2.3. Microhistory ....................................................................................................................... 72
3. The Memory of Latin America................................................................................................... 75
3.1. Memory: images and discourses ........................................................................................ 77
3.2. Syncretism .......................................................................................................................... 81
3.3. Objects................................................................................................................................ 82
3.4. Subjects .............................................................................................................................. 84
3.5. The common....................................................................................................................... 89
2
4. A performative memory project ............................................................................................... 92
IV. Transculturation, Heterogeneity and Hybrid Cultures ................................................................ 97
1.
2.
First move: Memoria del fuego, heterogeneous, hybrid or transcultured? ......................... 98
1.1.
Heterogeneity................................................................................................................ 98
1.2.
Transculturation .......................................................................................................... 100
1.3.
Hybridity ...................................................................................................................... 103
1.4.
Hybridity, heterogeneity and transculturation in Memoria del fuego ....................... 105
Second move: Memoria del fuego as a Latin American identity model ............................. 112
Conclusions ..................................................................................................................................... 118
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................... 122
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Dedication
This thesis is foremost dedicated to Eduardo Galeano, in memoriam. Su viva palabra
habitada de recuerdos y personitas me dejó existiendo en múltiples mundos desde la
primera vez que entró en mis vértebras. Luckily, I dream.
To the cradle of the chocolate, the maize, the guava, the chili, the papaya, the pulque, the
pineapple, the vanilla, the son, the cempazuchitl flower, the bolero, the condor, the samba,
the peyote, the cumbia, the amaranth, the tehuanas dresses, the muralism, the jarabe tapatío,
the arepas, the samba, the axolotl… Latin America, loved land of wonders.
To those who through the study of memory and identity are, like me, trying to find
themselves.
To my Latin American family in Groningen, those who taught me that “homeland” had
many faces.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my supervisors, Jeanette den Toonder and Brigitte Adriaensen, who
provided me with moral and academic support throughout the process of this thesis.
Thanks to my master colleagues, especially Jakob and Carmen, for the inspiring
conversations and encouraging support.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Sandy, for her friendship and English
counseling. Also to Dr. Pascal Gielen, for introducing to me one of the lines that, even if
veiled, deeply channeled this thesis.
My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, who have relentlessly supported and believed in
me. I miss them as much as they miss me. And finally, my acknowledgments to Erik, my
interlocutor, partner and family, who valiantly and willingly underwent my moodiness,
stress and sleepless nights without lessening his support and love.
4
“Uno supone que la literatura transmite conocimiento y actúa sobre el lenguaje y la
conducta de quien la recibe; que nos ayuda a conocernos mejor para salvarnos juntos. […]
Uno escribe, en realidad, para la gente con cuya suerte, o mala suerte, uno se siente
identificado, los malcomidos, los maldormidos, los rebeldes y los humillados de esta tierra
[…]
“Yo creo en los libros que cambian a la gente. La prueba de que la palabra humana
funciona está en quien la recibe, no en quien la da. […] Esa es la palabra viva, la que vale
la pena; la otra, la que te deja como estabas, puede sonar muy bien pero no me sirve.”
“Una literatura bien puede ayudar a crear los símbolos de una realidad nueva.”
Eduardo Galeano
5
Introduction
*
“El buen narrador cuenta su historia y hace que ocurra. […] Una mañana cualquiera, el
viejo narrador no despertará. Pero alguno de los que han escuchado sus historias las
contará a otros. Y después ese alguno también morirá, pero las historias continuarán
vivas mientras haya casas grandes y gentes reunidas en torno al fuego.”
Eduardo Galeano, Los nacimientos
I saw this tale in the movie The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam, 2009),
but I am sure I have heard it somewhere else. A group of Tibetan monks are gathered in a
mysterious, isolated temple, and, seated on the floor, they take turns to read, to unceasingly
tell, a collective story. It does not matter what the story is about, for among them lays the
belief that the story, any story, has to be told in order to keep the world going on. If the
narration is interrupted, the world will collapse and everything will be lost. The monks
devote their entire life to narrate, even though nobody is listening, because history will only
continue if someone tells it.
This thesis is about stories that give life, and the performative act of narrating as a
way to create memory, identity and community. I chose to explore the notion of collective
memory because I believe that the narration, exploration and reinvention of who-we-are are
what keep our very existence alive.
The literary trilogy that will be analyzed here, Memoria del fuego by the Uruguayan
writer Eduardo Galeano, is the recount and re-invention of Latin American memory: our
memory. It was issued between 1982 and 1986, and written in Spain, while the author was
exiled after being harassed by the military dictatorship of Videla in Argentina. By then, the
author had already published a plethora of books: from journalistic articles to short stories,
novels, chronicles and “unclassifiable” books. Eduardo Galeano, born in 1940, worked as a
factory laborer, painter, messenger, typist and a big etcetera before entering into the
journalist field when, at the age of 20, he started to work as an editor of the important
Uruguayan journal Marcha. His leftist political ideology was always manifest when
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working for Marcha and then for Época (1964-66), as well as in his political militancy in
“Juventud Socialista”, a socialist political organization in Uruguay. Therefore, when he
published his first novel, Los días siguientes, in 1963, he was already a quite known
journalist within intellectual circles. Galeano became more relevant for the literary and
intellectual field of the American continent after the publication of Las venas abiertas de
América Latina, in 1971. This publication led to a persecution and subsequent
imprisonment for a short time after the Uruguayan coup d’état in 1973, which forced
Galeano to go into exile to Argentina. Three years after, he was also harassed, along with
other intellectuals, by the Argentinian military dictatorship (1976-1981). He, then, flew to
Spain, where he wrote Memoria del fuego, and in 1985 he returned to Uruguay.
Most of Galeano’s oeuvre has been translated into several languages and has had a
terrific commercial success. His most famous book, for example, Las venas abiertas de
América Latina, has approximately 100 editions and reissues. Eduardo Galeano is thus a
rather popular writer in Latin America. He is indeed popular in a twofold connotation: he is
very well known and admired amongst left-sided intellectuals, students and even the
revolutionary Zapatistas1, but he is also popular because he seems to speak to the people.
This is, ironically, what has brought him some detractors within intellectual and academic
circles (far fewer, though, than his admirers): his simple and straightforward language
seems to speak self-evident truths. His unambiguous writing aiming to unequivocal
readings tends to dispel literary academic critic. Besides, his committed political stance,
which is absolutely evident in his texts, is not always well received among those who do
not think that art and ideology are two faces of the same coin. These reasons might speak
about the relative lack of studies about his oeuvre.
Memoria del fuego is a recollection of stories from more than 1,000 sources of
information about America, from its origins in pre-Columbian times, to 1984, two years
before it was submitted for its publication. It thus claims to be an attempt to rebuild the
stolen memory of American peoples, from Canada to the Patagonia, but with a special
focus in the Latin American region (Mexico, Central America, South America, the
Caribbean and the Antilles).
1
Since the formation of the guerrillero movement, Galeano manifested his support and was even constantly
involved in manifestations, activities and pronouncements. When the writer died in April of 2015, the subcommandant Marcos honored him by assuming the name of Galeano as his own pseudonym.
7
In the prologue, Eduardo Galeano writes that Memoria del fuego aims to give
history back its life, its breath, its liberty, while recovering the hijacked memory of Latin
America. Indeed, what the trilogy seems to be is a recount of (Latin) American history that
tells the story of those who have been neglected by official historiography, the wretched of
the Earth2. Yet, what makes this account a memory recollection instead of a historical
narration is one of the points to be addressed and debated in this work. Therefore, the
concept of collective memory will be central to this thesis, and it will be discussed in
Chapter II, as a preparation for analyzing the trilogy in the Chapter III. The first goal of this
thesis, thus, will be to determine if the concept of collective memory is applicable to the
narrative that Memoria del fuego proposes, and if so, what, ultimately, is a collective
memory project?
Collective memory, as will be discussed, has been thought to be closely intertwined
with cultural identity, in view of the fact that a group bases its consciousness of unity and
specificity upon a shared knowledge3. Consequently, the second goal of this thesis is to
discover if the memory recount of Memoria del fuego can lead (and if so, how?) to the
formation of identity. This, especially when considering that Memoria del fuego aims to be
an account whereby subjects made invisible by the hegemonic power strive to earn the
control of their own history and, hence, of their own self-definition.
Identity has been a “fashionable” topic within the field of Cultural Studies, so as the
question of Latin American identity among Latinoamericanists. However, what will be
argued in this thesis is that, through a memory recount, Latin American identity is not only
explored and formulated, but also devised. Indeed, the goal of Memoria del fuego as a
memory project, more than recovering a forgotten identity, is to size the faculty of selfdefining, building and evaluating the own identity. Therefore, apart from focusing on
collective memory, the second chapter will serve to formulate a theoretical discussion with
regard to identity. Some key approaches to identity formation will be discussed, and the
idea of a performative identity formation will be introduced. Thus, I will put into
consideration the possibility that Memoria del fuego aims to represent (but re-present as
will be seen) Latin American identity and in such a way performatively devise a
2
To quote the now popular formulation of Frantz Fanon (1961), where he explores the dehumanizing effects
of colonization, and the possibilities, implications and legitimacy of decolonizing movements.
3
See, for example, Jan Assmann’s article, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity” (1995).
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community and a new way of collective self-definition. The second chapter will also
appoint an exploration concerning old and new ideas about Latin American identity, in
order to put into context the definition and approach that the analysis of the oeuvre
(Chapter III) will convey.
In this thesis I depart from the belief that textual structures are legitimate social
phenomena, and that they strongly reveal not only ideologies, but also social formations
and identity manifestations. Therefore, I will look at Memoria del fuego not only as a
literary text, but also as an artifact, a cultural map and a medium. In this sense, the trilogy
constitutes the outcome of socio-cultural phenomena, as much as it also potentially serves
as a model to regard the underlying ideology, to find ideological structures that might have
their equivalents in social life, and as a medium to convey and act as a force to resist
hegemonic power.
In 1967 Antonio Gramsci examined and re-evaluated the place of popular culture in
apparently diverse societies, to come up with the concept of hegemony. Gramsci realized
that when the elite class ideology reached certain level of unity and politic power, it
constituted itself as the “norm”, while hierarchizing other cultural and social manifestations
and strata. This way, values, beliefs, perceptions and discourses that belong to the elite
group are regarded higher and more valuable than others’. These others are what Gramsci
called ‘subalterns’: those who are excluded from hegemonic representation and, therefore,
are denied voice and visibility in a society’s organization.
Nevertheless, the power can be restituted, as Michel Foucault stated (1977). This
can be done in a counter-hegemonic stance that reveals that it is not possible (or ethical or
needed) to eliminate and blur indigenous cultures or any other kind of ‘subaltern’
manifestations, discourses and identity, for they constitute a core component of society as a
whole, especially when aiming to found a decolonized society. My reading of Memoria del
fuego in this thesis will, therefore, show (one of) this process(es) of visibilization and
opposition.
As the reader will probably imagine, this work has a lot to do with questions of
postcolonialism, but, even more, with questions of decolonization. Labels are scarcely
relevant when the aim is to take a stance against colonialism, but if they serve to better
understand the quest, then a terse exploration cannot be left over. Walter Mignolo (1998)
9
refers to “postoccidentalism” as an alternative to “postcolonialism” that better emphasizes
the intellectual decolonization that must be carried out from Latin America. Western
epistemology –Occidentalism– has, on the one side, normalized the discourse of
marginality and exclusion, and, on the other, appointed Latin America as an object of study
rather than as a place of theoretical enunciation. The scholar Nelly Richard joins this call
for intellectual decolonization when, in her paper “Insertando Latinoamérica con el
Latinoamericanismo” (1988), she writes that it is necessary to reflect on the value of the
locus of enunciation:
[…] la condición de experiencia que emerge, para cada uno de nosotros, del
acto de pensar la teoría insertos en una determinada localidad geocultural a
través de la relación (construida) entre emplazamiento del sujeto y
mediación de códigos, entre ubicación del contexto y posición del discurso
(p. 346).
Richard criticizes the globalizing epistemology of Cultural Studies that has
incorporated the “Other” as such, monopolizing the faculty of representation and dictating
the direction of “inclusion” without really paying attention to autonomous spaces of rupture
and redefinition. Both scholars, Richard and Mignolo, see the need of generating a theory
enunciated from the interstices in Latin America, an epistemology that does not depart from
the colonized self-perception as the Other, but assumes itself as the subject of thought. This
epistemology should 1) question the visibility regime by dabbling in no-representation
margins that destabilize the simplification will of academic institutions (Richard, 1988) and
2) generate a theory that is applied not only to Latin America but to “planetary knowledge
and civilization” (Mignolo, 1988). Otherwise, the hegemony of imperial projects would be
kept and decolonization would only be of a virtual kind.
By introducing Mignolo’s and Richard’s stances I do not intend to label my work or
the literary oeuvre of authors such as Eduardo Galeano as postcolonial or postoccidental.
Instead, I aspire to ideologically situate this thesis and make evident my intentions to
produce theory on the basis of Latin American located thought. This does not mean that I
will only refer to the work of Latin American writers and scholars throughout this thesis. I
believe, with Mignolo and Richard, that speaking a theory from Latin America implies a
dialogue with Western theory and, moreover, implies avoiding by all means speaking only
to Latin America. Actually, the third goal of this thesis is to theoretically reflect on
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concepts such as identity, collective memory, heterogeneity and community on the basis of
the insights deduced from Memoria del fuego. Thus, I aim to produce a solid epistemology
that accounts not only for Latin American identity, but for a broader reflection on the
performative formation of heterogeneous communities. There are already some very strong
conceptual notions spoken from Latin America that attempt to define Latin America in its
own terms. In Chapter IV I will explore three of them: heterogeneity, transculturation and
hybridity, and situate them along with the identity discourse of Memoria del fuego in order
to discover what can this latter add to the understanding of Latin American identity. This
will, ultimately, be my fourth goal: to transform Memoria del fuego into a model for the
analysis of Latin American identity.
I am fully aware that, Memoria del fuego being a literary work, there will
undoubtedly be a handful of different fruitful readings, among which I only offer one.
Nevertheless, I will be delighted if this thesis provokes more questions than answers,
because that will probably lead the reader to find solutions and thus keep this topic alive.
And there is still much to be said.
This thesis thus consists in four chapters. Chapter I is devoted to an exploration and
analysis of the main scholarly works upon Memoria del fuego. In Chapter II, I try to
partially accomplish my first, second and third goals with a discussion of the notions of
collective memory and cultural identity, as well as to appoint an exploration concerning old
and new ideas about Latin American identity. Chapter III consists in a literary analysis of
Memoria del fuego and the attempt of finally accomplish my first three goals. Therefore, in
this chapter it will be determined what kind of memory project is Memoria del fuego and
how it builds an identity discourse. Finally, in Chapter IV I will explore other concepts with
regard to Latin American identity in order to discover the identity discourse in Memoria del
fuego and fulfill my fourth goal.
Before starting, there are two concessions I have to request from the reader; the first
one is rather easy, but the second is probably more problematic.
Firstly: to retrieve with me, with Galeano and with thousands more, the name of
“America” to the American continent and free it from its “United States of America”
imposed meaning. Thus, every time I –or others whom I quote– write “America” or
11
“American”, please do not forget we refer to the American continent and all the peoples
that populate it, including Latin Americans.
Secondly: I have to apologize for having to request a bilingual competence (or at
least very frequent visits to Google Translate) in order to read this thesis. Excerpts from
Memoria del fuego and other works are quoted in their original language: Spanish. This has
a twofold implication. First, I must confess that I have felt quite uneasy discussing
decolonization, and yet writing in English a thesis about the power of word and speech of a
beautiful oeuvre written in Spanish. This is, hence, my way to break the paradox, along
with not being ashamed of letting my Spanish writing style run at times through the English
academic style. Nevertheless, the second implication is more interesting: by writing this
thesis in English I expect to be contributing to introduce (or reinforcing the introduction of)
essential authors for Spanish speaking world to the Saxon critique. I would like that writers
such as Nelly Richards, Cornejo Polar, Castro-Gómez or Eduardo Galeano be more read
(because they are quite known in certain circles already) among scholars whose interest in
collective memory and cultural identity is not quite satisfied with Western theorists.
Therefore, I do expect that this work, in spite of being about Latin America, founds a room
beyond it.
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I. Memoria del fuego: Critical Reconstructions
*
There are more than 20 editions of Memoria del fuego (the one from Siglo XXI Editores in
Spanish has already 33 reprints) and it has been translated into more than 15 languages.
People around the globe have access to a version of Latin American history that they
probably had not found in any other source before. There are plenty of reviews, interviews,
biographies, and journalistic articles around Galeano that give account of his years of exile
in a small house in Cataluña, or his magnificent work as editor of the magazines Crisis,
Marcha and Época. People speak profusely about his work; some of his most famous
phrases are shared in social media, while the MERCOSUR Parliament appointed him “First
distinguished citizen” in 2008.4 Nevertheless, the scholarly analyses of his oeuvre are not as
abundant as we might think.
In this chapter I will examine some of the scholarly works around Memoria del
fuego that, in a way or another, positively or negatively, prompt this work. I follow a semichronological order because it better reveals a systematic change towards the definition of
the kind of project Memoria del fuego is. Additionally, it unfolds the concentrated interest
that Galeano’s work elicited during some years. I will discuss concisely every work,
defining the parameters that are more suitable for my own approach. Some articles have not
been taken into account for this chapter because they do not add anything especial to this
discussion or/and they were more of a journalistic tone. What this chapter aims for is to
trace an ideological line of the approaches that outline Memoria del fuego. It, thus, gives an
overview of the way in which Galeano’s work has been regarded in the fields of Latin
American, literary, cultural and postcolonial studies.
*
4
A statement after his decease can be read in the web-site of the MERCOSUR Parliament:
http://www.parlamentodelmercosur.org/innovaportal/v/9521/1/parlasur/comunicado-de-la-presidencia-delparlamento-del-mercosur-sobre-el-fallecimiento-de-eduardo-galeano.html
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While Eduardo Galeano published his first literary work in 1963, it did not receive
the scholarly attention it was due until some decades after. One of the first scholars who
wrote a comprehensive analysis of the work of Eduardo Galeano is the Serbian Diana
Palaversich. In Silencio, voz y escritura en Eduardo Galeano (1995), Palaversich carries
out an analysis of the narrative work of Eduardo Galeano, aiming to demonstrate that: “ésta
representa un caso de reivindicación de la veta realista de la literatura, un procedimiento
narrativo empeñado en rendir conocimiento de un referente histórico concreto” (p. 18).
Although she does not contrast Galeano’s narrative with other contemporary “realist”
works to prove a similar genealogy, her book is certainly devoted to display the historical
referent that Galeano’s narrative stands for. In order to do this, she shows that most of
Galeano’s writing appeals to an ambiguous, twofold, generic agreement with the reader,
one of literary autonomy (“Yo no soy historiador. Soy un escritor […]”5) and referentiality,
when narrating historical events. Indeed, it seems that Galeano’s general attempt is to
display the historical referent, restoring it from its neglect by the official discourse. In order
to accomplish this, he has to resort to many kinds of sources: literary, historical,
testimonial, journalistic and even his personal experience.
Palaversich devotes the first section of her book to the narrative of Galeano that in a
way or another has to do with exile. Instead, the second section of her book is devoted to
the building of a historical agency for Latin America in some works of Eduardo Galeano. It
is also in this section where she analyzes Las venas abiertas de América Latina and
Memoria del fuego. Palaversich recognizes in both books an effort to remap history from
the perspective of those who were defeated after the colonization –the subaltern– while
carrying out a deconstruction of official historical agency and narration of historical events.
She contextualizes these endeavors within a radical change in the concept of history
proposed by postcolonial theory, especially after the re-visions of Eurocentrist history,
performed by Eric Wolf (1982), Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) and André Gunder Frank
(1969), and very particularly after the important works of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and
Ngugi Wa Thiongo, who dared to speak from and for the colonized nations, and thus
restored a long silenced voice.
5
In the Prologue to the first volume of Memoria del fuego.
14
For Palaversich, the enterprise of Galeano, both in Las venas abiertas de América
Latina and Memoria del fuego, is to rewrite the history of the continent from a subaltern
perspective and strive for a “united America” in order to overcome “divorces” among
neighboring nations (1995a, p. 157). This strive is comparable to that of José Martí
(Nuestra América, 1891), Pablo Neruda (Canto general, 1950) and, ultimately, the avowals
of Roberto Fernández Retamar in Calibán (1979): “Asumir nuestra condición de Calibán
implica repensar nuestra historia desde el otro lado, desde el otro protagonista.”6
Palaversich also stresses that, in order to set forth an alternative history, Galeano has to
resort to two different strategies. Firstly, to storytelling: a scheme that would reiterate a
change in historical agency, from an academic discipline uttered from the center, to a tale
or fable told from the margins. Secondly, he also performs a reemplotment 7 : a re-encoding
of the facts contained in the chronicle to build a new plot, or a plot with new and different
codes. For Palaversich, this re-encoding will bring forward, due to its knowledge, an
alternative history of Latin America, which will eventually be the foundation for a project
for the future. She, thus, concludes that “la América revelada en Memoria del fuego se
presenta como una unidad de contradicciones y dualidades que marcan la identidad de sus
habitantes” (p. 193). This is a very relevant statement, where Palaversich ultimately
visualizes a specific “America”, revealed through Memoria del fuego, that might have
contributed to characterize the identity of American people. However, for Palaversich,
more than a “true expression of such an identity”, the narrative strategies of the book
constitute a rhetorical tactic to devise a “monolithic identity being”, which misrepresents
the actual character of the American continent. She argues that, while collective memory is
grounded on specific, different and heterogeneous groups, the “memory” in Memoria del
fuego does not recognize this heterogeneity:
[In Memoria del fuego] no se reconocen elementos heterogéneos de la
memoria colectiva que no es única e indivisible. El escritor la trata
como un ente monolítico sin reconocer un elemento fundamental, la
vinculación de la memoria colectiva con grupos específicos. (p. 199)
6
Roberto Fernández Retamar, Calibán y otros ensayos (La Habana, Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1979, p. 37),
cit. pos. Palaversich (1995a, p. 136).
7
Making explicit allusion to Hayden White. Cit. pos. Palaversich 1995a, p. 130.
15
Most of Palaversich’s analysis is quite brilliant, and in this thesis I will endorse,
sustain and explain a handful of her insights, as the reader will find out. Indeed, I also
regard, and will depart from, Memoria del fuego as a re-encoding of historical events to
build a new historical agency and a new meaning. The relevance of vignettes –windows– as
literary structure that enacts the fragmented nature of America is not to be diminished, and
will be examined further in Chapter III. However, some of her statements do not fit into the
perspective that will lead this work. Palaversich, in an almost unproblematic fashion, takes
the concept of collective memory from the works of Maurice Halbwachs, and does not
attempt to redefine the concept in order to fully grasp the memory project that is being
carried out in Memoria del fuego. Consequently, she misses an important trait of memory
and identity mapping; namely, their constituting character. Indeed, she does not seem to
acknowledge that identities are dynamic projects in constant formation, nourished by past
events and symbols but still continuously changing, and that collective memory has as well
the potential to be reformulated along with changing patterns.
On the contrary, my proposition in this thesis is to review the concept of collective
memory in order to better characterize the memory project of Memoria del fuego. I dissent
with some of the final conclusions of Diana Palaversich, especially when she assumes that
the enterprise of Memoria del fuego is “mirroring” the socio-geo-political community of the
Americas, and assumes that the author did not properly recognize the diversity of
subjectivities in the continent. Conversely, I will argue that instead of depicting an already
existing subjectivity, identity, or “true and unified extraliterary community” (p. 208),
Galeano’s endeavor is to performatively build it for the future: to suggest the possibility of
a remapping of the subjectivity –the memory– of such a community. The discourse about
identity in Galeano’s work is therefore not an “exploration” (p. 197), as Palaversich argues,
but a formulation, a conception, a reinvention, a project.
Palaversich references cover a wide range of disciplinary areas and fields, going
from Hayden White to Michel de Certeau, from Hans Magrus Enzensberger to Mikhail
Bakhtin. Her arguments are solidly informed and her vision has an appealing clarity that
makes her analysis of Galeano’s works essential for any subsequent intended study. Hence,
the reader will see how my own reading of Galeano meets in more than one occasion with
Palaversich’s analysis (as well as with the other scholars’ that will be reviewed here).
16
Within the framework of this research, it is therefore essential to build new knowledge that
makes the most of the work of other scholars that, passionately and insightfully, have
devoted themselves to the study, analysis, rescue and thorough dissemination of Eduardo
Galeano’s work.
In 1996, just a year after Diana Palaversich’s book was released, the Argentinian
Hugo Riva published Memoria viviente de América Latina, a review of the complete work
of Eduardo Galeano (until El futbol a sol y sombra [1995]). This account is, however, of a
more descriptive nature, that points out themes and motives in Galeano’s oeuvre (memory,
pain, hope, political commitment, subalternity, objectivity and agency, the word as
encounter, literary genres, the role of the author and the reader, etcetera), but does not
thoroughly examine any of them. It is, therefore, symptomatic of the kind of interest that
the narrative oeuvre of Galeano, excluding Palaversich’s works, elicited in those first
approaches: Their nature is rather impressionist and topics along Galeano’s oeuvre are
reviewed without engaging in a deeper literary criticism.
Nonetheless, Silencio, voz y escritura was not the first attempt of Diana Palaversich
to examine the work of Eduardo Galeano. Before her book was issued, she had already
published two articles about Memoria del fuego. The first one, “Memory of Fire as
Alternative History” (1991), is practically the sketch of what would later be developed into
the chapters VI, VII and VIII of her book. In the second article, however, she quarrels with
the intended classification of Eduardo Galeano as a postmodern writer; an argumentation
that she will uphold across Silencio, voz y escritura. Effectively, in “Eduardo Galeano entre
el postmodernismo y el postcolonialismo” (1993) (an article that she would later republish,
with some changes, under the name of “Postmodernismo, postcolonialismo y la
recuperación de la historia subalterna” [1995b]), Palaversich’s main argument is that
Memoria del fuego, as well as other testimonial narratives, do not belong to
postmodernism, but:
[…] a nuestro ver, pertenece[n] a otro orden epistemológico,
postcolonial, que concebimos no como parte natural del postmodernismo
universal sino como una práctica cultural y un proyecto político
diametralmente opuestos al relativismo y laissez faire ideológico del
postmodernismo” (1993, p. 14).
17
She will therefore argue that postcolonial “epistemic order” consists mainly in
subalterns’ attempt to forge their own identity outside of hegemonic power: “este deseo
urgente de los grupos subalternos de forjar su propia imagen, no en términos del poder
hegemónico, colonial o patriarcal, sino en los suyos propios” (1993, p.14). She classifies
Galeano’s literature as postcolonial provided that it is founded on a concrete political,
historical, cultural and social reality, and while departing from a specific experience (a
historical referent, as discussed in the main argument of her book Silencio, voz y escritura),
it examines its own relation to centres of power. She also holds that Galeano’s
deconstruction of the privileged status of a one and only hegemonic narrative, ultimately
aims to establish another master narrative: that of a constant exploitation of colonies and
neo-colonies. Thus, Galeano’s classification as a postmodern author falls down. Moreover,
she argues that this sort of literature, for which notions of truth, authority, subject, ideology,
history and conscience –rejected by postmodernists- are essential instruments for subaltern
emancipation, is ideologically incompatible with poststructuralism and postmodernism. Her
proposal is that the term “postcolonial” applied to literature should serve to make a
distinction between depoliticizing practices proper to Western postmodernisms, and
politically conscious postcolonial practices.
Diana Palaversich’s analysis tests Galeano’s work for characteristics of postmodern
literature: structural fragmentation; polyphony; questioning of the notions of identity and
historical subject; and intertextuality. She ultimately finds that the label of “postmodern”
proves to be inadequate for the case of Memoria del fuego and other works of the author.
This is a strong stance against artificial classifications that would certainly mislead readings
of Galeano’s narrative. Additionally, it is a determining position in the debate about the
applicability of the concept of postmodernism to non-Western cultural producers, and what
it might constitute in different socio-cultural frameworks. Palaversich shows that what
might seem a postmodern narrative from a poststructural perspective, is really not one;
therefore, it is critics’ duty to strive for another classification. She reveals that the
pertinence of postmodern theory applied to Latin American narrative needs to be
reevaluated for more than one reason. Apart from arguing against what Wole Soyinka
18
called “the second epoch of colonization”8, an integral and ideologically committed reading
of Galeano’s narrative would only be possible when the “postmodern” label attached to it
has been dismissed. In short, what is a particularly relevant element of Palaversich’s
critique is that she emphasizes the urgency of retrieving a political –postcolonial- reading
of Galeano’s narrative, which implies an ethical, moral, stance; otherwise:
[…] la experiencia de la marginalidad con sus connotaciones políticas y
morales se arrebata de las manos de los que la viven y se deposita en las
plumas académicas postmodernistas que representan una alternativa cómoda
a la amenaza de una praxis concreta. (1995b. p.14)
I share Palaversich’s reluctance to classify Memoria del fuego as a postmodern
oeuvre, and believe with her that features highlighted by the term “postcolonial” fit more
swiftly to Galeano’s oeuvre. Nonetheless, postmodernism has been analyzed from many
perspectives, and Palaversich might be simplifying in her critique a much more
problematized (in a positive way) term. The characteristics she chose to be tested against
Galeano’s narrative are indeed general but there have been many other stances on
postmodernism that could be more properly applied to Galeano’s (and testimonial)
narrative. George Yúdice9, for example, has argued for the formulation of a postmodernism
that really refines the reflection on Latin American cultural production from the 1960s until
now. Therefore, Palaversich’s position, although enriching for a study of Memoria del
fuego, in that other vein only highlights what some critics had already discussed: that a
deeper reflection on what postmodernism (and postmodernity) implies to Latin America is
needed.
A couple of years later, in 1998, José Ramón González developed, in a comparable
way to Palaversich, a critic of the “postmodern” label applied to Galeano’s work,
specifically El libro de los abrazos. In his article “La estrategia del fragmento. El libro de
los abrazos de Eduardo Galeano”, he makes the following argument:
8
After “material” or political colonization, this second-phase process of applying Western theory to nonWestern cultural production: “We have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of
colonization –this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose
theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social
neuroses and their value systems”, in Soyinka Wole, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge
University Press, 1976: x), cit.pos. Palaversich (1995b). Very much in line to Mignolo’s and Richard’s call
(see Introduction).
9
In “¿Puede hablarse de modernidad en América Latina?” in Revista de Crítica Literaria, año 15, número 29.
19
[…] una concepción del arte como instrumento capaz de transformar la
realidad y el convencimiento de la vigencia de ciertas explicaciones
globales del mundo y de la condición humana desde una perspectiva de
compromiso ideológico-político, hacen más aconsejable situar a Galeano
en una tradición modernista. (p. 101)
González does not explain further which characteristics of modernism applied to
Galeano’s work better than postmodernism; however, he does elaborate on heteroglossia as
the guiding principle of contemporary narrative, which is openly assumed in El libro de los
abrazos. As known, the term heteroglossia (a translation from the Russian разноречие) has
been introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin in 1934, who also considered the modern novel as the
best suited genre for employing his strategy. González does not refer explicitly to Bakhtin,
but this follows from his main argument that dismisses a postmodern reading of Galeano’s
book. He presents a thorough examination of fragmentation, marginality and language in El
libro de los abrazos (characteristics that this book shares with Memoria del fuego) and
concludes that language serves as a meeting point for communication in the book, where
the reader is able to experience such diversity and plurality. For him “El libro de los
abrazos es […] un comentario sobre la realidad actual –y sus insuficiencias– que refleja
una creencia en el papel liberador de la palabra.” (p. 107)
One of the most interesting points of José Ramón González’s text is that, unlike
other critics, he notices the importance that the magazine Crisis, which Galeano directed
from 1973 to 1976, had to help the author to build an idea of culture and communication.
He suggests that there is a strong relation between the two literary works:
La breve descripción de lo que suponía Crisis resulta extremadamente
reveladora. Es toda una declaración de principios que no sólo señala lo
que fue el semanario, sino que, además, anticipa ya en 1978 el programa
completo y detallado de lo que desde ese momento ha sido, y sigue
siendo, al tenor de los últimos libros publicados, la producción literaria
del escritor uruguayo. (p. 102)
The idea that language gives rise to a space of communication, of interaction, of
encounter, which readers can experience by themselves, goes in line with our reading of
Memoria del fuego. In this sense, heteroglossia and heterogeneity are not just rhetoric
strategies, as Palaversich has previously argued, but part of an awareness process and, as
20
will be discussed later, a project of identity that will be performed through the acts of 1)
writing, and 2) reading. Even if González stops short at the assertion that this
communicative experience will yield a distinctive aesthetic experience to the reader,
without developing this further, his appraisal of “el papel liberador de la palabra” (p. 107,
emphasis added), results in the assertion that a new aestheticism is not the only aftermath of
the interplay of silenced voices.
After González work, the idea of a performative power in the literary speech of
Eduardo Galeano seemed to gain weight. Virginia E. Bell’s 2000 article “CounterChronicling and Alternative Mapping in Memoria del fuego and Almanac of the Dead”
makes an interesting account in this respect. In her article, Bell compares Galeano’s novel
with a book written by the U.S. writer Leslie Marmon Silko. This comparison is based on
the impression of them both being “voluminous publications that provoke epistemological
crises about how we distinguish history from fiction and that resist the tendency to write
Eurocentric nationalist history” (p. 6). She also argues that both works use the chronicle to
“legitimize a particular ‘imagined community’”, “reinvent[ing] what ‘nation’ means,
dislodging it from Eurocentric narratives.” She thus states that, while nationalism is a
Eurocentric practice that uses history to “reinforce the hegemony of this epistemological
system” (p. 8), both books use chronicling as a subversive, countering strategy that “undoes
the provisional authority appropriated by nation states”, especially in the case of Memoria
del fuego, which does not use temporal or spatial markers, and if so, they are used in an
autocratic way, “establishing links between seemingly disparate moments and sites” and
“replacing linear chronology with synchronic descriptions” (p. 11).
Consequently, for Bell this counter chronicling aims at subverting certain
hegemonic assumptions, sustained by nationalistic symbols, such as the “progress” of the
North, as opposed to the South. The main conclusion Bell draws from Memoria del fuego is
that, in order to overturn nationalisms, Galeano’s chronicling conceives “temporal” and
“mutable” alliances among people that involve “porous and provisional communities” (p.
14). These alliances are mirrored, for example, on the different women that appear
throughout the book and come from different backgrounds and nations. Finally, Bell reacts
to critics (such as Abdul R. Jan Mohammed) that argue that colonial discourse resorts to a
manichaean allegory. For Bell, “describing Memoria del fuego as manichaen erases the
21
variety and complexity of the different forms of subordination the trilogy explores and,
most importantly, the potential tensions among different positions of subordination” (p.
17).
Her conclusion is of great interest, for she is aware of the fact that Galeano’s
historiographic project, unlike nationalisms, does not serve one static community
exclusively, but instead forges alliances set on values or on circumstantial historical events.
This, in my view, is a very fertile insight that is missing in Palaversich’s study: the
possibility of mapping communities that do not necessarily have a correspondence in the
geopolitical world. This perspective is compatible with the conclusions of José Ramón
González, who acknowledges the interactive character of a linguistic/literary enterprise.
Both points of view are also akin to my perspective of Galeano’s Latin American identity
project, and the view of identities as not fixed but temporal subjectivities dependent from a
complex system of moving alliances. This definition correspondingly follows the one
proposed by Stuart Hall: identities as “points of temporary attachment to the subject
positions which discursive practices construct for us”10. Therefore, identity built through
“memory” (the same as through “counter chronicle”) discourse is not unified but flexible,
mutable, heterogeneous; a perpetually incomplete construction process.
The view of Memoria del fuego as an alternative historiographic project continued
to prevail, and Daniel Fischlin wrote, very much in line with Virginia Bell and Diana
Palaversich, that the ultimate aim of Galeano’s project is to destabilize official narratives of
the past.
Fischlin has worked with the oeuvre of Eduardo Galeano in more than one occasion,
but in his article “History’s ‘Refuse’: Benjamin, Galeano, and the ‘Power to Create’”
(2001), he writes that “[Galeano’s] critique of official history advocates the inherent ethical
responsibility in the historical present as necessary predicate to the conditional, potentially
transformable future that remains to be made” (p.108). He thus sees an ethical and political
agenda in community and history remapping.
Nonetheless, the main point in Fischlin’s article is his argument on Galeano’s
appropriation of Benjaminian literary montage, using “the rags, the refuse” as an alternative
form of historical archive. Fischlin, then, argues that “Galeano’s historical writing is clearly
10
In “Questions of Cultural Identity”. London: SAGE Publications, 1996, p. 8.
22
in line with Benjamin’s argument that the ‘materialist presentation of history carries along
with an immanent critique of the concept of progress’ [Arcades 476]” (p. 109). This method
will render an incomplete, fragmented narrative that will show how “toda situación es el
símbolo de muchas”11, which means that every single story, while incomplete, is part of a
much more complex world. Galeano, therefore, will strive towards a “radical
deconstruction of all histories” (p. 114). Every single story in Memoria del fuego matters,
even those that have been misrecognized over time, such as indigenous experiences.
Fischlin’s ultimate conclusion is that the dissonant historical discourse of Galeano has “the
power to transform history’s refuse, into the rejection of abjected memory and historical
amnesia” (p. 121).
Although Fischlin’s contribution is captivating and his conclusions are relevant for
understanding the implications of Galeano’s historiographic project, comparing Galeano to
Walter Bejamin’s historical method seems rather artificial for his particular argument. A
critique of progress can be indeed traced in Galeano’s work, but it is symptomatic of Latin
America’s struggle to attain a self-definition, rejecting Eurocentrist paradigms, as other
“postcolonial” writings reveal. In this way, Galeano’s discourse would fit into what José
Joaquín Brunner called “macondismo”12: an ideological stance where modernization and
progress are regarded as alien phenomena to Latin American “essence”.
It is noteworthy that Fischlin, Bell and Palaversich reach similar conclusions
through different paths; they all describe the subversive historiographic character of
Memoria del fuego aiming for the construction of a new historical agency that speaks for
the subaltern. Nevertheless, only Bell and González could grasp the performative character
of literary speech in the case of Memoria del fuego, while Fischlin misused, in my view, a
very interesting comparison with Walter Benjamin by reducing it to a comparable critique
of the Western idea of progress. Instead, his insights about “the rags, the refuse” could be
used to examine more thoroughly the unconventional fragmentary structure of Memoria del
fuego, a critique of hierarchies and centrality, and a prevalence of the fragment, the orality,
the plurality, the heterogeneous.
11
Galeano, “Apuntes sobre la memoria”, cit. pos. Fischlin, p. 112.
“Tradicionalismo y modernidad en la cultura latinoamericana” en Cartografías de la Modernidad, Santiago
de Chile: Dolmen Ediciones, 1994, pp. 151-190.
12
23
After these seminal approaches, the studies and analysis of the work of Eduardo
Galeano became more diverse and less rigid in nature. In 2001, Rodolfo Bonino published a
short analysis titled “Memoria del fuego: Una escritura de la esperanza” in an online
magazine. In this analysis, he carries out a structural linguistic analysis of Memoria del
fuego to ultimately argue that Eduardo Galeano’s project is more symbolic than
historiographic. Bonino states that the name of the book, Memoria del fuego, conceals a
metaphor of Prometheus, the mythic hero that retrieved the foundational fire to men: “Esto
parece fundar en el seno de este siglo del viento una utopía épica genitora del nuevo héroe
mítico que devolverá el fuego a los hombres” (p. 37). Indeed, for Bonino, the main goal of
Galeano’s project consists in building up a utopia to found the future, instead of just
retrieving a historiographical revision of the past. Bonino then argues that this aspect of his
project constitutes the ultimate difference with “official history”, which strives to
reconstruct and explain the past from a non-mythical perspective and does not intend to be
a foundation for the future.
Although Galeano’s venture to recover the mythical, pre-Columbian past of the
Americas is quite evident, especially in the first volume of Memoria del fuego, the
comparison with a Greek-Latin Classical myth is, in my view, completely astray. All
Galeano’s efforts in Memoria del fuego attempt, as a matter of fact, to break down the
discursive monopoly of the West, so that in his first volume, Los nacimientos, there is
actually a myth about fire, from the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche people:
El fuego
Las noches eran de hielo y los dioses se habían llevado el fuego. El frío
cortaba la carne y las palabras de los hombres. Ellos suplicaban, tiritando,
con voz rota; y los dioses se hacían los sordos.
Una vez les devolvieron el fuego. Los hombres danzaron de alegría
y alzaron cánticos de gratitud. Pero pronto los dioses enviaron lluvia y
granizo y apagaron las hogueras.
Los dioses hablaron y exigieron: para merecer el fuego, los
hombres debían abrirse el pecho con el puñal de obsidiana y entregar su
corazón.
Los indios quichés ofrecieron la sangre de sus prisioneros y se
salvaron del frío.
Los cakchiqueles no aceptaron el precio. Los cakchiqueles, primos
de los quichés y también herederos de los mayas, se deslizaron con pies de
pluma a través del humo y robaron el fuego y lo escondieron en las cuevas
de sus montañas. (p. 13)
24
The Cakchiqueles (and with them, all Latin American genealogy, as can be
followed from the fact that there is only one myth of fire in Memoria del fuego), chose not
to hand over their prisoners – or surrender themselves –, and instead stole the fire. The
recovery of fire is, thus, a collective enterprise. Contrary to Classic mythology, in which
restorative acts are attributed to one single hero –the eternal individualism of Western
program– Galeano emphasizes the communitarian character of American myths.
However, Bonino’s perspective does render an interesting view. In his argument of
Memoria del fuego as a symbolic project, he states that the historical characters of the book
represent archetypes, metaphorical agents: “Más que seres biográficos, los personajes
históricos cuentan aquí como agentes metafóricos” (p. 37). This goes in line with a more
performative model of the discourse found in Roland Barthes’ “The Discourse of History”
(1989), where he argues that more than a vehicle for transmitting information about an
external referent, a discourse is a device for the production of meaning, a trait that indicates
the “constituted” rather than the “found” nature of their referents. This view differs
radically from some of the previous scholarly works that have been reviewed, especially
from Palaversich’s, who dismissed Galeano’s memory project for not being anchored into
the diverse-group-specific reality of the Americas. The performative nature of this
approach, instead, allows the “memory” of Memoria del fuego to be “constituting” in the
meaning it produces, without necessarily aiming to “represent” the actual reality.
It is of course difficult to determine whether Memoria del fuego aims to “represent”
reality or to constitute a new vision, a new mapping of the “imagined” community of the
Americas. That is why it is so essential to accurately define the Galeano’s project and to
conceptually determine his understanding of memory. However, it is undeniable that both
considerations, either the one that takes Memoria del fuego as a historiographic project or
the one that regards it as a constituting one, throw very rich insights on Latin American
identity issues and that is what I intend to demonstrate with this critical review.
In its 2009-2010 issue, the magazine Revista Borradores from the Universidad
Nacional de Río Cuarto (Argentina) published the papers that resulted from the seminar of
Latin American novel lectured by Marisa Moyano and Silvina Barroso in 2006. Two of the
papers in this issue corresponded to works about Eduardo Galeano’s Memoria del fuego:
25
“La
reescritura
de
la
historia-identidad
latinoamericana
desde
una
posición
posoccidentalista en Memoria del fuego de Eduardo Galeano” by Ana Giayetto and
“Memoria del fuego –Eduardo Galeano- Recuperar la voz, restaurar la Memoria, concebir a
la Historia como más que un desfile de próceres” by Magalí Retamozo. Retamozo sees in
Memoria del fuego an effort to recover the identity symbols of indigenous cultures. She
contrasts the discourse of the book with the chronicles of Bernal Díaz del Castillo (Historia
verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España [1568]) and Hernán Cortés (Segunda Carta
de Relación [1520]), just to put forward the Eurocentrist vision of the latter two. She
analyses Galeano’s oeuvre on the light of Antonio Cornejo Polar’s work, and concludes
that Memoria del fuego is “una muestra del carácter diverso, complejo y heterogéneo que
aún hoy identifica a la literatura latinoamericana” (p. 11). Her conclusions, as we can see,
even though following the historiographical-project line, differ from those of Palaversich.
Giayetto does see in Memoria del fuego a portrayal of the heterogeneous, plural reality of
Latin America. She writes that the three volumes:
[…] definen y articulan no sólo una relectura de la historia latinoamericana
que va desocultando una identidad plural, sino que instauran otro relato de
la historia latinoamericana en la que la identidad se perfila desde la
diversidad de sujetos, voces, perspectivas, lenguajes, discursos,
concepciones […] (p. 6)
She emphasizes that this new narrative of identity is opposed to the one devised in
the 19th century, and which “desde una supuesta unidad latinoamericana, reproducida por
el aparato educativo e instalada, sin solución de continuidad, hasta el presente, oculta la
heterogeneidad de las producciones discursivas latinoamericanas, sus sujetos y culturas.”
(p. 4) She is, evidently, referring to Cornejo Polar’s heterogeneity (1994), which will be
treated as the overarching element of “posoccidentalism” –“la perspectiva latinoamericana
que se quiere alternativa frente a la mirada posmoderna” (p. 5).
Giayetto also argues that the present tense of verbs in Memoria del fuego brings to
the present events of the past, eliciting a simultaneity effect that gives rise to the idea of
certain coexistence of multiple subjectivities. Her conclusion is that this and other structural
elements of Memoria del fuego are an attempt to decolonize knowledge production through
the devising of a narrative that represents history from a plural, heterogeneous and
contradictory identity.
26
There are two interesting points in this analysis. First, Giayetto chooses, in
accordance with Diana Palaversich and José Ramón González, to take a distance from the
“postmodern” label and instead brings to the discussion the term “posoccidentalism”,
proposed by Walter Mignolo (1986, 1997) and Zulma Palermo (2001), which can be
conceived as an alternative to postcolonialism. Secondly, she somehow also notices the
performative character of the construction of memory in Memoria del fuego and other
postcolonial narratives. Even if she does not explicitly refer to performativity, her
argumentation about language’s capacity to institute representations of what is “real”
proves to be a core devise in the reflection of the construction of identity in Latin America.
Moreover, it is noteworthy that her work appears in an anthology that explores the
formation of identity from a performative perspective.13
*
After this revision of some of the scholarly works devoted to Eduardo Galeano’s
Memoria del fuego, some essential elements can be summarized as follows:
First, more than one scholar chose to remain distant from “postmodernism” labels
but instead characterized Galeano’s Memoria del fuego as “postcolonial” or
“postoccidental”. Could it perhaps be symptomatic of a growing disbelief of what
“postmodernism” implies and what it conceals, just as Andreas Huyssen stated in an
interview regarding his book Modernismo después de la posmodernidad (2011): “Nobody
talks about postmodernism anymore in a serious, critical way today” 14? This position,
however, also throws relevant insights on what Latin American scholars understand and
expect from postcolonial studies and what is in the agenda of Latin American studies now.
Secondly, as years went by, scholars started to move from classifying Memoria del
fuego as an alternative historiographic scheme to regard it as a project to fund the future of
Latin America. Therefore, there are some scholars that see in a linguistic, literary agency a
space of interaction and communication. Others go further and gather that language and
13
Hugo Aguilar and Marisa Moyano (eds). Sentido y performatividad. Aportes teóricos y desarrollos sobre la
construcción discursiva de la identidad. Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, 2009.
14
Interviewed on March 24, 2001 at the Museum Reina Sofía:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUdbnz9I00
27
narrations can forge subjectivities; thus, identities and even collective memories. This
creative possibility of language is an important aspect of this thesis, one that will be more
extensively elaborated in Chapter II and III.
Thirdly, in the last works we reviewed, the affiliation between Cornejo Polar’s
heterogeneity and Galeano’s enterprise was put forward. It represents a dramatic move
from Palaversich’s view that Memoria del fuego does not enact the heterogeneous elements
of collective memory in Latin America. For Palaversich, the “big narrative” that Memoria
del fuego tries to build is incompatible with the heterogeneous reality of the subaltern,
while for other scholars, this “big narrative” is in itself full of heterogeneous elements.
I will examine this issue in a more detailed way in the two final chapters of this
thesis. As stated in the introduction, even though it is interesting to reveal the elements in
Memoria del fuego that enact heterogeneity, it is, at this point, more fertile to discover what
Galeano can add to the understanding of Latin American heterogeneity, as much as to other
concepts, such as cultural hybridism and transculturation.
Finally, Memoria del fuego, either seen as a historiographic account or as a project
to forge a future for Latin America, is commonly regarded as a way to destabilize official
narratives of Latin American history and inscribe an alternative memory recount. This is,
ultimately, the pillar of the oeuvre: to give a voice and recognize the identities and past
recollections of those who do not have a voice or a body in the hegemonic power structure:
the subaltern.
28
II. Collective Memory and Latin American Identity
*
In this chapter, two essential concepts to this thesis will be explored: collective memory
and (Latin American) identity. These concepts are so theoretically rich that I do not intend
to cover them exhaustively. Rather, I would like to let them seduce us in order to find their
more suggestive and relevant scopes and implications to the analysis of Eduardo Galeano’s
Memoria del fuego. Of course throughout this thesis more concepts that may elicit our
curiosity will appear. These two are certainly not the only notions used in this analysis but,
conversely, they are pivotal and the ones around which this thesis will be developed. Both
of them are equally fascinating and have been on the agenda of the interdisciplinary field of
cultural studies, motivating the reflection of scholars of many disciplines, such as
Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Semiology, Historiography, Politic Science and
Philosophy.
I will start with the concept of collective memory because its examination and
further conceptualization will bridge a gap with questions of identity that must be
formulated and explored before discussing the identitarian discourse in Memoria del fuego.
It is crucial to have a theoretical discussion in order to build a clear understanding of the
path that will be followed in Chapter III, and to explain how such path was reached.
Likewise, I think it is essential to fully understand the immense relation between a
constituting collective memory and a performative formulation of cultural identity.
It is additionally important to include in this chapter a review of the birth and
evolution of the idea of Latin American identity, in order to situate Eduardo Galeano within
a specific theoretical framework. In the last section of this chapter we will explore different
conceptions of Latin American identity or Latinamericanism (theoretic representations and
narratives about Latin America), that collide in one way or another with what will be said
and constructed with regard to Memoria del fuego in the next chapters. Ultimately, I will
try to do an archaeology of the formation of this concept, to have an argued basis when
examining Galeano’s work. This preliminary exploration will serve to start the analysis
29
with a grounded idea of the kind of concepts aimed to be developed, within the case of
Latin America, through Memoria del fuego.
*
1. Collective memory
The 2000 movie Memento, directed by Cristopher Nolan, tells the story of Leonard Shelby,
a man that suffers from anterograde amnesia due to a struck in the head the night two men
broke into his home and raped and murdered his wife. Leonard is unable to storage new
memories for more than a few minutes; after that, he forgets everything and has to start a
reconstruction of his life all over again. The psychological-thriller film narrates the quest of
Leonard to find and kill the man who murdered his wife. He has a series of clues tattooed in
his body and some photographs with footnotes, which will help him to reassemble the
events he forgets. During the film (which is narrated in both chronological and reversed
order alternatively), Leonard is helped by different people, who would give him
information about John G., the alleged killer. However, they also take advantage of his
condition and deceive him reiteratedly, playing with the fact that he has just a few minutes
to perform a continued action before he forgets everything again. Leonard eventually
discovers that people might have been lying to him… or maybe they have been not… The
possibility that people told the truth, and that Leonard has rebuilt erroneous stories out of
his own clues, is in the air. The movie replicates, in its format, the tension of having to
rebuild an incomplete story out of fragmentary recollections before everything gets twisted
and forgotten.
Imagine Leonard as a society (or any given cohesive group of people) and each of
the time lapses before and after he forgets everything once again, as a generation of the
society members. Of course this comparison does not aim to be accurate but it is perhaps
analogous. Reconstructions of past events made by groups of people tend to be as
ambiguous and incomplete as Leonard’s quest: a matching and encoding of existing clues,
either material or linguistic. While animals can rely on genetics to pass on new skills and
30
traits generations after generations, humans have to resort to other means to keep cultural
learnings, traditions and developments alive. Collective (or cultural) memory is in this
sense a knowledge that steers behavior and experience through societal generations (cfr.
Assmann, 1995).
Memory is a reconstruction, a reassembling. Every assemblage, though, is in risk of
being both incomplete and potentially deceiving; think in Memento. Yet, memory
rebuilding, even if consisting only of an imperfect remapping of ambiguous clues, is a
necessary process. It constitutes the life and identity project of any given society. Otherwise
we would be like a Leonard Shelby deprived of his life purpose: we would be societies
without present, past or future.
Collective, or cultural, memory is one of the key concepts for this thesis. Given that
Memoria del fuego refers explicitly to memory –its collectivity implicit by the genitive
“memory of America”15–, it is important to understand this notion and to sketch a final
outlook that helps to characterize Galeano’s trilogy.
Collective memory is generally understood as the recollections that people have
about past events and which they transmit either horizontally (to neighbors, colleagues), or
vertically (to descendants, students). These recollections, hence, tend to be subjective,
profoundly attached to people’s ways to recall past and to the relevance they attribute to
some events over some others. This way, “memory” is commonly opposed to “history”
because of the subjectivity attributed to the former and the objectivity supposedly aimed by
the latter. The bulk of collective memory studies that have appeared in the last thirty years,
focus mainly in the study of traumatic events, such as the Holocaust, migrations, or
dictatorship’s victims. This is not coincidental; those studies aim to gather the subjectivity
of such historical depictions as a way to emphasize the effects, on an individual or
communitarian level, of big, violent, events. Collective memory thus refers to the verbatim
narration made by people of the events they lived, or as they were lived by their relatives,
commonly found in literary accounts –even in literary fiction-, but not exclusively.
Nevertheless, the definition I aim to sketch here is somewhat different. Memoria del
fuego is a memory recount composed not by firsthand testimonies, but is instead mediated
15
In the Prologue of the first volume of Memoria de fuego: “I am a writer who would like to contribute to the
rescue of the hijacked memory of all America, but especially, of Latin America” (xv).
31
by more than 1,000 sources that are read, interpreted and re-narrated by a single author. In
spite of the strategies that make the oeuvre appear as a recount made by the (Latin)
American people itself, its characterization as a memory project does not depend on the
personal recollections of events that members of a community make. It has to depend on
something else: in its power to build a community and to constitute a collective identity.
This feature of collective memory, then, demands a more thorough theoretical exploration
that allows us find its basis. Consequently, my aim is not to give an exhaustive summary of
all existing works on collective memory; various critical overviews exist already: MarieClaire Lavabre’s “Usages et mésusages de la notion de mémoire” (2000), Nicolas Russell’s
“Collective Memory before and after Halbwachs” (2006) and Ana Carolina Ibarra’s “Entre
la historia y la memoria” (2007), just to name three perspectives of scholars with different
cultural backgrounds. Nonetheless, the approaches that will be explored here were chosen
for being especially useful to understand the idea of memory that, in my view, is performed
in Memoria del fuego.
1.1. Collective memory or cultural memory?
Whereas some authors are not concerned with making a distinction between the
terms “social memory”, “cultural memory” and “collective memory”, and simply choose
operatively one of the locutions to work with (Manero Brito, 2005; Olick, 2002), others
prefer to establish terminological differences to analyze conceptual nuances independently.
Geoffrey Cubitt (2007), for example, distinguishes between social memory (the process
whereby knowledge or awareness of the past is developed and sustained within human
societies) and collective memory (the fiction or construction of such awareness). Astrid Erll
suggests that “collective memory” and “cultural memory” are interchangeable 16, but she
also states that “the very concept of cultural memory is itself premised on the idea that
memory can only become collective as part of a continuous process whereby memories are
shared with the help of symbolic artefacts that mediate between individuals” (2008, p. 1).
Therefore, she prefers to use “cultural memory” to emphasize media transmission in
memory processes.
16
“’Cultural’” (or, if you will, ‘collective’, ‘social’) is certainly a multifarious notion” (in Erll, 2008, p. 1.)
32
The choice of the term “collective memory” in this thesis for analyzing Eduardo
Galeano’s memory project, responds to a simple purpose. It contributes to making more
explicit Galeano’s enterprise of devising a memory that mirrors a multitude or collectivity
of social groups. However, in my view, the notion of “cultural memory” could be also
applicable and “interchangeable” without any quandary given the fact that Galeano’s
project is supported in a cultural artefact –namely, literature-, and this must be necessarily
taken into account when characterizing his project.
In her handbook on cultural memory studies, Astrid Erll defines cultural memory as
“the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts” (2008, p. 2). This way, the bidynamical interaction whereby present is affected by past events as much as past is
interpreted and understood according to present circumstances and needs is highlighted.
Even though this is a key feature of the concept of memory, it has not been equally
developed in all memory studies. Interesting contributions have however been made
regarding this aspect. They will be shown at the end of this section.
The second question that will be underlined here with regard to cultural (or
collective) memory, and somewhat connected to the prior issue outlined, is its potential to
form (or contribute to the formation of) identities. Thus, the specific features of the concept
of memory that are useful for understanding Galeano’s literary project will be framed and,
consequently, a direct link with the second concept examined in this chapter –identity– will
be established.
1.2. Maurice Halbwachs: the putative father
One of the first scholars to be theoretically interested in collective memory, and
who actually coined the term, was the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice
Halbwachs17. His study La mémoire collective is influenced by Bergson’s studies on
memory and Durkheim’s “collective effervescence”18, and which was posthumously
published in 1950. Halbwachs first considered collective memory as a sort of reinforcement
17
This is a generally accepted statement. However, Nicolas Russell, in his paper “Collective Memory before
and after Halbwachs” (The French Review, N°79, Vol. 4, March, 2006), argues that, in spite of the absence of
the term “mémoire collective” before Halbwachs’ works, this concept was already present, explicitly or
implicitly, in many pre-twentieth century French texts, in expressions such as “la mémoire des hommes”.
18 Cfr. E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).
33
of individual memory. In his view, every individual memory is ultimately tied to our
socialization and dynamics of groups: “Nos souvenirs demeurent collectifs, et ils nous sont
rappelés par les autres, alors même qu’ils s’agit d’événements auxquels nous seuls avons
été mêlé, et d’objets que nous seuls avons vus” (1950, p. 52).
Halbwachs suggested three determining characteristics of collective memory: 1) its
concrete reference to time and place; 2) its concrete reference to a group; 3) its process of
reconstruction. In other words, collective memory required support of a concrete group
delimited in space and time, but furthermore, since it is individuals, as group members,
who remember, their recollections must be relevant to their frames of reference. Therefore,
his conceptualization of memory was closely attached to cognitive aspects of people
consciousness. So, collective memory is mainly the habitus or practices that group
members reproduce in their daily life; an aspect that actually emphasizes the existence of
many different collective memories –as many as groups there are.
For Halbwachs, memory and history are substantially different. History’s aspiration
to universality prevents it from being supported in concrete groups of people. In
Halbwachs’ opinion19, while there is (the aspiration to) only “one history”, there may (and
must) be many –group specific– collective memories. Then, members of social groups have
their own individual memories, but they are grounded in group cohesive memories that
appear to them as “current of continuous thought” (2004 [1950], p. 82) or recollections.
Eduardo Galeano also imagined a dividing line between history and memory. In the
prologue to the first volume of Memoria del fuego: Los nacimientos¸ he states that:
Yo fui un pésimo estudiante de historia. Las clases de historia eran como
visitas al Museo de Cera o a la Región de los Muertos. El pasado estaba
quieto, hueco, mudo. Nos enseñaban el tiempo pasado para que nos
resignáramos, conciencias vaciadas, al tiempo presente: no para hacer la
historia, que ya estaba hecha, sino para aceptarla. La pobre historia
había dejado de respirar: traicionada en los textos académicos, mentida
en las aulas […] Ojalá Memoria del fuego pueda ayudar a devolver a la
historia el aliento, la libertad y la palabra. […] La historia oficial
latinoamericana se reduce a un desfile military de próceres […] Yo no
soy historiador. Soy un escritor que quisiera contribuir al rescate de la
memoria secuestrada de toda América. (xv, emphasis added)
19
We must not forget that Halbwachs wrote before this positivist vision of History was contested.
34
In Galeano’s view, history is characterized for being dead, stiff, mute, without any
relation to present times, to change or to the future. By contrast, memory is the lively breath
of actual, concrete people that inhabit America. Halbwachs has a similar view when he
writes that : “[la mémoire collective] ne retient du passé que ce qui est encore vivant ou
capable de vivre dans la conscience du groupe.” (1950, p. 131, emphasis added). What
Halbwachs attemptes to underline here is that collective memory (just as individual
memory) obeys to certain selection criteria linked to systems of values, which keeps
memory pertinent and relevant to present practices.
Even though certain traits of the distinction between history and memory are shared
by Halbwachs and Galeano, a substantial difference eventually appears. Halbwachs’
conception of collective memory is primarily linked to individual memory and, therefore, to
individual cognition. By means of socialization and everyday communication, members of
specific groups tend to share practices, meanings and understandings. Their individual
memories, that ultimately constitute a memory of the group, enable effective cultural
interactions, linking members to each other and braiding a shared subjectivity, a common
image of their group-identity. In consequence, Halbwachs’ idea of collective memory is
grounded in the cultural outcomes of everyday communication, something manifested in
oral traditions and cultural communicative practices among members of the group. For
Halbwachs, written and objectivized memory becomes, conversely, “history”.
This conceptualization of a stiff difference between cultural practices that have been
fixed by means of material mediation, and those that are rooted in cognition and vivid
communication, proves to be inadequate when trying to analyze a book that attempts to
recover the “lost, hijacked memory”. Firstly, because Galeano seems to trust the pertinence
of a written agency able to evoke –and even enact– a lively memory; and secondly, because
the community to which this alleged memory belongs to is much bigger than the
collectivities that Halbwachs considered20. It is the collective memory of a whole continent,
20
Gilberto Giménez remarks, in his chapter upon collective memory, that: “Halbwachs pensaba ciertamente
en el grupo en cuanto grupo, concebido a la manera durkheimiana como una colectividad relativamente
autónoma —familia, iglesia, asociaciones, ciudad— dotada de una ‘conciencia colectiva’ exterior y
trascendente a los individuos en virtud de la fusión de las conciencias individuales. Por eso este autor
distingue tantas clases de ‘memorias colectivas’, como cuantos grupos sociales puedan discernirse en una
determinada sociedad” (in Teoría y análisis de la cultura. México: UNAM, 2005, p. 99).
35
populated by many “specific groups”. If memory is about the distinctive and lively
interaction between group members, and each group of people holds irremediably its own
singular and defining memory, Galeano’s enterprise to narrate “a” memory likely to be
pertinent to all “subgroups” would be virtually impossible. However, as Erll asserted, by
means of media and material transmission, the sharing of collective memory among groups
that may not have daily contact (physical, direct communication) is somehow possible.
Halbwachs’ approach is useful to acknowledge that 1) memory is not only
individual, but it also has a social, cultural realm, consisting in its potential to be shared by
groups, and 2) that collective memory makes manifest the direct and lively relation between
past events and present practices, images and discourses. However, it is not suitable to
conceptualize a broader range of cultural practices derived from (or conducive to)
collective memory. The concept of collective memory, thus, had to be reformulated in more
effective terms, and after Halbwachs, many approaches have been produced.
1.3. Collective memory and identity formation
When reviewing the work of Maurice Halbwachs and Aby Warburg in his article
“Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, Jan Assmann tries to come up with a more
nuanced classification of collective memory. He, then, proposes to make a distinction
between “communicative memory” and “cultural memory”, departing from the
aforementioned authors’ reflections on “collective memory”. For Assmann, communicative
memory refers to the “varieties of everyday communications [that] M. Halbwachs gathered
and analyzed under the concept of collective memory” (1995, p. 126). Cultural memory, in
contrast, maintains “fixed points” of the past for longer periods, (more than 100 years,
initially) by reproducing them through cultural formation and institutional communication.
In short, it “comprises that body of reusable text, images and rituals that are specific to each
society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s selfimage” (p. 132).
Jan Assmann stresses six characteristics of cultural memory which, indeed,
emphasize its identity-formation feature: concretion of identity, capacity to reconstruct,
formation, organization, obligation and reflexivity. He defines concretion of identity as “the
36
store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity
[and which] is characterized by sharp distinctions made between those who belong and
those who do not” (p. 130). This aspect echoes Halbswachs’ suggestion that collective
recollections or knowledge being reproduced are necessarily transcendent for the group’s
self-image. Indeed, a group’s knowledge of its own cultural traits, historical events,
traditions and so on, is the basis to form an idea of identification and segregation. This
point is also particularly strongly related to the second characteristic of cultural memory: its
capacity to reconstruct or, in other words, the relation (or interplay, I would say) of
collected knowledge to actual and contemporary practices and meanings. This aspect
emphasizes that every reconstruction of the past is exactly that: a remapping that takes
place in accordance to contemporary frames of reference and that it is precisely this frame
of reference what will give memories their transcendence, relevance and potential to be
stored. Both points explain how a group “chooses” (either consciously or not) the
knowledge that will be stored as collective memories, and depending on which they will
feel related and, to some extent, defined by.
Throughout the last four characteristics, Assmann remarks that: 1) such knowledge
constituent of memory should be objectivized and then transmitted in what he calls “the
culturally institutionalized heritage of a society”. This transmission can be made through
different media (pictorial, literary, narrative, etc.), without any specific distinction between,
for example, written and oral language; 2) in spite of this equity of transmitting media, the
organization of cultural memory is not diffuse and, instead, is “cultivated” by specific
practices; 3) this organization engenders a clear system of values and a normative selfimage of the group (important-not important, central-peripheral, etc.); and 4) cultural
memory is reflexive in the sense that it symbolically interprets its own practices, draws in
itself to explain them, and reflects the self-image of the group by paying attention to its
own social system.
The complex nature of cultural (collective) memory as a system that produces its
own norms and paradigms, and reflects on them acting upon itself, reveals how variable
this system can be from one culture to another, as well as the plasticity it has to model and
reflect a society’s self-image. Assmann stresses that the manner of organization, media
37
transmission and institutions of collective memory in each culture is so variable that it
actually “tells us much about the constitution and tendencies of a society” (p. 133).
Jan Assmann’s short article is one of the most clear and straightforward initial
accounts to reflect on and problematize cultural (collective) memory. It also shares a lot
with others scholars’ contributions about the relationship between memory and identity
formation. The historian Geoffrey T. Cubitt, for example, alleges that “representations of
the collective past hinge on background projections of current perceptions of identity: the
past takes mental shape by being viewed as the breeding –and testing ground- of today’s
social collectivities, which are themselves interpreted, by the same token, as the possessors
of an organic durability rooted in the deep continuities of an earlier history” (2007, p. 200).
He continues in the same vein stating that: “by foregrounding aspects of the past with
which the disparate members of society can feel connection, and by molding these aspects
into a coherent vision of society’s past development as a collectivity, they supply a mental
basis for the social collaboration in which the members of a society are expected to engage”
(p. 203). This last statement is especially relevant to understand how alternative historical
recounts that attempt to build a non-hegemonical narrative of a society from subaltern’s
point of view function. To understand this, the distinction Cubitt makes between social
memory (the process to build and sustain collective memories) and collective memory (the
actual narrative or construction) is very useful. If, ultimately, every collective memory is a
narrative devised by remapping aspects and elements of a society’s history, then this
formation can be expanded and include external elements mapped as own in a coherent
narrative in order to ease the social collaboration and/or identification. The European Union
is an example of these big identificatory narratives that act as a supplement for
collaborative purposes. It can be said that, in the same way, an excluding narrative can be
and has been devised for political purposes. The former Yugoslavia and other former
countries can be an example of this: new narratives can build identification among
members of recently formed countries, while they foster segregation and exclusion towards
outsiders.
Therefore, if one of the quandaries discussed here (but also in other works that put
into question the notion of Latin American identity) concerns the pertinence and validity of
an identity discourse that attempts to include a variety of different groups, which is the
38
same predicament exposed in Diana Palaversich’s work about Memoria del fuego, Cubitt’s
account casts light on this issue. It puts forward the fact that members of societies (even
members of small groups) are anyway disparate, and memory remapping should be able to
supply with identificatory elements for small groups as much as for bigger ones, from
nation citizens to extra-national communities. Think about members of a religious
community spread around the globe, who share collective memories even if they do not
share a proper space and time. In this sense, a “valid”, coherent, collective memory will
stress aspects that are relevant to the members of such community, so that they can feel
engaged and pertaining.
1.4.“Constituting” memory
Communities are shifting and collective memories do not remain static through
time; instead, they relate dynamically with present times, re-signifying past events
according to present incidents and eliciting projections to the future. Hence, a triangular
relation is drawn. Metaphorically speaking, while the present serves as a frame for mapping
the past, the past is pregnant from a forthcoming future, and the future acts as a womb for a
retrospective past.
To discuss how present, past and future relate in the formation of collective
memories, the French sociologist Henri Desroche underscores the relationship between
collective memory, collective consciousness and collective imagination. He explains that
the possibility to put into question and think about past events (even if they were not
experienced personally), summons shared images of the past that carry out specific social
functions. Desroche discusses Halbwachs’ argument about the capacity of collective
memory to reconstruct significant past events in accordance with contemporary concerns, a
core aspect in Assmann’s paper too. He concludes that collective memory “tends to be a
constituting memory as much as and more than a constituted memory” (1979 [1973], p.
152). The term “constituting memory” makes explicit how memory is not a fixed narrative,
but instead, it is continually constituting, shaping past events in coherent, identificatory
accounts, and mobilizing the ways in which people signify and build up their social reality.
The notion of constituting memory proves revealing to define the particular character of a
39
memory project such as Memoria del fuego and to explain the difference between a
memory project and a historiographic account. It lies in the way projects are intended to
affect and change a prospective becoming and collective self-images, more than in the way
they are aimed to depict and relate past events or adamant social realities.
As can be seen, collective memory turns out to be a more complex and prominent
notion than the mere account of traumatic past events by groups of people. Its capacity to
affect the future and have an influence over the self-perception of communities is a fertile
field to reflect on the subalterns’ strives to institute their own accounts of the past and their
own self-image. It also explains the relevance of alternative memory accounts, such as
Memoria del fuego. Collective memory can, therefore, be defined as a structure of
collective knowledge that has the potential to be reconstructed and remapped in accordance
to contemporary and time-moving frames of reference. It also has the power to affect and
constitute present and future practices and, thus, to dynamically outline the self-image of a
community, being one of the most crucial elements of identity formation.
1.5. History and memory
History & Memory. Studies in Representation of the Past is a journal published by the
Indiana University Press that “explores the manifold ways in which the past shapes the
present and is shaped by present perceptions.”21
This short first description of the journal echoes our definition of collective memory;
however, it refers to the studies of both history and memory, without problematizing a
distinction between them both. Therefore, instead of making the two terms contend in a
battle camp, the journal apparently makes them play in the same team as a dynamic
couplet. The abstract continues as follows:
The journal focuses in a wide range of questions relating to the formation of
historical consciousness and collective memory, the role of historical memory
in modern and premodern cultures, and the relationship between historical
research and images of the past in different societies and cultures.
History and Memory aims to explore not only official representations of the
past in public monuments and commemorations but also the role of oral
21
Via Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_and_memory/
40
history and personal narratives, the influence of the new media in shaping
historical consciousness and the new relevance of history writing for
emerging nations and social conflicts. [Emphasis added.]
Even though no clarification about the contrast or borders between history and
memory can be found in this abstract, some hints about their relationship can be
distinguished. Whereas “history” alludes to “official representations of past”, the coupling
“history and memory” acts as a compound term that introduces the study of phenomena
such as “oral history”, “historical consciousness” and “personal narratives”. It seems that
history and memory, more than being two poles of the representation of past, constitute a
dynamo that fosters new approaches to study past and its relation to people’s subjectivities.
Geoffrey Cubitt states that memory has become one of the central preoccupations of
the historical scholarship. There is a growing interest of social historians “in gaining access
to the experiential aspects of social processes and situations, […] the methodological
engagement with the mental and social dynamics of remembering [and] the working and
interactions of orality and literacy” (2007, p. 1). Linking memory and history is seen as the
“fresh air” to explore the more “lively” and vivid experiences of people and their past.
Before the memory turn, historiography, as history’s discourse, had already been
problematized by historical theorists, semiotists and philosophers of language alike. In
“The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory” (1984), Hayden White
discusses the narrative mode of representation in historical discourse. He contests the
premise that what distinguishes “historical” from “fictional” narration is the content (the
story of “real”, not invented, events) and that the discourse is simply a simulacrum, a
representation of the structure and processes of such events. From this perspective, when
narrative mode of representation effectively resembles the “happening” of the events
referred, it can be taken as a true account.
White challenges this assumption by quoting Hegel’s statement that “it is the state
which first presents a subject matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but
involves the production of such History in the very progress of its own being.” 22 This way,
the content of historical discourse is not the representation of “real events”, but the relation
between present and past that allowed the historical narration to be constituted as it is and,
22
Hegel (1970), Vorlesungen über der Philosophie der Gesichte, Frankfurt am Main, p. 83, cit. pos. White
(1984), p. 4.
41
moreover, a political interest of human communities that made possible a historical
consciousness to spring and, with it, a narrative mode for its representation.
Nevertheless, if history, just as memory, is the peculiar relationship of past and
present that allows a historical consciousness to find its own narrative mode, where, if there
is such, does the distinction between them lie?
If we speak about historiography or we speak about collective memory in the specific
sense that Cubitt confers –the fiction or narration of collectives’ awareness of the past–, we
are ultimately talking about a discourse: the particular kind that recounts past events.
Roland Barthes asserted in “The Discourse of History” (1981) that, because of its
performative, uttered, “speech-act”, linguistic nature, “historical discourse is in its essence
a form of ideological elaboration, or to put it more precisely, an imaginary elaboration”,
which process of signifying aims to “fill out” the meaning of History. Therefore, “the
historian is not so much a collector of facts as a collector or relater of signifiers; that is to
say, he organizes them with the purpose of establishing positive meaning and filling the
vacuum of pure, meaningless series” (p. 16-17). In consequence, what constitutes the
“difference” between history and memory is not the kind of discourse (historical narrative,
in the end) but the fact that the former is mediated by the meaning and encoding bestowed
by a particular historian. Memory, in contrast, is expected to be unmediated by any
particular agency, and is instead located in a collective awareness or knowledge. This by
any means implies that memory is not arranged in the form of a discourse and, hence, that
memory has more a direct relation with extrinsic referent than history. As indicated before,
both memory and history, are the same kind of discourse; namely, “imagined” or
“ideological elaborations” and forms of narration that create meaning instead of referring to
it (poiesis more than noiesis). However, the meaning produced in memory accounts shifts
and changes with the collectivity that supports it, is reframed and reformulated, whereas a
historical agency, most probably formulated by a scholar, cannot be manipulated by a
collectivity but only within a metahistorical level.
If all this is true, then why is Memoria del fuego a memory project instead of a
historiographic one? Is not Galeano himself acting as historical agent, and moreover, as a
42
historien23? He, indeed, is. In order to write Memoria del fuego, he gathered, from more
than 1,000 sources, information, data and discourses that would aid him to recount the
history of the Americas from the perspective of the subalterns. Subsequently, his objective
is not only to show, to designate an extrinsic referent, but to create a discursive meaning, to
perform in the same way as historical discourse is being performed. Yet, the tension
between memory and history in Memoria del fuego does exist, not as an opposition, but as
a relationship of a more complex nature. In effect, memory and history are both
historiographical agencies, but the distinction lies, precisely, in the kind of meaning they
constitute.
The memory turn that Cubitt described in his book is evident in the increasing
amount of papers and books devoted to the study of memory and history. This is probably
because of the awareness that focusing into memory issues might ultimately provide new
approaches to historical studies. Consequently, the relationship between history and
memory has more lately been not one of opposition but of supplement. As Cubitt posed it,
one of the manifold possible relations between history and memory is the role of the latter
in historical processes.
The interest in this dynamic has been not only on the side of theorists of history from
the “Old World”, but also from writers who, from a postcolonial (postoccidental)
perspective, see in the reflection of memory an occasion to examine identity issues and
build a position from within. In the case of Latin America, it is relevant the Latin American
forum “Memory and Identity” in Montevideo that, since 2004, seeks to establish a
pragmatic interdisciplinary dialogue that enables, via the combination of perspectives and
knowledges (saberes) from different social and ethnic groups, the construction of a new,
integral project. In the theoretical realm, there is the previously mentioned work of Roberto
Manero and Maricela Soto, “Memoria colectiva y procesos sociales”, which tries to
examine the relation between collective memory and specific Latin American social
processes, such as post-dictatorship political projects in Chile, the zapatistas’ movement in
Mexico and legal actions after the “desaparecidos” of Argentinian dictatorship.
23
To read more about the concept of “historien”, see Paul Ricoeur (1981), Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences.
43
Now, even though Galeano does not aim to produce a theoretical basis for his trilogy,
there is nevertheless the suggestion of a complex relationship between memory and history,
very similar to what has been stated in the abstract of the journal History & Memory or in
Cubitt’s words. In the Prologue to Memoria del fuego, Galeano uses the two terms, history
and memory, with a clear demarcation, to relate the situation of historical agency and
memory in Latin America:
History has been deprived of its voice, of its life, and dumb, lies imprisoned in
schoolbooks, museums and scholarly texts, buried underneath statues and monuments;
silent and mute. A memory account –Memoria del fuego– could retrieve history its breath,
its becoming. Memory is the lively experience of every group and subgroup of America; it
is the different voices of people; it is every victory and defeat and what is neither victory
nor defeat; it is the values of the people and their spirit and their memories and their myths
for the future. However, Latin America’s memory has also been stolen. Historians narrate a
dead history, a deaf history –historiography–, condemning Latin America to an amnesic
state in which, with a buried, hijacked memory, it is unable to build its own history and
accepts, submittedly, a settled historical narration where it fails to recognize itself. A
history that fails to provide people a ground where they can recognize themselves is a
history without memory. Memoria del fuego, then, attempts to be a historiographical project
where the memory of Latin America is essential, considering that for Galeano memory
connects historic approaches to the actual, spirited, experience of people.
*
2. Identity: a general characterization
Identity is one of the most problematic, as well as intriguing, concepts of interest in the
field of cultural studies. To talk about collective identity is always delicate. Either one
assumes that a group of people shares a similar, unifying and integral image of themselves,
or one refuses to accept that identities are unified and immutable, and instead explores the
44
possibility that societies develop other kind of essential (or inessential, as Giorgio
Agamben proposed24) joints.
The question of identity has been explored from many angles; from psychoanalysis
to feminist critique, from sociology to anthropology, turning into a central point on the
debates of post-colonial and cultural studies. The interdependence between memory and
identity has been established already, but why transforming and grounding an analysis of
the memory project in Eduardo Galeano’s work necessarily into an analysis of its identity
discourse? Is identity really that important?
Stuart Hall asks himself a similar question in his article “Who needs ‘identity’?”
(2000). If identity is such a problematic concept, what kind of knowledge are we trying to
gain by delving into the identity notion that a writer such as Galeano bears in his literary
work? Why is it so important to understand questions of identity and why do people insist
in proposing a debate that embraces this notion? Hall argues that the recurrence of the
question of identity “seems to be in the attempt to rearticulate the relationship between
subjects and discursive practices” (2000, p. 16). Indeed, to fully understand the implications
of a memory project, we should pay attention to the subjects involved and their relation to
different frames of reference and discursive practices. Identity cannot be just defined as the
recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics, if those characteristics are
rooted in specific historical conditions and discursive formations that demand from subjects
allegiances and engagements that change in time. That is why identity formation can be
analyzed from the hegemonic discursive practices that consolidate unifying nationalisms,
but also from subalterns’ strives to make their identities (symbols, traditions, their own
discursive practices) visible and recognized as political subjects. This includes not only the
subjects alluded to in Memoria del fuego, but also those to whom the book is addressed, as
24
Giorgio Agamben proposed the idea of an “inessential” community. In La comunidad que viene (1996) he
tried to prove and show the possibility of the existence of a being that belongs to a group and does not belong
at the same time. He called it “the example”. In this theorization, Agamben reflects on what is common and
what is singular at the same time. The singularity would necessarily have to be “whatever”, “whoever”,
because no singularity is essential to a community and, at the same time, singularities would represent
openness to the possibilities and the future: “Decisiva es aquí la idea de una comunidad inesencial, de un
convenir que no concierne en modo alguno a una esencia. El tener lugar, el comunicar a las singularidades el
atributo de la extensión, no las une en la esencia, sino que las dispersa en la existencia.” (1996, p. 22). What is
common, writes Agamben, cannot constitute the essence of the singular subject, because the common is that
which is happening.
45
well as not only the discursive practices “depicted”, but also, and more than anything, the
intended practices.
Insofar, the relevance of identitarian discursive practices from a memory project has
been remarked, but a conceptual exploration of the notion of identity is still missing. What
then, is identity?
As stated before, there are two initial paths to explore the question of identity: the
essentialist one and the “constructivist” one. The former stems from the Aristotelian
tradition that conceives identity as one of the fundamental principles of the being. This path
asserts that there are essential characteristics that members of a society share and which
distinguish them from the rest. “Sameness”, thus, is given only with respect to the other, the
outsider, the abject, and more than the sign of a constituted unity and similarity, identities
are the product of the marking of difference and exclusion (Hall, 2000).
Closer to social psychology and psychoanalysis that structured the feminist and
performative theory of gender constitution (see Butler, 2003) is the “constructivist” view,
which asserts that identity is not a given innate essence but a social process of construction
(see, for example, Larrain, 2000; Hall, 2000; Giddens, 1991). This perspective is, in my
view, much richer in explaining 1) inconsistencies between the image (identity) of a
collectivity from the hegemonic power and the self-image the given collectivity strives to
install; 2) how collective identities can overlap and are not mutually exclusive; 3) identity
formation as a discursive practice, and 4) identity formation as a performative project.
Stuart Hall explored this way and defined identities as “the points of temporary attachment
to the subject positions which discourse practices construct for us” (1995, p. 5-6). This
definition, as we can see, goes in the same line with stressing the relationship between
subjects and discursive practices. Identities in this sense are viewed as the “meeting point”
(Hall, 2000) between the discourses and practices that “interpellate” social subjects, and the
subjectivities –self-images in a complex sense– that subjects construct, or, even more, the
processes of construction of such self-images.
To explore this perspective and definition of identity, it is necessary to acknowledge
three constitutive points connected with one another. Firstly, that identities are imaginary
constructions, in the sense that they are not “things” we are born with, but instead they arise
from characteristics given and transformed in relation to discourse and representation (Hall,
46
1995). In this point it is inevitable to bear in mind the influential notion of “imagined
communities” proposed by Benedict Anderson (2006). Anderson argues that while
nationality is the “most universally legitimate value” in the political life of our time, it is an
“imagined community” in the sense that it is not based on an everyday face-to-face
interaction among its members, but on imagined and consensual characteristics that
members agree upon. Accordingly, identities function the same way as nations: they are
containers and producers of meaning, for we only get to know, for example, what “being
Mexican” is because there has been a discourse on “Mexicanity” that implicitly or
explicitly tells us and represents the values and characteristics attributed to this notion. The
same happens with Latinamericanism, a trait that we will explore later in this section. Even
the more “objective” or “grounded” criteria, such as physical territory, language or genetic
inheritance, are only representations that function as signs within specific discursive
practices.
Secondly, we must agree that this imaginary construction called “identity” enables
subjects to recognize adherences (or exclusions) from social groups. Therefore, if a number
of subjects share an imaginary construction of themselves, they will feel as belonging to a
group. Collective identity is thus forged. Consequently, it is possible to understand
“culture” as a web of identities25 we are embedded in, and “identity” as a system of cultural
representations. In addition, some would say that since meaning is generated through
relations of différance (see Derrida, 1968), signifiers generate meaning not in relation to
fixed objects but in relation to other signifiers (see Barker, 2011). In this way,
representations do not “represent” or depict concrete “realities” of the world as much as
language relations, defined by oppositions to other meanings. Representations, then, depict
ideas, and ideas move subjectivities, which accordingly elicit actual group formations.
Thirdly; these aforementioned representations and relations come in a two-folded
way: both, the representations we have of ourselves and the representations others build
about us: the way we are perceived by others. Jorge Larrain explains that “the others are
those whose opinions about us we internalize. But they are also those against whom the self
acquires its distinctiveness and specificity” (2000, p. 26). Not only are identities definitions
against the others, but they are also the struggle to be recognized by them (see Honneth,
25
A web of significances, would Clifford Geertz (1973) assert.
47
1995). This struggle is so important that it embodies a political movement, the political
movement per se. Politics, according to Jacques Rancière (1996; 2001), is the strain for
rendering visible as political subject by interfering with the hegemonic logic of a State
apparatus26: the strife of subaltern identities to become hegemonic themselves.
These three characteristics stand for a constructivist approach of identity formation.
An individual, as part of a society, is always surrounded and interpellated by discursive
practices, and the way he reacts and gives sense to them frames and conducts his identity.
Giddens, particularly, emphasizes the view of identity as a project in construction: “selfidentity is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of traits, possessed by the individual. It
is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography” (1991,
p. 53). His view of identity is derived from his theory of structuration27 and his assertion
that structure and agency are interdependent: individuals affect their society as much as
they are constrained by it.
Collective identity is not just the sum of many individual identities, in the same way
that collective memory is not the sum of various individual memories. Instead, it is an
imaginarium shared by a group of people that, nevertheless, admits differences and
fragmentations, pluralities and heterogeneities28. Ernesto Laclau even developed the
concept of “dislocation” (1990) to express the way modern societies “are cut through by
different social divisions and social antagonisms which produce a variety of different
‘subject positions’” (see in Hall, 1996, p.600). Subject positions –identities- can be
articulated together not because they are unified, but due to certain “nodal points of
articulation” that allow interpretations derived from representations concur. Nevertheless,
Laclau stresses that this articulation is always partial and the structure of identity remains
open to change.
In this thesis I want to propose not only that identity is a process of becoming, but
also that it gets performatively constituted. I bring the theory of performative constitution
26
Rancière states in “Ten Thesis on Politics” that: “If there is something 'proper' to politics, it consists
entirely in this relationship which is not a relationship between subjects, but one between two contradictory
terms through which a subject is defined” Therefore, “[p]olitical struggle is not a conflict between well
defined interest groups; it is an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the community in
different ways” (in Theory & Event. Vol. 5, N° 3, 2001.)
27
See A. Giddens (1984). The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
28
I am using “heterogeneity” here in its lax and general acceptation. However, it does echo the heterogeneity
proposed by Cornejo Polar that we will review in the final chapter of this thesis.
48
of identities from Judith Butler’s famous theory of performative constitution of gender
(1990) (however without entirely assuming it, for many aspects of it are not of this thesis’
concern) and surely from J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words (1955).
Butler argues in Gender Trouble (1990) that sex is shown to be a performatively
enacted signification, meaning by this that gender –and thus identity– is constituted by
language. Discourse does gender, not the other way around, for there is no “I” outside
language. Butler, as we can see, goes more radical than Giddens: she does not acknowledge
a reciprocal interplay between subject and action, but instead argues that “culturally
intelligible subjects are the effects rather than the causes that conceal their workings” (p.
145, emphasis added). With “culturally intelligible” she is referring to the act of generating
a “coherent practice” through the matrix of coherent norms. She adds that “the ‘coherence’
and ‘continuity’ [unified and integral identity] of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytic
features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of
intelligibility” (p. 17). I do not intend to go that far in my examination and outlining of the
concept of identity. When discussing identity I aim not to explore the way subjects embody
their identity but instead the process of building and devising an identity discourse. To
argue that in Galeano’s Memoria del fuego identity is not only seen as a project but also as
a performance, I want to go back to the point where Butler’s and J. L. Austin’s ideas meet:
the way actions are performed through language.
Butler states, also in Gender Trouble, that “identity is performatively constituted by
the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (p. 25). She refers to the way
individuals, by enacting an identitarian ‘persona’, are actually performing a repeated
“stylization of the body” that will eventually produce “the appearance of substance” (p.33).
Even though Butler was thinking in a bodily exercise when speaking about performance
(daily life as a stage and daily action as a representation), her argument is issued from the
theory of speech acts of John Austin and the view of language as the locus where actions
take place. In short, Austin argues that a speech act is an utterance that has a performative
function in itself (to request, to promise, to warn, to prohibit, to exclude, etc.) Austin
distinguishes three types of speech acts: locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and
perlocutionary acts. A locutionary act is simply the performance of an utterance. An
illocutionary act, on the other hand, is the performance of an act apart from the utterance
49
itself; it is the proper speech act: when I say “I promise I will read the novel”, apart from
doing the action of speaking (or even informing) I am performing the act of making a
promise: an act is sealed just in the very moment that I utter the words. Finally,
perlocutionary acts have the purpose of affecting the interlocutor in some way: to impress
him, convince him, etcetera; they can be seen as an extension of the illocutionary act.
When speaking about the performative aspect of identity I want to imply that, by
means of language –of discourse-, an identity idea is carried out. Therefore, identity is not
just an ongoing project, but a construction, an assemblage that occurs while being uttered.
If we keep on reflecting about the concept of identity due to its relevance to show how the
relationship between subjects and discursive practices is articulated, this performative
notion of identity shows us how discourse enables a remapping of its imagined community
not by depicting or representing it, but by performing a projection of it into the future and,
why not?, a retrojection into the past. Pierre Bourdieu writes in “L’identité et la
representation” that:
[L]a logique spécifique du monde social [est] cette «réalité» qui est le lieu
d'une lutte permanente pour définir la «réalité». Saisir à la fois ce qui est
institué, sans oublier qu'il s'agit seulement de la résultante, à un moment
donné du temps, de la lutte pour faire exister ou «inexister» ce qui existe, et
les représentations, énoncés performatifs qui prétendent à faire advenir ce
qu'ils énoncent, restituer à la fois les structures objectives et le rapport à ces
structures. (1980, p.67)
As we can see, according to this argument, identity and memory are not just
complementary but also parallel concepts that go hand in hand when considered
performative constructions.
Before discussing the specific case of Latin American identity, I want to summarize
a three-folded possible acceptation of “collective identity” that has been surmised along this
journey. First, identity as the discursive narrative (an integral and coherent narrative made
of discursive practices) constructed and spoken from a power center to a social group, and
which serves to stabilize and reproduce a society’s self-image. Secondly, identity as the
never-ending process of self-definition that occurs while the individual or the collective
constructs and enacts his/her/it self-image. Thirdly, the idea of identity that regards the
sense of belonging and exclusion and which is used to compose (and strive for) a new,
50
recognized, narrative. This distinction serves to point out, on the one hand, the discursive
narrative of Latinoamericanism that was institutionalized in the seventies, and, on the other
hand, the strive of subalterns for identity, which leads to the construction and performance
of alternative accounts of the past, where subalterns (or anyone, of course) can be mirrored,
being able to recognize themselves.
*
3. Latin American identity. Where from? Where to?
One thinks of identity whenever one is not sure of where one belongs; that is, one
is not sure how to place oneself among the evident variety of behavioral styles
and patterns, and how to make sure that people around would accept this
placement as right and proper, so that both sides would know how to go on in
each other’s presence. Identity is a name given to the scape sought from that
uncertainty.
(Zygmunt Bauman, 1996)
Jorge Larrain (2000) asserts that there has always existed a consciousness of Latin
American identity, articulated alongside national identities. This might be due to the fact
that Latin American countries share not only a similar history, from Spanish colonization,
independence wars and similar processes of modernization, but they also share language
and a somewhat similar cluster of traditions. Larrain sees signs of this consciousness in
common elements that have been growing in the last decades: 1) Authors who assume that
there is a Latin American identity either by directly describing its characteristics or by
analyzing a particular national identity and extending the results to other countries. 2) Many
cultural artifacts such as literary works, music and television programs depict places or
people that are archetypical, (intendedly) universally representative of the Latin American.
3) Latin American cultural production has had an important and widespread continental
impact, thanks, to a large extent, to broadcasting media, such as cultural magazines and
television programs. 4) A discursively constructed Latin America spoken from Europe,
rooted in the European popular imaginary. Larrain argues that “the access to these versions
51
of identity and their internalization by the Latin American people was secured by three
centuries of colonial domination” (2000, p. 3).
The term “Latin America” was coined, according to Leopoldo Zea (1977), in 1861,
when the French writer L. M. Tisserand used it in an article published by the magazine La
revue des races latines to refer to the group of territories under the colonization of Spain,
Portugal and France in the Southern America. After this usage, it was primarily employed
by Michel Chevalier, one of the ideologists of Napoleón III, to propose a contingent that
covered all Romanic speaking territories, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and could
effectively oppose the northern growing forces. Juan Carlos Morales (2012) writes: “Para
brindar algún marco de legitimidad a sus aspiraciones hegemónicas sobre Iberoamérica,
Francia requería de un nexo de identidad que la ligara a la misma. La tesis ‘panlatina’, que
tenía como ideólogo a Michel Chevalier, constituyó la vía natural para ello” (n.p.) 29. The
term would erase the Spanish connotation that “Hispanoamérica” had, and replace it with a
more neutral, still homogenizing name that could cover all Southern American countries.
An interesting fact to be remarked here is that America was primarily conceived as
the Other for Europe. This has been noted and reflected upon by many authors. Carlos J.
Alonso (1998) writes that from the “Discovery” onwards the New World was defined by
Europe by its capacity to amaze, its exoticism and a cognitive gap that “made possible
European appropriation of the recently discovered lands” (p. 7). Eventually, and after the
Independence wars, the operation was inversed: American countries assumed themselves as
subjects of history and started to call into question whether they should follow European
modernization processes or just keep a distance and find their own paths. Jorge Larrain,
then, asserts that modernity has been conceived as an eminently European phenomenon
and, thus, Latin American identity has, throughout history, been constructed in opposition
to it. European colonization was the subject from which America had to grow apart, also in
an ideologically sense: struggling to build a thought of one's own and, additionally, by
means of practices, habits, and cultural production that were markedly different from that
of the Old Continent. Hence, in the constitution of an identity that could be called “Latin
29
In a lecture taught at the 6th Latin American Congress of Political Science (2012), Morales compared
historically and geopolitically the terms “Hispanoamerican”, “Latin American” and “Panlatinoamerican”.
52
American”, the Other was essentially Europe (and the United States after the Second World
War): the colonizing countries and the economic models they wanted to impose.
The term “Latin America” enacts an attempt to conjoint a number of territories that,
in spite of sharing cultural, historical and idiosyncratic characteristics, are, unavoidably,
different. Nonetheless, a word has different meaning depending on whom the speaker is
and the purposes it serves to, and more than tracking the vicissitudes of a term, our
endeavor here is to clarify the way it was condensed into the spirit of a collective (Latin
American) identity.
3.1. Latin America as an imagined community
Cultural identities work by producing meanings and stories with which individuals
can identify. Independence movements across the continent needed those meanings and
stories to provoke nationalist feelings that would settle strong demarcations against
European domination. In the case of Mexico, for example, the image of the Virgin of
Guadalupe (which represented all those that were born in Mexican lands) served as a strong
banner that connected indigenous people, mestizos and creoles in a single American –nonEuropean- identity.
Latinoamericanism as an identity discourse saw its brightest light when the Cuban
writer José Martí conceived the union of Latin American countries as a libertarian move
from colonization, based on the recovery of the Pre-Columbian past of the Americas and a
thorough knowledge of political and social reality. In his famous essay, Nuestra América
(1891), Martí called Latin American nations to join against Spanish colonization and North
American imperialism (“El desdén del vecino formidable, que no la conoce, es el peligro
mayor de nuestra América”). The essay is addressed to every (Latin) American citizen, in
an attempt to retrieve the name of America to the whole continent, where it belongs, and
snatch it from the hands of a single, monopolizing, country —the United States of America.
The spirit that floated among the lines of Nuestra América served as a banner and
inspiration for the upcoming Cuban Revolution. The decades of the sixties and seventies in
Latin America were of a terrible turmoil given the wave of military dictatorships that
battered the continent as a consequence of the political polarization of the world that the
53
Cold War produced. Neoliberalism was forcibly introduced into Latin American countries,
and those governments that resisted and appealed to more socialist political practices were
beaten by military coups financed by the C.I.A., political arrestments, assassinations and
prosecutions. In this period many artists and intellectuals were exiled and forced to think
and write from foreign lands: sometimes from other Latin American countries that were in
peace at the time, some others from European cities that harbored them as refugees. Latin
American writers, especially those who were in exile or were opposed to military regimes
financed by the C.I.A., started to harvest the idea that a joint, unified, Latin America, as
José Martí envisioned it, could be the strongest way to take against imperialism.
Even though a sort of Latin American identity consciousness started much before
the Cuban Revolution, its victory certainly heightened the spirit and helped to give
Latinoamericanism some kind of substance. Alliances between Latin American countries
started to be a serious and committed program, and in February of 1960 the first Latin
American integration organism, the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA)
appeared30. The institutionalization of an intellectual Latin American community also
became quite relevant, for intellectuals were attributed a huge responsibility within the
liberation program31. In 1965 the Latin American Community of Writers was founded, and
the next year the first congress took place in Arica, Chile. As a result, being Latin
American meant more than a birth certificate; it entailed an active engagement with a
revolutionary process and an ideological commitment against colonization and imperialism.
According to Claudia Gilman (1999), one of the most interesting and relevant happenings
of this epoch was that for the first time the Latin American community was less “imagined”
and developed an empirical, concrete linkage. Artists and intellectuals had the possibility to
meet their foreign homologous in transnational encounters, congresses or due to political
asylums in time of dictatorships. Cultural magazines helped to spread the literary work, not
just of main foci of production (such as Argentina, Mexico and Chile, for example), but
also of those countries and even cultures that had been systematically neglected32.
30
For a complete compendium of Latin American integration organisms, check: Mathis, Ferdinand John.
"Economic Integration in Latin America". Austin: Bureau of Business Research, 1969. 3.
31
Claudia Gilman (1999) has a very exciting work about the role of the intellectual during the revolutionary
decades of the sixties and seventies in Latin America.
32
And at this point the determining contribution of the cultural magazine Crisis, whose director was Eduardo
Galeano between 1973 and 1976, is worth to be mentioned. Crisis was important not only because it gave a
54
The institutionalization of Latin American community was certainly one of the most
notorious impacts of Latinoamericanism after the Cuban Revolution, but it also constituted
a marked discursive practice and a mechanism of discursive control.33 The Cuban
Revolution and its revolutionary promise was a topic in literary and criticism texts.
Additionally, it entailed an ideological position: to write from the revolutionary
Latinoamericanism was a duty (either explicit or implicit) of left-wing writers. Therefore,
while Latin American identity was an outspoken topic (see, for example, texts by Pablo
Neruda, Mario Benedetti or Roberto Fernández Retamar), it also constituted the
acknowledgement of a clear discursive practice. Thus, the issue of Latin American identity
brought out the relationship between subjects and discursive practices: either you were in or
you were out, and the belonging to this community was constantly contested34. This is not
surprising. As Larrain asserts, “for identity to become an issue, a period of instability and
crisis, a threat to old-established ways, seems to be required” (p. 8). Questions of identity
are important, both for ideological state apparatuses35 and for individuals, when
communities’ margins are re-traced. Then, societies need unification and the meaning of
traditional symbols and institutions is challenged and re-considered.
place to popular and indigenous cultural manifestations, but also because it acted as a space of communication
for contributors and readers. In the structure of the magazine (or the “poetics”, as I think it should be called)
one can find an analogy to what will later be Galeano’s narrative work, Memoria del fuego included. About
this, I will discuss a little further in the next chapter.
33
See Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du Discourse, 1970.
34
The famous case of the eviction of the poet Heberto Padilla is an example of this. Padilla’s prize winning
poetry book Fuera de juego (1968) elicited suspicion for being critical to the regime of Fidel Castro. Padilla
and his wife were arrested in their home at La Habana in 1971. After 38 days of confinement, Padilla
pronounced a historical discourse at the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, in which he retracted
everything said or alluded in his poem in such an obviously self-denigrating way that a dozen of writers
(among others, Simone de Beauvoir, Fernando Benítez, Italo Calvino, Marguerite Duras, Carlos Fuentes, the
Goytisolo brothers, Carlos Monsivais, José Emilio Pacheco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Resnais, José
Revueltas, and Juan Rulfo) signed a letter addressed to Fidel Castro where they expressed outrage to the selfincriminatory performance of Padilla, which “was a remembrance of the most sordid moments of the
Stalinism” (“Creemos un deber comunicarle nuestra vergüenza y nuestra cólera. El lastimoso texto de la
confesión que ha firmado Heberto Padilla sólo puede haberse obtenido por medio de métodos que son la
negación de la legalidad y la justicia revolucionarias […]” the complete letter can be found in the
commemorative
edition
of
Fuera
de
juego
[Ediciones
Universal,
1998]). The
site
http://www.habanaelegante.com/Spring2001/Barco.html gathered some documents related to this case, from
the verdict at the UNEAC literary competition, to the declarations of Fidel Castro and Heberto Padilla.
Another example of such a fragile and questioned belonging to the Latin American (revolutionary)
community is found in some interviews made to the writer Julio Cortázar. In an interview by Alberto Carbone
in the magazine Crisis (1973), Cortázar is questioned upon the fact that his latest book, El libro de Manuel,
whose topic was repression in Latin America, was written from Paris and not from Argentina, where all the
turmoil was happening. (Crisis, Buenos Aires, June 1973, N°2, p. 11).
35
I am indeed alluding to Althuser’s thesis.
55
3.2. Populism
Populism was (and continues to be in a great extent) an aspect of great importance
for Latin American identity construction, especially in the aforementioned decades, but also
during the twenties, thirties and forties. The Chilean sociologist Fernando Calderón
believes that “populism was the most genuine social and cultural creation in Latin America
in the twentieth century” (1995, p. 58). It integrated “masses” to national modernization(s)
and gave industrialization a “Latin American aura” that made the integration and expansion
of modernity processes easier to the disparate nature of Latin American societies.
Furthermore, populism gave prominence to the image of the worker, the housewife and –of
course– the revolutionary as representative figures of Latin American identity in an attempt
to bring together social groups and minorities that had been hitherto relegated. Santiago
Castro-Gómez writes: “este proyecto se dirigió hacia la formación de un Estado capaz de
incorporar las diferentes culturas en un solo ‘sentimiento nacional’ que debería reflejarse en
todos los ámbitos de la vida social […] Ya el problema no era, como en el siglo XIX,
construir la nación, sino asegurar la unidad espiritual de la misma” (1996, p.69). In his
analysis of discourses of identity in Latin America, Castro-Gómez also stresses how, within
populism, the continental identity was supported on the notions of “people” and “nation”,
which were pivotal in devising an identity that included the “excluded” under other
authoritarian regimes. Castro-Gómez analyses the “filosofía de la liberación” of Enrique
Dussel and Carlos Cullen and describes the prominence that the concept of “nation” has for
the Volksgeist –the people’s consciousness, or the cultural identity of a society–. For both
authors –Dussel and Cullen–, only the masses, the people, the subaltern, those who exist in
the periphery and are the metaphysical Other, can liberate the rest from oppression and
present a real alternative for future humanity given their “fundamentally different ethos”.
Under this view, “la ‘periferia’ es una experiencia esencialmente telúrica, firmemente
anclada en el núcleo ético-mítico que define la identidad del pueblo” (Castro-Gómez, 1996,
p. 74).
56
3.3. The search for a Latin American “essence”
When talking about theoretical conceptions of identity conceived in Latin America,
Jorge Larrain classifies authors in “essentialists” and “constructivists”, the same way as
discussed in the section about general definition(s) of identity. The stance of Cullen, Dussel
and other intellectuals akin to the “filosofía de la liberación” was essentialist in the sense
that they searched for a “true” identity that lied under the notion of “people”. However,
they were not the only ones. José Vasconcelos’ famous essay, La raza cósmica (1925), is
probably one of the most clear –reductionist and apologetic– examples of a desired unified
identity and “race” in Latin America. Vasconcelos proclaims Latin American “race” as the
more synthetic (and, thus, strongest) of all, born from the mixture of Hispanic, indigenous
and African cultures, and which would ultimately “reveal the universal age of humanity”.
Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, builds up a unified racial myth in an attempt to
strengthen the ideological power of Latin American nation states during the decade that
followed the Mexican Revolution, regarded by Castro-Gómez as the first link in the chain
of populisms that had a major influence into the Latin American twentieth century thought.
Nonetheless, essentialist conceptions of identity continued in the subsequent
decades. Larrain shows that during the postwar expansion (1950 – 1970), and even more,
during the dictatorship decades, Latin America was defined in opposition to Europe, either
in positive or in negative terms, and authors tried to find and characterize the “essence” or
“originality” of Latin America. The Venezuelan Ernesto Mayz Valenilla (1957, cit.pos
Larrain), for instance, thought that rather in Indian traditions, the essence of Latin America
was to be found in its inhabitants: their permanent dissatisfaction with the present and
expectations with regard to the future. Octavio Paz is another example of an essentialist
approach to Latin American identity. In El laberinto de la soledad (1950) Paz relates how
the Mexicans’ search for their origins, like orphans, “is at the same time a rejection of the
past, a condemnation of origins, a renegation of hybridity” (Larrain, 2000, p. 128-129). Paz,
thus, thinks that there is something “essentially Mexican” and Latin American: an
immutable and inescapable way of being in the world.
There is, additionally, the approach that José Joaquín Brunner called
“Macondismo”, present in Latin American literature and criticism. Macondismo makes
57
reference to the underlying assumption that “they (foreigners) will not be able easily to
understand us (the Latin Americans)” (1994, p. 172), and which had its peak in most of the
“Boom” literature.36
What Castro-Gómez regarded as an idealization of American ethics (1996, p. 84), is
termed by Jorge Larrain as “Neo-Indigenismo” (2000, p. 144). In both cases it refers to the
imperative of searching a “true Latin American ethos” in the Indigenous past and traditions,
as if they had remained immutable and pure throughout all these years. Larrain classifies
Eduardo Galeano as a neo-indigenist author given that “he writes that America must
discover itself by redeeming its most ancient traditions” (p. 145). In my view, this is a
simplistic reading of Galeano’s work. It is true that Galeano pays attention to indigenous
ethos, but when searching elements of Latin American memory and identity he goes
beyond, reaching not just modern times but also subjects that did not belong to an
indigenous past and came from distant lands, such as Albert Einstein and Tina Modotti. In
my view, more than arguing for the search of a static and millenary indigenous ethos,
Galeano’s stake is for a community that is dynamic and growing, that has its roots in
universal values, and mirrors present, past and future in a constituting commonality: a way
of being together that allows the political-social existence of the many as being many. But
this will be properly discussed in the next chapter.
3.4. Three “novel” conceptions of Latin American identity
In the last chapter of this thesis, I will discuss, in relation to Memoria del fuego, the
work of three authors that developed three rich concepts with regard to Latin American
culture: transculturation, hybridism and heterogeneity. Even though the works focused
explicitly in the literary field, those concepts sprung out of a reflection about historical
processes, and aimed to establish sociocultural categories for explaining peculiarities and
the specific way to be of Latin American literature. The three works coincide in the view of
Latin American sociocultural paradigm as product of complex historical processes of a
region that 1) has been object of continuous cultural (political, social, economic)
36
Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Mario Benedetti, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García
Márquez, José Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, et al.
58
interventions, assimilating many of them, and 2) where native cultural traditions are still a
relevant force, evident in manifestations such as music, literature, film, etc. Therefore,
instead of looking back for a lost “true identity”, they deconstructed the process itself,
emphasizing the questions of difference in Latin America. Regardless manifest differences
and contentions among the three, it is relevant that they all represented an important shift
into the way of conceiving Latin American identity. However these three concepts will be
introduced and discussed in the last chapter of this thesis, it was worth to mention here the
relevant shift with regard to the conception of Latin American identity that these paradigms
represented.
*
In this final section I outlined the genealogy of Latin American identity with an
emphasis in the dictatorship decades, in which Galeano’s thought, in Uruguay and later in
Buenos Aires, was formed. Consequently, even if arguing about a different way of
conceiving identity, it is undeniable that Galeano’s participation into the intellectual
program of the seventies and eighties had an impact on how he conceived Latin American
integration. Claudia Gilman, who has extensively studied this period, wrote that with the
victory of the Cuban Revolution, the “founding” of Latin America community meant a
“space of belonging” that attempted to link culture and politics in a concept capable of
erasing national borders (2003, p. 27). Galeano is, therefore, fittingly inserted into this
attempt, and we shall not neglect this important point when we analyze Memoria del fuego
in the next chapter.
Equally relevant to bear in mind in the next chapters is the idea of collective
memory as gathered knowledge shaped and arranged in relation to contemporary frames of
reference, which has the capacity to affect perceptions of the identity, past and future of a
community. A “memory project”, such as Memoria del fuego, would consist in remapping
historical events and relate them to values, symbols and images that the community
members feel as representing their lively experience. This is a performative project insofar
as it is created by means of language and it intends to affect people’s subjectivities, aimed
to delineate a new identity narrative. This identity narrative, more than a representation of
59
“reality”, is a continuous discursive struggle to redefine reality according to new
paradigms. An attempt to blur the hegemonic outlines of “the Latin American”, while retracing and highlighting the “common” of the community: to create new links based on
alternative –subaltern– identity, memory, relations and images.
60
III. The Recovery of a Hijacked Memory
*
1. Re-presence, communication and collective memory
After the previous discussion about collective memory and cultural identity, a big quandary
still haunts me: How can a single author –Galeano– attribute himself the agency of
speaking on behalf of a whole continent? If Galeano refuses to be called “a historian”, what
kind of voice does he sustain? Is Memoria del fuego a legitimate collective memory
project?
These questions refer me to Gayatri Spivak’s very legitimate questioning in “Can
the Subaltern Speak?” (1994) and the distinction between two different possible types of
representation: vertreten and darstellen. Spivak questioned the representational agency
(Vertretung) of scholars who endeavor to study and “speak for” the subaltern, the
“subalternologists”, the Gramscian “organic intellectuals”. Conversely, Darstellung speaks
about a representation as a “re-presence”: an embodiment of the problematics and
complexities of the subaltern without the presumption of absolute knowledge or exterior
objectivity. Through darstellen, the discursive agent assumes a political position within
knowledge production and instead of “portraying” the subalterns, strives to change the
politics of representation from within.
In the prologue to Memoria del fuego Galeano writes:
Yo no soy historiador. Soy un escritor que quisiera contribuir al rescate de
la memoria secuestrada de toda América, pero sobre todo de América
Latina, tierra despreciada y entrañable: quisiera conversar con ella,
compartirle los secretos, preguntarle de qué diversos barros fue nacida, de
qué actos de amor y violaciones viene. […] Yo no quise escribir una obra
objetiva. Ni quise ni podría. Nada tiene de neutral este relato de la historia.
Incapaz de distancia, tomo partido: lo confieso y no me arrepiento. (xv-xvi,
emphasis added)
61
If Galeano’s ultimate intention is to build and narrate an alternative history of the
Americas, where the subalterns37 –those who had been deprived of a place in history, a
political participation even– are protagonists of their own history, his program consists,
more than in representation, in dialogue, in an interlocution. For him, the way to recover
memory and retrieve it to history is through a “conversation” with Latin American telluric
forces: every person and object, word and thought that has been born there (“quisiera
conversar con ella, compartirle los secretos, preguntarle de qué diversos barros fue nacida,
de qué actos de amor y violaciones viene” [I, p. xv]). Moreover, his reluctance to attribute
himself the job of a historian (that of a proxy, a Vertreter) and openly claim that his
position is by no means objective, but instead politically committed, locates him more on
the side of Darstellung. His intention is to narrate an alternative history of the Americas,
but, instead of making a portrait, he aims to present and open a space of interaction, where
the narration is not unilateral, but multiple. And this is manifest in the varied kinds of
images and discourses he puts into dialogue, into communication. Communication is,
indeed, an important part of the collective re-framing of memory and, for Galeano, it is the
crucial core of culture.
1.1 Collective memory as communication
Between 1973 and 1976 Eduardo Galeano was the editorial director of the
Argentinian cultural magazine Crisis. The magazine was not born as a homogeneous
cultural artifact: it never had a fixed structure in sections or an inaugural manifest, but one
can find a clear aesthetic and political program throughout its pages. A great importance
was conferred to popular culture, not only to myths and transcriptions of oral narrations
from indigenous tribes, but it was also a place for spontaneous expressions of art of the
37
Populations that suffer under hegemonic domination of a ruling elite class that denies them the basic rights
of participation in the making of local history and culture , rendering them politically, socially, and even
sometimes, geographically, outside. See Gramsci (1971), Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
Spivak, on her side, emphasized the double exclusion that women suffered, both from colonial discourse, but
also from anti-colonial discourse. As will be discussed, Memoria del fuego strives to take women out of this
double effacement.
62
people: reredos, votive offerings, tango lyrics, drawings and letters of political prisoners or
school children.
In an interview about the magazine Crisis, Galeano declared that one of the intentions
when founding the magazine was to demonstrate that popular culture had an inner voice
that expressed the collective memory of the people; a memory that was made of past and
present, of becoming:
Cuando fundamos la revista queríamos demostrar que la cultura popular
existía, que no era la mera reproducción degradada de las voces del poder,
sino que tenía fuerza propia y expresaba una memoria colectiva lastimada,
herida, traicionada, mutilada, pero viva. Y esa memoria estaba hecha de
pasado y de presente también. Se construía cada día.38
Moreover, in his early book of chronicles, essays and short narrative, Días y noches
de amor y guerra, Galeano states, regarding to Crisis, that “culture” meant the creation of
any meeting point for people, as well as every identity and collective memory symbols,
testimonies, etc. Therefore, their intention was primarily to talk with people, give the
speech back to them, because culture fundamentally consists in communication:
La cultura no terminaba para nosotros en la producción de libros, cuadros,
sinfonías, películas y obras de teatro. Ni siquiera empezaba allí.
Entendíamos por cultura la creación de cualquier espacio de encuentro
entre los hombres, y eran cultura, para nosotros, todos los símbolos de la
identidad y la memoria colectivas: los testimonios de lo que somos, las
profecías de la imaginación, las denuncias de lo que nos impide ser.
Queríamos conversar con la gente, devolverle la palabra: la cultura es
comunicación o no es nada. Para llegar a no ser muda, creíamos, una
cultura nueva tenía que empezar por no ser sorda. Publicábamos textos
sobre la realidad, pero también, y sobre todo, desde ella. Palabras
recogidas en el campo, en la calle, en los campos, en los socavones,
historias de vida, coplas populares. (1978, p. 165-166)
These insights about the magazine he founded and shaped for three years, reveal the
way he conceived culture and collective memory, as well as his own endeavor: to build a
space of communication and interplay for a plethora of heterogeneous voices that could
38
In Kovacic, Fabián, “Contra la propiedad privada de la cultura” in Semanario Preguntas.
Montevideo, noviembre de 1992: https://semanariopreguntas.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/contra-la-propiedadprivada-de-la-cultura-eduardo-galeano-las-entrevistas-de-preguntas/
63
actually interact with what is happening in the world. To speak from and not only about
Latin America.
To conceive collective memory as communication implies finding images and
discourses that belong to many or can be appertained, so there can be a common arena. It
hence implies an openness to multi-dynamically include symbols and perspectives from
many grounds, and which recognize the difference as well as the common. “Common” is
actually an important term that shares roots with “communication”: both have the IndoEuropean prefix *kom- (together, close to), and the lexeme munis, from the Indo-European
*mei- (to move, to change). What is there together, hence, is at the same time movable,
exchangeable, flexible.
When the Italian post-operaists wrote about the “multitude”39, they coined the term
“commonality” to refer 1) to the life in common “that allows the political-social existence
of the many seeing as being many”40, and 2) to the product of immaterial labor:
communication, collaboration and cooperation41. The multitude is, thus, a group of people
that acts diversely on the basis of singularities that are shared in common, and, even though
being part of the community, their links are not fixed: they depart from the common but
aim to the individuation42. Their differences are what potentiate their commonality, as well
as the interactive possibilities: it is the social collective.43 Commonality is, in this way, like
an “amniotic liquid” where individuals, even though being common to each other,
acknowledge difference and heterogeneity as part of their way of being. This is the kind of
interplay that Galeano called “culture”: a space of encounter and interaction of the
difference and the common alike, for difference and commonality are both constitutive
parts of identity. This is what Crisis meant, and this is what a memory project of the
Americas aims to be.
In the next pages, the memory project of Eduardo Galeano will be analyzed to
finally trace the notions of collective memory and commonality. To do so, it is necessary to
39
See Paolo Virno (2004), A Grammar of the Multitude; Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri (2004), Multitude.
War and Democracy in the Age of Empire.
40
Virno, op.cit., p. 24.
41
Hard and Negri, op.cit.
42
For a detailed explanation of the process of individuation, see Virno (2003). “Multitud y principio de
individuación” in: http://www.sindominio.net/arkitzean/multitudes/virno_multitud.html
43
See Gielen, Pascal & Paul De Bruyne (eds.), Community Art. The Politics of Trespassing (Amsterdam:
Valiz, 2009).
64
take into account what specifically relates the history of Latin America to the lively
experience of people: those images and discourses that constitute the “memory” in
Memoria del fuego’s historiography. In Galeano’s words:
La historia oficial nos desvincula de los demás. A cada país se le enseña su
historia aislada como si hubiera ocurrido dentro de un vaso de agua. Se
enseña una realidad desvinculada, rota, fragmentada. Yo quise a partir de
estos fragmentos, recuperar la perdida unidad de las cosas: en lo geográfico,
porque el mundo es uno, y en lo histórico, porque la historia es una historia
compartida… y a partir de estos fragmentos, tratar de armar, reconstruir una
unidad. América Latina se une o está perdida… Yo quisiera con Memoria
del fuego y con todo lo que escribo ayudar a descubrir comunidades, cosas
que nos unen, espacios comunes que podemos habitar.44
*
2. Aesthetic and discursive strategies
2.1. Fragmentation
The first thing to notice when opening Memoria del fuego and other books of the
author is their peculiar structure. Galeano has a characteristic preference for the vignette, or
the “window”, as he calls them: short fragments that, in spite of forming part of a broader
totality in the book –even a possible linearity– are independent and closed. They make the
oeuvre appear as a palimpsest, a transmedial document: occasional advertisements, poetry,
songs, images, minifictional narrative, dialogues, that can be –but are not necessarily–
mixed. In an interview made for the documentary El siglo del viento (Fernando Birri,
1999), Eduardo Galeano suggests that a “window” structure allows the reader a glimpse to
that other reality, the reality of people that does not appear in history books or in
Hollywood movies. This glimpse is fragmentary and incomplete, but pregnant with a huge
significance. In “Apuntes para la memoria y el fuego” he comes back with this idea:
44
In an interview made by Diana Palaversich (1995, p. 158).
65
Las ventanas, espacios abiertos al tiempo, ayudan a mirar. Eso, al menos,
quisiera el autor: ayudar a mirar. Que el lector vea y descubra el tiempo que
fue, como si el tiempo que fue estuviera siendo, pasado que se hace
presente, a través de las historias-ventanas que la trilogía cuenta.45
Windows or vignettes, as fragments of a complete story, privilege a democratic
narrative. There are no central or peripheral vignettes so the importance of the subjects that
populate them is equal, unlike traditional historiographic accounts, focused on “heroes” and
relevant figures. While characters in Memoria del fuego come from different backgrounds,
their vignettes are not arranged in hierarchical sequence. This is the first guideline for
culture as a space of communication: democratization of participants, a destabilization of
hierarchies. Vignettes’ fragmentary nature allows a plastic transition on space and time, as
well as a soft, unproblematic, shifting among characters. There is actually no strict
continuity in the stories, and readers can easily “jump” between windows, without
necessarily missing a logical continuity as would happen with a more canonical historical
narration .This way, in the second book, Las caras y las máscaras, for example, the
window “Retablo de la plata”, that relates the situation of miners in Guanajuato, rich for the
extraction of silver, is followed by the window “La función colonial”: the narration of a
Portuguese edict to prohibit factories in Brasil to prevent people to be “totally independent
from Portugal”. This relative independence of vignettes yields a mosaic-like structure, very
similar to the organization of the magazine Crisis, where, especially in the section
“Carnet”, a collage of news, advertisements and letters from different sources appeared
without any apparent relation apart from the one(s) that the reader inferred.
However, in spite of the fragmentary nature of vignettes, some of them do follow a
not necessary, still meaningful, relation. In the second book, for example, the window
“Miranda”, which relates the encounter between Francisco de Miranda and the chief of the
British government, William Pitt, is followed by the window “Miranda sueña con Catalina
de Rusia”, a short, fictitious narration about an erotic dream Francisco de Miranda
supposedly has with the queen of Russia. Another example of this logical continuity is the
window “Tina Modotti” in El siglo del viento, which presents the photographer and her
45
From its online versión in Ser como ellos y otros artículos. (Argentina: Siglo XXI Editores, 1992)
https://books.google.nl/books?id=Uwq2dXSbi9cC&printsec=frontcover&hl=es#v=onepage&q&f=false
consulted on June 11, 2015.
66
expulsion from Mexico for being “guilty of freedom”. This window is followed by another
about Frida Kahlo, which starts with the statement “Tina Modotti no está sola frente a sus
inquisidores” (III, 92, 93).
The agency of the author is evident in these cases of meaningful relation among
windows. Memoria del fuego is not only a compilation of fragments of different sources
following a chronological order, but windows are meant to build a broader meaning. Diana
Palaversich had already argued in her book that Memoria del fuego produced the sensation
of a compact and homogenous text: “a pesar de la alta fragmentación de la trilogía, evidente
en la narración dispersa entre una multitud de temas, eventos, personajes y áreas del
mundo, captadas en aproximadamente 1200 viñetas, la lectura de la obra produce la
sensación de un texto compacto y homogéneo” (1995, p. 157). There is actually a temporal,
ideological and aesthetical unity in spite of fragmentation and eclecticism. The intervention
of Galeano in recollecting information, manipulating it and bringing it back affords a
stylistic unity to the stories. In spite of coming from different sources, there is an abiding
voice that narrates it all. The author, thus, assumes the role of a storyteller, the guardian of
collective memory, he who narrates and via narration builds a community.46
Despite its written nature, Memoria del fuego is constantly aiming to defend its
“memory account” nature by means of a number of rhetorical strategies. Every vignette is
written in present tense as an attempt to make history present, to vividly rekindle what has
happened before. In “Apuntes sobre la memoria y el fuego”, Galeano states in this respect
that: “Memoria del fuego está escrita en tiempo presente, como si el pasado estuviera
ocurriendo. Porque el pasado está vivo, aunque haya sido enterrado por error o por
infamia.”47 Present tense, thus, displays historical events as being shown in a stage, where
readers can actively get involved with them as if they were having a firsthand experience.
Furthermore, in his role as storyteller, Galeano’s choice of sources and fragments to
support his recount is completely diversified and de-hierarchized. The author establishes a
referentiality contract at the beginning of the trilogy by stating that he is using documentary
sources to sustain his chronology (“cada fragmento de este vasto mosaico se apoya sobre
46
When referring to this authorial attribution, Diana Palaversich quotes Scholes and Kellog’s (The Nature of
Narrative; Oxford University Press, 1966) statement that oral narrator is a vehicle by which tradition acquires
a tangible form (1995, p. 204).
47
In Ser como ellos y otros artículos, from its digital version.
67
una sólida base documental. Cuanto aquí cuento, ha ocurrido; aunque yo lo cuento a mi
modo y a mi manera” [I, xvi]). He explains that the text will be in italic font whenever the
quote is literally extracted from the source; insisting in the documentary support his oeuvre
has. However, by the final book of his trilogy, he states that Memoria del fuego is not an
anthology of historical sources but a literary work that is freely developed:
Este libro es el volumen final de la trilogía Memoria del fuego. No se trata
de una antología, sino de una creación literaria, que se apoya en bases
documentales pero se mueve con entera libertad. […] El autor cuenta lo que
ha ocurrido, la historia de América y sobre todo la historia de América
Latina; y quisiera hacerlo de tal manera que el lector sienta que lo ocurrido
vuelve a ocurrir cuando el autor lo cuenta (III, p. xix).
Indeed, many windows are based in more than one source; yet in each case it is
difficult to say to what extent the author kept within the document, or if he freely
interpreted information. The variety of the sources is enormous: from historiographic
documents to anthologies, chronicles, history books, literary works, indigenous transcripts,
biographies, cookbooks, testimonies, and popular literature that includes poetry, songs and
sayings; all of them taken equally as solid foundations. This way, Galeano subverts once
again hierarchies by treating all documents without differentiation, not having to bestow
more or less importance to any particular kind of sources.
At this point it is pertinent to note that the abolition of distinctions between high and
low culture, scientific or standard discourse, hegemonic or counter-hegemonic sources and
written or oral agencies, is part of what has been called “dependency theory.”48 This
practice is evident in the literary criticism of the time (the decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s)
and in some cultural artifacts such as the magazines Crisis, Marcha (Montevideo, 19391974) and Los libros (Buenos Aires, 1969-1976).
Ultimately, the nature of the sources Galeano refers to in Memoria del fuego does
not really matter for the content, since he “uses” documents merely to reinterpret and
narrate his own version of the history. Palaversich, for instance, argues that Galeano carries
out a “negative” reading of the documents, building, from margins and gaps, the alternative
48
There is a good amount of literature about the theory of dependency, but for the case of Latin America, see
Andre Gunder Frank (1969). Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution. New York & London:
Monthly Review Press. And Jorge Panesi (1998) “La crítica argentina y el discurso de la dependencia” in
Críticas, Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Normal, pp. 17 – 48.
68
history of subalterns(1995, p. 216). In effect, the usage of such sources is so free that irony
and subversion is at times the discursive means to incorporate documents. In the first
volume, for example, the author uses a literal quote to speak about slavery in Brazil. The
straightforward cruelty of the speech immediately reveals an ironic use of the source on the
side of Galeano:
-Por grande que sea la multitud de los enemigos, es una multitud de
esclavos. La naturaleza los ha creado más para obedecer que para resistir.
Si los destruimos, tendremos tierras para nuestras plantaciones, negros
para nuestro servicio y honor para nuestros nombres. Los negros pelean
como fugitivos. ¡Nosotros los perseguiremos como señores! (I, p. 292).
2.2. Orality
The insertion of documents in Memoria del fuego does not always culminate in a
narrative text, but it can also consist in fragments that reproduce orality, either literally
quoted or fictionally composed by the author. Taken from the book of Miguel Rojas-Mix,
La Plaza Mayor. El urbanismo, instrument de dominio colonial, is the following window:
Pregones del Mercado en Santiago de Chile
-Claveles y albahacas para las niñas retacas!
-¡OBLEAAAAS!
-¡Lindos botones, a real la sarta!
-¡P a j u e l a a a a a a s!
-¡Correas, correas para cincha, sobaítas como guante!
-¿Una limosna, por amor de Dios?
-¡C a r n e v a c á n!
-¿Una limosna para un pobre ciego?
[…]
-¡SANDÍÍÍAS!
-¡Al rico pan! ¡Calientííííto!
(II, p. 174)
As can be seen, Galeano recurs to graphic strategies to represent oral speech from
different speakers in, what seems to be, a busy street in Santiago de Chile. Orality is, as
stated before, a core aspect of Memoria del fuego; it is the “memory” of the historical
agency, the breath, the connection to people, and it is present in a manifold way. In the
69
storytelling role of the author, when narrating Latin American memory; in the importance
bestowed to non-written sources, such as testimonies, oral myths, popular and oral
literature; and in the transcription of dialogues (either fictitious or not) as a documentary
source of collective memory.
In his book, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (1982), Walter
Ong examines oral culture and its relation and counterpoints with literate culture. He
notices how, for literate cultures, it is impossible to conceive words without their graphic
equivalent. Yet, writing is inevitably linked to sounds and orality. For oral cultures, he
states, words are more than mere sounds; the word is an utterance and, thus, an action;
word is power. And, since one knows only what one can remember, the power of oral
speech lies in the moment of its performance, as well as in sounding and logic patterns such
as rhythm, cogency, addition, redundancy, and, specially, fragmentation. Despite that
written language “tyrannically locks forever” words into a visual field, Ong argues, it can
be useful to restore memory: “Literacy can be used to reconstruct for ourselves the pristine
human consciousness which was not literate at all—at least to reconstruct this
consciousness pretty well, though not perfectly” (1982, p. 14).
Iuri Lotman shows in his work, On the Semiosphere (1998), that peripheral
languages (and orality is certainly one after the supremacy of the literacy) can be
represented by fragments, when entering a central semiotic structure (written agency).
When both structures are in touch, meaning formation is catalyzed and a reconstruction of
the whole peripheral system is elicited. This reconstruction, however, is more the formation
of a new code than the actual recreation of the old one, even if subjectively perceived as a
recall and reassembling of the original language49. What this means with regard to Memoria
del fuego is that Galeano’s attempt to retrieve oral agency in his project, actually creates a
new code that is neither oral nor written, but which may contribute to foster the significance
of living speech of people connected to the recovery of a hijacked memory.
There is a prevailing assumption of memory as a current of continuous dialogue
between past and present. At the end, only the past that has an echo in present times lasts in
49
“Las formaciones semióticas periféricas pueden estar representadas no por estructuras cerradas (lenguajes),
sino por fragmentos de las mismas o incluso por textos aislados. Al intervenir como ‘ajenos’ para el sistema
dado, esos textos cumplen en el mecanismo total de la semiosfera la función de catalizadores. […] Esta
reconstrucción de un lenguaje ya perdido, en cuyo sistema el texto dado adquiriría la condición de estar
dotado de sentido, siempre resulta prácticamente la creación de un nuevo lenguaje” (p. 31)
70
memory. Galeano trusts in speech more than in materiality and in tradition more than in
History, to spread and transmit memory. In the first volume of Memoria del fuego, in the
window that relates how Diego de Landa threw to fire, one by one, the sacred books of the
Mayan people, Galeano writes:
Al centro, el inquisidor quema los libros. En torno de la hoguera,
inmensa, castiga a los lectores. Mientras tanto, los autores, artistassacerdotes muertos hace años o hace siglos, beben chocolate a la fresca
sombra del primer árbol del mundo. Ellos están en paz porque han muerto
sabiendo que la memoria no se incendia. ¿Acaso no se cantará y se danzará,
por los tiempos de los tiempos, lo que ellos habían pintado?
Cuando le queman sus casitas de papel, la memoria encuentra
refugio en las bocas que cantan las glorias de los hombres y los dioses,
cantares que de gente en gente quedan[…] (I, p. 158 [emphasis added])
Memory’s refuge is speech; is, moreover, sung speech. Song is the peak of orality
given that, because of rhythm, rime, and being rooted in the daily life of people, it remains
in memory through generations. Besides, Memoria del fuego shows how the dominant
power has always looked for silencing the voice of the dominated. Their voices are their
power, the power of the subaltern. In spite of genocides and abuses, slavery and
exploitation, the collective memory of people has the capacity to remain, generation after
generation, through orality and traditions. Speech represents the capacity of memory;
memory not seen as an archive but seen as a vivid connection between past and the current
experience of people. Speech and language being understood as the possibility to stay alive,
to continue living, also mean the fight of people for the right to have their own language,
their own means to speak out, to render visible. Native languages are, thus, memory in
action, memory being performed:
En las misiones se hablaba en guaraní y se leía en guaraní. A partir de la
expulsión de los jesuitas, se impone en los indios la lengua castellana
obligatoria y única.
Nadie se resigna a quedar mudo y sin memoria. Nadie hace caso. (II, p.
44).
As long as there is speech, there is memory. Memory, this way, is continuous and
perpetual. This is one of the basic pillars of the book: the survival of collective memory
71
through narration; the idea that history, while being told, is able to continue happening.
Memory can thus be immortal.
In Las caras y las máscaras a window relates how African immigrants brought their
cheerful gods to whom African people will go back after death:
Todos tenemos dos cabezas y dos memorias. Una cabeza de barro, que será
polvo, y otra por siempre invulnerable a los mordiscos del tiempo y de la
pasión. Una memoria que la muerte mata, brújula que acaba con el viaje, y
otra memoria, la memoria colectiva, que vivirá mientras viva la aventura
humana en el mundo. (II, p. 37)
This vignette serves as reaffirmation of the prologue, which links collective memory
to active human experience. This premise saves memory from being confined to history
books that do not speak to, or about, actual people, and where nobody can find him or
herself mirrored.
2.3. Microhistory
It is easy to feel unfamiliar with the history of Latin America if it speaks only about
those “big” historical events, wars and political treaties that happened in abstract places and
times and whose protagonists are nothing but difficult names and stiff faces in a history
book. Instead, if behind those haughty characters a life story appears, one that shows the
human side, frailties and dreams of the subject, then he or she is suddenly brought to life.
As an example, the portrait of Manuela Sáenz, lover of Simón Bolívar:
Ya no viste de capitana, ni dispara pistolas, ni monta a caballo. No le caminan
las piernas y todo el cuerpo le desborda gorduras; pero ocupa su sillón de
inválida como si fuera trono y pela naranjas y guayabas con las manos más
bellas del mundo.
[…]
Al caer la noche, Manuela se divierte arrojando desperdicios a los perros
vagabundos, que ella ha bautizado con los nombres de los generales que
fueron desleales a Bolívar. Mientras Santander, Páez, Córdoba, Lamar y
Santa Cruz disputan los huesos, ella enciende su cara de luna, cubre con el
abanico su boca sin dientes y se echa a reír. Ríe con todo el cuerpo y los
muchos encajes volanderos.
[…]
72
Cuando don Simón se marcha, Manuela pide que le alcancen el cofre de plata.
Lo abre con la llave escondida en el pecho y acaricia las muchas cartas que
Bolívar había escrito a la única mujer, gastados papeles que todavía dicen:
Quiero verte y reverte y tocarte y sentirte y saborearte… Entonces pude el
espejo y se cepilla largamente el pelo, por si él viene a visitarla en sueños
(Los tres, II, p. 215-216).
Or this other window that shows the human façade of Leonel Rugama:
El altivo poeta, el chaparrito de sotana que comulgaba de pie, dispara hasta
el último tiro y cae peleando contra todo un batallón de la dictadura de
Somoza.
Leonel Rugama tenía veinte años.
De los amigos, prefería a los jugadores de ajedrez.
De los jugadores de ajedrez, a los que pierden por culpa de la muchacha que
pasa.
De las que pasan, a la que todavía no llegó.
De los héroes, prefería a los que no dicen que mueren por la patria.
De las patrias, a la nacida de su muerte. (III, p. 253)
The same way, if the historical narrative devotes attention to the daily life of people,
to those moments and objects and thoughts to which everybody can feel identification,
history breaths life again:
El reloj de los sabores
Con la lechera, a las siete, nace el bullicio de Lima. En olor de
santidad llega, detrás, la vendedora de tisanas.
A las ocho pasa el vendedor de cuajadas.
A las nueve, otra voz ofrece confites de canela.
A las diez, los tamales buscan bocas que alegrar.
[…] (II, p. 47 – 48).
For Diana Palaversich, Galeano’s narrative perspective resembles the movement of
a cinematographic camera, alternating between short shots, that reveal the intimate aspects
of character’s life, and high angles, which show the collective, historic and epic dimension
of the event (1995, p. 171). Ana Giayetto, on her side, argues that Galeano carries out a
“semantic emptying” when he leaves to the end the name of the character and urges the
reader to carry out a critical reading of such character (2010, p. 9).
73
In any case, this form of historical narrative –comparable to what has been called,
by Giovanni Levi, Carlo Ginzburg and Charles Joyner, “microhistory” 50– serves to
illustrate better the narration of the abused, the silenced voices of oral tradition and the
human side of those who more than being historical heroes, are the faces where many of us
can and want to find identity51. At the end, as Galeano himself states in “Apuntes sobre la
memoria y el fuego”, “toda situación es el símbolo de muchas, lo grande habla a través de
lo más chiquito”, every situation and event has just been a metaphor of many others:
Retrato de un obrero en Nicaragua
José Villarreina, casado, tiene tres hijos. Minero de la empresa
norteamericana Rosario Mines, que hace setenta años volteó al presidente
Zelaya. Desde 1952, Villarreina escarba oro en los socavones de Siurna;
pero sus pulmones no están todavía del todo podridos.
A la una y media de la tarde del 3 de julio de 1979, Villarreina asoma por
una de las chimeneas del socavón y un vagón de mineral le arranca la
cabeza. Treinta y cinco minutos después, la empresa comunica al muerto
que de conformidad con lo dispuesto por los artículos 18, 115 y 119 del
Código de Trabajo, queda despedido por incumplimiento de contrato. (III, p.
299).
It is notorious that this memory narrative of Latin America from the perspective of
the subaltern does not aim to be an objective historical account. In contrast, specific
qualities of characters are emphasized, and the attention is always paid to the continuous
abuse committed against native people (either indigenous, African immigrants, mestizos,
women, artists, or any other that can be inscribed within this Latin American community).
Capitalism is seen as the puppet master of exploitation and slavery, and socialism regarded
as a more beneficial alternative. Nevertheless, the partition between “We” and “the Other”
is not as straight as to say “Latin America vs. The West”. Alliances are malleable,
especially in a community that is being constituted while being mapped.
50
See Ginzburg (1976) Il formaggio e i vermi. Torino : Einaudi. And (2012) “Microhistory, Two or Three
Things that I Know About It” in Trades and Traces. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nevertheless, one of the pioneers of the method is the Mexican Luis González y González in Pueblo en Vilo.
Microhistoria de San José de Gracia. México: El Colegio de México, 1968.
51
The concept that Ana Giayetto extracts from Unamuno’s essay En torno al casticismo (1905),
“intrahistoria”, also proves to be utterly pertinent: “los periódicos nada dicen de la vida silenciosa de millones
de hombres sin historia que a todas horas del día y en todos los países del globo se levantan a una orden del
sol y van a sus campos a proseguir la oscura y silenciosa labor cotidiana y eterna” (p. 9).
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In the next section, this community and what constitutes the memory of Latin
America will be presented: images and discourses that take part of this project of collective
memory.
*
3. The Memory of Latin America
In the last section of the previous chapter we discussed how, in Latin America, the 1960s
and 1970s led to the institutionalization of Latin American community as a space of
belonging for intellectuals. Given the fact that countries in South and Central America went
in and out of dictatorships and military regimes, the necessity of a new geopolitical frame
of reference was a top priority. After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, efforts were
directed to this goal, and Latin American organizations, communities and organisms were
created. Subsequently, the possibility of real communication and interaction among
members of different countries strengthen links and promoted shared symbols as well as the
exchange of cultural products. However, these initiatives constantly led to the
homogenization and blurring of the complex multiversity that constitutes Latin America, a
continent inherently dissimilar and heterogeneous. Populism, the politics of consensus52,
fostered the unproblematized unification of Latin American diversity, grouping every
particular ethnic and cultural case within the vague word “people”. Regardless the virtual
foundation of a supra-national decolonized community based on difference and the power
of “the wretched of the Earth”53, exclusion existed, and some voices remained silenced.
Racism, classism and discrimination are prevailing issues in spite of politics of
inclusion. Memoria del fuego is not the first attempt to make visible invisible subjects or
retrieve dignity, history and voice to subalterns. Within Latin American art it is noteworthy
52
To see a discussion on this regard, see the book of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (1985). Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Also, Chantal Mouffe (1993).
The Return of the Political. London: Verso.
53
A phrase coined and popularized by Frantz Fanon. See Fanon (1963), The Wretched of the Earth.
Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.
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the literary work of José María Arguedas54 and Augusto Roa Bastos, the subversive
discourse of Latin American muralism, and the musical restoration of the movement
“Nueva Canción Chilena.”55 To retrieve voice and visibility to the subalterns is a political
act, in view of the fact that it contests the logic of inclusion/exclusion in political partition
and designs a new political subject. According to Jacques Rancière (2001), a subject
becomes political when it interferes with the logic of government, what he called “le
partage du sensible”, “the system of divisions and boundaries that define, among other
things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetic-political regime” (2004,
p.22). Politics, for Rancière, is the act of dissensus; the violent and forceful inclusion, in the
distribution of the sensible, of new subjects who were before invisible or silenced, banned
from political participation. Moreover, politics is throughout this inclusion the
redistribution of the politically visible; a new form of representation: “If there is something
'proper' to politics, it consists entirely in this relationship which is not a relationship
between subjects, but one between two contradictory terms through which a subject is
defined.” Therefore, “[p]olitical struggle is not a conflict between well defined interest
groups; it is an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the community in
different ways.”56 A political act would, hence, dissent with the hegemonic power structure
that defines who has a part of the political world and propose (impose) a redistribution, an
alternative sociohistorical political account.
Up to this point, it has been already argued in this thesis that the essential project of
Eduardo Galeano is the creation of a (Latin) American community that shares a collective
memory and where those who have been silent in the hegemonic discourse, the subaltern,
can finally be subjects of their own history and, therefore, together devise a future. The
program of Memoria del fuego, then, is to redefine the logic of inclusion and exclusion; to
54
Los ríos profundos (1958) recovers the orality of the Quechua; it is an attempt to present the cultural
dimension of the Quechuas from within.
55 New attempts to give voice to the unheard are being carried out especially from Latin American
immigrants in U.S.A. and Canada or writers in the frontier between Mexico and U.S.A., the epitome of the
cross-cultural locus nowadays. Moreover, Diana Palaversich has some works on the homosexual proletarian,
and other up-to-now ignored voices. See, for example: Palaversich, Diana and Allatson, P. (2002). “The
wounded body of proletarian homosexuality in Pedro Lemebel's Loco afán”; (2003) “I shout, then I exist.
Homosexuality and political dissidence in the narrative of Reinaldo Arenas and John Rechy”, and (2013).
“Cultural dyslexia and the politics of cross-cultural excursion in Claudia Llosa's Madeinusa”.
56 From the online versión of “Ten Thesis on Politics”: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jacquesranciere/articles/ten-thesis-on-politics/
76
remap a community that establishes a new distribution of the sensible: that renders visible
silenced subjects and objects, images and discourses.
3.1. Memory: images and discourses
In the first volume of Memoria del fuego, a compilation of myths of numerous
indigenous tribes in the continent sets a background for the axiomatic structure that will
take place. Tribes from all over the continent are represented in this part; from the igluliks
in Canada to the cashinahuas in the Amazonia, from the wawenocks in North America to
the cakchiqueles of the Caribe. Still, no especial emphasis is placed in where the myths
come from, for there is the overarching idea that values and identifiers are part of the
commonality and, thus, can be shared by everybody. Or at least this is what the project
aims to build.
The alternative history found in Memoria del fuego relates the struggle of people
that, in spite of having suffered from colonization, slavery and other injustices, possesses an
inner force, ingenuity and spirit that make them resist and fight against the dominant power
to, ultimately, achieve the “promise of America”:
El tigre azul romperá el mundo.
Otra tierra, la sin mal, la sin muerte, será nacida de la aniquilación de esta
tierra. Ella está cansadísima y ya ciega de tanto llorar ojos adentro.
Moribunda atraviesa los días, basura del tiempo, y por las noches inspira
piedad a las estrellas. Pronto el Padre Primero escuchará las súplicas del
mundo, tierra queriendo ser otra, y entonces soltará al tigre azul que duerme
bajo su hamaca (II, p. 3 [fragment of the first window of the second book]).
This is the leitmotive that lies throughout the book: the continuous rebirth of
American people, of Latin American land, because “death is a lie”. It is the courageous
hope of Galeano when he finished writing Memoria del fuego, that America would be
reborn out of external domination:
-Rompo este huevo y nace la mujer y nace el hombre. Y juntos vivirán y
morirán. Pero nacerán nuevamente. Nacerán y volverán a morir y otra vez
nacerán. Y nunca dejarán de nacer, porque la muerte es mentira. (I, p. 3
[fragment of the first window of the trilogy. Emphasis added.])
77
[…] El árbol de la vida sabe que jamás cesará, pase lo que pase, la música
caliente que gira a su alrededor. Por mucha muerte que venga, por mucha
sangre que corra, los hombres y las mujeres serán por la música bailados
mientras sean por el aire respirados y por la tierra arados y amados. (III, p.
336 [last window of the triology. Emphasis added]).
A sentence of hope appears as an epigraph at the beginning of each volume. In the
first, “La hierba seca incendiará la hierba húmeda”, an African proverb brought by slaves to
America; and in the last one, from Juan Rulfo, “y agarrándose del viento con las uñas”. The
motives of rebirth and immortality go throughout the trilogy. In Las caras y las máscaras
the prophecy of Túpac Amaru’s resurrection comes about: “Se realiza ahora el mito que en
aquel entonces nació de su muerte. La profecía se cumple: la cabeza se junta con el cuerpo
y Túpac Amaru, renacido, ataca” (II, p. 63); and in El siglo del viento the revolutionary
Miguel Mármol avoids death more than 12 times, being born again each time he was
supposed to die and does not.
Latin America has a peculiar relationship with death. In Mexico, people celebrate
the Day of the Dead eating chocolate and mole, drinking pulque and mezcal with their dead
relatives, represented by an altar of cempasúchil flowers, candles and candy skulls. For
indigenous tradition, death is just the beginning of life. A little boy explains: “-Mi abuelo es
tan pequeñito porque nació después que yo” (III, p. 332). Death gives life, implies Galeano
when he claims that the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were given birth by their
disappeared children57.
Still, in this logic, the more certain form of disappearance is oblivion. The
importance of maintaining an alive memory comes back once and again as a precept from
the storyteller Galeano to all those who learn from his stories. It is also a maxim of hope:
nothing is forgotten, no voices can be silenced, as long as there is someone who is still
speaking out loud, someone who still remembers:
57
In an interview for the documentary El siglo del viento (Fernando Birri, 1999). Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo is an association of parents whose children were “disappeared” (possibly killed, but no corpses have
been found) during the military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Juan
Gelman, whose son was also disappeared, writes: “el 24 de agosto de 1976 / mi hijo marcelo ariel y / su mujer
claudia, encinta,/ fueron secuestrados en/ buenos aires por un / comando militar. / como decenas de miles / de
otros casos, la dictadura / militar nunca reconoció / oficialmente a estos / “desaparecidos”. Habló de / “los
ausentes para siempre”. / hasta que no vea sus cadáveres / o a sus asesinos, nunca los / daré por muertos” in
Carta abierta (París-Roma, enero, 1980).
78
Contra el olvido, que es la única muerte que mata de verdad […] (III, p. 331).
[…] Los indios se niegan a mover esas piedras del lugar donde los abuelos de
los abuelos adoraban a los dioses. Esas piedras no prometen nada, pero salvan
del olvido. (II, p. 53).
Desde el Caribe hasta la ciudad chilena de Quillota, pasando por Montevideo, y
desde La Haya hasta París, pasando por Londres, esas frases del padre Labat
han viajado mucho más que su autor. Sin pasaporte ni disfraz. (II, p. 134).
The discourse of memory in Memoria del fuego shows a subversion of Western
hierarchies of rationality and agency: what should be and what should not be included in
historical discourse. Galeano constantly contests discourse control mechanisms.58 Firstly,
by his selection of sources: his account is supported in scholarly publications and in literary
texts alike, implying that the same kind of information can be obtained from any kind of
texts. Since the reading of these texts and the reconstruction of history will be, anyway,
free, any text is susceptible of holding a historical dimension. Additionally, he gives a
preponderant place to popular poetry and songs59, which serve to reveal experiences from
the perspective of the subaltern, as well as to subvert the legitimacy of information sources.
Memory can be inscribed in the most unimaginable kind of documents; from a rock in the
Atacama Desert (II, p. 241) to shouted announcements (“pregones”) in the street. Memory
is, ultimately, the experience of people. Therefore, one of the strategies that the author uses
to subvert power apparatuses is to consider the intimate experience of characters as
deserving of historical interest.
This is not new in the oeuvre of Galeano. In the magazine Crisis a big relevance
was given to alternative documents too. For example, the third issue of the magazine
featured texts and drawings from prisoners in Trelew and letters sent by their children. In
the fifth issue, the romantic correspondence of Leopoldo Marechal was shown in a
facsimile print, and in the eighth one, some examples of Rioja’s votive offerings appeared
58
See Michel Foucault, “The order of discourse”, an inaugural lecture given at the Collège de France on
December 2, 1970.
59
There are plenty of examples of popular lyrism from many different cultures and places throughout the
three books of Memoria del fuego. They strongly reveal popular language and an autochthonous culture.
Most of the entries appear without any other intervention of the author apart from the title of the vignette.
79
in the main pages. These contributions had the goal of revealing a more human, less stiff
façade of people, more than extracting an objective knowledge. They are not scholarly
commented, and instead, they appear freely, in the irregular composition characteristic of
the magazine.
In Memoria del fuego, likewise, the more intimate aspect of characters, and even of
the Latin American land, is revealed. Love plays a singular place in this memory
configuration: “porque mejor profeta es el capaz de amor que el capaz de razón” (II, p. 4).
This way, a letter of Manuela Sáenz, Bolívar’s lover, to her husband, James Thorne,
occupies one of the most dramatic spots in the book. The story of the tragic romance
between Camila O’Gorman and Ladislao Gutiérrez, a catholic priest, is narrated as in a
drama play. Lovers, martyrs, are the heroes of such microhistories, characters susceptible of
representing values with which the community can identify:
[…]
En calabozos separados los encierran, en la prisión de Santos Lugares.
Si piden perdón, serán perdonados. Camila, embarazada, no se arrepiente.
Ledislao tampoco. Les remachan hierros en los pies. Un sacerdote rocía los
grillos con agua bendita.
Los fusilan en el patio, con los ojos vendados. (II, p. 200).
The same way love stories are part of the historical discourse of this memory
project, intimate dreams are important to characterize people. The window named
“Miranda sueña con Catalina de Rusia”, previously referred to, is an example of this. There
is a great importance attributed to dreams within indigenous populations, an importance
that Galeano tries to rescue:
Para los hurones, se hace culpable de gran crimen quien no respeta lo que el
sueño dice. El sueño manda. Si el soñador no cumple sus órdenes, el alma se
enoja y enferma al cuerpo o lo mata (I, p. 265).
Magic exists as a part of daily life,60 and this is constantly made evident: by the
twelve times Miguel Mármol dodged death, in the curare that the Tukano old man prepared
in front of Alexander Von Humboldt and Bonpland (II, p. 109), and in the rain that falls
while Túpac Amaru resists a cruel assassination:
60
Impossible to not evoke the magical realism of Latin American literature.
80
Es tiempo de larga sequía en el valle del Cuzco. Al mediodía en punto,
mientras pujan los caballos y Túpac Amaru no se parte, una violenta
catarata se descarga de golpe desde el cielo: cae la lluvia a garrotazos, como
si Dios o el Sol o alguien hubiera decidido que este momento bien vale una
lluvia de ésas que dejan ciego al mundo (II, p. 75).
Magic exists as the remaining structure of an old configuration of pre-literacy
language and culture. But it exists in literacy, it survived until today, and it is the duty of
the narrator to find those surviving traces in common life, and to narrate them, so they stay
alive. Ultimately, magical thinking, the power of the unconscious and the value of emotions
are found as constituting sources and topics of historiographic discourse, as well as mapped
within this identity communitarian project.
3.2. Syncretism
Even though syncretism shares a lot with the concept of transculturation that will be
examined in the next chapter, the latter is a more complex process. Cultural syncretism
refers to the combination of different traditions or beliefs and the resulting synthetic
practice. It is important to mention it here because it is one of the pillars of Galeano’s
identity discourse, which will be constructed in the next chapter; and, additionally, it is
representative of the way Memoria del fuego enacts cultural heterogeneity and memory as a
living constituting process.
Indeed, from the beginning of the trilogy, Galeano reveals to be in favor of
mestizaje –especially when being cultural- and against racial chauvinism. He criticizes
Spain for the expulsion of the Muslim Moors: “Moros llaman los españoles cristianos a los
españoles de cultura islámica que llevan aquí ocho siglos” (I, p. 62), and embraces the first
signs of cultural and religious syncretism in the New Spain: “Estaba vestida de luz la que
en lengua náhuatl le dijo: ‘Yo soy la madre de Dios.’ […] La virgen nacida en
Extremadura, morena por los soles de España, se ha venido al valle de los aztecas para ser
la madre de los vencidos” (I, p. 98).
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Syncretism, which is developed throughout the three volumes of Memoria del
fuego, is regarded as a singular native characteristic of Latin America. The author is
conspiratorial with this trait, in the view that, in the incorporation of Christianity and
Western practices to their own, the indigenous people show creativity without betraying
their own spirit. Ultimately, they adopt what they instinctively feel as appertaining, and
dispose of other practices that they cannot endorse. Needless to say that this is not a naïve
move of the author towards colonization, since he also devotes pages to narrate the cultural
violence and impositions the indigenous and African people had to endure. But, at the end,
his stance shows that his view of Latin American identity is less essentialist than what his
critics pretend. He acknowledges culture as a moving, intertwining agency, and consistent
with his own position is the stance that only what is relevant to the present times will
remain alive:
[…] En una iglesia, el embajador encuentra un santo aporreado. A pedradas
piden milagro las solteras. Por esperanza disparan piedras las jóvenes,
creyendo que la mejor puntería les dará el mejor marido; y por venganza las
marchitas, que ya no esperan de San Antonio de Padua marido ni consuelo y
lo acribillan vociferándole insultos. Bien reventado lo tienen al pobre San
Antonio, la cara deshecha, muñones por brazos y puro agujero el pecho. Al
pie, le dejan flores. (II, p. 187-188).
3.3. Objects
One of the alterity myths of Latin America spoken by the West is the myth of
exoticism and impenetrability61, which justified the metaphysical estrangement of
Europeans towards America. This narrative was born right after the “discovery of America”
and especially during the Spanish colonization, with the chronicles of Bernal Díaz del
Castillo and other soldiers who first arrived to the land and who, from a European,
colonizing perspective, narrated everything they saw. On Deconstructing America, Peter
Mason shows how, when Europe faced the problem of accounting America as an unfamiliar
other, it either assimilated the New World as such –a new, undiscovered, exotic, unfamiliar
61
One can say that this myth lasts up to day, although probably transfigured into other, more
contemporary,“exotic” images. Brigitte Adriaensen (2012) and Ignacio Sánchez Prado (2005), for example,
explore the exoticism of violence in Latin American fiction.
82
world–, or projected its own internal Other into it. Mason demonstrates that aspects of the
magical thinking, which were excluded from the European civilized identity, served as
mediators in the early perception of America. The author asserts that there is “a homology
between the structures of European demonology and the perception of the New World” (p.
58).
When mapping a community that includes so many different countries and cultures,
it will be difficult, at certain point, to not involve objects that might result unfamiliar to
some, but familiar to others. Galeano, then, had to find a way to make everything familiar,
to dethrone the alterity horizon and build a space of the common. One of the strategies is to
not specify where the narration comes from, and just let it be among other images that
populate the book. This is done with certain consistence in the mythical account of Los
nacimientos, where, most of times, there is no detailed statement about where and when the
myth comes from.
Another strategy, however, is to give human characteristics to inanimate beings, to
grant them admirable values and to play with representation, so the reader feels some kind
of closeness and familiarity with them. Additionally, to speak in plural and in present tense
definitely contributes to create a simultaneity effect that fosters the idea of coexistence and
belonging, in spite of the conflictive range of multiple world views. In this sense, Memoria
del fuego is like an album of objects, traditions, plants and animals that represent American
land. The descriptions are not just descriptions but entire narrations of the cultural
implications of each item. And, in a comparable way to morals and traditions from
particular communities, Galeano uses rhetorical devices, especially ethos62 and irony, to
gain the reader’s engagement and agreement, and, thus, make him want to identify63 with
what is being described:
Las llamas
–Felices criaturas –dice Flora Tristán.
Viaja Flora por el Perú, patria de su padre, y en las sierras descubre al único
animal que el hombre no ha podido envilecer.
62
About ethos see: Nedra Reynolds (1993), “Ethos as Location: New Sites for Discursive Authority” in
Rhetoric Review. 11 (2).
63
It is important to say that it is not within the scope of this thesis an empirical approach to the experience of
the reader. Therefore, my interpretation of this issue, which is limited, modest and subject to be challenged, is
merely hermeneutic.
83
Las dulces llamas son más ágiles que las mulas y suben más alto. Resisten
fríos, fatigas y cargas pesadas. A cambio de nada brindan al indio de las
montañas transporte, leche, carne y las sedas limpias y brillantes que cubren
sus cuerpos. Pero jamás se dejan atar ni maltratar, ni aceptan órdenes.
Cuando interrumpen su andar de reinas, el indio les suplica que reinicien la
marcha. Si alguien las golpea, las insulta o las amenaza, las llamas se echan
al suelo: alzando el largo cuello vuelven al cielo los ojos, los más bellos ojos
de la Creación, y suavemente mueren.
–Felices criaturas –dice Flora Tristán. (II, p. 174-175)
There are portraits of the potato, the pulque, the maguey, the llamas, the palm, the
ceiba, the Pachamamma, and so on. In his account, Galeano characterizes American land,
with its cheerful African genealogy, leaving outside, at the same time, everything that is not
American, making a clear demarcation, necessary for an identification process. In his
narrative, constitutive elements that forge identity and represent collectivity –such as
dances, music, songs, clothing, language–, and which were prohibited by colonizers, are
rescued and brought to life, narrated in a picturesque way, so there is a positive disposition
on their favor:
El capitán general, don Martín de Mujica, proclama por caja y pendón la
prohibición del juego de la chueca […]
Dice el bando del capitán general que se dicta la prohibición para que se
eviten pecados tan contra la honra de Dios Nuestro Señor y porque
corriendo la pelota los indios se entrenan para la guerra: del juego nacen
alborotos y así después corre la flecha entre ellos. Es una indecencia, dice,
que en la chueca se junten hombres y mujeres casi desnudos, vestidos
apenas de plumas y pieles de animales en los que fundan la ventura de
ganar. Al comienzo invocan a los dioses para que la bola sea favorable a sus
proezas y carreras y al final, todos abrazados, beben chicha a mares. (I, p.
264)64.
3.4. Subjects
Notwithstanding the fact that in Memoria del fuego the protagonists are the
subalterns, what is meant by this word is more complex than it seems. This alternative
history of the Americas narrates the life and ventures of countless of individuals,
emphasizing those who were victims of unfair killings, even –and mostly– if their names
64
The “chauca” is a game that, as the reader probably guessed, is still played in Bolivia and Chile.
84
are not very well known. Names and stories file in an endless procession of irrational
executions and tortures from colonizers: “Tiradentes” in Brazil, who wanted “Brazilians to
be Brazilians” (II, p. 92, 93) and Javier Eugenio Espejo, about whom Galeano says that
even though the city of Quito has no record of this Independence precursor, he has been
“the most brilliant of its sons”:
Escribió las más afiladas palabras contra el regimen colonial y sus métodos
de educación, una educación de esclavos […] Predicó el gobierno de
América por los nacidos en ella. […] Era hijo de indio. Recibió al nacer el
nombre de Chusig, que significa lechuza. […] La ciudad de Quito no
registra en el libro de gentes principales el fin de este precursor de la
independencia hispanoamericana que ha sido el más brillante de sus hijos
(II, p. 95-96).
Ultimately, the goal of Galeano in Memoria del fuego is saving from disappearance
into oblivion all those who fought for America to be our land, and whose names and images
were erased from official discourse because their lives did not appear interesting to
hegemonic power.
Women are among the main protagonists of this alternative historical recount.
Throughout the three books, Galeano reveals how their participation was essential for the
liberation struggles. A strong feminist discourse can be found in a tenor that is surprisingly
far from conservative standards. The constrained role of women in patriarchy is contested,
and they appear in a multifaceted display where they can love, fight, laugh, do magic, die,
create, and also suffer from extreme rights violations.
These are some examples that illustrate this feminist discourse in Galeano’s
Memoria del fuego. In the third book, the prostitutes from Puerto Cabezas are praised as
being “the most honorable women in the world”:
[…] Ellas conocen, por confidencias de cama, el lugar exacto donde los
marines norteamericanos han hundido cuarenta rifles y siete mil cartuchos.
Gracias a ellas que jugándose la vida desafían a las tropas extranjeras de
ocupación, Sandino y sus hombres rescatan de las aguas, a la luz de las
antorchas, sus primeras armas y sus primeras municiones. (III, p.76)
With regard to the slaves that escaped from Dutch fields in Suriname, Galeano
writes that: “Ellas llevan la vida en el pelo” (II, p. 10), and about Juana Azurduy he says
that: “Todo lo que come se convierte en valentía. Los indios no la llaman Juana. La llaman
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Pachamama” (II, p. 139). Many women appear as forceful warriors, not only in the battle
field, but also as scientists, writers and lovers; “guilty from being free”: Elisa Lynch,
Manuela Sáenz, Isadora Duncan and the colonel Rosa Bobadilla, just to name a few. The
narrator positions himself on the side of these women, and uses irony to denounce sexism
and discrimination from men and hegemonic culture.
The feminist discourse of Galeano goes beyond recalling brave women. He makes
two moves that are quite emancipatory and which shall not fall through the cracks. First, he
questions the subaltern position of women within historical discourse by posing the
interrogation, regarding hegemonic heroes, “what if he had been born woman?” He
discusses the life of Jane Franklin, sister of Benjamin, by making a parallel between the
lives of the two siblings. He uses irony to reveal that whereas Benjamin had a lustrous
career, Jane, with a brave life as mother and wife, has not been relevant for historians: “su
caso carecerá de interés para los historiadores” (II, p. 61-62). This vignette is powerful and
subversive. Galeano stresses the difficult life that Jane had as “a woman of her time”, and
how she could never enjoy pleasures that Benjamin Franklin, on the other hand, could:
“jamás conoció el placer de dejarse flotar en un lago, llevada a la deriva por un hilo de
cometa, como suele hacer Benjamín a pesar de sus años.” The author contests how women
have been left outside from the privilege of having time to think, or to doubt, and to enjoy
sex: “Benjamín sigue siendo un amante fervoroso, pero Jane ignora que el sexo puede
producer algo más que hijos.” At the end, he makes a double criticism: besides the feminist
discourse, he states a strong difference between historians and his memory project, which
includes subjects such as Jane.
In his second strong feminist move, Galeano writes about a transsexual, Madame
Satán who, during the week is a man, a pimp, but in weekends she is the best dancer in the
carnival:
Madame Satán es él de lunes a viernes, un diablo de sombrero panamá que a
trompadas y navajazos domina las noches del barrio de Lapa, mientras pasea
silbando y marcando el ritmo del samba con una cajita de fósforos; y los
fines de semana es ella, la diabla que acaba de ganar el concurso de
fantasías de carnaval con una capa de murciélaga dorada, que lleva un anillo
en cada dedo y que mueve las caderas como su amiga Carmen Miranda (III,
p. 142).
86
The ease with which Galeano treats the story of this peculiar character enacts a solid
emancipatory gender critique, while stating that the subalterns are also those who have been
sexually discriminated. His feminist discourse is rather consistent. In his account of big
personalities he includes the lives and speeches of feminist fighters, such as Charlotte
Gilman, for example. In addition, he contests the discourse of “liberators” that did not
really fight for a real emancipation and equality, and kept women in a lower submissive
position:
Aristócrata de Virginia, [Thomas] Jefferson predica la democracia, una
democracia de propietarios, y la libertad de pensamiento y fe; pero defiende
la jerarquía del sexo y de los colores. Sus planes de educación no alcanzan a
las mujeres, ni a los indios, ni a los negros. Jefferson condena la esclavitud y
es, y seguirá siendo, amo de esclavos. Más lo atraen las mulatas que las
blancas, pero tiene pánico a la pérdida de la pureza racial y cree que la
mezcla de sangres es la peor de las tentaciones que acechan al colono
blanco. (II, p. 60)
Throughout Memoria del fuego, Galeano will denounce once and again the
hypocrisy of U.S.A., French or British “liberation” programs, which always maintained
subalterns as such, merely securing elite class’ solid steps to “democracy”.
Yet, women, indigenous and black people are not the only subalterns in this
historical mapping. There is a semantic progression of the word, which includes not only
those who were born indigenous, but also those who supported Latin American
emancipation and equality, and died or suffered for it. This, consequently, leads to an
expansion of the community, since, ultimately, what this community shares is to be
opposed to imperialism and strive for equality and a fair life: people who shares the values
that were delineated at the beginning of the trilogy, throughout the myths and the first
battles.
Therefore, friars like Jesuits who, in time of colonization, struggled to keep alive the
native memory of indigenous people and were unfairly exiled from America, are also part
of the community:
[…] El Viejo Sahagún no se da por vencido. A los ochenta años largos,
aprieta contra el pecho unos pocos papeles salvados del desastre […] (I, p.
180).
87
[…] El rey de España castiga a los hijos de Loyola, que tan hijos de
América se han vuelto, por culpables de reiterada desobediencia y por
sospechosos del proyecto de un reino indio independiente. Nadie los llora
tanto como los guaraníes. Las numerosas misiones de los jesuitas en la
región guaraní anunciaban la prometida tierra sin mal y sin muerte; y los
indios llamaban karaí a los sacerdotes, que era nombre reservado a sus
profetas. (II, p. 43-44)
The inclusion in this community is not exclusively reserved to those who actively
participated in the emancipation struggles. Actually, other historical figures which were
born in U.S.A. or in Europe, but whose visions and lives match with what is being mapped,
are also included in the narration: Alexander Von Humboldt, Albert Einstein, Edgar Allan
Poe, Lautréamont and Paul Lafarge. Galeano rescues their alternative life stories, those that
might be not so well-known but which speak about their own subalternity or/and their
ethical stances.
For instance, the author narrates the story of Curt Unkel, the German who became
indigenous: “no nació indio; pero se hizo, o descubrió que era.” He lives with the
Guaraníes, “con ellos comparte la comida y comparte la alegría de compartir la comida.”
When he becomes a Guaraní, his name changes to “Nimuendajú”, that means “the one that
creates his own home”.
Writers, such as Whitman and Melville, are also included in the account:
impoverished artists who dreamt with lands of equality and freedom:
[..] El poeta abraza a Dios y a los pecadores y abraza a los indios y a los
pioneros que los aniquilan, abraza al esclavo, a la víctima y al verdugo.
Todo crimen se redime en el éxtasis del nuevo mundo, América musculosa
y avasallante, sin deuda alguna que pagar al pasado, vientos del progreso
que hacen al hombre camarada del hombre y le desencadenan la virilidad y
la belleza. (II, p. 216)
[…] En estos tiempos de euforia, en estas tierras norteamericanas en plena
expansión, desentona la voz de Herman Melville. Sus libros desconfían de
la Civilización, que atribuye al salvaje el papel del Demonio y lo obliga a
desempeñarlo […] Sus libros rechazan la Verdad única y obligatoria que
unos hombres, creyéndose elegidos, imponen a los demás. (II, p. 216)
This inclusion problematizes the discourse on the Other. The community includes
all those under the label “subaltern” –indigenous, workers, women and African immigrants
88
and their descendants– but also includes groups or subjects that, even though born within
the hegemonic class, were themselves subjects of oppression.
On account of this, what is, then, “the Other” for Memoria del fuego’s discourse?
Some traces have been already delineated throughout this analysis. It is true that Memoria
del fuego polarizes protagonists and antagonists as in an actantial model where the
subjects/protagonists are the subalterns of America, the opponents/antagonists are
colonizers and neo-colonizers, and the object is the American land itself as a free land, “la
promesa de América”. However, more than locating “the Other” in a physical or
geographical locus, in a body or in a name, the opponent is a set of values: economical
voracity, contempt against other human beings and disrespect for the alterity in either the
form it takes. What I want to argue, then, is that in this mapped community there is no
fundamental abjection for other cultures, as long as they are not colonizing cultures. In this
assemblage, native Americans are pillars, but women, travelers, thinkers and dreamers are
part of too, part of the common.
3.5. The common
This is, in my view, the strongest artifice of Galeano and the one that sustains his
whole performative project: not the blurring of heterogeneity and diversity into a
homogenous community, but instead, the suggestion that every cultural trait, no matter how
specific, has the possibility to be shared by everyone. To propose a community and find
commonalities, and by proposing it, to create it.
As we discussed before, one of the strategies throughout Memoria del fuego is the
use of rhetorical devices that allow the reader to subscribe and feel identification towards
what he reads. In the first volume, a compilation of myths of tribes from the whole
continent describe the creation of the world. There is no geographical or historical sequence
in the way the myths are arranged and, this way, we have, one next to another, myths from
the Tarascos, the Wawenock, the Comanches, the Cashinahua, the Iglulik, and more.
Instead of installing a homogenizing mythology that founds the identity of the whole
continent (just as nationalism does, for example, in Mexico with the Aztecs, or Peru with
the Quiches) Galeano builds a common world view and mythical genesis out of the mosaic
89
of diverse cosmogonies. This resulting cosmogony is, therefore, inherently heterogeneous,
utterly multitudinarian, as it “allows the political-social existence of the many seeing as
being many”. There is, however, a stylistic unity in this compilation, for all the myths are
narrated by the author, in his own words, as if Galeano was endorsed with the role of a
storyteller. A stylistic unity can also be found in the rest of the oeuvre, so the memory
recount does not feel as a pastiche of scraps of different sources, but instead a complete
history narrated by the storyteller of the community.
There are some other strategies that create a communitarian perception. Some of the
myths, while coming from different indigenous tribes, relate how the “First Father”
participated in the creation of natural elements. This might seem as a superposition of
Christian cosmogony into the indigenous world view. However, the truth is that many
indigenous mythologies consider the advent of a primary god before the others appeared.
What Galeano merely does is effacing the name of the first god in order to create
community: if everyone had a first god (and then a second and a third), is it really important
to distinguish him from other tribes’ gods?
Gods are cheerful and lively characters in Memoria del fuego and they are important
for people’s daily lives. This syncretism speaks foremost of a shared disposition of
American people that is continuously in contact with their nature and spirituality, with
magic and never-ending memory. Religious syncretism does not betray or violate Latin
American identity because it is born from an active engagement with the supernatural
world. At the end, those who preserve the memory in each tribe preserve the memory of the
whole land, of the whole community: “Así los indios tukano consiguieron el veneno, según
cuentan los hombres de mucho tiempo, los guardadores de la memoria” (II, p. 110).
What Galeano suggests in Memoria del fuego is not that Latin America is
homogenous, but instead that its commonality prevails over national and cultural
differences. This idea is more decisive in the third book, which narrates the time when
almost all Latin American nations are already formed. In the window titled “Banderas de
varios países” Galeano relates how, during the War of the Pacific which confronted Chile
against Peru and Bolivia for a part of the Atacama desert that was full of saltpeter, the
nation of the people involved was less important than every-day interaction when choosing
alliances:
90
[…] José Briggs, jefe de la huelga, es hijo de un norteamericano, pero se
niega a pedir protección al cónsul de los Estados Unidos. El cónsul del Perú
intenta llevarse a los obreros peruanos. Los obreros peruanos no abandonan
a sus compañeros chilenos. El cónsul de Bolivia quiere salvar a los obreros
bolivianos. Los obreros bolivianos dicen:
—Con los chilenos vivimos, con los chilenos morimos. (II, p. 14-15)
Galeano demonstrates that people can choose the community they want to belong
to; they can build their own homes. The community is so big and flexible, based only in
commonalities and not in fixed, imposed, external symbols, that people can relate freely
with each other no matter where they come from. This is manifest both in the window
about Curt Unkel, “Nimuendajú”, and in this following window that narrates how a
community in Nayarit, Mexico, chose its name after the Chilean president Salvador
Allende:
En la sierra Mexicana de Nayarit había una comunidad [huichola] que no
tenía nombre. […] Carlos González lo encontró, por pura casualidad. […]
Al atravesar un basural, recogió un libro tirado entre los desperdicios. […]
El libro hablaba de un país de nombre raro, que Carlos no sabía ubicar pero
que debía estar bien lejos de México, y contaba una historia de hace pocos
años.
En el camino de regreso, caminando sierra arriba, Carlos siguió leyendo. No
podía desprenderse de esta historia de horror y de bravura. El personaje
central del libro era un hombre que había sabido cumplir su palabra. Al
llegar a la aldea, Carlos anunció, eufórico:
—¡Por fin tenemos nombre!
[…] Esta comunidad lleva el nombre de un hombre digno que no dudó a la
hora de elegir entre la traición y la muerte.
—Voy para Salvador Allende —dicen, ahora, los caminantes.
Community is possible on the basis of a shared history among subaltern subjects.
But “history” not as the mute, imprisoned, official account, stored in museums and
schoolbooks; “history” as the breathing, lively account of memory; history as a life in
common.
*
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4. A performative memory project
When using the term “performative” I intend to recall the speech acts theory of John Austin
and the way we “do things with words”. Words are powerful not only in oral cultures, as
Walter Ong described, but also in the literacy universe where speech acts (even, and
especially, when written) are translated into effective actions in the world. There are many
examples of this: contracts that mean actual legal commitments, engagements that start
with a vehement “I promise”, or the declared confession of a convict. Identity is also a
performative act, constituted, as Butler noticed, by the expressions that are said to be its
results: representations of identity actually build identitarian notions, and not the opposite.
Collective identity is thus framed by the narratives that are created with regard to a
community’s memory, myths, history and values. Identity, then, is constituted within
representation; it is, as Stuart Hall asserts, “not only a story, a narrative that we tell
ourselves about ourselves, it is the stories which change with historical circumstances. And
identity shifts with the way we think and hear and experience them” (2000, p. 59). In this
sense, a literary work that relates the history and memory of the subaltern, which had been
hidden, hijacked and silenced, aims to have an effect on collective identity, and hence, to
shift the way a community perceives itself. Eduardo Galeano’s effort to map a community
based in re-encoded identity traits aims at changing and reformulating, with each reading,
the notion of (Latin) American history, so that new communitarian alliances are made
effective.
However, it is worth posing the question: who are the readers of Eduardo Galeano?
Certainly not many of the people depicted in Memoria del fuego, those in indigenous
communities who might not read Spanish and who have probably never heard the name of
the author. Are they aware of the fact that Galeano is framing them in a new community
and that their histories are being told out loud, rescued from the silence? I would have my
doubts.
In her broadly discussed essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Gayatri Spivak
concludes that subaltern cannot speak themselves because they are silenced by the
representations that intellectuals feel entitled to make of them. However, as I argued before,
92
Galeano’s ultimate goal is not to speak for the subaltern, but instead to establish a space for
the re-presence, the Darstellung, an embodiment of the problematics and complexities of
Latin America and strive for a change in what is visible and how to represent it; in the
distribution of the sensible. As Wolfgang Iser puts it, “representation is first and foremost
and act of performance, bringing forth in the mode of staging something which in itself is
not a given” (1987, p. 232). From the beginning, Galeano positions himself as the narrator
of the history, without the pretension of speaking for the subaltern but instead taking an
actively subjective position which is openly partial and engaged: “Incapaz de distancia,
tomo partido: lo confieso y no me arrepiento” (p. xvi). He is there to “propose” a new,
alternative, memory account, as well as to open a space of interaction for different
discourses that do not participate in official, colonizing, historiographies. Subsequently, the
main characters of Memoria del fuego, more than being the expository subjects of the
account, are there to enact the kind of relationship that will serve to trace the community
and change the politics of representation.
The first step toward decolonization is to question the legitimacy of colonization,65
while founding a new epistemology based on a geopolitically “biased” enunciation. As
Ramón Grosfoguel poses it:
How would the world-system look like if we moved the locus of
enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous women in the
Americas, to, say, Rigoberta Menchú in Guatemala or Domitila Barrios de
Chungara in Bolivia?[…] From the structural location of an indigenous
woman in the Americas, what arrived was a more complex world-system
than what political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis
portrait. A European / capitalist / military / Christian /
patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived in the Americas and
established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global
hierarchies. (2012, p. 7)
Eduardo Galeano, as the enunciative character, assumes a geopolitical position
breaking the myth of the disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the
Western epistemology66 and evidencing the dynamics that led to the never-ending
65
Angela Wilson and Michael Yelow Bird, cit. pos. Amy Lonetree (2012). Decolonizing Museums.
Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. North Carolina: University of North Carolina
Press, p. 120.
66
Santiago Castro-Gómez (2013) would call it “the point zero myth”.
93
colonization of the American people. In this sense, Memoria del fuego is a decolonizing
agency for, more than producing knowledge about the subaltern groups in (Latin) America,
it criticizes Western epistemological system in the shape of historiography and implements
a new way of account based on memory as a way of connecting history to the actual
experience of people. As a decolonizing agency, the readers –the addressees– are not
necessarily the subaltern, but those who maintain the Western paradigms and can, through
reading, effectuate a change. It is possible to say, then, that Memoria del fuego is a
decolonizing agency insofar as it interpellates67 subjects to make them shift and create
communities, devise identities and discover commonalities.
The power of speech to performatively constitute –politically visible– communities
is put forward by Hannah Arendt’s discussion over the Greek polis. In The Human
Condition, she states that the polis, the place for politics, was not a building or an
architectonical point, but instead it consisted more in the interaction and communication
among participants. She asserted that: “action and speech create a space between the
participants which can find its proper location almost anywhere and anytime. […] The
space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech
and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm
and the various forms of government” (1982, pp. 198-199). Language, speech, word, as
means to create community and belonging, come once and again in Memoria del fuego, as
previously reviewed. Galeano narrates how, for native people, speech, as a way of
resistance, helped them to establish a contact that was almost physical, and which defined
their way of relating with each other and of establishing commonality:
Se funda en Haití la lengua créole. Como el tambor, el créole es el idioma
común que los arrancados de África hablan en varias islas antillanas. Brotó
del interior de las plantaciones, cuando los condenados necesitaron
reconocerse y resistir. Vino de las lenguas africanas, con africada melodía, y
se alimentó de los decires de normandos y bretones. Recogió palabras de los
indios caribes y de los piratas ingleses y también de los colonos españoles
del oriente del Haití. Gracias al créole, los haitianos sienten que se tocan al
hablarse. (II, p. 90, emphasis added)
67
I am thinking here in the Althusserian interpellation. See Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
(1971).
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Memoria del fuego aims to become a space of interaction, a meeting point not only
for the heterogeneous mosaic of stories and agencies that appear along the three books, but
also for the narrator, the reader, and in fact, everyone that is willing to participate of this
open community of the subalterns history. In Memoria del fuego Galeano challenges le
partage du sensible, the distribution of the sensible, to render visible and subject to
interaction everything that had been invisible68.
This emphasis on a continuous communication is also described by Jacques
Rancière in “The Emancipated Spectator” (2007). In this essay, Rancière contests the
hierarchy that, within the history of theater, has appeared between passive and active
spectatorship. Since German Romanticism, theater has been associated with the idea of
community: “the community as a way of occupying time and space, as a set of living
gestures and attitudes, that stands before any kind of political form and institution;
community as a performing body instead of an apparatus of forms and rules” (p. 272). In
this schema, dramaturgs such as Artaud and Brecht strived for eliciting a more politically
engaged spectator: a theater where the audience was confronted with itself as a collectivity,
and a passive spectator could be turned into its contrary. For Rancière, the very statement
that a “free” and “committed” spectator should be “active” in his theatrical spectatorship is
deceiving, for it implies that there is an intellectual difference between those who are in
stage (those who want to teach something to the spectator) and the spectator, who is only
looking. Rancière argues that the emancipation of the spectatorship starts with the premise
of equality of intelligences and the abolition of the superiority of the active over the
passive. Changing the hierarchy passive/active would imply changing the distribution of
the sensible, the hegemonic partition of who is (deserves to be) politically active.
Everybody, either those who are over the stage and those who are “just looking”, are active
participants of a collective body, because “looking is also an action that confirms or
modifies that distribution, and that ‘interpreting the world’ is already a means of
transforming it, or reconfiguring it” (p. 277).
Rancière concludes that, in this way, emancipation means “blurring of the
opposition between those who look and those who act, between those who are individuals
68
Important to remember, though, that since Galeano endorses a geopolitical position, as argued before, this
“everything” means “everything within this very point of view”.
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and those who are members of a collective body”: allowing a community of storytellers and
spectators that are translators of what they see (p. 280).
It is relevant that the fragmentary nature of Memoria del fuego, which allows a more
democratic disposition of stories and characters, is also a statement against borders and
fixed points of attachment. Therefore, characters are not essentially compelled to belong or
not to the community; instead, their inclusion or exclusion, as well as their interaction with
other members, is given by means of the relation that is performed through interaction:
porous, mutable and provisional69 alliances.
At the end, what remains is a literary work where past is re-framed and memory is
rebuilt including aspects that subvert official historical recounts. Galeano’s goal is to make
visible and audible those-without-voice, the “people without history”70, the subalterns, and
to narrate a history that is epistemologically built from a Latin American, subaltern,
perspective. Moreover, by including subjects that, however not subaltern, strongly
sympathize with Latin American subaltern ethos, Galeano is implying that the community
is not restricted to those born in the countryside, indigenous towns or isolated favelas, but
instead, that this community is open to anyone that can feel identification.
If the name “America” was given to the continent by European colonizers as a way
to unproblematically unify the Other, Galeano retrieves the meaning to a historically
heterogeneous, evolving, deeply telluric ethos that corresponds with a fertile territory that
did not have one name, but many. Latin America then, is not a land of borders but a land of
interaction; it is the land of the multitude.
69
70
See Bell, 2012. p. 14.
See Eric Wolf, 1982.
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IV. Transculturation, Heterogeneity and Hybrid Cultures
*
We are leading to the final part of this thesis, and yet there are more ways in which to read
the discourse in Memoria del fuego. In the previous chapter an analysis of Memoria del
fuego showed how a literary-historiographic account can aim to the reconfiguration of
communities in Latin America. Indeed, Memoria del fuego is a project for the
reconstitution of an alternative historical narrative based in the subalterns as main
characters in order to restore the visibility of the “people without history”. But additionally,
it redesigns, by means of a number of strategies, the communitarian alliances that allow the
interaction between different people(s) in and out of (Latin) America. Ultimately, the
recovery of memory in Memoria de fuego has the ethical and political goal of regenerating
the social tissue and re-structure communitarian bonds.
However, in order to carry out the goal of this thesis, I would like to situate
Galeano’s discourse within other discourses that, spoken from Latin America, try to define
and interpret the Latin American situation, in specific, identity and cultural formation. This
is not an easy move. Memoria del fuego is not an essay and does not aim to establish a
theory of Latin American identity. Nevertheless, discourse always reveals more than what it
explicitly states and, in between the lines, there is a discursive configuration that speaks
about remapping a community that acknowledges the heterogeneous character of
individuals and groups in Latin America and, on that basis, builds an identity narrative.
The concepts that will be discussed in this chapter are chosen by their paradigmatic
epistemological potential to conceive and reflect on the way Latin American nations are
constituted by conflictive cultural spheres that are (internally even) heterogeneous. In fact,
the concepts of transculturation, heterogeneity and hybridity were born one after the other
as attempts to better define specific situations that, in Latin America, had to do with
multiculturalism and post/neo-colonialism/Occidentalism. This is, in principle, what they
have in common with Memoria del fuego: the acknowledgment of Latin American
heterogeneity as the primary basis for decolonization. As Cornejo Polar writes: “partir de
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un reconocimiento epistemológico de esa condición, respetuoso también de la múltiple y
conflictiva realidad que venían escamoteando los criterios homogeneizantes” (1994, p.25).
It is, however, impossible to ignore the fact that Memoria del fuego and the works
that will be discussed here do not belong to the same discursive paradigm. Actually,
Memoria del fuego, as a literary oeuvre, can be analyzed in the light of the concepts of
heterogeneity, transculturation and hybridity, especially for the reason that those three were
specifically applied to discuss and categorize Latin American literature. Nonetheless,
instead of being a drawback, this fact only means that there are at least two possible ways
to draw insights from Memoria del fuego. The first way consists in situating it within the
literary paradigm. The second would be interpreting its discourse with regard to the
construction of Latin American memory and identity. These two are the twofold path that
this chapter will take. I am, evidently, more interested in the latter, since what I will
ultimately argue is that within the lines of Memoria del fuego there is a theoretical
proposition on how, on the basis of a heterogeneous and cultural conflictive society, it is
possible to devise a collective Latin American identity. This has already been suggested in
the previous chapters. However, it will be in this final chapter where, being Memoria del
fuego contrasted to other models of analysis, its identity discourse about Latin America will
be cast.
*
1. First move: Memoria del fuego, heterogeneous, hybrid or transcultured?
1.1.
Heterogeneity
When discussing the aesthetic characteristics and rhetoric strategies of Memoria del fuego,
the words heterogeneity and heterogeneous came out more than once to describe the nature
of the sources and voices that compose the trilogy. As it was argued, Memoria del fuego
embraces cultural heterogeneity as a constituting part of the memory project, which is
manifest throughout the books.
Heterogeneity, from the Greek ἑτερογενής: heteros “different” and genos “kind,
gender”, refers to the coexisting difference, the diversity that composes a totality. Antonio
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Cornejo Polar used the concept for the first time in his 1977 speech, published in 1982 as
an article, “El indigenismo y las literaturas heterogéneas. Su doble estatuto sociocultural”,
where he retook José Carlos Mariátegui’s call to devise a critical system capable to account
for the heterogeneous literatures from Peru. Here, Cornejo Polar calls “homogenous
literature” the one that is produced and received by writers and public from the same
cultural stratum: “es, podría decirse, una sociedad que se habla a sí misma” (1982, p. 73).
“Heterogeneous literatures”, on the other side, are those literary texts conformed by at least
two different sociocultural signs: while the authors belong to the hegemonic social stratum
(literate, educated, publishing subjects), the subject matter refers to a different cultural
system –the indigenous, oral and subaltern. This way, there is a cultural duplicity that leads
to a conflict zone where one of the elements –at least– does not correspond to the others.
Cornejo Polar, this way, distinguishes between “indigenous” literature and “indigenist”
literature (homogeneous, since the producer and the subject matter belong to the same
sociocultural statute). It is the latter the one that reveals the heterogeneous configuration of
Latin American societies. He describes this distinction as follows:
[“Mestizo”] alude a toda una compleja red de cuestiones socio-culturales,
principalmente el hecho de que este proceso de producción obedece a
normas occidentalizadas o “europoides”, según la terminología de
Lipschutz, tanto por la posición social y cultural de sus productores,
claramente integrados al polo hegemónico de las sociedades a que
pertenecen, cuanto por el contexto en que actúan y las convenciones
culturales y literarias que emplean. Para señalar sólo lo más evidente: el
modo de producción indigenista no se concibe al margen de la escritura en
español, mientras que la oralidad quechua o aymara sería el modo más
propio de la producción indígena. (1977, p. 18).
For Cornejo Polar the literary text is the symbolic space of interaction of the
heterogeneous configuration of Latin American culture. It reveals the conflictive
sociocultural statute that has existed in the continent ever since colonization. In 1994, he
published his famous book Escribir en el aire. Ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad sociocultural en las literaturas andinas, where he expanded and developed the concept of
heterogeneity. There, he examines literary works from the Andes to discover the historical
processes of cultural clashes that have impacted collective subjectivities. He reveals how
marginal discourses have been incorporated to the literate system, describing such
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antagonisms and conflicts in order to display the way the subaltern exists within the
hegemonic. Cornejo Polar additionally proposes to use the Bakhtinian categories of
intertext (interdiscourse) and dialogism to polish the analysis of the literary phenomenon he
refers to, and focuses on three basic textual cores: discourse, subject and representation.
First, he finds out that there is a temporal displacement within the literary discourse:
different times filter and cross, so he proposes to make a “historical recount of synchrony”.
With regard to the subject, Cornejo Polar perceives that in heterogeneous literatures the
narrator is constantly ambiguous about his/her cultural status, which turns him/her into a
heterogeneous subject. Actually, he is emphatic that literary heterogeneity comes after a
basic, primary, heterogeneity: again, the one that has its basis in the foundational violence
of colonization, which is extended until these days in the shape of neo-colonizing practices,
hierarchies, marginality and a structured privileges system. Therefore, the ultimate goal of
deconstructing heterogeneity is to hear all silenced cultures, to acknowledge tensions and
conflicts that survive and that speak about resistance, and to clearly establish a Latin
American constitution that privileges specificity within Latin American cultural theory.
1.2.
Transculturation
Even though it was the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz who first coined the term
“transculturación” and actually introduced it as a neologism, it has been the work of the
Uruguayan Ángel Rama the one that has been more extensively discussed, given the
elaboration he made of the term in his book from 1982, Transculturación narrativa en
América Latina. The impact that the Cuban anthropologist had among some European
sociologists is however noteworthy, especially given the attention paid and diffusion made
by Bronislaw Malinowski to the work of Ortiz. The concept of transculturation has been,
this way, explored from the European side, with other implications and definitions that,
however, is probably that would not equally apply to the Latin American case71.
71
I am thinking in the work of Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality –The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today”
(1999), and the way he uses the concept of transculturality to refer the status of “modern cultures”, which are
constantly in contact with one another, so “there is no longer anything absolutely foreign”. Here Welsch
disregards that transculturation was, in principle, a process born due to colonization and cultural imposition,
and turns it into the product of free and happy globalized interaction among cultures. This might be due to
Malinowski’s words in the prologue to Ortiz’s work: “Es un proceso en el cual ambas partes de la ecuación
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Fernando Ortiz coined the term “transculturation” to contest and replace the prevailing
North American concept of “acculturation”, which refers to the process wherein a culture
acquires elements from a different one. For Ortiz this notion did not thoroughly give
account of the varied phenomena originated in Cuba due to the complex cultural
transmutations lived. Instead, he proposed “transculturation” as an alternative concept,
which emphasized the more complex phases of the process. He argued that, besides
acquiring elements from a foreign culture, the original culture undergoes a cultural loss or
uprooting –a partial “deculturation”–, followed by the creation of new cultural phenomena
that did not exist before –a “neoculturation”–. The outcome, therefore, would be a culture
that is different from its “progenitors”, but which consists in recognizable traits from the
cultures it originates from. Transculturation would, hence, refer to the transition from the
original culture to this new one, which is not a copy of the foreign, but a new third one.
In Transculturación narrativa, Ángel Rama introduces Ortiz’s concept to analyze Latin
American literature. He discusses how, from independence onwards, Latin American
countries have tried to build a literary system that aims to be representative of the region,
thus accounting for a solid opposition to European literature. This representative principle
would have its foundation in originality as a sign of decolonization and independence. Yet,
Rama noticed a tension between the internationalization that had paradoxically made Latin
American literature autonomous and integrated in the Western paradigm, and the strife for
autonomy based on the particular traditions and traits of the region. This is the phenomenon
that led Ángel Rama to analyze Latin American narrative on the light of transculturation
theory. What he noticed is that Latin American narrative was framed into a double
sociocultural statute: on the one side, regionalism, which accentuated the cultural
particularities of marginal areas, contributed to particularize and distinguish Latin
American narrative from Western literature. On the other side, its insertion into the core of
national culture, obeyed to “urban” literary structures while requiring the preservation of
regional and traditional cultural elements that had contributed to the cultural
particularization process of the nation. In sum, whereas literary narrative articulations –the
form– obeyed to urban –centralized– principles, literary expressions where sought in the
resultan modificadas” (In Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho,
1978, p. 5).
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margins: in the traditions of native cultures. According to Rama, this resulted in a
“historically crystalized formula of tradition” (1982, p. 32). Rama, then, sought traces of
narrative transculturation in three main levels: language, literary structure and world view.
For Rama, a literary analysis would have the ultimate goal to give insights in culture,
because: “las obras literarias no están fuera de las culturas, sino que las coronan y en la
medida en que estas culturas son invenciones seculares y multitudinarias hacen del escritor
un productor que trabaja con las obras de innumerables hombres” (p. 24). Moreover, a
culture that is able to adapt and survive transcultural processes shows to be a lively culture.
Rama notices three prominent moments of the clash between modernization and tradition:
first, the impact of modernization causes that native cultures seek, defensively, refuge in
their most rooted traditions. Then, original cultures undergo a critical examination of their
own values and elements, and select those they want to keep or are more prone to
adaptation. Finally, the modernizing impact is absorbed by the regional, original, culture.
There might be a re-discovery of self traits that, in spite of belonging to the traditional
heritage, were not so much used before (p. 36).
Even though Rama closely follows Ortiz’s work, he argues that the latter’s view is
rather “geometric” in acknowledging the cultural plasticity and creativity of cultures.
Therefore, Rama takes distance from Ortiz in two main points. First, in emphasizing what
he calls the “ars combinatiorio” proper of any autonomous cultural system; the selective
and creative capacity of cultures to choose and combine own and foreign elements they will
keep: mostly, those that might be able to endure the transculturation process. And secondly,
that transculturation, instead of being a three-step process as Ortiz stated, implies a
comprehensive restructuration of the cultural system.
Despite the richness of Rama’s argument, Cornejo Polar challenged his vision in a short
article published in 1995, “Mestizaje, transculturación, heterogeneidad”. Cornejo was
uncomfortable with the concept of transculturation due to two main reasons. First, because
for Cornejo, transculturation implies that, in a given moment, there would be a syncretic
and synthetic, unproblematized and conciliating outcome: the synthesis of two (or more)
languages, ethnic consciences, historical experiences, etc., which would reduce difference
and alterity. And secondly, because Rama only took into account those literary (and
cultural) manifestations that were already incorporated into hegemonic culture,
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disregarding all the discourses that have not had an impact on “high” literature (1995, p.
369). In his article, Cornejo Polar emphasized the remaining need of a theoretical device
useful to account for those sociocultural situations where crossed cultural dynamics do not
have a synthetic outcome, but instead underscore conflicts and estrangements. Additionally,
Cornejo criticized mestizaje as a “salvational ideology” that would legitimize a conciliating
integration of Latin American condition. Rama had previously praised mestizaje as a
strategy of great relevance on the defense of indigenism, and moreover, as a trait of a
lively, present, culture. He discussed how the writer José María Arguedas used and
defended Quechua language as it was spontaneously used by people: full of Spanish
language words. For Rama, only cultures that are capable to adapt to modernization,
incorporating their own traits and traditions, are able to survive. Conversely, to Cornejo
Polar this picture is homogenizing as Rama neglects to account for the strong heterogeneity
in Latin American societies and cultures.
In my view, Rama’s and Cornejo’s respective accounts on indigenism are very similar
in the recognition of a cultural duplicity and strategies that bring those two sociocultural
strata together. The difference consists in the outcome: whereas for Rama transculturation
accounts for the capacity of interaction and integration, for Cornejo heterogeneity is not as
easily synthetized and difference shall not be consumed in cultural compromising. But with
regard to the literary application of heterogeneity and transculturation, both authors take
into account comparable points of discussion: subject, discourse and representation, for
Cornejo; language, literary structure and world view, for Rama. Therefore, when Cornejo
Polar discusses the heterogeneous discourse, he, like Rama, refers to the conflictive relation
between oral and literate language in indigenist narrative. However, whereas Rama
underscores the meeting point of these two different strata, Cornejo Polar’s aim is to
highlight the inner conflict of these discourses, relevant as well in all levels of literary
production.
1.3.
Hybridity
Written in the dawn of the 90s, Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la
modernidad explores the cultural manifestations of a world where “las tradiciones aún no
se han ido y la modernidad no acaba de llegar” (p. 13). As its title suggests, the book’s
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main concern is to explain how the coexistence of the modern and the traditional spheres is
possible. The essential question to answer is what the cultural outcome of having big
metropolises with a totally established modernization next to highly impoverished regions
where there was never the intention or the success in founding a modern infrastructure is.
Throughout his book, Néstor García Canclini addresses the situation of modernization
in Latin America, as well as the role of the popular and the traditional in the modern world.
His main premise is that Latin American countries are the aftermath of the crossing,
sedimentation and juxtaposition of indigenous traditions, catholic Hispanism and
modernizing politic, educative and communicative efforts (1990, p.71). These intersections
have produced an extensive variety of hybrid formations in every social stratus: indigenous
communities that consume Coca-Cola, and fancy houses with indigenous crafts as
decoration, colonial furniture and satellite dish. García Canclini calls this phenomenon
“multitemporal heterogeneity”, symptomatic of the dissimilar, still hasty way
modernization was established in Latin American countries, and the relation between
regional cultures and national cultures. His perspective is comparable to Rama’s view of
tradition’s need to integrate into national cultures as a way to remain alive. The same way,
García Canclini underscores the symbolic value that “folklore” has in founding a typically
Latin American way of modernity. The author notices a case of this questioning in the way
literary (and also pictorial) modernism grew in Latin America. He argues that when writers
came back from Europe, instead of copying European avant-gardes, they would try to relate
the specific circumstances of their countries, next to striving to find more proper ways to
communicate with their people. Therefore, García Canclini interprets indigenists as writers
who wanted to found a new art, to represent the national within the modern aesthetic
development (p. 76).
In a deeply comparable way to Ángel Rama’s insights about native cultures being a
vigorous, creative forces, able to face changes and transmute accordingly, García Canclini
also argues against the perspective of crystalizing tradition in a marmot stone. In this
regard, he declares the following: “al dramatizar sólo los mitos de origen y la formación de
colecciones apodícticamente constitutivas de la nacionalidad, no permiten que emerjan las
preguntas por la actual composición de la cultura” (p. 332). When analyzing the case of the
National Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico, the author regrets that there is
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no single hall devoted to what is currently happening in ethnic terms in Mexico, such as
Mexican migrants to the U.S.A. or migrations and displacements from the rural landscapes
to the city, and the corresponding cultural products.
Apart from “hybridity”, García Canclini uses the terms “syncretism” and
“mestizaje” to also describe hybridization processes. Still, he declares to prefer
“hybridization (hybridity, hybridism)” itself because it can be used to refer to a variety of
intercultural merges, not only the racial, religious or artistic ones. In my perspective, the
term “hybridism” is accurate in denoting a cultural manifestation that has its clear roots into
two different cultural spheres. Therefore, it is the specific category that was referred to by
Rama and Cornejo Polar when they wrote about literary texts with a clear cultural duplicity,
even though they did not called it thus. However, hybridity, as a socio-cultural category,
still speaks about a conciliatory product, a synthetic outcome, probably in a more
pronounced way than transculturation. Heterogeneity, on the other side, exists to account
for cultural milieus where there is no synthesis possible and the difference cannot be
blurred. In my opinion, both categories account for different and specific conditions and
they cannot and should not be supplemental. Raúl Bueno saw it similarly when he wrote
that whereas the main characteristic of cultural mestizaje (and hybridism) was to establish
an existential continuum, heterogeneity affirmed cultural discontinuity emphasizing
differences and alterity (2004, p.28).
All in all, the category of hybridity with its specific referent proves useful when
discussing literary texts. In the analysis of Memoria del fuego performed in the previous
chapter, it was made evident that syncretism and hybridism are processes that have
nourished and formed contemporary cultural identities. But this will be discussed more
extensively in the next section.
1.4.
Hybridity, heterogeneity and transculturation in Memoria del fuego
I wanted to bring to the table this revision of three of the most important conceptual and
epistemic notions of Latin American critic, in order to reflect on them with regard to
Memoria del fuego. This is pertinent because, in my opinion, Eduardo Galeano is an author
that could have been studied by Rama, Cornejo and García –even if he was not. Thus,
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thinking on the trilogy on the light of those three concepts will help to ideologically situate
Galeano’s endeavor, as well as to better understand his contribution and reflections upon
Latin American culture(s).
As stated, Memoria del fuego is populated by a big diversity of voices and subjects that
belong to a variety of cultural and ethnic groups: from pre-Columbian indigenous people,
African slaves and their descendants, revolutionaries, intellectuals, etc. Memoria del fuego
is thus not devoted to a single ‘type’ of subaltern –indigenous-, but to subalternity, a
broader community whose links are not social nor ethnic but ethical. Yet, there is the
intention to emphasize the roots that link all those heterogeneous subjects to their
(multiverse) origins by dedicating the first half of the volume 1 (made explicit by the title,
“Los nacimientos”) to American indigenous myths. There are two aspects to acknowledge
in this fact: 1) the need of the author to recover pre-Columbian tradition and integrate it to
the notion of Latin American memory, identity and ethos that will be developed throughout
the books, and 2) to emphasize the heterogeneous –yet comparable– character of these
origins.
Galeano, as a Uruguayan author, does not belong to the alluded indigenous
communities whose origins he tries to retrieve. His connection is purely ethical, as has been
argued before, and yet he does not present himself as foreign or strange and instead the
myths are narrated with a peculiar familiarity that reinforces his role of storyteller. What
kind of author is he?
With regard to the transcultural author, Ángel Rama insists that, even though facing a
linguistic conflict72, he/she is reintegrated to the linguistic community of his subject matter,
and speaks from within it with unimpeded use of its idiomatic resources from the moment
that he no longer perceives himself as an outsider. But instead of recovering the original
language as a replica, the author is able to build a literary language within its framework;
thus, neoculturation phenomenon. Rama argues that this way of vivacious linguistic
integration restores a regional worldview and prolongs its validity in a form yet richer and
more interiorized than before. It thus expands the original world view in a way that is better
72
Cornejo Polar would also refer to this situation when discussing about the socio-cultural duplicity of
indigenism or heterogeneous literatures. The barrier can be purely linguistic, as in the case of indigenous
languages, but it can also consist in the contrast between orality and literacy, which would imply a radically
different cultural rationality.
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adapted, authentic, artistically solvent and, in fact, modernized –but without destruction of
identity (1982, pp. 42-43).
These statements about the creation of a new language that, nevertheless, brings to life
the older and original one recovered from the margins, recall Iuri Lotman’s assertions in On
the Semiosphere. Lotman’s arguments were referred to in the last chapter to argue how
Galeano’s attempt to retrieve oral agency created a new language that actually fosters the
significance of the living speech of people. Memoria del fuego thus acts as a pivot between
native cultures –orality– and the modern reader –literacy–. His creative intention to
restructure the cultural system makes him a transcultural author and, following Rama’s
model, this can be evidenced in three levels in Memoria del fuego:
The first level of narrative transculturation is with regard to speech and language. It was
shown in the analysis of Memoria del fuego how Galeano rescues orality as a way to
transgress hegemonic agency, but also in order to bring to life the lively speech of people
and connect it to memory. According to Rama, two summonses led Latin American
literature to search a path apart from “universal” literature: originality and representability.
Galeano uses the representation of oral speech as a way to account for Latin American
ethos, as well as to create a counter-hegemonic narrative.
The second level of transculturation is the literary structure. Also discussed in the
previous chapter was the emphasis on fragmentation as a rhetoric strategy to account for an
autonomous and dynamic heterogeneity. Rama associates this characteristic with
modernism: a new form of narration that does not exist within indigenous practices.
Galeano uses it to reinforce the particularity of a Latin American memory account, and he
displays it along with other narrative elements: naturalism, street’s criers, testimonies:
Yo nunca le perdoné a Tello que lo hayan matado de un balazo, así
nomás… Sentí un gran miedo, y como que se metió en miedo también la
montaña. Se calmó el viento de la montaña y los árboles dejaron de
mecerse, no se movía una hoja, los pájaros dejaron de cantar. Todo se
volvió tétrico esperando el momento de que llegaran y nos mataran a
toditos.
Y empezamos a caminar. Cuando nosotros empezamos a caminar en son de
combate quebrada arriba, fue como que sacudimos a la montaña, como que
la agarramos y le dijimos: bueno, cabrona, qué te pasa... (III, p. 287).
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Therefore, the literary structure of Memoria del fuego, however has the intention of
subversively bring to life forms of narrative that better account for the dissimilar
configuration of Latin American culture, reveals an avant-garde (postmodern?)
composition.
The third level of narrative transculturation addresses the world view. This aspect
refers mainly to the recovery of cognitional structures of native cultures, their mythic
thought, in order to prevent them from disappearance. The world view of Memoria del
fuego was also extensively discussed in the previous chapter, but as a significant example
one of the leitmotivs of the third volume shows the magic thinking that prevails in the
oeuvre: the continuous rebirth of American people and of American land in the face of the
12 births of Miguel Mármol.
Eduardo Galeano is thus located in the intersection of a double sociocultural statute.
Regardless his origin, his ethical affiliation is certainly subaltern –indigenous, but not only–
so, apart from being a transcultural author, he surely is heterogeneous, in the sense
bestowed by Cornejo Polar in his article from 1978.
The heterogeneity in Memoria del fuego permeates its structure, its sources, its
polyphony and the subjects that populate it. In a more emphatic way than transculturation
and hybridism, heterogeneity is an epistemological proposal to acknowledge, affirm and
respect the cultural difference that started from colonization and has been prolonged until
these days. Cornejo Polar found that, within ‘Latin American literary system’, there was an
overwhelming disparity of signs and discourses that had their roots in a dissimilar
sociocultural affiliation: each one of them represented (and re-presented) different times,
rhythms and worldviews. Cornejo Polar’s program to “recount the history of the
synchrony” invites to pay attention to each specific discourse and trace its signs, respecting
its relative autonomy as well as the way it has historically interacted with others.
Ultimately, to erase once and for all the myth of Latin American identity as a coherent,
uniform, lenient and unproblematic block.
In Memoria del fuego, Galeano attempts to include hundreds of different voices that
participate in the memory account to make visible their particular visions and attachments.
Moreover, by being put next to one another in the democratic configuration of vignettes,
equality among strata, cultures and origins is suggested. Each subject (either individual or
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collective) is additionally addressed emphasizing its set of values, speech and world views,
so that we have relatively independent cultural spheres of African descendants, indigenous
from different tribes, colonized natives and so on. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity of this
variety of subjects does not hinder interaction. What is thus mostly emphasized is the
possibility of co-existence and the commonality that, above all, pervades (Latin) American
diversity.
It is notorious that the vast majority of the subjects alluded to in the trilogy are tied to
Latin American territory, either by birth or by interaction –mutual nourishment–: they are
telluric subjects, and in this sense they represent Latin American land. This is largely
explicit in most of the windows that compose Memoria del fuego. For instance, in the third
volume, the narration in the window about Pelé starts as: “Resplandece el fútbol brasileño,
que baila y hace bailar” (p. 202). The affiliation of Pelé with Brazilian territory comes at
once. The following window is about Garrincha, another famous Brazilian soccer player
who plays in Stockholm. Garrincha does not act as a normal soccer player because he
“juega por reír, no por ganar, alegre pájaro de patas chuecas, y se olvida del resultado. Él
todavía cree que el fútbol es una fiesta, no un empleo ni un negocio” (p. 203). In a few
sentences the narrator links Garrincha to his natal land and his Brazilian natural charisma.
Sometimes the telluric attachment to American lands and the way subjects wander and
relate to these lands reaches those who were not even born in Latin America. About the
Italian photographer Tina Modotti, for example, it is said that “ha sabido penetrar muy a
fondo México adentro” (III, p. 92), and Chaplin is described as “Carlitos el Vagabundo,
paria y poeta” (III, p.53). Therefore, even if each cultural subject holds a certain degree of
autonomy (illustrated, as discussed before, by the autonomy of the vignettes), they are all
somewhat related to what can be called a Latin American ethos. By contrast, African
immigrants or descendants are always related to their own African traditions, and even if
those can be extended or have impacted American-born cultures, as explained in the
previous chapter, the opposite case is never exemplified, namely, African traditional
expressions being impacted by native American (either indigenous or mestizos) practices. It
is as if African “ethos” could be assumed by anyone, but it was so strong that Galeano
assumed a sort of irremediable attachment of Africans to their own traditions.
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What can be concluded out of this is that even though Galeano acknowledges and
underscores the heterogeneous constitution of (Latin) America, he sees a sort of “common
ethos” among subjects who inhabit the territory, a specific way of “being in the world” that,
even if evolving, is strongly attached to its “origins”. Still, the complex diversity of (Latin)
American characters, traditions, thoughts, stories, subjects and practices displayed in
Memoria del fuego, honors the configuration that Cornejo Polar strived to uphold, articulate
and thoroughly study: “el carácter de una realidad hecha de fisuras y superposiciones, que
acumula varios tiempos en un tiempo, y que no se deja decir más que asumiendo el riesgo
de la fragmentación del discurso que la representa y a la vez la constituye” (1994, p. 13).
The last question to be discussed in this section is the notion of hybridity with
regard to Memoria del fuego. In Chapter III, I showed how cultural syncretism was an
important element of Latin American identity and part of the historical evolution of
traditions and religions in the diverse latitudes of the continent.
García Canclini proposed an analysis of popular, traditional and indigenous cultures
(which he referred to by the encompassing noun “folklore”73) that accounted for their
interactions with elite and industrial cultures. Indeed, his account of traditional cultures is
globalizing, and based on a market logic perspective. His argument that traditional cultures
have not disappeared but instead have grown and transformed (p. 200), is based on the
study of craftwork as a symbolic capital that has been incorporated to industrialization and
services, specially within the touristic sector. Nevertheless, his thesis turns very rich and
revealing concerning some points:
One of García Canclini’s strongest premises is that the popular does not longer
belong exclusively to popular social groups, but folklore is now integrated synchronic and
diachronically to several systems: urban, rural, mass-mediated, etc. To support this claim,
he quotes Martha Blache when she writes that: “No hay un conjunto de individuos
propiamente folclóricos; hay, sin embargo, situaciones más o menos propicias para que el
hombre participe de un comportamiento folclórico.”74 His thesis is, therefore, that the
73
García Canclini uses this term throughout his book, even though he is emphatic on his critic that: “Lo folk
es visto, en forma semejante a Europa, como una propiedad de grupos indígenas o campesinos aislados y
autosuficientes, cuyas técnicas simples y poca diferenciación social los preservarían de amenazas modernas”,
and that this “preservation” would hinder an analysis based in cultural change.
74
In “Folclor y cultural popilar”, Revista de Investigaciones Folclóricas, Instituto de Ciencias
Antropológicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Issue 3, December, 1988, p. 27.
110
popular, the folkloric and the traditional are constituted by hybrid processes wherein
institutions, trading and even marketing contribute. Similarly, the refabricating of traditions
in a self-managed fashion can sometimes bring economic prosperity and symbolic
reaffirmation.
García Canclini’s study and perspective are rich in that they consider the big impact
that the incorporation of regional, indigenous, traditional and popular cultures has had in
the hegemonic cultural identity. Additionally, they describe milieus of intense modern
hybridizing processes, such as borders and cities with high rates of immigration. They also
explain to some extent the efforts, on behalf of institutions and indigenous and traditional
groups alike, to preserve and reproduce such cultural manifestations. Its focus on cultural
change is a point that is shared with Eduardo Galeano’s, who, with charisma and merriness,
narrates scenes of indigenous people re-interpreting modern and religious practices, or
urban portraits full of a regional spirit:
“Coplas descaradas que las indias de Cochabamba cantan a Jesucristo”
Santa Vera Cruz, Papito:
«Hija mía», estás diciendo.
¿Cómo pudiste engendrarme
si no tienes pajarito?
«Floja, floja», estás diciendo,
Santa Vera Cruz, Papito.
Pero más flojo eres tú
que estás parado durmiendo. (III, p. 174)
Now, a crucial difference between García Canclini’s hybridity and Galeano’s, is the
relation with modernity in the shape of market and industry. Galeano endorses a very critic
stance against capitalism and its modernity. His criticism is specially addressed to the
contradictions appeared when foreign models were brought:
“Sobre la literatura de ficción en la época colonial”
El virrey de México, Matías de Gálvez, firma un nuevo bando en favor de
los trabajadores indios. Han de recibir los indios salario justo, buenos
alimentos y asistencia médica; y tendrán dos horas de descanso, al
mediodía, y podrán cambiar de patrón cuando quieran. (II, pp. 84-85)
111
Instead of objectively exploring the productive relations between tradition and
modernity, as García Canclini attempts to do, Galeano’s main concern is tracing the origins
and primary characteristics of evolving traditions in Latin America. Hence, he details the
telluric tradition behind quotidian objects, products and landscapes: the clay jug, the
Illimani Mountain, the pulque, the tango... Galeano is not opposed to cultural change but
his perspective on it is on the side of the anthropologist more than on the sociologist, on the
side of tradition, less concerned with economic and social effects of such hybridizing
processes. Still, it is not possible to say that there is no hybridity in Memoria del fuego. The
fact that it is a memory account of the past and history of a broad community, addressed to
readers that might be unfamiliar with it, shows the author’s struggles to communicate to his
society the inner conflicts of its people. It evidences the strife to bring together two (or
more) different cultural stances and to put them to dialogue for their recognition. In
conclusion, it is possible to say that, while Memoria del fuego as a literary text shows the
conditions and effects of hybridity processes, it is not so much concerned to examine them,
privileging instead the heterogeneity while searching for a common ethos to build a
collective identity from.
*
2. Second move: Memoria del fuego as a Latin American identity model
We have reached the final part of this thesis. The ultimate goal has been to turn Memoria
del fuego into a tool for understanding Latin American identity. One of the initial
statements of this work was that the identity discourse in Eduardo Galeano’s trilogy could
actually add to the understanding of heterogeneity (and transculturation and hybridity) as
model(s) to explain the way a Latin American identity has been forged. Therefore, in this
section Memoria del fuego will function as a theoretical proposition and its standpoint will
be cast.
In the section about Latin American identity, we reviewed how the
institutionalization of a Latin American community was one of the intellectual projects
112
after the Cuban revolution. It was based on the need to promote economic and cultural
bonds and interchanges that transcended eventual political discordances, but also on the
view of an ethically unified bloc. In Transculturación narrativa, Ángel Rama describes this
idea of Latin American unification, but stressing that: “[p]or debajo de esa unidad, real en
cuanto proyecto, real en cuanto a bases de sustentación, se despliega una interior diversidad
que es definición más precisa del continente. Unidad y diversidad han sido una fórmula
preferida por los analistas de muchas disciplinas” (1982, p. 67). Indeed, what characterizes
these conceptual approaches to the understanding of Latin American identity
(transculturation, heterogeneity and hybridity) is the stress on diversity as a strong cultural
trait that should not be undermined. If identities are representations that shape our selfperception –stories we tell about ourselves–, what these new conceptual paradigms bring is
a different way to represent, to conceive, the Latin American: one that is based on plurality,
diversity and heterogeneity. Cornejo Polar suggests that throughout the examination of our
national or even Latin American identity, the disparities and contradictions of the realities
and images that we relate to Latin America were little by little made evident. Thus, the
celebration of our diverse, multiple and conflictive configuration has come to complement
the quest of what we call “Latin American identity”.
There have been a few attempts to categorize cultural difference in Latin America. It
is well known the classification scheme that the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro (1979) made
of Latin American societies, in which he distinguished between the “Testimony Peoples”
(Mesoamerica and the Andes), the “New Peoples” (Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia,
Panama and the Antilles), and the “Transplanted Peoples” (Argentina and Uruguay).
Likewise, Manuel Diéguez (1955) suggested a division between tribal indigenous, modern
indigenous, peasants, sugar factory, urban, and high class metropolis subcultures in order to
better understand cultural behaviors, migrations and study specificities in a more thorough
way.
However, in spite of regional, cultural and striatal differences, the question persists:
how is it possible to devise an inclusive collective identity that acknowledges and
emphasizes difference, if identity, as a concept, seems to whisper “sameness”?
Cornejo Polar proposed the category of “conflictive and contradictory totality” to
describe the intermediation and interplay between different and heterogeneous strata and
113
cultures. Indeed, to fully comprehend the commonality of a region that, in spite of
difference, has strong meeting points that make impossible to cancel the plausibility of a
shared identity, the category of “totality” proves quite useful. Even though Cornejo Polar
coined it to explain the Peruvian literary system, composed of different and autonomous
subsystems (hegemonic literature, popular literature and indigenous literature), each one
revealing a different socio-historic process, the concept of totality brings a more accurate
alternative to the notion of unity, the most used when discussing questions of identity. For
Cornejo Polar, and I endorse his perspective, the category of “unity” blurs difference in an
integrative synthesis that impedes the vision of multiculturalism and socio-historical
specificities. It thus theoretically and epistemologically contends against its opposite,
diversity, struggling to minimize difference while emphasizing –or inventing– sameness.
The category of “totality”, on the other side, dialectically incorporates different systems,
revealing and explaining the socio-historical development of each one on the sidelines of
the others, either from associations or contradictions, without blurring difference, but trying
to discover intersections (see Cornejo Polar, 1983). All in all, the ultimate characteristic of
totality is its capacity to underscore that: “la producción literaria, sin perder su
especificidad en cuanto a plasmadora de símbolos verbales, es parte y funciona dentro de la
totalidad social, fuera de la cual –por consiguiente– resulta incomprensible” (1983, p. 50).
In this sense, this approach is certainly suitable to explain how Memoria del fuego, as a
memory project, consists not of a coherent narrative of a unified history and identity, but of
the fragmentary account of a heterogeneous and dissimilar totality.
In her doctoral dissertation, Beatriz Pantin Guerra (1997) makes a revision of the
notions of mestizaje, transculturation and hybridization, noticing that they refer to different
kinds of categories. While mestizaje75, hybridity and heterogeneity are fixed socio-cultural
categories, transculturation and hybridization are processes of cultural change. This schema
provides a yielding way of comparison. Transculturation and hybridization outline the
process and effects of two colliding cultures: the native and the foreign (modernity, in
García Canclini’s approach). While Rama emphasizes the creative and renewing outcome
of transculturation process, both approaches underscore the quite synthetic and conciliatory
75
For Pantin Guerra, hybridity and mestizaje share some principles, but the former appears under urban and
modern conditions while the latter is the result of historic colonization. Therefore, I will leave out the
mestizaje in the following lines.
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results. Therefore, hybridity as a socio-cultural category, the result of a hybridization
process, accounts for a culture wherein the composite of different cultural origins creates a
space of integration, rather than difference. It, hence, does not emphasize cultural diversity,
but integratory possibilities. In contrast, what the term heterogeneity as a socio-cultural
category puts forward is the conflictive coexistence of different cultural systems; meaning
that the outcome of such multicultural crossings is not synthetic but rather dissimilar and
emphasizing alterity. Moreover, what for Pantin Guerra is determining about hybrid and
transcultural identities, is that they are characterizations applied to and originated from the
condition of colonized subjects. Therefore, these categories aimed to understand cultural
change after and during colonization, are born with a decolonizing intention.
As it was previously discussed, Memoria del fuego shares this decolonizing
intention that aims to display the openly heterogeneous configuration of Latin America and,
thus, retrieve agency, voice, visibility and legitimacy to those who belong to subalternity.
However, while the epistemic force of the concepts analyzed here was to emphasize a
complex process of cultural collision, difference and even the possibility of intersystemic
transit, they do not explain how is it possible to build a collective and shared identity that
does not erase such difference.
If identity speaks about representation (re-presentation), the model that Memoria del
fuego displays is one of a multitudinarian cultural configuration where the possibility of
interaction and is based on a shared ethos. Indeed, the space that Memoria del fuego represents is one of fragments of incredibly dissimilar cultural backgrounds and
characteristics that, nevertheless, communicate freely. Not only the possibility of
communication is given, but also the chance of assuming origins that, even though
miscellaneous, are open and yawning. Thus, the memory discourse of Memoria del fuego
invites the reader to assume such diverse cultural origins once one is assumed as (Latin)
American. This assumption, however, is not fixed, but movable and evolving. Galeano
acknowledges regional, striatal and cultural differences, but instead of marking borders, he
proposes mobility in a broader community that is porous and based in commonality. This is
his path to conceive a shared identity, because, as has been discussed in the previous
chapter, it is implied that identity (alliances, belongings, self-definitions) is something one
can choose instead of something one is bestowed with. This is a clear difference between
115
identity as based in commonality, in multitude, and identity based in nationalism and unity.
For instance, the word “patria” and the word “nation” are used only once throughout
Memoria del fuego; “patria” in a literary quote from criollos who see in Mexico their
homeland (II, p. 62), and “nation” referred to one of the indigenous tribes of the first
volume (“la nación haída”). There is, then, a subversive and heavily meaningful use of such
terms; one that casts aside the strong unifying connotation nationalistic discourses have
conferred.
The proposal of an identity image that is not based on the hegemonic discourse of
homogenizing unity but in the celebration of plurality and a deeply ‘subaltern ethos’, has to
be supported in a correlated story. In order to make identification possible we need to make
up stories, narratives that tell us who we are (and why and where and how we are),
arguments that relate our current self-perception with the image(s) we call “us”. The model
of community that Galeano proposes is supported on a common memory account. Instead
of theoretically founding the concepts of “heterogeneous community”, “multitude” or
“subaltern ethos” as models of Latin American configuration, a new historic account that
serves as identity narrative is formulated in Galeano’s work. Given that this community is
porous and mutable, a unitary historiographic project would cancel it. Instead, the memory
account of Memoria del fuego promises to tell the story of the subalterns (in the broad
extension, as seen) and to connect it to the experience of people in the form of literature,
dreams, songs, traditions, love affairs, fictions and magic. But more importantly, more than
just ‘telling’, in order to recall it, the memory and past of (Latin) American subjects,
Memoria del fuego shows and performs such story by its literary structure and rhetoric
strategies. Identities are constructed by dialogical and discursive interpellation, and in
Memoria del fuego this interpellation is made by means of the linguistic and literary represence of the (Latin) American community. Fragments, vignettes, heterogeneity,
plurality, orality, movable cultural origins are not only rhetoric strategies but ways to make
present, to stage in paper –but then in language–, Latin American community.
What Memoria del fuego shows is that heterogeneity and diversity as our “way to
be” are also possibilities of multitudinarian belonging and identification. If Latin America’s
cultural origins are anyway dissimilar, the belonging to this community cannot be fixed and
rigid, but integrative and changing. Memoria del fuego is thus the representation of Latin
116
America as an imagined community, supported not in a geopolitical but in an ethicalideological foundation. This community and the identity idea it endorses aim to affect the
way social subjects conceive themselves and their social groups. It proposes that the only
way subalterns can have visibility is if the community is not based in political and
geographical borders but in commonality and multicultural interaction.
117
Conclusions
In times of uncertainty, questions about who we are, what we were and where to go,
become more than compelling. But which times are not uncertain? Writing about a literary
trilogy published 30 years ago was just my way of writing about the possibility of forging a
community based on commonality more than in nationality or specific cultural traits. This
thesis was primarily moved by my experience as a Latin American in a European country
and finding myself inevitably and profoundly attached to other Latin American people, no
matter the country. This was actually the initial quest. The idea of the multitude spoken by
Virno and Negri became then revealing to understand the possibility of an identity that is
not based on unity but on the celebration of diversity. Soon after, when analyzing Memoria
del fuego, the notion of collective memory sprung and became core. I would say that the
relevance that Memoria del fuego has in the Latin American imaginary also drove this
thesis. Memoria del fuego, as well as Las venas abiertas de América Latina, is a sort of
Bible for people who try to retrieve a counter-hegemonic discourse that fights against
ideological colonization. Those who say: “History is not what we have been told! Look!
This is us!”
Throughout this work we traced the notions of collective memory and (Latin)
American identity in Memoria del fuego. It was especially interesting to contrast history
and memory in order to find out what was specifically the quest of Galeano’s trilogy.
Collective memory as the knowledge and awareness about the group one feels appertaining
showed to be strongly linked to contemporary frames of reference: values, beliefs, selfperceptions. It has the capacity to build subjectivities, attachments and conceptions about
such group; thus, to contribute to the formation of collective identities and change them in
time, changing conceptions of history all along. Nevertheless, insights about the most
radical difference between collective memory and historical discourse were to be found in
Memoria del fuego: the connection of memory to the experience of people. In Memoria del
fuego this was achieved by means of a number of discursive strategies. Galeano tried to
blur the historical agency by assuming the role of a storyteller more than a historian, and
118
thus, re-presenting instead of depicting (darstellen instead of vertreten) the history of
America’s inhabitants. He did so also by stating that the experience of people could be
contained in any kind of sources, not only those traditionally considered historical by the
hegemonic discourse. Therefore, he included songs, testimonies, literature, myths…
anything that could be recounted. To bring the experience of people to life, Galeano
recurred to reproduce oral speech and thus create a particular relationship between two
different codes: oral and literate. This way, orality had the faculty to 1) subvert discursive
hierarchies and 2) literarily perform a worldview that re-presented, in an interactive space,
a subaltern ethos. By formulating a third-code through the literary representation of orality,
Galeano fostered the significance of the living speech of people. Finally, another strategy
for connecting memory to the living experience of people was the use of microhistory: to
tell those stories that in big historical narratives do not matter: the stories of common
people, the stories of the subalterns whose voices are normally never relevant, as well as
the more intimate, human and less opulent façade of those subjects whose names do appear
in history books next to dates and deeds.
The re-encoding of collective memory can lead to devising a collective identity. In
this thesis, the idea of a performative identity formation was also explored. Through a
literary configuration of heterogeneity and interaction, a space of appearance and
communication that renders visible the subaltern worldview is created. In Memoria del
fuego the big diversity of American land is framed in an interactive space, erasing borders
of nationality but without blurring cultural difference. Thus, the idea that mobility and
communication among dissimilar groups is possible is performed, and a collective identity
is hence perfomatively proposed. Even though Galeano brings to the stage the cultural
heterogeneity of American peoples, this heterogeneity allows coexistence, interaction and
collaboration: a life in community. But above everything, the discourse of Memoria del
fuego suggests that this community can partake in a collective identity based in a shared
subaltern ethos. Heterogeneity, thus, does not imply disconnection or exclusion but the
possibility that our self-perception (the stories we tell about ourselves) includes cultural
traits that, even if originally not ours, we can assume and feel identification with.
Moreover, Memoria del fuego is the celebration of and an invitation to this prerogative.
119
I think that one of the most lustrous outcomes of this thesis is the spotting of the
possibilities of a representational —Darstellung— account of the heterogeneous Latin
American identity. And this is so because instead of depicting subalternity, what is carried
out in Memoria del fuego is the performance of the possibility of interaction, not only
among represented subjects, but also among intended readers and the memories that are
being framed. Thus, the final stake of this way of representing is to change the distribution
of the sensible: to change the way we conceive identity and our communitarian
relationships, the way we conceive our origins, and the attachments we accordingly
develop. Memoria del fuego is, hence, politically rebellious in a twofold way: it renders
visible invisible subjects and it changes the logic of representation, founding a new
epistemic order in relation to cultural identification: an expansion of what is considered to
be the self.
This way of representation is not exclusive of Memoria del fuego. It can be found in
other artistic expressions where the configuration of a space of communication is vital and
the interaction of culturally different subjects (an enactment of heterogeneity) is attempted.
Latin American mural painting (muralism) is a good example of this: the representation of
Latin American peoples takes place by a strategy of contiguity: putting one next to other
symbols that respectively represent diverse and heterogeneous cultural spheres. I would
argue (but this as merely a preliminary insight that would worth a deeper study) that in
muralism what is being depicted are not the subjects themselves, but the possible relations
among them. This way, individuals can identify with what is being depicted not on the
basis of mimetic identification, but on the basis of interaction, acknowledging
heterogeneity and difference, but taking as a principle what they have in common: being
part of the political act of appearance. In this manner it is possible to generate a
supranational identity that embraces every particular –alien- identity as part of the same life
in common.
It would have been interesting to complete this work with an empirical study of the
formation of such supranational identity by means of the re-presentation of a heterogeneous
community. To find out if a collective subjectivity is performatively really taking place in
individuals. Actually, an empiric study about the formation of collective identity would
prove extremely relevant and influential for many of us. Still, a handful of works and
120
projects about the formation of subjective, imagined, communities are being carried out.
The development of affects as a way of rendering politically visible is being researched by
a group of people in Chile and Mexico. This is beautifully connected to my premises with
regard to Memoria del fuego: I deeply believe that the possibility of forming a collective
identity out of heterogeneity and difference is rooted in solidarity, but moreover, in the
affects and attachments we develop for those who are different but are also common and
close. A heterogeneous community which commonality is based on a combination of ethos
and pathos. This is especially evident in Memoria del fuego in the kind of discourses
selected for the recount: those that make the reader feel a bond, and develop empathy and
sympathy for the subjects portrayed and for the past that had been previously hidden but is
now rescued. Then, for instance, the researcher Paloma Castillo in Santiago de Chile is
reflecting on the politic power of tenderness in times of dictatorships and violence; the
affective affiliation that connects generations, communities and subjects beyond nations
and which acts as a political stance and a social, community, project. This is, ultimately, a
strong, determining, way to found a new episteme for a thorough decolonization —
decolonization not only from Western ideological colonization, but from our own
rationality that hinders a true integratory identification with the diversity of peoples that are
also “us”.
121
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