Explanation of The Galeano Project

Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan writer. He's a poet. He's an historian. He's a man who loves words. He writes history as a poet, as a writer who makes beautiful things from the words he loves. His history is a history of the world but it is not a history you might find in a history book. In his new book Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, he re-writes/writes history with an eye toward beauty. For instance, here is his piece on the history of modern art.


Origin of modern art

West African sculptors have always sung while they worked. And they do not stop singing until their sculptures are finished. That way the music gets inside the carvings and keeps on singing. In 1910, Leo Frobenius found ancient sculptures on the Slave Coast that made his eyes bulge.

Their beauty was such that the German explorer believed they were Greek, brought from Athens, or perhaps from the lost Atlantis. His colleagues agreed: Africa, daughter of scorn, mother of slaves, could not have produced such marvels.

It did, though. Those music-filled effigies had been sculpted a few centuries previous in the belly button of the world, in Ife, the sacred place where the Yoruba gods gave birth to women and men. Africa turned out to be an unending wellspring of art worth celebrating. And worth stealing.

It seems Paul Gaugin, a rather absentminded fellow, put his name on a couple of sculptures from the Congo. The error was contagious. From then on Picasso, Modigliani, Klee, Giacometti, Ernst, Moore, and many other European artists made the same mistake, and did so with alarming frequency.

Pillaged by its colonial masters, Africa would never know how responsible it was for the most astonishing achievements in twentieth century European painting and sculpture.

Here is a video of Mr. Galeano.




I asked my students, who are now reading INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison, to name elements of the novel. Some of the "elements" they came up with: Whiskey, The Golden Day, Internal Racism, Shackles. Each of them had to choose one of these elements and then write his/her own Galeano-esque piece on that topic.

Here is what they came up with.