Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano passed away in 2015 and has been on my to-read list since. His books have remained elusive, seemingly banished from all Chicago bookstores. Eventually, I took advantage of the deus ex machina of Bookshop and ordered two books of his last fall, primarily because I wanted to read Soccer in Sun and Shadow ahead of the World Cup (required reading for any soccer fans or frauds like myself). Last week, I started reading the other book I’d ordered, the Book of Embraces. Here he wrote (as translated by Cedric Belfarge):
Chicago is full of factories. There are even factories right in the center of the city, around the world’s tallest building. Chicago is full of factories. Chicago is full of workers.
Arriving in the Haymarket district, I ask my friends to show me the place where the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st were hanged in 1886.
‘It must be around here,’ they tell me. But nobody knows where.
No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago. Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.
Thankfully, this has been rectified (kind of). Mary Brogger’s statue sits at the original site of the Haymarket affair. It was commissioned by both the Illinois Federation of Labor History and the Fraternal Order of Police. Naturally, it was moved to Union Park when a giant development was being built along Des Plaines a few years back. Money and power continue to throttle and control the revolution.
Galeano continues:
May 1st is the only truly universal day of all humanity, the only day when all histories and all geographies, all languages and all religions and cultures of the world coincide. But in the United States, May 1st is a day like any other. On that day, people work normally and no one, or almost no one, remembers that the rights of the working class did not spring whole from the ear of a goat, or from the hand of God or the boss.
After my fruitless exploration of the Haymarket, my friends take me to the largest bookstore in the city. And there, poking around, just by accident, I discover an old poster that seems to be waiting for me, stuck among many movie and rock posters. The poster displays an African proverb: Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter.
I did a search of Eduardo Galeano in Chicago to learn more about his connection to the city. Just today, Jacobin invoked his words in a May Day article. And the best history of Galeano’s time in Chicago can be found on the Chicago Labor and Arts Festival Blog.
And while it was recorded in New York City, here’s an interview between quintessential Chicagoan Studs Terkel and Mr. Galeano. “I’m trying to recover the lost unity of life,” Galeano tells Terkel. Unity. Memory. History. Beauty. Soul. Love. Joy. Pain. Connect the fragments. The essence of Galeano, in Chicago, in Montevideo, wherever.
And if you’ve gotten this far and still have no idea what I’m talking about, Kyle Kinane can offer some more insight to you.