"The Right to Rave"

In a class today in Spanish at Cochise College in Douglas, AZ, our professor Guillermo Retana introduced us to the celebrated Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, and his beautiful piece, "The Right to Rave."  It is a beautiful piece of writing by an author I should have known a lot more about but didn't. (We saw Galeano read his piece on You Tube, but I haven't been able to find that yet.)

I have spent most of my career in public health writing about social justice in health but Galeano takes that quest to a whole new level, to the right to dream of another world.

It's a gorgeous prose poem, very short, by a writer I intend to get to know much better, and I am grateful for Professor Retana for helping us learn not just a beautiful language but also about a world beyond ours in the Americas that has so much to teach us.

I have already ordered Galeano's classic book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. I believe that it was a copy of Galeano's book that the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez presented to President Obama in a recent meeting among the heads of state of the Americas.

In many ways I see Galeano's dream of a different world as a dream I have dared to reach for in my writing about the gospel of life itself and of the dream of a democracy of days. 

Comments

[Carole Beauchamp]

Very beautiful.