Feeling and Thinking Eduardo Galeano: A Shared Performance in Songs

Sentipensando a Eduardo Galeano: Una Actuación Compartida en Canciones

How can the indelible thoughts and feelings that Eduardo Galeano leaves etched in a reader’s mind be captured and brought to life in a shared performance, whether through music or theater? Where some write questions in the margins of books, I write songs. I have no interest in retelling a story or reciting facts; that is not my vocation. Instead, I seek an internal dialogue with the text, a conversation that helps me synthesize what must not be forgotten. It is my way of choosing faith over despair, and hope over the rhyming of regrets. But a private dialogue is only half the work. These songs are written to be performed, and theater, reimagined as a shared space, is where they begin to breathe: it turns one reader’s private conversation into a gathering, a collective act of remembering.

My approach was deliberate. First, I found a text that resonated with me. Second, I “scavenged” for outside sources, such as Pamela Newkirk’s Spectacle, to give historical depth to Galeano’s writings on Ota Benga. Finally, I let the ideas marinate, allowing them the space to return as something new: a blend of memory, judgment, and value. What emerged was not a lecture but a set of songs, each one a scene that theater, in the form of a community gathering, can bring to life among people who sing, listen, and respond together.

That is the experience I want to create, and it is not the passive audience of a traditional theater. It happens in a community space, or any shared space, where no one simply watches. Everyone is both audience and actor—a willing participant. The internal conversation I had with Galeano’s text continues in the room, now joined by the new conversation that emerges among the performers and the people who gather there. Each song poses a question, and the answers come from everyone present: a voice taking up a refrain, a story offered aloud, a hand keeping time. The performance is not complete until the room has joined in. Galeano wrote against forgetting, and a community remembering together is that act made visible.

The writing process itself was a haunting of sorts. As I worked to repair my soul, the melodies of legends, from Violeta Parra and Silvio Rodríguez to Nina Simone and Bill Withers, drifted into my mind, providing a sonic framework. The verse structure of my song “Albert Einstein,” for example, emerged from the folkloric bones of Parra’s “Porque los pobres no tienen.” These songs carry their ancestors with them, and in a shared performance those voices fill the room again, joined by the voices of everyone present.

This was never a “plan,” but a springboard for thought, an exercise in finding meaning through action and reflection. As Samuel Beckett said, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” After three years of writing and five years of hesitation, these songs have outgrown their “box of dreams.” Some feelings are too strong to keep inside; they demand to be shared, not only with a reader in a quiet room, but with a community singing, listening, and remembering together, as partners in the work rather than witnesses to it. Each person lifts up another, carrying on the ideals of being part of the human race, easing one another’s pains and amplifying the joys of being alive.

Songs

Send me a note if you would like to continue the conversation or share your thoughts on any of these songs: