By Concepcion M. Moreno

MADRID – Leftist Uruguayan author and journalist Eduardo Galeano said his books use him as a medium and therefore he is not the one to say which one will serve as follow-up to his most recent title, “Espejos” (Mirrors), published in 2008.

“They gradually grow from inside-out and bottom-to-top; they travel my body starting with my feet,” the 69-year-old Galeano, in Spain to pick up two awards, told Efe about his creative process.

“I get to writing when my hand starts itching. These books steadily grow and gain shape and form in their own way, until in a certain sense one reaches my mouth and says: ‘open, I want to give myself to others,’” said Galeano, whose most famous work “Las venas abiertas de America Latina” (The Open Veins of Latin America) was published in 1971.

Galeano said he used to debate with his late compatriot and mentor Juan Carlos Onetti about the author’s role and the connection between a writer and the public. But whereas the latter would write for himself, he said he has always defended the idea that “from the moment you publish, you’re addressing yourself to others.”

“This world organizes us for disassociation, while one writes from the premise that connection is possible. One writes to be in communion with others,” said Galeano, whose works combine fiction, journalism and political and historical analysis.

An author strives to write in “sensing/thinking language,” a word he said he learned from fishermen in Colombia and that encapsulates the ability to “feel and think” through words.

Galeano said that he prides himself on writing by hand, as Onetti taught him, and that he has “a physical relationship” with books and therefore is incapable of reading them on a computer screen.

“For me, it has to have paper that smells, rustles; I have to be able to press it against my chest and feel it under my arm,” the author said.

He mentioned two other illustrious figures in Latin American literature, the late novelists Mario Benedetti and Julio Cortazar, as “the two most unusual cases of generosity” that he recalls from the region’s club of writers, a group that is “very selfish and very (boastful).”

“Both of them were happy when others did well. They celebrated other people’s success,” he recalled.

In referring to the great authors in Uruguayan history, Galeano did not hesitate to mention Idea Vilariño, who, like Benedetti, died this year, saying she “defies classification by genre (and) is the best that Uruguayan poetry has produced.”

“I think she’s the author of the most beautiful love poems ever written in Latin America: magnificent, desolate, devastating, painful, passionate,” he said, noting that “if she hadn’t been born a woman, she would have triumphed.”

Galeano says he is drawn to the world of children – who he says restore his will to live when he loses it – but is concerned about the way they are educated. According to the author, educational systems in the West “disassociate children from nature and that’s the worst thing that can happen because they end up becoming adults who are disassociated from life.”

“That magical look is something we must try to defend as much as possible,” he said, adding that children have the “freedom to believe that nature is sacred.” “Later, that’s lost (as they receive) an education that desacralizes nature and turns it into a source of profit and an object to be exploited,” he said.

Speaking of the new technologies, Galeano said that in spite of his initial reticence, the Internet has become a tool for “the multiplication of life and of alternate voices that transmit life energy in a world organized for death.”

Just weeks before Uruguay’s general elections, he said the five years in which the center-left Broad Front coalition has been in power have been “positive in many ways.”

“The good thing is its diversity and we have to jealously guard the right to express that diversity without it being confused with heresy,” Galeano said.

The author was in Spain to receive the Circle of Fine Arts’ Gold Medal and a prize from the Save the Children foundation in Spain, where he lived in exile during a military dictatorship in Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s.

He told Efe that in his travels he continues to seek – and find – “compatriots and contemporaries no matter the borders on the map and the borders of time.” EFE