This post is cross posted today at PCH Press (http://www.pchpress.com) in the Books and Arts section. PCH Press is Malibu, California's only daily news.
New York City’s Town Hall has a storied past. It’s where Marian Anderson made her New York debut. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Billie Holiday, Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Robeson, and so many more have performed, read or debated there.
So it was with great anticipation that a full house awaited Arundhati Roy and Eduardo Galeano tonight on West 43rd St. Two celebrated progressive writers from the Southern Hemisphere, one a Booker Prize winning novelist, the other an American Book Award winner, two activists who have lived lives of resistance and independence seemed destined to light up the hall. The audience wasn’t disappointed, even if it was more an evening of tribute than a night of chemical incandescence.
Eduardo Galeano, is a Uruguayan writer, journalist, cartoonist, and voice of protest. After being forced into exile twice by military dictatorships, once from his native country and later out of Argentina, he returned home to write his most famous trilogy in 1985. Memory of Fire chronicles the history of the Americas, using a unique style of short episodes that portray elements of the colonial story of conquest. His latest book is Voices of Time: A Life in Stories.
Arundhati Roy has worked as a film designer, actor, screenwriter, and novelist, all with the background of a student of architecture. She comes from the small village of Aymanam in Kerala, India, and now resides in New Delhi. Her sensibility and literary fame stem from her childhood experience in Aymanam. The God of Small Things chronicles rural characters of a fictional village like her own, informed by Roy’s vulnerability and unique perspective as both a child of the village and a citizen of the world.
Roy’s career in activism began after her novel won worldwide acclaim and she now works in many spheres of struggle, both in India, where she fights against big dams that threaten to wipe out regional cultures and on the world stage, where she speaks and writes against economic globalism, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and nuclear proliferation.
The evening at Town Hall began with an introduction by Patrick Lannan, whose family foundation was a co-presenter of the event, along with the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. Arundhati Roy then read from The God of Small Things. Her selection included an autobiographical character’s return to India to reunite with her twin. The selection was affecting, funny, and touching, bringing both the spark and the sadness of the émigré character’s travels and early experience out in a short reading.
Mr. Galeano chose to read several short excerpts his writing, including several near one-liners about an alternate past in which the Conquistadors, who subjugated the Americas in reality were thwarted in his fictional universe by a lack of appropriate papers, visas, or shots: kept by bureaucracy from entering the lands they would have put under colonial rule. His excerpts, in both English and occasionally read in their native Spanish, were apropos of the moment here in the United States, where the plight of Latin American immigrants is in the news. Galeano’s selections were extremely short, skipping from one to another, rather like a witty hummingbird pollinating every flower within reach.
The anticipated moment of the evening was the conversation between the authors. It was an experiment to bring the two personalities together, which Roy described as feeling like twins from opposite sides of the world.
Perhaps Roy’s was an appropriate description, since the two generally agreed, which made for conversation that didn’t crackle with argument, but rather moved from one topic to another briskly. The audience, which clearly came to cheer the speakers, applauded fragments of conversation as if rating political bumper stickers on passing vehicles. One sometimes wished that there hadn’t been so much approval, but perhaps more quiet for the duo to engage each other more deeply.
Some themes emerged between the two, one being a shared advocacy for the diversity of nature and human perspective against the enforced ideological and economic homogeneity of global capitalism. Both made pointed references to the United States as the place where the most egregious violence against the developing world emanates. Galeano described the difference between the 1970’s, when the United States fought to overthrow progressive democracies like Chile’s, versus the situation today, where democracy has been “holed out,” leaving the institutions of elections in the hands of professionals and the public largely uninformed.
Both Roy and Galeano derided the rigid control of developing democracies by the IMF and the World Bank, enforcing an economic structure from afar, which prevents experimentation and local democracy. Roy mentioned the quick about-face which the leftist government of South Africa was forced to take to avoid capital flight after the fall of apartheid. Galeano called this sort of shackled democracy like, “a Mass without God,” and called for a new democracy.
Neither artist expressed a vision of how a new democracy will emerge, but both are keeping faith with the great majority of humanity that wants access to the Earth’s resources and sees the “voracious nature of modernism” as something to resist. Mr. Galeano, in his closing reading, suggested that, “in dark times, let’s be skillful enough to fly like bats.”
There was a sense of the frustration they both seemed to feel at speaking to an audience in the economic center of the system they oppose. The Uruguayan writer spoke directly to his American friends when he said that it is important to ignore the orders of governments and authorities when they contradict what one knows to be right, or when they defy common sense. Galeano noted that in the hour after the September 11th attacks, loudspeakers told workers in the Trade Center to go back to their desks. “Those who obeyed,” he noted, “did not survive.”
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