A Hijacked Memory

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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

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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.

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“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.”

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Introduction

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“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.

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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).

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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 self-defining, 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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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“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

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I. Memoria del fuego: Critical Reconstructions

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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

semi-chronological 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.

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4_{A statement after his decease can be read in the web-site of the MERCOSUR Parliament:}

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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.

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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 reemplotment7 : 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).

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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.

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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:

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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.

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, 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} non-Western 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).

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[…] 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

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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 “Counter-Chronicling 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).

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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

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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.} 12

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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.

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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.

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“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).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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: Marie-Claire 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 interchangeable16

, 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.

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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 bi-dynamical 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

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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)

A Hijacked Memory