Annotations for Subject: Writer

Also, a conversation with Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano and his unique views of American culture.

Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano, who wrote the critically acclaimed book Las Venas Abiertas de Latinoamerica, The Open Veins of Latin America, sees the world from many different points of view.

From the point of view of a worm, a spaghetti dish is an orgy. According to the wise old men of Colombia's Chocó region, Adam and Eve were black, and so were their sons, Cain and Abel. When Cain killed his brother with one blow, God's fury thundered across the heavens. Cringing before the Lord's rage, the murderer turned so pale and pale from guilt and fear that he stayed white until the end of his days. And that's why we whites are all children of Cain.

Eduardo Galeano's latest work translated into English is entitled Upside Down, a primer for the looking glass world. We're honored to have Eduardo Galeano now join us on Latino USA.

So many people, so many Latinos and students of Latin America in this country look to you as more than a role model, as someone who is life-changing. I mean, certainly reading The Open Veins of Latin America changed my life. Is that a heavy burden? Do you want to have that burden, or is it okay to have that on your shoulders?

No, I don't feel like a burden. I don't feel loaded by what I have written. I mean, for me, you know, I feel happy about it. I mean, it's just a proof that I'm not... Remember, I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who said once that writing is a useless passion. And I think it's a quite useful passion as soon as it allows you to be the friend of so many people. I mean, that's the way I feel it. I write like embracing others. So for me, it's not a burden at all.

Your book is entitled Upside Down, and it's looking at your perspective on the world, but certainly your perspective also on North America, on the United States. And I'm wondering then how you see this migration, this constant migration of Latinos to this country, if this country from your perspective is so upside down. How do you interpret that they all continue wanting to come here?

Well, the entire world is upside down. It's like a giant school teaching lead to float and corks to sink. But being the United States, the center of prosperity nowadays, it's perfectly understandable that people try to come here and improve their lives in the center of paradise. This is what the publicity says. Anyway, it's the invasion of the invaded, because all these people are coming from countries that have been invaded several times by the United States.

So when you walk the streets of New York, for example, and this has happened to me more than once, where I will be walking down Broadway and I will hear my paisanos, mexicanos, my Mexican compatriots speaking in Nahuatl, or Zapotec. And to me, that's almost the upside down world, that they come here and now they want to dress like New Yorkers, and yet they're walking the streets of Broadway speaking centuries old languages.

I like this melting pot. I mean, I like hearing so many different voices. I like diversity. The problem is that nowadays money is much more free than people, and then people have not the right to decide where to live.

They are being expelled at the frontier, many of them. Have all these tragedies of people trying to come here who cannot even arrive to the coasts like happened some months ago. I remember it was just a small news in the newspaper, but for me it was so expressive, so eloquent. It was the case of some Haitians, people coming from Haiti in a poor boat, 60, and they were drowned. They died. They were eaten by the Caribbean Sea. And what attracted my attention was the fact that they were, all of them were farmers. Farmers from Haiti that have been cultivating rice during their entire lives until to the moment in which an expert from the International Monetary Fund went there and said, no more subsidies for the rice. And Haiti began eating U.S. rice, which is highly subsidized by the U.S. government. And there is no IMF expert who goes to the White House and says, no more subsidies for the rice. This immigration process also hidden sometimes in some of these tragic stories about the unequal relationship between countries.

So when you travel, do you feel hopeful or hopeless?

At breakfast, hopeful. At about 11 o'clock, hopeless. At lunchtime, more or less hopeless, more or less hopeful. Later in the afternoon, a little more hopeful. At dinner, sometimes hopeless. At midnight, hopeless or hopeful, and so on. And I would mistrust any man or woman who is always hopeful. And I would be, I don't know, very sad thinking in any man or woman being all time depressed and hopeless. So I think life is as it is. You know, the only certainties that are really worthy are certainties that eat doubts at breakfast.

So what is the thing that you think is most horrifying about what we are living through today?

The upside down world. I mean, the world is organized against people and against nature to which people belong. And that's the worst thing. It's a scandal. I was reading the other day some reports from the United Nations and I was comparing figures and numbers and the conclusion is terrifying, really.

You also talk about your preoccupation with the commercialization of our world today.

Yes.

And yet, do you ever see yourself kind of being sucked into it?

Into the commodities world and the culture of consumption and so on. Well, nobody is much better than the society from which he or she comes. Because this is a culture which is inviting us to become objects, to become things. We are becoming the tools of our tools. And that's why we are being bought by the supermarket and driven by our cars and watched by our TV sets and programmed by our computers. And I try to stay alive as a human being. I think we human beings are much more important than things.

Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano, his latest book is Upside Down, a primer for the looking glass world. It's published by Metropolitan Books.