The Log of a Librarian

Coming to an end...

2008-08-02T09:27:00.002-03:00

Oscar Wilde said something like everyone, at every moment, is what s/he has been and what s/he will be. Likewise, our lines have always been what we have walked and what we have read –in a book, on the ground, looking at the stars- and, undoubtedly, will leave a mark on new pages...
With failures and successes, with great satisfaction after managing to overcome many obstacles that have been placed in our path, we have arrived at the place where on we stand. A place that is neither far nor close from/to somewhere else, a place that is yours and ours alike for we have shared it during almost three years, and from where we now say good-bye...
Perhaps, as Alejandro Dolina once wrote, it is not a bad idea ... from time to time ... to give life an advantage ... And one more thing. If we cannot feel proud of what we have done, at least that we can take a pride in what we did not want to do.
Thank you and good luck…

Sara & Edgardo, Edgardo & Sara

“Other writers made me want to write...”

2008-07-25T15:13:00.000-03:00

By Sara Plaza

A few days ago the “1ª Feria Infantil del Libro Córdoba 2008” (I Children Book Fair in Cordoba, Argentina) had a happy end after having been visited by thousands of people arriving at the “Paseo del Buen Pastor” (a cultural space created one year ago inside and around the building that was home to female prisoners up to a few years ago) day after day, from the 4th till the 20th of July. Among those visitors I found myself several evenings and was cramped not having enough room to move freely through the different stalls. On my feet, sat on my heels with my knees bent up close to my body, resting my shoulder on the rickety walls of the stalls, being elbowed in the knees when standing and kneed in the shoulders while sitting on the floor, I was able to have a look at fewer pages than I would have liked to, however, our library has more than half a dozen of new books, and authors such as Laura Devetach, Graciela Montes, Javier Villafañe and Liliana Bodoc have a place among the many other friends resting on the shelves, on the bedside table, on our desks.
Edgardo and I tried one evening to go and listen to Laura Devetach and Gustavo Roldán, who were to participate together in an informal talk with the readers. When we went to withdraw our invitations one hour in advance there was no one left, so, three days later, waiting for Liliana Bodoc’s visit I arrived in plenty of time. This time I got my invitation and could attend the presentation of her last book, “Amigos por el viento” (something like “Friends thanks to the wind”).
I found the first lines that I read from the author on the Internet a few years ago, when I still lived in Spain. On that occasion I came across the first two chapters of the work that I managed to bag for my birthday one year ago, “La Saga de los Confines” (something like, “The Far Corners Saga”, which has already been translated into German, Italian, Portuguese and French, and is going to appear in English in the near future as well), a trilogy made up of the novels “Los días del Venado”, “Los días de la Sombra” and “Los días del Fuego” (something like “The days of the Stag”, “The days of the Shadow”, and “The days of the Fire”). I enjoyed and was moved with those pages from cover to cover when my turn came. Let me tell you that the culprit of this blog, from whom my birthday present was, could not resist the temptation to read it first. That way, I followed Dulkancellin’s steps and rocked myself in Vieja Kush’s stories a few evenings after Edgardo had walked himself the paths of such a vast geography. We were amazed at how well documented those three books were written and, silently, we said thank you to the author for the great effort she had made –we supposed- to find out and read many different sources before start writing a story of this sort.
When I managed to listen to her at the Book Fair and, afterwards, approached her in order to say “congratulations” and “thank you” aloud, I felt so happy that I could hardly find the words and gave her a huge smile instead. There was so much joy inside me that, when I asked her to dedicate her last book of tales to Edgardo and me, I had first to untie my fingers before handing it to her, for I was so nervous that had ended up holding it tightly.
During the talk between Liliana Bodoc and the sixty people –adults and children- gathered round her, the little ones “called the tune” and were in charge of addressing the author with their questions most of the time. She answered them –and the grown-ups- with extraordinary generosity, giving all of us small pieces of her life, quotes from her books, colorful stanzas that her father had invented for her when she was a child, the reading of one of her tales for the little ones and a handful of answers that I wrote down in a piece of paper and would like to share with you in the following paragraphs.
When children asked her about the inspiration, Liliana told them that inspiration is something very brief, which come and visit to us for a short time and goes somewhere else quickly. So, she encouraged them to work hard in order to achieve whatever they want to. She said that when she begun to write was almost an elder 40 years old, but children did not agree (neither did I) and meant to know whether she was going to retire early or, on the contrary, she thought to become a sweet little old lady as writer. The author answered that her dream was to become a dear old and short lady as writer, shorter, even, than her pencil. Liliana told us that other writers made her want to write and added that she never thought about the book being published while she was writing, but on the story she wanted to write. She explained that what causes her to have new ideas include a lot of things, from a bus journey to one of her memories, so it is also very important to be all ears and wait with interest to hear what somebody next to us may say. The writer stated that she never feels nervous when she writes since she does so close to her “mate” (typical Argentinean, Paraguayan and Uruguayan infusion inherited from the Guarani people) and her cat.
Liliana talked about her process of revising her writing with the intention of changing, correcting or improving it and commented that she reads it carefully once and again and, sometimes, she hands the text to somebody else. The little ones enquired whether she was happy after finishing a book and she answered affirmatively. The children were curious about whom she dedicated her books to and whether she had written them for the people she loved. Then, the author told them that her books were dedicated to her father, to her both mothers, to her husband, to her children, to her friends and explained that when she starts writing tales she feels that she loves many people and has a lot of friends, so, in more ways than one, it was correct to affirm that she writes for the ones she loves. The little ones also asked her whether she had ever regretted writing any book and she said “no” and observed that it takes a lot of time to write a book and what any one usually regrets is a sudden decision or the sort of things done without thinking them twice, so it is more difficult to be sorry after writing a book.
Among the grown-ups there were also some people raising their hands before asking the author what someone has to do to start writing. Liliana answered that any one wanting to write must be patient and love failures and working hard; she also recommended this person not to be too anxious about the result and develop a passion for the creative process. A female short-story teller wanted to know how an author feels when they listen to someone else telling their stories. The writer said that she experienced a particular emotion when her stories where lit by different lights and encouraged tellers to use their own words and feelings in order to improve others’ stories.
Liliana Bodoc defended a Youth and Children Literature with capital “l” for little readers, with codes that can be understood and interpreted by them; a sort of Literature that does not make children remain indifferent, but allows them to change through its pages, to be transformed to some extent. Accordingly, she declared that neither boring, stupid or weak tales, nor those filled with commonplaces and a moral at the end are of her liking, and, once and again, insisted on a Literature committed to freedom. The hour Liliana was talking went very quickly and, on my way to home, I concluded that inspiration’s visits should be that short.
In my handbag there were Liliana Bodoc’s last tales and a few words written in black –she had four different color pens for children to choose their favorite- by her own hand at the beginning of the book. This time I read it first and felt a bit different when I closed it... I believe that the cause for my change was both in Liliana’s writing and in my own reading together with the love I feel for printing letters, words swaying in the wind, murmured in a circle round the fire, quietly spoken in the kitchen, cheerfully shared while drinking “mate”... I imagine that there is also an explanation for my transformation in the paths that I have trodden while walking across the southern south, along its curved spine, through its rough skin and its wrinkled bowels; in its fields sown with new dreams, hand in hand with people striving for helping them flourishing, who take part in their growing, who support their young and tender shoots...
Step by step, letter by letter, sound by sound, bite by bite, I have been changed both by this land literature and the land itself, thanks to those many that have shown me how to walk on it.
Thank you.

Cloistered novices, nymphs, goddesses and Creole females

2008-07-19T09:39:00.002-03:00

By Sara Plaza

Edgardo and I have a small jewel in our library with the stamp of the “Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas” (a team of professionals with cultural and educational interests, who traveled the length and breadth of Spain teaching and entertaining people with little or no education at all) created during the II Spanish Republic. I am talking about the play titled “Don Juan Tenorio” by Don José Zorrilla. As it is stated at the beginning of this piece of writing “this drama has been officially approved by the Kingdom theatres censorship board on the 4 of June, 1849, for being performed in a theatre”. In the next page there is a dedicatory, “To Mr. Don Francisco Luis de Vallejo as a token of good memory. His best friend, José Zorrilla. Madrid, March, 1844”. And immediately after introducing the characters the action takes place in Seville around the year 1545. The book is and looks quite old. I found it more than two years ago after walking the paved streets of Pedraza, in the province of Segovia, Spain, getting up the stairs of one its decked shops and searching through the second hand books arranged in several libraries without rhyme or reason. I touched the spine of several volumes and the title of many classics turning, from time to time, their yellowish pages. However, when I caught sight of the stamp mentioned above I could not avert my eyes from his purple letters. I blinked, smiled and felt excited with emotion. I closed and opened the book twice or three times more, showed it to my companions, went to the cash register, paid for it, wrapped it at home, put it in my backpack, took it to the plane and placed it in Edgardo’s hands two months later.
Some time before, he had got a fantastic English book, illustrated by Giovanni Caelli and written by North American Thomas Bulfinch, known as “The Illustrated Bulfich’s Mythology”. The work consists of three volumes “The Age of Fable”, “The Age of Chivalry” y “Legends of Charlemagne”. The Age of Fable was first published in 1855 and gathers myths and legends of ancient Greek and Roman heroes and heroines, along with those of fierce Nordic warriors, Celtic sages and sun worshippers, and Egyptian pharaons, the Phoenix, the Unicorn and other monsters, and the divine triad of the Hindus, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Edgardo also felt elated with his finding, for it reminded him of his readings while he was a child and the photographs of Renaissance pictures and sculptures his retina felt in love with during his teens.
Just one month ago, we gave us as a gift “Mujeres en la Sociedad Argentina. Una historia de cinco siglos” (Women in Argentinean Society. A history five centuries old) by Argentinean sociologist Dora Barrancos. Through her paragraphs we have covered five centuries of women history in this country and reviewed several clichés and a number of fallacies about their place and role in this part of the world.
This is how those three books came to our hands and through the structure woven by their authors along those many pages we found the paths walked by their main male characters and knew the different walls that hid the steps of their female protagonists.
In Part I, Act III, Scene 1 of “Don Juan Tenorio” the action takes place in the cell of Dña. Inés. The abbess is telling the novice that his father, Don Gonzalo de Ulloa, Calatrava Commander, has decided to leave her in the convent forever, instead of allowing her to marry Don Juan Tenorio, whom he regards as a wretch.
(I’m so sorry, but translating a piece of Spanish poetry into English is far beyond my skills, so the next lines are intended to give you just an idea of the words said by the Abbess in order to convince Dña. Inés that she will be really very happy living together with other nuns in the convent)
The abbess explains the novice, for example, that she is young, kind and good and does not need to prove nothing else in order to remain tied with sacred votes to the cloister since she has lived in it hitherto. In addition, she tries to make Dña. Inés believe that she must be very happy for not having known the outside world she will neither have to fear nor to remember it. The abbess goes on telling her that since she is something like a little dove that has learnt to eat from God’s hands and has never come out of his protective net, she will neither wish to take wings and fly away. Dña. Inés will hear all sorts of “good” reasons for her staying in the convent. In the end the abbess says that she can conceal her envy of Dña. Inés, who has the virtue of knowing nothing thanks to her innocent life.
In “The Age of Fable”, in chapter III, the story of Apollo and Daphne tells how Cupid, answering Apollo’s challenge -who said to him “What have you to do with warlike weapons, saucy boy? Leave them for hands worthy of them”-, advises him, “Your arrows may strike all things else, Apollo, but mine shall strike you”. The legend goes on: “So saying, he took his stand on a rock of Parnassus, and drew from his quiver two arrows of different workmanship, one to excite love, the other to repel it. (...) With the leaden shaft he struck the nymph Daphne, the daughter of the river god Peneus, and with the golden one Apollo, through the heart. Forthwith the god was seized with love for the maiden, and she abhorred the thought of loving”. Apollo longed to obtain the maiden and followed her but she fled. He grew impatient to find his wooing thrown away, and gained upon her in the race. She called upon her father, the river god: “Help me Peneus! Open the earth to enclose me, or change my form, which has brought me into this danger!” Immediately after she has spoken stiffness seized all her limbs and was turned into a plant. Then Apollo touched the stem and embraced her branches and said: “Since you cannot be my wife, you shall assuredly be my tree. I will wear you for my crown; I will decorate with you my harp and my quiver; and when the great Roman conquerors lead up the triumphal pomp to the Capitol, you shall be woven into wreaths for their brows. And, as eternal youth is mine, you also shall be always green, and your leaves know no decay”. This way Daphne was change into a Laurel tree.
In the same volume, in chapter VII, we can read the story of Proserpine, Ceres’ daughter. “Proserpine was playing with her companions, gathering lilies and violets, and filling her basket and her apron with them when Pluto saw her; loved her; and carried her off”. Proserpine became a queen, “the queen of Erebus, the powerful bride of the monarch of the realms of the dead”. Ceres sought her daughter all the world over and hearing this from the fountain Arethusa “implored Jupiter to interfere to procure the restitution of her daughter”. Jupiter consented on the condition that Proserpine “should not during her stay in the lower world have taken any food”. Mercury was sent by Jupiter to demand Proserpine of Pluto but the maiden has taken a pomegranate which Pluto offered her. This prevented her complete release and Proserpine was to pass half the time with her mother; and the rest with her husband Pluto.
In chapter III of Barranco’s work, in the paragraphs regarding the Argentinean Civil Law of 1869 and women’s lack of ability or skill, the authors explains “the vicissitudes of Amalia Pelliza Pueyrredón’s life caused by being holed up in her home by her husband, the renowned doctor Carlos Durand. Their marriage took place the same year the Law was approved. Durand was much older that she and probably, Amalia, according to the customs, should respect her family will and marry him, since the physician, though in his fifties while she was only 15, had the charm of his considerable fortune. He was the obstetrician of the most important families in Buenos Aires and nobody knows what led him to conceal Amalia in the big house where he lived. She brought the case to court but was not awarded separation, what, probably, made Dr. Durant more furious. He tightened her imprisonment, but, at the same time, facing her complaints, he humiliated her by renting an awful horse-drawn carriage –since having an exaggerated carriage was a distinction feature- and forcing her to travel on it for hours without stopping. Durand fell ill and Amalia took off the years of imprisonment and could go out, entertain herself with companions and take part in social gatherings (...) However, once the doctor had made a complete recovery, the imprisonment sentence became too painful and Amalia fled. Some years later the doctor died and donated an important part of his assets to build a hospital, the one named after him. The rest of his fortune –probably as a lesson- was given, following his instructions, to relatives and servants, all of them women. Happily, Amalia could get part of the joint assets and throw money away as it was expected from someone stolen so many years of joy. This case is emblematic of the circumstances of female defenselessness in the first Civil Law. Certainly, it does not mean that all husbands should imprison their wives; however, all of them were entitled by the Law to have legal authority over his wife and her possessions”.
Behind the walls of a convent or a house, under the bark of a tree or the earth’s crust, we have seen several examples of women being seized by those who thought –and human and divine Law stated it firmly- they owned them, and chained them to their realms in order to preserve their honor, their pride, their strength, their power and their reputation. Having a look at the legends of classical mythology, the theatre during Romanticism period and the first Argentinean Civil Law we can observe that both literature and the whole system of rules maintain women’s comparative incapacity and the fact that, to all intents and purposes, their legal representatives were always their father or their husband.
In the present XXI century equity laws and ministries are approved and created respectively, however, there are still innumerable barriers, extremely high walls and very thick crust limiting the rights and freedoms of many people, women and men alike, worldwide. Only by acknowledging those obstacles we will be able to overcome, to jump over and to bore through them. They are in our books and lives: let’s read the former and write the latter together

Colonial cries and chronicles...

2008-07-12T09:30:00.000-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

I hear, from my collection of Latin American folklore records, a song by an Argentinean group called “Los Trovadores” (The Troubadours), renowned for their careful vocal arrangements. The title of his song is “Pregones coloniales” (Colonial cries, made by street or market vendors at that time): the first one comes from the “aceitunero” (olives male seller) –“Aceituna, una...” (One olive...)-, and the following belong to the “velero” (candles male seller) and the “aguatero” (fresh water male seller) respectively. I keep skipping from one song to another and pay attention to the “Pregones del altiplano” (cries of the Andean high plateau). Here, I can hear the cries made by a man who sells blankets, the “mazamorrero” (“mazamorra” seller) and the “platero” (a man who sells and fixes objects made of gold and silver).
One of my favorite pictures, when I was a child, was that of the already mentioned colonial cries that I painted in my mind after listening to what teachers taught us about the (distorted) colonial history of my country. Maybe those street advertisements had something to do with music, an element that always seemed to me one the most attractive universal languages. The custom of crying in the streets had come by ship from Spain, together with (newly introduced) goods the sellers cried...
Short time ago, reading the incomparable pages of “Tradiciones peruanas” (Peruvian traditions) by Ricardo Palma, I found a fragment that I consider worthy of note. The following excerpt recovers part of these Latin American colonial cries, a typical quality that has not disappeared yet: it has just become different. If you mean to travel across Argentina, Bolivia or Ecuador these days, you will easily meet many vendors hawking from one bus to the next.
The fragment I am quoting is a bit difficult. It recollects the Peruvian colonial history. Many characters and most of the goods cried are little known in other places. However, with a number of explanations at the end, intended to clarify some terms, you will enjoy it a lot.
Palma explains how, in his neighborhood, the cries of vendors worked as a kind of non-official clock:

The milkwoman indicated six in the morning.
The “tisanera” (tisanes female seller) and the “chichera” (“chicha” female seller) of Terranova cried at seven o’clock.
The “bizcochero” (“bizcocho” male seller) and the “leche-vinagre” female seller (milk-vinegar, literally), who cried “¡a la cuajadita!” (curd), pointed eight to the minute.
“Zanguito of ñajú” and “chocholíes” female seller marked nine, canon hour.
The “tamalera” (“tamales” female seller) announced ten.
At eleven the “melonera” (melons female seller) and the mulatto woman of the convent passed selling “ranfañote”, “cocada”, “bocado de rey”, “chancaquitas de cancha y de maní” and “fréjoles colados”.
At twelve appeared the fruit seller, with its basket full, and the “empanadillas de picadillo” seller.
One was signaled by the “ante con ante” male seller, the rice female seller and the “alfajorero” (“alfajores” male seller).
At two in the afternoon, the “picaronera” (“picarones” female seller), the “humitero” (“humitas” male seller) and the delicious “causa de Trujillo” male seller shouted their cries.
At three, the “melcochero” (“melcochas” male seller), the “turronera” (“turrón” female seller), the “anticuchero” or “bisteque en palito” (steak driven into a little stick) seller were even more punctual than Mari-Angola of the cathedral (one of the big bells, which always were given female names).
At four shouted the “picantera” (“picante” female seller) and the “piñita de nuez” seller.
At five shrieked the “jazminero” (jasmine male seller), the “caramanducas” seller and the cloth-flowers seller, who shouted: “¡Garden, garden! Maiden, don’t you smell it?”
At six the “raicero” (roots male seller) and the “galletero” (biscuits male seller) singed softly to themselves.
At seven in the evening cried the “caramelero” (candies male seller), the “mazamorrera” and the “champucera” (shampoo female seller).
At eight was the turn of the ice-cream seller and the “barquillero” (wafer seller).
Even at night in the evening, at the same time that the “toque de cubrefuego” (when the cannon sounded announcing that it was time to go to bed), the “animero” or the parish sacristan went out, with a red cape and a little lantern in his hand, begging for the sacred souls in the purgatory or for the wax (candles) of “Nuestro Amo” (our Master). This guy was the terror of children that did not want to go to bed.
Afterwards, it was the turn of the neighborhood “sereno” (night watchman), who replaced the street clocks, singing blow after blow: ¡Ave María Purísima! ¡Las diez han dado! ¡Viva el Perú, y sereno! (Hail Mary, full of grace! The clock struck ten! Long live Peru and the city is calm!).

In order to clarify who were some of the characters and what sort of goods they sold, here is some additional information.
The “tisanera” sold medicinal herbs, and the “chichera”, “chicha”, a fresh drink made from corn, which is consumed in the Andean area nowadays both, non fermented and fermented (similar to beer).
The “leche-vinagre” is curd, the thick soft substance that is formed when milk turns sour, a typical Spanish product. The “zango de ñajú” is a stew prepared with the fruit of a plant similar to pepper with a viscose substance inside, but it is not used any more at this time.
The “tamalera” sold “tamales”, small cakes prepared with corn pastry stuffed with meat or vegetable and covered with the “chala” (the corncob leaf). The products sold by the “convent female mulatto” were sweets, master pieces of confectionery, typical of nuns’ cloisters.
The “ante con ante” was the popular rice pudding. The “alfajorero” sold a kind of Hispanic candies, the “alfajores”, which are still eaten in Latin America. The “picarones”, “choncholíes” and the “causa de Trujillo” are similar Peruvian desserts. The former were a sort of fritter made of pumpkin and flour covered with honey.
The “melcochas” were a sort of sweets prepared with sugar and butter. The “humitero” sold “humitas”, very similar to the already mentioned “tamales”. The “anticuchos” are similar to “pork kebab” made of slices of cow heart, which are still very appreciated in Bolivia and Peru.
The “jazminero” and other flower vendors offered their goods to the young girls, who used to get all dress up for their evening strolls, a custom that Palma explains in detail in his book. The “raicero” also addressed the maidens since he sold soft roots used at that time as our current toothbrush and toothpaste.
The “mazamorra” –in use nowadays in half South America- is a sort of casserole with white corn grains, usually sweet, which includes different substances added to give it its typical flavor and tastes delicious as a dessert.
Palma’s book recollects many other stories, and I highly recommend its reading to all of you who want to know more about customs and traditions of yesteryear. You will find the Manchaypuyto tradition; the game of chess played by Inca Atahuallpa; the story of Aguirre the traitor; the arrival of the first mouse, the first cat and the first melon in Peruvian lands; the tobacco chronicles; a lot of stories about Latin American sayings and proverbs; accounts of historical facts regarding the Conquest and the Independence of Peru; and many descriptions of different incidents and anecdotes with religious men, viceroys, noblemen and well-known citizens in the leading roles...
Just as the volumes arranged in our libraries can give us the strength that our branches need to grow and blossom, they can also be the soil for our roots to steady themselves against windy storms. Without roots, the slightest breeze can make a tree fall to the ground. And, in modern world, any breeze is changed into a strong wind and there are plenty around us...
Anyone will certainly smile at these readings –even if you are not from Latin America- and if you manage to travel by bus in southern latitudes and listen to modern cries you would notice that many traditions are still alive and bear close resemblance to the original version...

Do we know what we name?

2008-07-05T09:31:00.001-03:00

Do we know what we name by terms such as ‘the field’ or ‘the people’?

By Sara Plaza

It happened while I was trying to understand the last conflicts between the ‘farming world’ and the government in Argentina and together with Edgardo we asked ourselves the question that gives name to this post. For more than three months, this country has been immersed in a situation that, far from directing towards its solution, seems to move it further away from as time goes by. During this period the main positions have either radicalized or become contradictory. Nobody escapes from discredit and the issue has become so complicated that its already blurred margins have almost disappeared from our sight. In spite of the news we have listened to on the radio and the many articles we have read in the national and international press we still drag a sheer ignorance. However, trying to shake it off we have learnt a few things and keep on trusting our common sense when it comes to interpret certain discourses and to give our opinion about the statements made by some and others with the aim of clear nothing and confound everything. That common sense, that critical spirit that we both have deep-rooted inside, has led us to put a couple of questions and intend several possible answers. As good nonconformist and forever curious people we have tried to understand, in first place, what it was that the whole media named ‘the field’ and, secondly, whom ‘the field’ and the government referred to when they talked of ‘the people’. In the international edition of the journal ‘Le Monde diplomatique’, May 2008, you will find a number of articles about the food crisis worldwide and the conflicts in Argentina. In the essay signed by Axel Kicillof the author says that ‘... the great diversity of situations that distinguish the different characters involved in what is generally and abusively named “the field” –from sowing pools to the neglected rural laborer-‘, and in the lines written by Hugo Sigman the author suggest the following divisions according to the characteristic of each group:

‘... in order to analyze the conflict and find solutions that be to their mutual interest it is necessary the opening of what is called rural sector by differentiating the terms agriculture and livestock in first place. The results achieved by the agricultural sector and by the livestock sector are completely different. With the cereals and their industrial derivatives –oil and biofuels- rising price the farming world has got a high return on its investment despite deductions. However the livestock sector, milk and bovine meet, has obtained a dreadful economic result.
It is also necessary to distinguish between “producers” since they can be big, average and even rural family’ economies. Things have gone better for the former and worse for the latter. Another necessary division can be established between regions of agricultural and cattle production: in central areas results have been much better than in marginalized areas, where the return is much lower and costs, transport mainly, are much higher.
If we finally differentiate between agricultural and cattle producers, industrialists (cold stores, milk factories, oil and bio-fuels producers) and traders (particularly exporting companies and silos owners) it is clear that industrialists and traders have monopolized, as a direct consequence of the government policy, part of the profits from agricultural and cattle producers’.

We came across the best definition of ‘the people’ in the pages of Anna Karenina that I had been reading one month before. Leon Tolstoy outlines wonderfully an argument between Kostantin Dimitrievitch (Levin) and his brother Sergey Ivanovitch in the presence of the former’s father in law (the old prince) and a common friend (Kosnichev) regarding the Russian volunteers who, at that moment, were mobilizing to take part in the armed conflict against the Turkish in the Balkans... The whole chapter XV in part VIII is well worth reading, I’ve only copied here its last lines:

‘“Personal opinions mean nothing in such a case,” said Sergey Ivanovitch; “it’s not a matter of personal opinions when all Russia –the whole people- has expressed its will.”
“But excuse me, I don’t see that. The people don’t know anything about it, if you come to that,” said the old prince.
“Oh, papa!... how can you say that? And las Sunday in church?” said Dolly, listening to the conversation. “Please give me a cloth,” she said to the old man, who was looking at the children with a smile. “Why is not possible that all...”
“But what was it in church on Sunday? The priest had been told to read that. He read it. They didn’t understand a word of it. Then they were told that there was to be a collection for a pious object in church; well, they pulled out their halfpence and gave them, but what for they couldn’t say.”
“The people cannot help knowing; the sense of their own destinies is always in the people, and at such moments as the present that sense finds utterance,” said Sergey Ivanovitch with conviction, glancing at the old bee-keeper.
The handsome old man, with black grizzled beard and thick silvery hair, stood motionless, holding a cup of honey, looking down from the height of his tall figure with friendly serenity at the gentlefolk, obviously understanding nothing of their conversation and not caring to understand it.
“That’s so, no doubt,” he said, with a significant shake of his head at Sergey Ivanovitch’s words.
“Here, then, ask him. He knows nothing about it and thinks nothing,” said Levin. “Have you heard about the war, Mihalitch?” he said, turning to him. “What they read in the church? What do you think about it? Ought we to fight for the Christians?”
“What should we think? Alexander Nikolaevitch our Emperor has thought for us; he thinks for us indeed in all things. It’s clearer for him to see. Shall I bring a bit more bread? Give the little lad some more?” he said addressing Darya Alexandrovna and pointing to Grisha, who had finished his crust.
“I don’t need to ask,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, “we have seen and are seeing hundreds and hundreds of people who give up everything to serve a just cause, come from every part of Russia, and directly and clearly express their thought and aim. They bring their halfpence or go themselves and say directly what for. What does it mean?”’
“It means, to my thinking,” said Levin, who was beginning to get warm, “that among eighty millions of people there can always be found not hundreds, as now, but tens of thousands of people who have lost caste, ne’er-do-weels, who are always ready to go anywhere- to Pogatchev’s bands, to Khiva, to Servia...”
“I tell you that it’s not a case of hundreds or of ne’er-do-weels, but the best representatives of the people1” said Sergey Ivanovitch, with as much irritation as if he were defending the last penny of his fortune. “And what of the subscriptions? In this case it is a whole people directly expressing their will.”
“That word ‘people’ is so vague,” said Levin. “Parish clerks, teachers, and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, now what it’s all about. The rest of the eighty millions, like Mihalitch, far from expressing their will, haven’t the faintest idea what there is for them to express their will about. What right have we to say that this is the people’s will?”

At this point, I imagine that you will be also making some questions and maybe these lines can be of any help and give you a few clues to try a number of answers of your own. It was my intention with this post to share a couple of doubts and the explanations that we found for them among the pages we read from the press and the literature. I consider both of them good sources of information as long as we are able to add a generous dose of critic spirit to them. That way we will be learning to ‘judge things reasonably’ though we can’t yet understand them completely.

A course in Human Stupidity

2008-06-28T09:58:00.001-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

Day after day Sara and I walk along the wrecked streets of our neighborhood in the town of Cordoba, Argentina. We put one foot in front of the other on the uneven pavement and feel a great sense of indignation while talking about the high taxes citizens must pay to survive in very bad conditions in a city that offends and upsets people, which looks horrible and works poorly. On the way we meet half a dozen carts pulled by a horse –similar to the famous and skinny Rocinante- carrying innumerable pieces of cardboard stacked in heaps: a colorful postcard of the so-called “underdevelopment”. We go into the supermarket and face the shortage of food, the astronomical prices and the speculating plot to cheat consumers and enrich traders. We buy very few things, just the staples we need to keep on eating. Some food is not any more in the aisle, some other is out of our pocket and the rest we can buy two or three at a time. On the way home we pass several buses that remind us the ones we had ever seen in films of the World War (The First). Before reaching the entrance door of our block of flats we must avoid the garbage left in the street for two days and cross the stream of waste material flooding the sidewalks...
After coming in our department we turn on the radio and listen to the news, the different political discourses and the speeches made by the president. The very same words are repeated over and over again: “growth”, “welfare”, and “fair redistributive policies”. The Argentinean National Institute of Statistics also keeps saying the same mischievous numbers and percentages that disguise the inflationary spiral of our economy and appeal the ears of the official party leaders. That way they can deliver empty and meaningless speeches about high speed trains –in a country with roads in deplorable conditions- and about new hospitals and schools intended to be build –in a country where the existing ones are falling to pieces for there is no money to maintain them.
It is not that difficult to listen to other voices publicly denouncing the government’s handling of rural schools where children have to endure the same intense winter cold in their class – for neither there is gas or electricity nor the heating installation works properly- as they feel riding on horseback to the school for three of four hours every morning; of the impassable roads in the provinces, away from the capital, because of the ban condition; of retirement pensions, on which the elder can hardly get by... And anyone can see, as we have done with our own eyes, how public hospitals and public transports work, which, incidentally, do it whenever they want and can – provided there are not on strike.
At this point, both Sara and I make ourselves the following questions: those who write official speeches, do they really think that we are stupid? Do they really think that we are not aware of the oppressive and stinking reality that we face day after day? Do they really think that we do not realize they are holding us hostage during this ongoing crisis they insist on worsening? Might not they be the stupid ones they believe we are? Might not the media suffer from the same stupidity they make public and widely spread? Might not future history and sociology books be so stupid as to collect ordinary people’s life and our daily problems as myths and legends?
Almost half a century ago, the Hungarian writer Paul Tabori wrote a book that I consider splendid. The original title is “Natural History of Stupidity”. Tabori not only tries to successfully explain the term “stupidity” through the first chapter of this work but he also does an impressive review –more or less academic- of a great deal of documents (manuscripts, archives, old editions, incunabula) and extracts from them a real mix of different examples representing the true human stupidity. This colorful collection covers subjects such as thirst of gold, court ceremony, fake genealogical trees, excessive (and ridiculous) bureaucracy, laws (many of them, even more absurd), doubts, myths and love. The book does not have a single bad part in it. I find each paragraph amazing. The reader moves from one stupidity to another –every new one more surprising than the former and all of them well documented- through Human History. If you manage to find it, do not miss the opportunity to have a look at its pages.
In my opinion, Tabori forgot to include in his book a chapter about political speeches and communication media, for the things thought, said and done through them (at least in this country of ours) are excellent examples of proper stupidity. Stupidity which we can do nothing against, but dealing with it and –though it is too serious a matter- treating it as a joke (for crying is of very little help here, as in most of the cases).
Paul Tabori was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1908. He studied in Hungary, Austria and Germany and earned his doctorate of Political and Economic Sciences at the University of Budapest. Between the First and the Second World War he lived in 17 different countries as a correspondent. In 1937 he established in London, where he went through a state of feverish activity as a journalist and a writer. Between 1943 and 1948 he wrote a number of scripts for London Films and continued doing so during the 50s in Hollywood. For the 70s Tabori had finished more than 30 film scripts and over a hundred written texts of TV series. He belonged to numerous international writers’ associations and was co-founder of the International Writer’s Fund. In his last days he taught at the Fairfield Dickinson University, the City Collage of NY and the University of Illinois.
“Natural History of Stupidity” starts with the following paragraph. Does this book need any better presentation than the one offered by the author himself?
(NB. The paragraph is roughly translated from the Spanish book, since we don not have the English original).

This book deals with stupidity, foolishness, imbecility, inability, clumsiness, vacuity, short-sightedness, fatuousness, idiocy, madness, delirium. It studies idiots, fools, persons of low intelligence, dim-witted, mentally weak, silly, ridiculous, superficial, extremely stupid, rookies and gaga, simple, mentally unbalanced, crazy, irresponsible, dull. In it we intend to present a gallery of clowns, gullible people, morons, halfwits, wimps, blockheads, oafs, dummies, dopes, dullards, nuts and lunatics past and present alike. It will describe and analyze facts that are irrational, senseless, absurd, foolish, wrongly conceived, idiot... and so on so forth. Is there something more characteristic of our humanity than the fact that Roget’s Thesaurus dedicates six columns to the synonyms, the verbs, the names and the adjectives regarding ‘stupidity’ while the word ‘sense’ just takes up one?

Someday, someone will write “History of Political Stupidity”. I am sure the author will find enough material in the Argentinean newspapers and annals. However, I can say in all sincerity that most newspapers, whether international, national or regional fail to show –at length and in depth- the present economic, political, social, etc. situation faced by most Argentineans day after day (a situation that may also be similar to what is happening in other countries at this moment). They only publish and spread the empty words and the meaningless speeches delivered by official and opposition leaders. Ordinary people, as usual, remain voiceless and with our hands tied. Maybe that future book should dedicate a chapter to communication media as well... What about adding an entry for other items such as “hypocrisy”, “oppression” and “abuse”?
I send to you a big hug from the yesteryear beautiful city of Cordoba, Argentina.

PD. (For those who know little or nothing about the present social, economic and political situation in Argentina). During more than three months we have been immersed in a conflict between the national government and part of the agricultural sector. Only one week ago the disagreement that sparked off this crisis was taken to the National Congress where, at present, is being discussed before the representatives vote on the government’s proposal. In short this is what the international media have covered. However, nobody has spoken about the many hardships that Argentineans were suffering before this crisis and the many deprivations and injustices we keep undergoing day after day. No doubt, this conflict has been good for hidden more serious matters. Meanwhile, we are still here and join the struggle for survival.

University’s ill health 90 years afterwards...

2008-06-21T09:35:00.002-03:00

By Sara Plaza and Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

In Chile, university and secondary school professors and students went recently on strike for an unlimited period in protest at the Education Reform Bill presented by the government...
At the Spanish universities, a storm of protest has been raised against the Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior (EEES, European Space of Higher Education, better known as Bologna, after the city where the declaration was issued). Critics and detractors believe that it will help privatize and commercialize public university; that it will diminish the quality of degrees; that it will contribute to subordinate knowledge to commercial interests; and that it will turn university into a professional training school where teaching/learning processes will be connected with practice rather than with reflection, debate, constructive criticism, research, discussion...
The Congreso Regional de Educación Superior (Regional Conference on Higher Education) organized in May 2008 in Cartagena, Colombia, by the Instituto Internacional para la Educación Superior en América Latina y el Caribe (IESALC/UNESCO, International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean) sets strict limits on the participation of thousands of researchers, fails to address the current situation in education, hardly presents new ideas and excludes a great part of Latin American thought from its working sessions. In addition, it assumes the role that had previously criticized the World Bank for, becoming a market where educative community was silenced with fruitless documents –mostly elaborated by economists- and where neoliberal terms such as efficiency, efficacy, quality, access and equality, competitiveness, innovation, pertinence, management, governance, funding, accredited programs and evaluation were widely repeated
These are a few pieces of information extracted from different media during the last week. Curiously, at the same time, we have found some articles celebrating the University Reform 90th anniversary, which stemmed from the students’ requests at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC, National University of Cordoba), Argentina. Those students, seeing that their demands were not going to be met, burst into the University Assembly when the new rector was to be designated on the 15th of June, 1918 and came out on strike. The strike was supported by workers from all over the country and was meant to last for a period of time that had no fixed end. On the 21st, “La Gaceta Universitaria” (the university journal) published the Manifiesto Liminar de la Reforma (preliminary manifesto on the reform) written by Deodoro Roca and signed by the leaders of the Federación Universitaria de Córdoba (University of Cordoba Federation). Through July the university –whose control had already been taken in April, when the protests intensified, following President Hipólito Yrigoyen orders- was closed, the rector chosen by the clerical association called Corda Frates tendered his resignation and the government took over the running of the university. At that moment the statutes of the university were updated, the teaching staff changed and many of the students’ requests introduced.
Among the bitter criticism leveled by the Manifesto we can find some accusations made against the current university models on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean:
“Universities have become a copy true to the original decadent societies that strive to offer a pitiful sight proper to advanced age immobility. (...) Our university regime –even the most recent- is anachronistic. It is grounded on a sort of divine law: the divine law connected with lecturers. It comes from itself. It starts to exist and stop existing with it. It keeps deepening the rift. (...) The finished reins of the power that derive from strength do not agree to negotiate with what is claimed by the sense and modern concept of universities nowadays. The crack of the whip can only sign the silence of irresponsible persons and cowards. (...) University youth from Cordoba states that they never thought to question names or employees. They rose up against an administrative regime, against a teaching methodology, against a concept of authority. Public functions were exercised in favor of particular cronies. Plans and regulations were never reformed for fear of offending those who might lose their jobs. The instruction ‘you can do the same for me one day’ was common knowledge and achieved pre-eminence as university statute. Teaching methodology was marred by a narrow dogmatism contributing to keep university separate from science and modern disciplines. The lessons, hidden behind the repetition of old texts, protected a spirit of routine and submission.”
The Argentinean University that Deodoro Roca mentioned 90 years ago was tied to “the old monarchic and monastic domination”. The Spanish university that today students dress in banners reading “NO a Bolonia” (No Bologna) seems to have been injured by transnational commercial interests that want to hold it tight, which have also pierced the Congreso Internacional de Educación Superior that took place in May in Cartagena, Colombia. In 1918, the religious feeling inspired by the Compañía de Jesús (Society of Jesus) bounded and gagged university – “strange religion that teaches to despise the honor and look down on the personality. Religion for defeated or slaves”, wrote Roca in the Manifesto. At the present moment the World Bank thesis derived from the theory of human capital (stating that “the state should not invest in Higher Education” for “the act of investing in Higher Education is a regressive step”) and the World Trade Organization resolution (indicating that Higher Education is something produced to be sold) both pressure into making the university community free expression become weaker.
It seems to us that little progress has been made if the place occupied by religious persons 90 years ago is now taken up by modern economists... Maybe it is a good idea to discuss and promote 2008 education laws in the light of the 1918 reformist principles. At that time it was claimed that universities should act independently of government. Today it would be desirable that they also acted independently of international market, companies, WTO, WB... It continues being good practice that the university main characters, that is, teaching staff, students and graduates keep its management in their hands. It would be worth supporting free public education. And to improve outreach activities: university, its community and its knowledge should not be indifferent to society problems and social debates, on the contrary, university should play an important role in them. No doubt, it is necessary to defend teaching freedom and to update periodically the teaching staff, and to connect teaching with doing research. If 90 years ago a sort of Latin American Unity was proposed, why cannot we reformulate the European Space of Higher Education without confusing convergence with a single way of thinking, doing and saying things, without putting aside diversity and acknowledging difficulties, pressures, errors and failures in order to share and discuss new proposals?
We can certainly feel the effects of the mercantile system in every single facet of our life immersed in this huge “global village” –less and less “unified” and more and more “colonized” as time passes- and can also notice those effects on the way we produce, use and enjoy knowledge. Mercantilism presses education (a key factor in the countries’ growth, development, and progress) and information management deliberately. Our libraries and documentation centers provide conclusive proof of applying “management strategies”, “quality and efficacy measures” and an increasing number of techniques and tools that seek to turn knowledge units into profitable businesses. Mercantile culture contaminates everything: policies on “borrowing fees” are being discussed in our libraries while copyright legislation makes it difficult to share, spread, and use a lot of documents and software. At the same time the digital divide broadens and the social roles of library professionals blur or vanish, information illiteracy grows... Librarianship –similar to education- is being attacked by a new model, whose advocators neither call a truce nor accept alternative ways of doing things or adaptations nor listen to reason. It seems a battle in which no mercy is going to be shown and whose victims will be the ones always injured in any battle...
In 1918, the University Reform that took place in Cordoba, Argentina, spread throughout Latin America and raised a storm of protest from students all over the region, who, going over the ideas expressed in the Manifesto written by Deodoro Roca also achieved important changes in their national university systems. Today... who will set an example of how education and other public services can be improved without freedom constraints? Who will rise up against the yoke of mercantilism?

Global Warming and Us

2008-06-14T09:31:00.001-03:00

Assessing our environmental and professional responsibility

By Elaine Harger

While driving over the Continental Divide in Montana last summer, I was heartsick to see many rust-colored trees scattered throughout forests of usually solid green. In places it looked as though 20-30% of the tress were dead, and indeed they are –killed by a beetle whose only predator is the extreme colds of Montana winters, themselves seemingly headed for extinction due to global warming.
What does the death of pine trees have to do with librarianship? Is global warming a “library issue”? Many librarians argue that provision of books, programming, and other information concerning environmental matters is sufficient to fulfill librarianship’s obligations. Some argue that we need to balance the environmental crisis with sources that deny human responsibility for it. However, I’ve come to realize that global warming goes to the heart of our professional concerns in a number of ways.
Recently, as part of a Northwest Earth Institute discussion group called Global Warming: Changing CO2urse, I calculated my carbon footprint. The average daily production of CO2 emissions per person in the U.S. is 122 lbs. About 65 lbs. is under the direct control of each individual, while the other 57 lbs. is each person’s share of emissions produced by the businesses, industries, electrical generators, and transportation systems that make up part of the infrastructure of our society. By way of comparison, the average daily CO2 emissions per persons in the rest of the world are 24 lbs. And, as it turns out, Earth’s ecosystems can fully process only 9 lbs. of CO2 per day per person.
To calculate your personal carbon footprint, you gather up gas receipts for your vehicles and your utility bills, and count the number of airplane trips taken yearly.
My CO2 production amounted to 34 lbs. per day, lower than the U.S. average, primarily because I walk to work and use my car as little as possible.
This bit of information posed a profound question and prompted a period of complete demoralization brought on by contemplating its implications: How do I reduce my personal production of CO2 from 34 + 57 = 91 lbs. per day to 9? What permitted me to emerge from my feelings of complete defeat were four realizations:

- First, I personally am not responsible for reducing 57 of those pounds: this is a task for our entire society, including librarianship.
- Second, any reductions to my personal 34 lbs. would have to include my air travel to professional conferences, which are usually the only flights I ever take.
- Third, I am only a third-generation CO2 producer. Most of my ancestors lived just fine producing much less than 9 lbs of CO2 per day.
- Fourth, the task of turning our lives from Earth-destroying ones to Earth-sustaining ones is as full of adventure and promise as any task ever to face humanity; al we need is to reactive some of that good old human can-do spirit, and librarianship can help enormously.

For starters, host a showing of the 2006 documentary film Who Killed the Electric Car? at your library and ask the audience to imagine every gas station stocked with solar-charged exchangeable batteries instead of gasoline.
Sponsor and participate in Northwest Earth Institute discussion groups so that your community can explore the possibilities for creating sustainable relationships with your bioregion.
Travel the world through books instead of as CO2-spewing tourist.
And finally let’s rethink ALA conferences. “Greening” ALA Midwinter and Annual meetings is not just a matter of whether or not convention centers recycle paper. We need to rethink the need for national gatherings, because they are not sustainable given current conditions.

Elaine Harger is librarian at Mount Si High School in Snoqualmie, Washington, and a member of ALA Council.
American Libraries / April 2008 / On my Mind / Opinion

Voice cannot be restored to its rightful owners by writing them a script

2008-06-07T09:22:00.002-03:00

By Sara Plaza

A couple of months ago, at the local film club ‘Hugo del Carril’ in Córdoba (Argentina), it was presented a Spanish documentary film titled ‘Invisibles: Una sola mirada y cinco historias’ (Invisible ones: five stories but one only look), produced by Javier Bardem and directed by Mariano Barroso, Isabel Coixet, Javier Corcuera, Fernando León de Aranoa and Wim Wenders, which had recently won the Goya 2008 award for the best documentary film. In the review that appeared in the bulletin ‘Metropolis’ (Nº 55, April 2008) published by the film club itself, it could be read:

INVISIBLE ONES is a story of stories; an approach to those people condemned to obscurity by us; a wish to give their voice back to several people that fell silent by our indifference; a modest recognition for those ones that did never loose sight of them. But, above all, it is the willingness of five directors to turn visible the true and only main characters, people that we consider and like better as invisible.

I must admit that I did not like this presentation. I have become quite suspicious of hackneyed phrases such as ‘give voice to people without it’. Firstly, for I regard it as affected and secondly, for it is deceitful. I think of it as an expression that makes people believe something that is not true. For a start, I do not believe that people from the badly called and worse understood “Third World” are dumb neither I agree with the idea of returning their voice to them by writing them the words, together with the instructions for how to say them. On the contrary, many dialogues and monologues that appear in the quoted film only allow the “First World” to hear what it is prepared to.
In this sense, regarding the North American film industry, the Spanish film critic Carlos Boyero wrote two months ago (EL PAÍS, April 26th, 2008):

‘For some time, Hollywood has taken the third world and the old and never ending dirty tricks played on it slightly more seriously. It has done it with the best of intentions, making every effort to show a critical tone towards the disasters perpetuated by its colonizers, but never straying its attention from the gold-mines that are a box-office hit, the sacred conventions and the transparent or subterranean happy end’.

In an interview published by the same journal some weeks later (May 10th, 2008), the North American independent film director, John Seyles, also smiled before a label, ‘independent’, which Hollywood seems to like it very much lately:

‘It is a fallacy invented by major studios in order to save money. They create smaller divisions where cheaper films are produced, which are called ‘independent’, and with this excuse they can pay less to actors and directors. Nevertheless, as soon as it is decided that they are going to take part in the Oscar race, forty million dollars will be invested in publicity for the film’.

Jesús Carrión, who works for the ‘Observatorio de la Deuda en la Globalización (ODG, Globalization Debt Observatory) connected with the Polytechnic University of Barcelona, talking about the stock activism carried out by some NGOs, explained in an article (EL PAÍS, May 17th, 2008) that ‘the danger is that big companies use NGOs to legitimize themselves’. And this is what he stated talking of the Corporative Social Responsibility programs developed by Spanish multinational companies:

‘They make small donations but have great media power to achieve a publicity return on them while going on launching programs that destroy communities and territories’.

Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, in his last work ‘Espejos: Una historia casi universal’ (Mirrors: an almost universal story), under the headline “Americanos” (Americans) asks himself:

‘The official History tells that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man that saw, from a mountain top in Panama, both oceans. Those living there, were they blind?
Who gave their first names to corn, potato, tomato, chocolate and to the mountains and rivers of America? Hernan Cortés, Francisco Pizarro? Those living there, were they dumb?
It was heard by Mayflower pilgrims: God said that America was the Promised Land. Those living there, were they deaf?
Afterwards, the grandchildren of those northern pilgrims took possession of the name and everything else. Now, they are Americans. Those living in the other Americas, what are we?’
(Excerpted from a partial on-line translation of Galeano's book into English)

Curiously enough, ‘Babelia’, the literary supplement of EL PAÍS published on May 26th, 2008 was titled:

To reinvent America
Madrid Book Fair gives voice to the new narrators [arrived] from the other side of the Atlantic.

Once more the ‘First World’ was writing the script for the ‘Third’, making us believe that they are dumb, blind and deaf. Once more the ‘First World’ was speaking of the ‘Third’ with a profound ignorance, since as I pointed out at the beginning of this post, the ‘First World’ never listen to what does not want to hear.
To my surprise, reading Simonetta Agnello’s words in a recent interview (EL PAÍS, May 17th, 2008), I found out that some places in the ‘First World’ cannot express themselves either:

‘It is a tragedy that the greatest part of what has been written about Sicily should have been written by foreigners not by Sicilians. There must be a reason’

Might it be related with the ‘First World’ making excuses for its own deafness by insisting on the ‘Third’ being dumb?

Ink road across Africa

2008-05-31T09:40:00.003-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

If I ask you to think about ‘African libraries’, most of you will probably create a picture in your mind of modern units from different nations of the great continent. However, if I ask you to think about ‘African libraries a long time ago’, when a great part of those territories were still a mystery for Europeans that will only ‘discover’ them a long time afterwards... what would you think of?
(If this was an auditory, this would be the moment when everybody is silent and thoroughly checks their hands, the person’s before them back of the neck, broken floor tiles...).
On many occasions we have been sold an image of this part of the world as ‘tribal Africa’, ‘black continent’, ‘tam-tam and oral tradition land’, ‘artistic works as a means of transmitting wisdom’... Hollywood classics, travel books written by the XIX century explorers and the huge popular imagery slowly created will probably make us think of an Africa consisting of exotic dances and even more exotic songs, and of peoples without writing, without books and, of course, without libraries...
Maybe some of you will be surprised when I tell you that one of the greatest knowledge centers of that continent –one as important as other contemporary units- was placed on the fringe of the Sahara desert, at one of those crossroads where the main trading roads met.
It was –and is still- called Timbuktu. In this post I will try to tell you a small part of its history and the history of its books.
Timbuktu (or Tombuctu according to the French spelling) is situated in the present State of Mali, Western Africa. It was founded ten centuries ago by Tuareg o Targui people, those famous ‘desert blue men’, nomads of Berber origins that moved on their camels from place to place across this huge country without owner that was the Sahara Desert (did you know that ‘Sahara’ means precisely ‘desert’ in Arabic?). These peoples –that, curiously, had already developed a millenarian system of writing- established the original settlement, but initially it was populated by merchants from the neighboring city-state of Djenne, putting up a lot of markets and commercial headquarters. Timbuktu became a prosperous city very soon, for it was the place where trans-Saharan caravans met and cross each other. These caravans exchanged goods between the Islamic North (salt) and the southern area of Niger (gold, slaves, fruit, ivory), and Timbuktu was a rest area for camels and their owners. In the XI century there were many traders of Fulani, Mandé and Tuareg ethnic groups settled there. All of them were Muslims. The city belonged to several different empires: Ghana, Mali from 1324, Songhay from 1468... And it was under Songhay rule when Timbuktu became ‘the crown jewel’ and reached its entire splendor.
(It is unbelievable how many and how different city-states, empires and confederations emerged and disappeared in Africa before European history touched those peoples. Many times we are ready to believe that there was no history or anything worth to mention up to arrival of explorer such as Livingstone, Stanley, Burton... However, as I stated at the beginning, they are only part of our popular imagery).
In 1591, the city was captured by a band of Moroccan adventurers taking orders from a Spanish renegade named ‘Pasha Joder’. ‘Pasha’ was an honorific titled and the other word (a common Spanish swearword, actually) was the expression this so foul-mouthed guy used most.
This marked the beginning of the end of Timbuktu grandeur. In 1893 it fell in the hands of French colonial power –despite Tuareg strong resistance- and in 1960 achieved its independence together with the entire French Sudan (present Mali). In the 1990s, the city was attacked by Tuareg people pursuing the creation of their own State. The so-called ‘Tuareg Rebellion’ did not last long and ended in the burning of their weapons in 1996.
Nowadays, Timbuktu is an impoverished city. However, it was a mystery to Europeans for centuries, especially because being a Muslim center, anyone not professing Islam was forbidden from entering the city. At that time many legends were told about its wealth –many of them based on real facts- and a lot of men and western organizations set out to ‘discover’ Timbuktu and its fabulous treasures. In 1788, a group of Englishmen formed the ‘African Association’ in order to find the city and place it on the map. In 1824, the Geography Society of Paris offered a 10.000 francs prize to the first non-Muslim that got into the city and came back with relevant information. The Scot Gordon Laing arrived in 1826 but was assassinated. The French René Caillié, disguised himself as a Muslim, was there in 1828 and came back to tell everybody about it and win the prize - and the honor of having being the first European in entering the legendary city. Only three other Europeans were able to imitate his heroic deed before 1890.
It is one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites from 1988, and its mosques made of adobe and mud gives Timbuktu –and many other places in the region- the aureole of mystery that still hangs over the city. It is said that the silhouettes of these buildings were a source of inspiration for the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí. Regretfully, the city is turning into desert and has been declared in danger from 1990. Timbuktu is so enigmatic that a survey carried out in 2006 among Britain youth revealed that the 34% did not believe that the city was real and the 66% regarded it as ‘a mythical place’
Throughout the XV century a number of Islamic institutions were created in Timbuktu. The Sankore mosque is one of the most famous, also known as ‘Sankore University’ for the madrassa or Islamic school housed inside. It was built in 1581 and became the center of the Islamic academic community of that region though other surviving mosques –such as Djinguereber and Sidi Yahya- are even older. An Islamic madrassa does not look like a medieval university (comparing educational institutions in the same period). The madrassa consisted of a group of independent schools, each of them managed by a teacher or imam. Students joined a certain professor and classes took place in open places in the yards of the mosque or at private residences. Classes were mainly focused on the study of the Koran, but subjects such as Logic, Astronomy, History, Music, Botanic, Religion, Commerce and Mathematics were also important taught. Academicians wrote their own books as part of a socio-economic model based on scholarship. Benefits got from books sale were second in order of importance behind gold and salt trade. There were more than 100.000 books in the city, most of them written in Arabic or Pulaar (the language spoken by Fulani people), and their contents included the subjects studied at the madrassa. Between the XVI and XVIII centuries, the amount of books and the standard of knowledge reached such a high level that it was wisely expressed in the following saying: ‘Salt comes from the north; gold comes from the south, but God’s word and wisdom treasures come from Timbuktu’.
It is believed that there were more than 120 libraries in the city as part of the African ‘ink road’, which connected northern Africa with the east of the continent -under Arab traders’ control also- following the caravans’ roads. In recent times, libraries were reduced to 60-80 private institutions devoted to the conservation of priceless manuscripts. At present, Mamma Haidara, Kati, Al-Wangari and Mohammed Tahar libraries are good examples. The library that belongs to Kati’s family encompasses 3.000 documents from Andalusia, the oldest dated between the XIV and XV centuries. Nowadays, there are more than one million original documents kept in Mali and it is believed that 20 million more might be found in other parts of Africa, especially in the neighboring region of Sokoto, Nigeria. Many of them are kept as a family treasure and nobody will reveal their existence...
There are several joint international projects aimed at recovering this heritage in every way possible. In August, 2002, the Ink Road International Symposium was celebrated in Bamako (the capital of Mali). In 2006, joint efforts between Mali and South Africa governments made it possible to initiate a research on this matter. The UNESCO has set in motion the Timbuktu Manuscript Project and there is a foundation committed to preserving historical documents in the city itself.
Although there are no book artisans left, memories of their trade still remain that remind us of a flourishing business a long time ago...
The history we are usually told –not only about books- seems to be focused on Europe and very few times pays due attention to other geographical and cultural spaces. The Western Africa rough draft made in these lines might also be written about pre-Hispanic Central America, about its beautiful codices and its paper industry of amatl fig tree. How much have we been taught about it? How much have we learnt about it? How much do we know about it?
Far from pretending to ‘give voice to those without it’ –Sara will talk about this issue next week-, maybe we can try to ‘refresh memories’: memories of worlds that also had skillful bookbinders, fantastic illustrators and expert researchers, such as the ones from Timbuktu.

Are conflicts read differently as time passes?

2008-05-24T09:34:00.001-03:00

By Sara Plaza

Sometimes, it is curious to observe how different readings of conflicts –both resolved and unresolved- have developed through time. On some occasions it is not even necessary to wait for centuries to go by, for just a few years are enough to talk in a different way of the same problem that, as time passes, will undoubtedly suffer a lot of changes in order to remain unsolved or end in agreement.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence declaration. This State was created in the territories of Ancient Palestine, a region whose names and boundaries have varied throughout history
Allow me to bring back some memories and look through a little piece of the history surrounding this geographical area.
First human remains date back as early as 500.000 years ago. Twelve thousand years BCE. Natufian culture elaborated wood, stone and animal bone tools, and the agricultural communities were established between 10000 and 5000 BCE. New migrant groups, marked by the use of copper, were brought to the region from a culture originated in Syria, and between 3000 and 2200 BCE the first independent Canaanite city-states were settled. Civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria and Phoenicia had a great influence over Canaan due to commercial and diplomatic ties, and in 1190 BCE the Philistines arrived at this region and mingled with the local population introducing iron weapons and chariots to them.
It is said –though some historians do not even believe in his existence- that between 2000 and 1000 BCE, Abraham moved from the old city of Ur (ancient Mesopotamia) to Arum (modern Turkey) and once there he parted from his tribe and abandoned idolatry. Then he set off with his family and flocks to Canaan, the land promised to him, by God, as their homeland, where he should establish a monotheistic people. Canaanite people called Abraham Ibri and those who came with him became known as ibrim (‘from the other side’), term that gave birth to the word ‘Hebrew’. It is told that Isaac, Abraham’s son, went on to the south of this ‘Promised Land’, the Negev Desert, and that his younger son, Jacob, after deceiving his older brother, Esau, fled back to Mesopotamia, were he was renamed Israel (after successfully wrestling with an angel of God). It is also believed that Israel had 12 children. Joseph, his favorite, was the first brother who moved to Egypt. A few years later, hunger in Canaan forced the rest together with their father to follow Joseph’s steps.
In Ramesses II’s reign, Jews were treated as slaves and they could only leave Egypt after Moses appeared –apparently called by God to endorse the agreement made with Abraham and guide Israelites towards the Promised Land- and announced the famous seven plagues of Egypt. It is said that Moses waited 40 years in the Desert before coming back to Canaan. Then his disciple, Joshua, followed the Jordan River and captured Jericho in the first place and immediately afterwards took place the conquest of Canaan, which was divided among the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
At the beginning, the tribes of Israel were governed by successive judges, of whom Samson, betrayed by philistine Dalila, became very famous. According to Biblical tradition Saul, a peasant warrior, was the first king of the United Kingdom of Israel in 1020 BCE. His son-in-law, David –who won the Philistine giant Goliath-, came to the throne after his death. It is believed that David seized a small village on a hill and Jerusalem was made the capital of his kingdom there. During the reign of his son, Solomon, these peoples gained their greatest splendor, but after his death internal disputes caused the united kingdom to split and two new kingdoms were formed: the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah (origin of the word ‘Jew’). Both kingdoms coexisted in this region together with many others, including Philistine city-states.
The Northern Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian Empire two hundred years later and those 10 Israelite tribes –thereafter known as the Lost Tribes- were exiled. In 587 BCE, Judah was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar, and surviving Jews together with much of the other local population were deported to Babylonia.
After the Persian Empire was established in 538 BCE, king Ciro allowed Jews to return to what their holy books had termed the Land of Israel. The Persian Empire fell to Greek forces of the Macedonian general Alexander the Great and the Jewish population in Judah saw their autonomy in religion and administration limited. Fascination in Jerusalem for Greek culture resulted in an internal divide between reformist and ortodox Jews that ended in a sort of civil war, which allowed the intervention of Syrian Antiochus IV Epiphanes. In 167 BCE the Syrians will be expelled from Jerusalen by Judas Maccabeo and it is said that the Jews will progress under Maccabean. However, a century of independence disputes led to control of the kingdom by the Romans in 63 BCE. Judah was renamed Judea and became a Roman client kingdom. Roman rule was solidified when Herod was appointed as “king of the Jews”. As a result of the First Jewish-Roman War (66-73), Titus sacked Jerusalem. Surviving Jews were forced into exile following the fall of a Jewish revolt led by Bar Kokhba in 132–135, and the Romans joined the province of Judea (which already included Samaria) together with Galilee to form a new province, called Syria Palestine (to honor the Philistines) administered by the governor of Syria.
The Land of Israel fell under Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Sassanian, and Byzantine rule, between the time of the Jewish kingdoms and the 7th-century. Over the next centuries this region was captured by Arabs in 636, Crusaders in 1099, Tartars in 1244 and the Ottoman Empire in 1517, before falling in British hands in 1922.
The British had defeated Turkish forces in Palestine in September 1918 with the help of Arabs –who thought possible the creation of a new independent Arab State- and in July 1920, the French drove Faisal bin Husayn from Damascus. The British gave priority to their agreements with the French and broke the promise made to Arabs. In April 1920 the Allied Supreme Council (the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan) met at Sanremo and The United Kingdom accepted a mandate for Palestine. However, the boundaries of the mandate and the conditions under which it was to be held were not decided. On 24 July, 1922 the League of Nations approved the terms of the British Mandate over Palestine to secure the establishment of the Jewish national home. The population of the area at that time was predominantly Muslim Arabs while Jerusalem was predominantly Jewish. Five years before, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had issued what became known as the Balfour Declaration, which acknowledged the historical conexion between the Jewish people and Palestine territories. Under the administration of the mandate Britain favored Jewish population while the Jews maintained a policy of native population negation.
In the years following World War II, Britain's control over Palestine became increasingly uncertain. Finally in early 1947 the British Government announced their desire to terminate the Mandate, stating it was unable to arrive at a solution acceptable to both Arabs and Jews, and passed the responsibility over Palestine to the United Nations, which approved the partition of the Mandate over Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with the Greater Jerusalem area coming under international control. Jewish leaders accepted the plan, while Palestinian Arab leaders rejected it. Regardless, the State of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, and the neighboring Arab states and armies immediately attacked Israel following its declaration of independence and 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out. During the war, according to UN estimates, about 80% of the previous Arab population, fled the country. Israel was established in three-quarters of this territory by the end of the war, and the remaining quarter, comprising the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was occupied by Egypt and by Jordan, and later conquered by Israel during the 1967 war.
Up to here the memory exercise and the rough draft of the history that I wanted to check before the creation of the New State of Israel.
Now I would like to share with you two moments of the most recent history that I found while reading two different texts on the very same subject. One of them is the article ‘El sufrimiento como identidad’ (The sufferings as identity) written by the journalist, expert in international policy, Andrés Criscaut, for the international Argentinean edition of the journal Le Monde diplomatique, ‘el Dipló’ in May, 2008. The other is a book titled ‘Israel’ by Robert St. John that was published in 1962 and belongs to the collection ‘Biblioteca Universal de LIFE en Español’ (LIFE Universal Library in Spanish).
This is the way Andrés Criscaut describes what happened between 1936 and 1939:

‘The Palestine Arabs both urban and country men, found themselves alone and facing a Jewish colonization that raised from 12500 people in 1932 to 66000 in 1935, when refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany increased their numbers. Between 1936 and 1939 a spontaneous revolt took place –similar to the one staged during the last decade with both Intifadas- basically by ordinary people of the country and people living in the fringes of urban centers, and it was known as the Great Arab Revolt in Palestine, which took by surprise the small elite of Palestine leaders (only 9% participated and less than 5% directed operations or guerrillas).
The uprising, although started off by challenges and inequities due to the growing Jewish enclave during the mandate, had a clear anti-British orientation, for the Crown was immediately responsible for this imbalance.
Nevertheless, at its late stage it ended up being a real civil war between Palestinians. The revolt put the mandate administration in an awkward position, and there were more troops deployed in the small territory of Palestine than in the whole Indian subcontinent’. (p. 33)

And these are the lines of Robert St. John explaining the same conflict:

‘In the middle 1930s, anti-Semitism in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, and reluctance on the part of Australia and under populated American countries to open their doors to Jews fleeing from Central Europe to save their lives caused many of them to seek refuge in Palestine. Now, the Arabs, as a gesture of protest, organized a rebellion on a large scale that sparked off in the spring of 1936. What caused it to start was first in Jaffa and later spread to every place with Arabs and Jews population. Many people died and everywhere the normal life was disrupted by the general strike declared by the Arabs. The British sent military forces from Egypt, Malta and Great Britain, and order was restored in the end’. (pp. 39-40)

One might carefully check a lot of things, but what attracted my attention first was that Criscaut calls ‘revolt’ what St. John considers a ‘rebellion’, and the spontaneity attributed to the former contrast with the organization of the latter. Only the methods used by the British seem to be quite clear to both authors.
Forty four years separate St. John’s book from Criscaut’s article, which seem to have been of great importance according to the different names given to the armed conflict in 1948.
Criscaut writes:

‘For the Israelis, 1948 was the year when the Jews won the “Independence War” and created the State of Israel. For the Palestinians, it was the year of the Nakba (the Disaster), the year when they lost Palestine and their society was devastated’. (p. 33)

St. John states:

‘However, during the war that followed after the British forces withdrawal in 1948, [Jerusalem] was the scene of bloody combats between Israelis and Arabs ... since they defeated the Arab army ... [the Israelis] proudly call this conflict “Liberation War”’. (pp. 12-14)

In the excerpts shown above, both texts talk about the same facts, how can they look like so different in the eyes of each author? Could it be said that it has been time the only cause for their different gazes? What about our own analysis? Has it also changed during the last years? I believe that time plays a key role, of course; however, maybe authors and readers’ prejudices are the ones to blame. On many occasions, mostly when we do not have enough experience or information of something –or we are deliberately misinformed about it-, we start from preconceived notions to reach preconcluded conclusions.
Before finishing this post, I invite you to look for and do everything possible to find and sit down in front of your TV or your PC to watch the great film ‘Private’ (Italy, 2004, 35mm, AM13, 90’), directed by Severino Costanzo. It was awarded in a number of Cinema Festivals and Costanzo won the ‘David di Donatello’ prize in 2005. You will be able to put yourself in the place of a Palestinian family whose house has been confiscated by Israeli army. You will have the opportunity to make yourself many questions and, probably, won’t be able to answer most of them, however, is worth the effort to be left with some doubts in order to keep on thinking about it.

Encyclopedias

2008-05-18T10:25:00.001-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

Encyclopedia: word derived from misspelling the original in Greek ‘enkyklios paideia’, which means ‘general education’. That name passed from Greek into Latin and from Latin into almost every European language, and became a synonym for ‘general knowledge’.
Encyclopedias were a solid ground where on libraries built their reference collections. Even nowadays, in a world were digital media become dominant day after day, they continue being the first step that anyone must take before carrying out a research on any subject. A good example of the importance that they presently have is the astounding development and diffusion attained by Wikepedia, where, under the leadership of a plural team of editors, an even bigger group of contributors provides a variety of information about the topics concerning their area of expertise.
A similar process happened, some centuries ago, while the most famous European encyclopedia was being elaborated by Diderot and d’Alambert. There are a good number of curiosities related to it. Allow me to share a bit of its history with you.
In 1728, Ephraim Chambers published in London his ‘Cyclopaedia’, subtitled ‘A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences’. It consisted of two thick volumes in folio, with almost 2500 pages, which became soon one of the first –and most celebrated- general encyclopedias in English language. It had a solid cross-reference system and the articles were ordered following one of the first subject headings classifications (which included 47 subjects). Based on previous works (such as the one carried out by John Harris in 1704), Chambers’s work stand out because of his seriousness and good judgment. In fact, it remained very popular for a long time and turned out to be the origin of the famous French ‘Encyclopédie’.
The ‘Encyclopédie’ or ‘Reasoned Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Crafts’ was published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later reviews and supplements (1772, 1777 and 1780), and numerous subsequent translations and derivative works. Originally, it intended to be a simple translation from Chamber’s into French. For that purpose, in 1743 the publisher André Le Breton asked John Mills to do the job. Mills was an Englishman settled in Paris, a modest writer who has produced a few texts on agriculture in his native country. In May, 1745 –two years later- Le Breton announced that the work was ready to be sold. His surprise and dismay were great when he discovered that Mills was not only unable to speak or write properly in French (many affirm that he was only just coming out with his first faltering words in that language), but he did not have a copy of the ‘Cyclopaedia’ either. As you may guess, the job had not even been begun.
Le Breton had been shamelessly swindled. He looked angrily for Mills and beat him up (some say that he used a cane, others that it was a stick) so badly that the ‘translator’ took the publisher to court for hitting him. The court, after studying this case, reached a decision and agreed that Le Breton had his reasons for acting like that. In their opinion, the aggression was justified by negligence on the part of Mills.
Mills was replaced by Jean Paul de Gua de Malves in 1745. Among those hired by Malves to carry out the huge work of translation were Étienne Bonnot de Codillac, Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot. In August, 1747, Malves was removed from his job due to his rigid working methods. Other version explains that Malves himself decided to abandon because he had grown tired of his employment. Then Le Breton hired Diderot and D’Alambert as new editors. From that moment onwards, the initial work of translation would turn into a complex work of writing.
Diderot would remain in his position over 25 years and was able to see the completion of his work. It consisted of 35 volumes, 71.818 articles and more than 3.000 illustrations. Many of the most celebrated figures during French Enlightment took part in the elaboration of those articles: Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu... Louis de Jaucourt was the author that contributed the highest number of writings: 17.266 articles. Eight every day, between 1759 and 1765...
Even Le Breton allowed himself to write an article for the ‘Encyclopédie’: the one related to black ink, ‘Encre noire’. He also had the ‘satisfaction’ of censoring a good number of texts to turn it less ‘radical’. This fact annoyed Diderot on many occasions. Le Breton especially cut out articles related to ‘Saracens or Arabs’ and ‘Pyrrhic Philosophy’... In all cases, there were political reasons for his policy of censorship.
The writings that make up the ‘Encyclopédie’ were revolutionary due to the confrontation between those lines and Catholic dogmas. In fact, the whole work was forbidden by a Royal Decree in 1759. Fortunately, thanks to the support given to it by influential characters –like famous Madame de Pompadour- the work went on ‘secretly’. In reality, civil authorities did not want to give up an economic activity that employed so many people. The ban was actually a sort of ‘front’ in order to silent the furious attacks from the Church.
The ‘Encyclopédie’ became a famous work considering both the ideas presented and their authors. However, other works done by single authors some centuries ago were much more relevant. Regrettably, many of them have vanished or disappeared into oblivion. Some examples might be the following:

- The medical encyclopedia written by Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, the father of modern surgery, in the year 1000, which consisted of 30 volumes.
- The first scientific encyclopedia ever known, ‘Kitab al-Shifa’, by Ibn Sina or Avicena, written between 1000 and 1030. It consisted of 9 volumes about Logic, 8 about Natural Science, 4 about Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry and Music, and the same number about Philosophy, Psychology and Metaphysics.
- The ‘Canon of Medicine’, an encyclopedia with 14 volumes also written by Avicena around 1030. This work was reference and model in many European and Muslim universities until XVII century. In it pages, experimental medicine and a good number of new infectious-contagious diseases were explained together with many other findings.
- The ‘Canon Masudicus’ by Abu al-Rayhan al-Bisudi (1031), an extended encyclopedia on Astronomy.
- The 43 volumes encyclopedia by Ibn al-Nafis (1242-1244) entitled ‘The Comprehensive Book on Medicine’, one of the greatest medical encyclopedias in history, though very few volumes have survived.

Sadly, the majority of the most important works of Islamic knowledge –whose information, understanding and skills were the basis for many ‘discoveries’ made in Europe centuries later- disappeared in Baghdad when the Mongol invasions took place; in Damascus with the Crusades; and in Al-Andalus during the Reconquest (of Spain from the Moors). Most of it was burnt and destroyed. Only the texts translated into Latin –during XII and XIII centuries- in culture and knowledge centers such as Toledo, Segovia, Catalonia, Sicilia or southern France, could be preserved and handled down to posterity.
Centuries later, there were many who thought they succeeded in discovering such and such and went down in the books of history and science as great figures when, in reality, those findings had been done hundreds of years ago. History matters...
Actually, Eurocentric history matters...’Euro-whatever’, would say Eduardo Galeano: that is the headline (‘Eurotodo’ in Spanish) chosen by the Uruguayan writer in page 103 of his last work, ‘Espejos’ (Mirrors):

‘Copernicus published, when he was dying, the book that laid the foundations of modern Astronomy.
Three centuries in advance, Arab scientists Muhayad al-Urdi and Nasir al-Tusi had elaborated theorems that were very important for carrying out his work. Copernicus used them but did not quote those sources.
Europe saw the world looking at itself in a mirror.
Further away, there was nothing.
The three inventions that made it possible for the Renaissance to take place -the compass, the gunpowder and the printing press- came from China. Babylonians had announced Pythagoras one thousand and five hundreds years in advance. Before anyone else, Hindus knew that the Earth was round and had even calculated its age. And better than anyone else, Mayans had known the stars, the eyes of the night and the mystery of time.
This trifling little things were not worthy of attention.’

Galeano also affirms in the same page of his book, under the title ‘Sur’ (South):

‘Arab maps still outlined the South at the top and the North at the bottom; however, in the XIII century, Europe had just established the natural order of the universe [upside down].’

The author tells us that the Imperial Library of Beijing had, in the XV century, 4000 books that gathered together the knowledge of the world. The king of Portugal had only six books at that time...
History matters. Memory matters. Fortunately, today’s virtual encyclopedias -such as the already mentioned Wikipedia- allow easy access to versions in Chinese, Arab, Russian, Greek and many other languages. Sadly enough, those of us who can only read Latin alphabet and know just a couple of European languages will never find out what happened and is happening on the other side of the mirror.
I go back to the beginning in order to finish this post. The word ‘encyclopedia’ derives from Greek and means ‘general education’. Maybe someday we will have a ‘generality’ that will bring together and take notice of everyone and everything. Perhaps, that day we can learn something new, diverse and of great value. Meanwhile, we will have to make it with the only hitherto known ‘generality’.

Book pages are like a friend’s shoulder

2008-05-11T10:32:00.001-03:00

By Sara Plaza

The other day, Edgardo and I were going through the shelves of our library and rediscovering aged volumes –most of them from second-hand bookshops- in the lowest ones when I came across an old English edition of “Anna Karenina”. Its covers were worm out and while I was turning carefully those thousand pages it came through them that smell of old paper that characterizes libraries and archives stores. There was a number of other “paper treasures” in those shelves but for any special reason my interest –a boat with many curious sailors- put in at that port with woman’s name. Without sitting up straight yet –I had lay down on the floor and was surrounded by low piles of books that we intended to organize together- I started to read those words by count Leon Tolstoy and I couldn’t stop until I got awful pins and needles in one of my legs. Then I urged myself to put all those books back in their place –if I remember rightly, at that moment Edgardo was as absorbed as me in his own discoveries- and, getting up off the floor, trying it slowly to awake my limb from its painful sleep, I walked to my chair with very little steps. This time, sitting down “properly” –I use to put my feet on the seat of my chair and rest my chin on my knees when I read- I keep on finding out more and more things about that Russian society from the late XIX century. At the beginning of chapter twenty nine in the first part of the book, I discovered some very fascinating lines that I couldn’t prevent myself from reading once and again and thought of sharing with you. They reminded me of many other readings, of many kilometers sitting on a bus with a book in my black traveling bag, of many times looking through their windows while playing with the pages marker in one hand and drawing the line of the horizon with the other, of many others closing my eyes to dream awake with the life of those characters that -without my being aware of their escape- have sat down on the traveler’s knees that was placed in the seat next to mine, and smiled broadly at me noticing my surprise after finding them out of the pages that I had left open. Those books and those sights through the bus windows have been –and still are- the best interlocutors to share an important part of my life. For years I have put my eyes, my hands and my thoughts on them, for they are like a friend’s shoulder: the place where one’s projects, complaints, annoyances and illusions can rest. The other day, Tolstoy took them back to my memory and Anna Karenina managed to revitalize them. I would like you to have a look at the following excerpt from the novel where I acknowledged many of my steps as reader. Who knows, you might find yours as well...

“Come, it’s all over, and thank God!” was the first thought that came to Anna Arkadyevna, when she had said good-bye for the last time to her brother, who had stood blocking up the entrance to the carriage till the third bell rang. She sat down on her lounge beside Annushka, and looked about her in the twilight of the sleeping-carriage. “Thank God! Tomorrow I shall see Seryozha and Alexey Alexandrovitch, and my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual.”
Still in the same anxious frame of mind, as she had been all that day, Anna took pleasure in arranging herself for the journey with great care. With her little deft hands she opened and shut her little red bag, took out a cushion, laid it on her knees, and carefully wrapping up her feet, settled herself comfortably. An invalid lady had already lain down to sleep. Two other ladies began talking to Anna, and a stout elderly lady tucked up her feet, and made observations about the heating of the train. Anna answered a few words, but not foreseeing any entertainment for the conversation, she asked Annushka to get a lamp, hooked it onto the arm of ther seat, and took from her bag a paper-knife and an English novel. At first her reading made no progress. The fuss and bustle were disturbing; then when the train had started, she could not help listening to the noises; then the snow beating on the left window and sticking to the pane, and the sight of the muffled guard passing by, covered with snow on one side, and the conversations about the terrible snowstorm raging outside, distracted her attention. Further on, it was continually the same again and again: the same shaking and rattling, the same snow on the window, the same rapid transitions from steaming heat to cold, and back again to heat, the same passing glimpses of the same figures in the twilight, and the same voices, and Anna began to read and to understand what she read. Annushka was already dozing, the red bag on her lap, clutched by her broad hands, in gloves, of which one was torn. Anna Arkadyevna read and understood; but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. It she read that the heroine of the novel were nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised every one by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper-knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read.
The hero of the novel was already almost reaching his English happiness, a baronetcy and a estate, and Anna was feeling a desire to go with him to the estate, when she suddenly felt that he ought to feel ashamed, and that she was ashamed of the same thing. But what had he to be ashamed of? “What have I to be ashamed of?” she asked herself in injured surprise. She laid down the book and sank against the back of the chair, tightly gripping the paper-cutter in both hands. There was nothing. She went all over her Moscow recollections. All were good, pleasant. She remembered the ball, remembered Vronsky and his face of slavish adoration, remembered all her conduct with him: there was nothing shameful. And for all that, at the same point in her memories, the feeling of shame was intensified, as though some inner voice, just at the point when she thought of Vronsky, were saying to her, “Warm, very warm, hot.” “Well, what is it?” she said to herself resolutely, shifting her seat in the lounge. “What does it mean? Am I afraid to look it straight in the face? Why, what is it? Cna it be that between me and this officer boy there exist, or can exist, any other relations than such as are common with every acquaintance?” She laughed contemptuously and took up her book again; but now she was definitely unable to follow what she read. She passed the paper-knife over the window-pane, then laid its smooth, cool surface to her cheek, and almost laughed aloud at the feeling of delight that all at once without cause came over her. She felt as though her nerves were strings being strained tighter and tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness. Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or were standing still altogether; whether it were Annushka at her side or a stranger. “What’s that on the arms of the chair? Myself or some other woman?” She was afraid of giving away to this delirium. But something drew her towards it, and she could yield to it or resist it at will. She got up to rouse herself, and slipped off her plaid and the cape of her warm dress. For a moment she regained her self-possession, and realized that the thin peasant who had come in wearing a long overcoat, with buttons missing from it, was the stove heater, that he was looking at the thermometer, that it was the wind and snow bursting in after him at the door; but then everything grew blurred again... That peasant with the long waist seemed to be gnawing something on the wall, the old lady began stretching her legs the whole length of the carriage, and filling it with a black cloud; then there was a fearful shrieking and banging, as though some one were being torn to pieces; then there was a blinding dazzle of red fire before her eyes and a wall seemed to rise up and hide everything. Anna felt as though she were sinking down. But it was not terrible, but delightful. The voice of a man muffled up and covered with snow shouted something in her ear. She got up and pulled herself together; she realized that they had reached a station and that this was the guard. She asked Annushka to hand her cape she had taken off and her shawl, put them on and moved towards the door.
“Do you wish to get out?” asked Annushka.
“Yes, I want a little air. It’s very hot in here.” And she opened the door. The driving snow and the wind rushed to meet her and struggled with her over the door. But she enjoyed the struggle.
She opened the door and went out. The wind seemed as though lying in wait for her; with gleeful whistle it tried to snatch her up and bear her off, but she clung to the cold doorpost, and holding her skirt got down onto the platform and under the shelter of the carriages. The wind had been powerful on the steps, but on the platform, under the lee of the carriages, there was lull. With enjoyment she drew deep breaths of the frozen, snowy air, and standing near the carriage looked about the platform and the lighted station.

Freedom of knowledge

2008-05-04T10:59:00.001-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

When humankind had memories and became aware of the need for them to pass those recollections from one person to another in order to keep them alive, knowledge began to be transferred from hand to hand and from mouth to mouth.
At that time knowledge was free. It was the basis of development in any society. It was the sort of information that allowed them to best grow plants, to hunt animals, to heal illnesses and wounds, to build a house or a temple, to understand world order and to remember divinities’ mysterious ways.
Human imagination burst into thousand artistic expressions: from music and songs to dances and tales, and from paintings made of sand and sculptures made of bones to stone carvings and baskets made of wicker.
This knowledge was huge and, due to the sheer impossibility of being remembered by one only person, its custody and survival went on to depend upon particular groups. That way, artists lived, transmitted and perpetuated their skills, farmers passed on theirs and craftsmen did exactly the same with their abilities.
Many scratched a living doing what they know and made enough money to live on, but with difficulty. A great deal of the knowledge available, however, continued being common property, vital to support group development.
Unfortunately, little by little, things started to change. Information became power and was stored up by dominant classes. Calendar control –which caused crops to succeed- and the knowledge of healthy substances remained in the hands of the few elected, who had to pass difficult tests to show how good they were for such purpose. Something similar happened with writing skills, and so forth. What at the beginning had been a common asset within a horizontal society became a consumer item in a vertical structure. In fact, it might well have been one of the pillars of such pyramidal society.
At present, we continue witnessing continuous buying and selling of strategic knowledge. We are so familiar with it –practical experience during the last twenty or thirty centuries has made us used to living with it- that, sometimes, we are not conscious of the damage caused by such practice. Our doctors, architects, engineers, biologists and the like, must buy the most advanced knowledge –handled by publishers that make huge profits from their activities- in order to become good professionals. Those unable to access such information –without the money that is needed to pay for their training- face an incomplete and impoverished education lacking in the most recent information on the subject. As information professionals, we also take part in those movements: buying a particular database in order to provide information to our users, we agree to this unfair system and, somehow, allow it to go on as it is. It seems as if there were not other possibilities for our libraries to continue working. However, there are a few ones. Open Access archives are a good example.
Current discussion on the subject is focused on authors’ property rights. Very few know that those authors hardly make any profit from the money we spend to buy the knowledge they produced. Most part of it remains in the hands of intermediaries, people who neither wrote, nor did any search, made any effort or studied, but who came to know, on the one hand, how to take advantage of the professionals’ need to publish and share knowledge, and, on the other, how to exploit the need to read and learn of the rest.
Authors’ property rights are mentioned a lot when talking about music, literature and software programs, especially in a modern framework where such cultural property can be downloaded free of charge from the Internet.
Great companies get angry and remind potential buyers of the damage caused to artists, writers, musicians, etc. by “piracy”... However, it is curious to know that those artists –with the exception of the handful of acclaimed ones who have signed “juicy” contracts- hardly make any profit at all. Therefore, we are in a situation that should be known and acknowledged by everybody. It has nothing to do with whatever multinational corporations and their messengers have to say: it refers to knowing what is really happening. Why strategic knowledge is sold when a great part of the world population can’t manage to buy it but need it even more than the part that can afford it...? Why do artists “starve to death” while their production companies get bigger and bigger and their products cost more and more...? Where does the money that we invest in strategic knowledge and artistic and cultural property, go to? Does it end up in the hands of those who produce it? Do they make any profit? Are we feeding those members of our society who have decided and chosen to perpetuate our knowledge? Or, on the contrary, are we feeding “lazybones” who, taking advantage of market forces and copyright laws, have been deceiving us for years and continue swelling up at our expense?
On many occasions, from these same pages, we have encouraged the publication of scholar knowledge in Open Access archives, and we have also provided relevant information on the way to do so. Likewise, we have diffused many documents and resources closely connected with the subject. We have gone even further and, according with our way of thinking, we have placed our complete work in open and free access archives, as Open Access documents or blogs. Now, we would like to join in advertising the Spanish version of the English original “Dossier Copy/South”, elaborated by an international and multidisciplinary group of research. This document considers, from different points of view, the problem of copyright, especially in contexts of the so-called, wrongly, “third world”. It analyzes and goes through the iron laws regarding authors’ property, the many interests hidden behind them, the knowledge producers’ point of view, hypocrisy that can be found in many of the calls for “piracy” end...
From these pages, we celebrate the publishing of such documents. We acknowledge the right of our modern “culture perpetuators” to make a living from what they do best –for this has been their choice and we need them for the healthy growth of our society-, but also know that, at present, there are less people earning their living as artists or scientists. Maybe this is the time to identify exploiters and find out alternatives that allow us to get rid of their bad influence and their “invisible” clutches.

Poems in Prose

2008-04-27T10:39:00.001-03:00

By Sara Plaza

Under this title some writings by Oscar Wilde were published in ‘The Fortnightly Review’ in July, 1894. I have come across them in a collection of his short stories called ‘Oscar Wilde, Complete Short Fiction’, edited by Penguin Classics with an introduction and notes by Ian Small. Among those texts that make up ‘Poems in Prose’ –that can be seen either as poems or prose-narratives-, the one titled ‘The Artist’ might be an ideal setting for the loud racket caused by the May 1968’s 40th anniversary celebrations during the following days. I took notice of this noise a week ago reading the pages of ‘Babelia’, EL PAÍS literary supplement that appears with the newspaper on Saturdays. But let’s start at the beginning. I would like to introduce you to Wilde’s words first:

The Artist

One evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image of The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment. And he went forth into the world to look for bronze. For he could only think in bronze.
But all the bronze of the whole word had disappeared, nor anywhere in the whole word was there any bronze to be found, save only the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that endureth for Ever.
Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands, fashioned, and had set it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved in life. On the tomb of the dead thing he had most loved had he set this image of his won fashioning, that it might serve as a sign of the love of man that dieth not, and a symbol of the sorrow of man that endureth for ever. And in the whole world there was no other bronze save the bronze of this image.
And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great furnace, and gave it to the fire.
And out of the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that endureth for Ever he fashioned an image of The Pleasure that abiteth for a Moment.

I have read once and again the story and still cannot decide whether his first work ended up being enveloped in flames for there wasn’t really any bronze left in the whole world or for the artist have run out of love and sorrow successively. May 1968 was also a work of great artistic merit and, as it seems, there is no material left in today’s world as the one used by its authors four decades ago. It is even possible that some of them have also run out of the revolutionary feeling they were inspired by. However, it won’t be crazy to think that maybe inspiration is connected with the First Law of Thermodynamics, the one explaining that nothing is lost for everything changes into something else. If that is the case, it might happen that the material used for the so called French May is still part of the poetry and prose written about it 40 years later. You may judge for yourself having a look at the opinions conglomerate that, with a great deal of lyric, ‘Babelia’ presented on Saturday 20th April. I believe that there was a lot of metaphorical sense in the headlines of some articles; have a look at the following verses by Fernando Savater: ‘The Walls Eloquence’ and Juan Goytisolo: ‘Instant [photograph] in sepia tones of an extraordinary month’. And pay attention to the brief outlines of possible stanzas sketched in some sentences as the one written by Catherine François y Santiago Auserón: ‘The Youth did not want an assured future but a fascinating present’, or the one they mentioned that was written in 1984 by Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari: ‘No matter how old the event was, it does not agree to be left behind, for it means the opening-up to what is possible’.
However, what most excited me while I was getting further with my reading appeared when I was trying to make up my mind whether the rhyme of that literary supplement was consonant or assonant. At that very moment, Josep Ramoneda and Antonio Muñoz Molina added another possibility that I had not previously considered: dissonant. The former went back over the events topicality, but through different lens: ‘It has not been easy to understand that time passes for everybody and modernity patent does not belong to anybody’. And the latter almost turned his back on the issue: ‘To be honest, so much May 1968 celebration causes me a sheer boredom. I already know everything: the part of the story about the imagination coming to power, about being realistic and ask for what is not possible, about the paving stones and the sand on the beach, etcetera. Other contemporary events are matter of much more importance to me, thought they inspired much less literature’. On his part, Octavi Martí, in his article ‘The echoes of the revolt’ went over the thoughts murmured aloud by another group of voices that also disagree with each other on the importance of that student movement and whether it change the world –for better or for worse- or didn’t change anything. Among those voices there was the present President of France during the last election campaign, who, as Martí mentioned: ‘only missed the opportunity to award retrospective influence to May 1968, and blame it for Nazism, slave trade or the Babel Tower collapse’.
Despite the fact that during the last four decades rivers of ink have been expended on this topic, flood warnings have been issued by publishers after announcing the new books that will come out these days. Good news on the other hand, if we consider that there is no harm in checking our opinion under the current circumstances. It won’t be strange to discover a good number of trite phrases and some commonplaces, to find out that we don’t know everything about the subject yet, though we can recite some mottos from memory. Needless to say that, sometimes, new readings don’t serve us well in undoing old clichés, on the contrary, they may help to perpetuate them. So we will have to make an effort to unwrap those ideas that have been used so often, which no longer have much meaning, and argue their point. Nonconformity is always healthy in small doses.

I’ve said, sometimes, that we were better children –as far as we knew how to face our parents- than parents –as far as we didn’t know how to face our children-. With our attitude –and integration power of contradictions inside capitalism- we have left them no place for transgression [1].

[1] Excerpt from the article ‘Contestación mundial’ (World Contestation) by Josep Ramoneda. El PAÍS, Saturday, 20th April, 2008.

The Devil’s Dictionary

2008-04-20T10:34:00.002-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

I came across a few quotations from ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ by Ambrose Bierce while I was going through the French Dokupedia website, where I had collaborated some time ago…
Ambrose Bierce was a curious guy endowed with a black humor, cynical and caustic, which helped him to reach a good position in North American literature. He was born in 1842 in a small village of Ohio (EE.UU.). Ambrose was the tenth out of thirteen brothers, who all were baptized names beginning with letter ‘A’. When the American Civil War broke out, Bierce joined the Union army as topographer. He fought in a number of battles, which left him some injuries and deep impressions that marked him and his writing forever.
Ambrose got married in 1871 and had tree children. Two of them would die before their parents in terrible circumstances and in 1880 his marriage was broken when he discovered some compromising letters that a secret admirer had sent to his wife, who died sort afterwards. Bierce’s character was shaped by all these experiences.
His lifetime was spent mainly in San Francisco (though he also lived in London for health reasons), where he developed an intense and fruitful literary activity for The San Francisco Newsletter, The Argonaut, Overland Monthly, The Wasp and San Francisco Examiner journals.
Ambrose wrote assays and news articles –which allowed him to win instant fame-, poetry and short stories, most of them regarding war experiences. Nevertheless, his most famous work is ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’. The entries of this peculiar dictionary were published in different journals during a long period of time (1875-1906), and were only compiled in one only volume in 1906 under the title of ‘Cynic’s Word Book’. In those definitions, Bierce displayed the unique style that would to immortalize him.
In October, 1913, when he was in his seventies, the author set off for Mexico, a country on the brink of a revolution. Bierce joined Pancho Villa’s forces as observer and disappeared without trace between 1913 and 1914. This is the most famous literary disappearance in North America. In his last letter, addressed to one niece of his, the writer uncovers part of the mystery, showing –one more time- his profound cynicism:

"Good-bye — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!".

The sardonic look towards human nature that marked his work, together with his vehemence and his incisive criticism, won him the nickname of “Bitter Bierce”. At present, their critics remark the use of very pure English in his writings and an excellent wording through which he explained, in one only short phrase, complex groups of ideas (sometimes opposing each by means of the double meaning employed).
In 1911 the Dictionary was published under the present title ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’, as part of Bierce’s complete works. In 1967 a new extended version was compiled and a good number of entries –missing in the previous editions- were added. Finally, in 2000, it came to light a reviewed edition, which added some entries and removed over 200 meanings wrongly attributed to Bierce.
Some examples taken from ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ will allow you to become aware of Ambrose’s sharpness, irony and use of double meaning. Pay attention, for instance, to the following harsh definitions, which, regretfully, take in real feelings of the early century (some of them might even be easily extended up to day):

ABORIGINES, n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.

AFRICAN, n. A nigger that votes our way.

INFIDEL, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

IMMIGRANT, n. An unenlightened person who thinks one country better than another.

AIR, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor.

DISTANCE, n. The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep.

Bierce examined the human nature in a clever new way with his unlimited inventiveness...

ACCUSE, v.t. To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a justification of ourselves for having wronged him.

ADHERENT, n. A follower who has not yet obtained all that he expects to get.

FRIENDSHIP, n. A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.

JEALOUS, adj. Unduly concerned about the preservation of that which can be lost only if not worth keeping.

MEEKNESS, n. Uncommon patience in planning a revenge that is worth while.

IDIOT, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.

Now, a couple of definitions that might well have been applied to himself:

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual.

About definitions themselves and dictionaries, Bierce had a very particular opinion:

DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.

MAGNET, n. Something acted upon by magnetism.
MAGNETISM, n. Something acting upon a magnet. The two definitions immediately foregoing are condensed from the works of one thousand eminent scientists, who have illuminated the subject with a great white light, to the inexpressible advancement of human knowledge.

He also had a very definite point of view about writers and writing:

GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling.

SERIAL, n. A literary work, usually a story that is not true, creeping through several issues of a newspaper or magazine. Frequently appended to each installment is a "synopsis of preceding chapters" for those who have not read them, but a direr need is a synopsis of succeeding chapters for those who do not intend to read them. A synopsis of the entire work would be still better.

Human customs did not escape him either:

CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

MAMMALIA, n.pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to nurse, or use the bottle.

BEGGAR, n. One who has relied on the assistance of his friends.

PITIFUL, adj. The state of an enemy or opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.

Although mainly focused on “human weakness”, he also included in his dictionary entries of very different taste. For example, politics:

AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

BATTLE, n. A method of untying with the teeth of a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.

CANNON, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

A few more examples might be:

CERBERUS, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance -- against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance.

CIRCUS, n. A place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.

FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

Anyway... This is just a sample of a great work that should not be left out of our own library. For those interested in the complete reading of this text –and who may have good access to Internet and the chance to read it from the computer-, the original book mat be downloaded from the Gutemberg Project website.
Allow me to say good bye to you with one more definition, and a doubt that won’t be able to uncover: What had Bierce written, in his very peculiar style, had he lived at the present moment?

LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

[‘Society’ knows] ‘The price of everything and the value of nothing’

2008-04-13T10:30:00.004-03:00

By Sara Plaza

The society with capital ‘S’ that Oscar Wilde portrayed in late XIX century was London Victorian aristocracy: a group that was parodied in many works of the Irish writer, who highlighted the impotence of good in reaching a happy end inside its shallowness walls; ‘shallowness’ that, more than a century later, still remains in many other ‘upper-class’ examples worldwide; ‘upper’ attending not to their moral stature but to their astronomical bank accounts and high levels of corruption and hypocrisy.
This society, which in order to listen to themselves needs to silence dissonant voices, has almost nothing to say and very much to be ashamed of. This society, which knows the price of everything, has taken it upon them to make a vast majority of people believe that they are worth nothing. This society, which goes on living and believing their lies, encourages the rest to have faith in the truth. This society, which scorns memory, is the one that teaches us History. This society, which despises the life of many, pays a company that ‘assures’ theirs. This society, which does not cook for itself but is a lover of good food, is deforesting huge areas, poisoning the rivers and fatally wounding the land. This society, which lavishes miserable handouts on the poor, appropriates what is not theirs and keeps to itself what belongs to all.
Many have been against this society, which has room for very few, but the deafening sound of millions of bare feet, millions of chapped hands, millions of hungry mouths, millions of subdued eyes, millions of exiled dreams have not been able to pull down its walls or to shake its foundations yet. At the very bottom, these foundations might not be as strong as in the past but its structure keeps on being an example of architectural efficiency. I believe that its vitality has much to do with the growing sense of disenchantment experienced by the ones who saw how many of their projects faded away through their life and by those who do not know where to sow the seeds of theirs.
Two weeks ago, while Edgardo and I were visiting my family in Spain, the librarian that always goes with him put in my hands one of the volumes in which my parents had bound all the “Bustarviejo” magazines that the cultural association “El Bustar” published during tree decades in my village. Edgardo showed me the number 35-1 of February 1980. Inside there was an interview with my grandparents (my mum’s parents) written by the priest of my village at that time. I did not remember to have read it when I was seven years old and it was a great discovery at the age of thirty-five. Its title is ‘Mariano y Jesusa. El sufrimiento de los pobres’ (Mariano and Jesusa. The poor’s suffering) and begins with my grandmother’s words: ‘I have said it to my daughter already, the only thing that I can share with Antonio [the priest] are sorrows, nothing else but sorrows. So, when he come the only thing that I will tell him will be sorrows’. The final words were said by my grandfather after being asked why the youth had abandoned the land: ‘The land is ignored and treated as unimportant. The work is very hard, always looking up at the sky, dependent on the rain and the weather. You don’t get any vacation, any leave, or any extra payment. The land offers very few rewards to you. So, the youth has abandoned the land when they have had the opportunity of doing something different. They have left rural areas out of obligation and maybe considering that authorities do not reward it. The peasant has to live at the same level as the others do. The sharecropper and the poor have had to abandon the land for it has only been a matter of concern to them. The only ones who always get something are the great landowning families. The nation will not benefit from people leaving the countryside. The Government, concerning this matter, has not been right: has left the peasant aside. I believe that there are many trade unions and many other things that might be reduced and more attention should be paid to agriculture and cattle raising’. Immediately afterwards, the interviewer drew the reader’s attention to the number of complaints printed in Mariano’s words and I could not avoid smiling timidly. Of course there are complaints in their words, and I was surprised to find them in an interview where my grandparents remembered the sum of their defeats through their life. I was also surprised by the good sense of humor that they showed in their answers a couple of times despite their general touch of bitterness, and it hurt me to notice the harsh words that my grandfather used to talk about that sense of disenchantment I referred to in a previous paragraph. I knew that he had chosen to fight at the Republicans side during our Civil War and that he was in a concentration camp in France afterwards. I also knew that he never wanted to talk about it and that he was so insistent on asking his three sons and his one only daughter not to go into politics. His answer respecting this matter was very demonstrative: ‘I wash my hands, I packed it in. Since I was in France I quitted politics’.
No doubt a war, poverty, unemployment, the fact of being forced to abandon the place where one has lived because you are sentenced to death or to die of hunger, are sufficient grounds for the feeling of disenchantment, disillusion and disappointment. However, the heirs of those who suffered them should not forget that they are the nutrients that, on the one hand, enforce the shallowness in which the minority ‘upper-classes’ worldwide are enveloped and, on the other, revitalize the injustice that surrounds the large number of ‘low-classes’. They are key elements to allow the former to keep on putting a price on everything and to prevent the latter from recognizing their own value. For this reason, despite the fact that there are sufficient grounds for disinterest -and lost of hope and enthusiasm-, we should always find others for denouncing the origin and the cause of it. I am of the opinion that the seed of our projects will germinate in the lands we reclaim from our disappointment. On the contrary, the lands we keep on fertilizing with our disenchantment will only increase the impotence of good in reaching a happy end on either side of the walls that separate society with capital ‘S’ from the rest.
Some years ago, one of my teachers introduced me to Wilde’s works and only a couple of weeks ago the one to blame for this blog put in her accomplice’s hands a volume where I could read a short account of my grandparents’ life. I would like to say thank you to the teacher and to the librarian for the pages they set in front of me, and to their respective authors for writing and pronouncing the words that are printed in them.

Note: The title of this post belongs to words of Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s fan by Oscar Wilde.

Worse than being blind is not to want to see

2008-03-05T09:12:00.004-02:00

By Sara Plaza

Probably you will become aware of it in the following lines, but I want to advise you anyway: I am a bit angry while I am writing them.
Today is one of those lazy Sunday mornings in which the world awakes later than me, for I get up very early every day of the week. There are still a few puddles in the street and on a number of flat roofs that we can see from our balcony, which seem silent remains of the summer storm that made the sky shudder last night in this part of the world that lies to south of the South and always looks at the North. For those who walk in this area still do it following the routes that were traced out by the conquerors that went back home with all that were able to steal from these parts. In this sense, we will never have the potholes of route number 40 repaired (the route that goes through La Patagonia, whose potholes were cleverly sidestepped by that traveling salesman who picked up my backpack and me in Esquel [1], when I took the four volumes of “La Patagonia rebelde” [2] in my hands and decided, three years ago, to follow the footprints of those men who, at the beginning of the last century, rose up to defend their employments against Lieutenant Colonel H. Benigno Varela troops) but we will soon be able to get on a high speed train between Buenos Aires and Córdoba, something like a modern Camino Real (highway) that, who knows, might have a stop in Potosí in the near future.
This great sense of indignation that I feel today is related with the one felt a couple of months ago while reading an article written by Norman Gall, where, in two lines, he explained “[t]he improvement in transports allows poor people to travel long distances to emigrate, to pay someone a visit or to do business” [3]. Sometimes I ask myself what it is that analysts analyze and which is the basis that allows them to reach their conclusions, for I do not know how they can be so distant from ordinary people’s opinions and reality. I ask myself whether those professionals will not be inventing a reality that suits their numbers and percentages, whether they will not have much more imagination than the ones labeled as utopians or/and dreamers. One cannot avoid continue asking him/herself similar questions when s/he finds “little dialectical jewels” such as the words written by Spanish Foreign Affairs and Cooperation minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, who, after finishing a tour around Africa, stated one month ago:

No doubt, Africa is a continent full of problems, but above all it is a continent that is alive. Every day its inhabitants have to pass a thousand and one tests to survive. Most of them do it with a big and sincere smile, which reflects in those hairs in ringlets, in those magnetized eyes and in those elegant bodies that unleash their rhythm when the music begins. That movement spreads into the whole continent: a continent that wishes to come across happiness. Everything is conditioned to this search. That inner strength explains the high level of sacrifice and suffering in most of the citizens. [4]

After reading those lines I keep on asking myself whether Foreign Affairs ministers visiting the interior of a continent will not have to wear a certain type of glasses through which they perceive a reality that has nothing to do with the reality in which its people really and truly live. I ask myself how they come to know whether or not those smile that they see through the windows of their armor-plated cars are sincere, how they can state in such an irresponsible way that millions of hungry and sick people surrounded by poverty and never ending wars, start dancing as soon as music begins. I ask myself how they can conclude that sacrifice and suffering are the driving force that will help people to find happiness...
Luckily, that very same day, I came across Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina’s opinion about the film “Four months, three weeks, two days”, which, in my view, was much more true-to-life than those comments made by the two “authoritative” sources that I have just mentioned above:

... I went in depth into my perception of those two women swept away by misfortune and fear, saved by a sort of fraternity made of innocence and courage, made of a rare women’s alloy of fragility and fortitude. I went with them through the sordid night of a tyranny, and neither was it necessary to see uniforms nor to listen to political declarations in order to feel the cold of the despotic surveillance in the back of your neck and, on your shoulders, the entire grief and sorrow of a regime, which greatest cruelty seems to be its desolate duration. There are lives that are fulminated by the surgical brutality of executors: others, the majority, continue degrading through the years by diary dose of submission and conformity, deteriorating as buildings badly erected and old cars that are still in use, wearing out and getting dirty as painted paper on the walls of rooms that nobody cares for. [5]

I cannot stop asking myself and trying to find a few answers, to seek them at least, while I keep on moving forward on a bus, sailing through the pages of a book or a diary, talking with people around me, writing to those who are far away... So I get angry when I discover answers that are completely unsatisfactory as the ones provided by Mr. Gall or Mr. Moratinos. I am not talking about true or false answers, I speak of the sort of answers that allow me to keep on investigating, making inquiries, learning, criticizing. Regretfully, the explanations offered by those men are so superficial that nobody can take them seriously. Nothing can be built from them, much less valid reasons or valuable knowledge. What worries me the most is the fact that their answers become the basis for new cooperation and development projects. For on grounds so weak I cannot see how the children of people living in countries and continents with deep wounds as those still bleeding in Latin America, Africa or Rumania will be able to build their present and think about their future.

[1] It is an important city placed at the foot of the Alps in the Argentinean province of Chubut.
[2] This impressive work was written by Argentinean writer and lecturer Osvaldo Bayer.
[3] Norman Gall is managing director at the World Economy Fernand Braudel Institute of Sao Paulo. His words belong to the article “El olvidado progreso de América Latina” (The forgotten progress of Latin America), published in the international edition of EL PAÍS, Saturday 19th of January, 2008.
[4] From the article “Una mirada a África” (One look at Africa), published in the international edition of EL PAÍS, Saturday 9th of February, 2008.
[5] From the article “Regreso al cine” (Back to the cinema), published in the international edition of EL PAÍS, Saturday 9th of February, 2008.

Shepherds tracks

2008-03-05T09:12:00.003-02:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

March has found us spending a few weeks in a small village in the so-called “poor mountains” of Madrid, which belonged to the province of Segovia in the past. Its name is Bustarviejo. Although “modernity” keeps on moving forward, the place still preserves part of the peace and tranquility of some towns in the Castilian provinces.
Here, in Bustarviejo, where I am writing today, it is possible to walk along the Cañada Real, one of the old cattle tracks that cross the Iberian peninsula, a cobbled paving built by the Romans that have witnessed the practice of moving animals to winter/summer pastures (transhumance) year after year. In the past –and even nowadays, in an effort to revitalize the shade of the old days- flocks of sheep (one of the main sources of income in this region, Old Castile) had to move northward/southward looking for pastures throughout the year. Long lines of animals moving slowly were driven along the “cañadas” from the Middle Age. Those tracks kept the cattle away from the sown fields and allowed the Crown to collect the ubiquitous taxes.
Transhumant shepherds’ life was connected with a particular culture with very peculiar elements: musical instruments, which hardly survive nowadays in the hands of a number of elders with good memories and some young that want to recover those wonderful memories; types of food relating to different kind of cheese, bread, seasonal fruit and cold meats; songs and tales; traditional customs and habits belonging to their nomadic style of life; and a series of techniques, activities, sayings and proverbs...
This very same culture –except for the distances and logical differences that separate one from each other- can be found around the people leading llamas across Bolivian highlands, carrying potatoes from the high Andean plateau to the salad lakes southward to exchange them for blocks of salt and then take the latter to the warm valleys eastward and once there give them and get coca leaves, vegetables, fruit and cheese instead. This culture includes old rites of passage and ceremonies performed for travelers and animals’ protection; it also includes, as said above, unique musical instruments, sayings, rituals, customs...
And you may also discover similar traits around Sub-Saharan Africa camel-drivers; around yaks train drivers crossing the Himalayas between India and Nepal or Pakistan; around Saami people (Laplanders) taking their reindeers through Scandinavia; and around Masai people tending their precious cattle across western Africa...
These patrons and features make up an immense human mosaic in which we are all included. Some of them are expressed in many of the documents that we store up on the shelves of our libraries. However, this is only a tiny part, the knowledge that has been written. Most part of this culture keeps on showing its face and leaving its marks on the surface of our planet. It continues living, changing, evolving and, sometimes, disappearing. It is important that we do not forget all the knowledge that remains far from our hands: many things keep on beating out of the walls of our libraries, far from their catalogues, databases and the Internet. This knowledge also deserves our attention for it is the remains of an age where women and men still knew and recognized the rhythms of Nature.
As I told you before, a huge part of this traditional culture is alive in many corners of our world. Here, in Bustarviejo, there are still memories of the immense clouds of dust caused by the sheep movement to different fields in different seasons.

Hand tool reflections

2008-03-05T09:11:00.001-02:00

By Jan Stürmann
From The Hand-Sculpted House by Ianto Evans, Michael G. Smith, and Linda Smiley

The unquestioned creed of modern carpentry proclaims that without the extensive use of power tools we cannot build efficiently, profitably, or well. I question that creed.
I build both conventional homes where the first thing on the site is power and natural homes where power is often added as an afterthought. Working on these natural homes has confronted me with my own prejudices and the pleasures of using body-powered tools.
I get a sense of profound satisfaction from hand tools that I never find with power tools. Entering the tool shed, my hands automatically reach for my favorite chisel, the ax, the hatchet. A need just to touch, caress. I heft the three-inch-wide slick. Found rusting in an old barn, the blade chipped, the handle socket all mushroomed where some idiot whacked it with a hammer. I carried it home like a sick animal, ground the burrs, buffed off the rust, carved the handle from a piece of maple, and sharpened the edge. The slick came alive for me, sings in my hands, shaving off thick wood curls. I love to look at it, hold it. I never feel that with a power tool. My hand never reaches out just to touch those dead weights of plastic and metal on the shelf.
Why when I use the circular saw or the drill or the chain saw for any length of time do I feel like a bionic man, hard, rigid, at war, forced to wear goggles, ear muffs, respirators to protect my fragile body? While after a day of using the bit and brace, chisels, a plane, my body soft, my mind still, like that listen-to-the-Universe silence after making love? One depletes, the other nourishes. A mystery.
Yet the power seduces. The brute weight of a chain saw in your hands. The engine screams, bittersweet two-stroke smoke swirls through the nasal cavity up into the brain. Trees drop like pins. What a surge, a high we lack the responsibility to handle.
Power tools give us power that is not ours. It is lent indiscriminately. But somewhere down the line it demands payback –with interest. Inevitably we end up paying more for nonhuman power than we gain. Gradually I am realizing that this is true, not just abstractly or instinctively, but practically.
While writing this I got a job installing cabinets in a large L.A. home. Complex scribes, custom-fitting each piece –a headache, but a chance to explore the practicalities of using hand tools when convention dictates power tools. Each morning, to appease the contractor, I uncoiled the extension cords, but then I played and experimented.
Building with wood is predominantly a process of cutting pieces of material to length and attaching them in place. All things being equal I am quicker with a power saw and nail gun than with a handsaw and a hammer. But I found that all things are not equal. It takes me a minute to buckle on my tool belt, which holds my hammer and saw. It takes twenty minutes to unravel the extension cords, wrestle with the table saw and miter saw, drag out the compressor, attach the hoses, and get electricity flowing to where I want it.
It takes me half minute to cut a 1 x 4 with a Japanese kataba handsaw, ten seconds with a power saw. But if I want to still listen to Beethoven and read the Funny Times when I’m eighty, I need to put on goggles and ear protectors before I click that switch, so add a few seconds. The handsaw’s whisper requires no protection.
A handsaw makes coarse dust that quickly settles to the floor, but power saws throw up a dust so fine it hangs suspended in the air until we breathe it in, blocking sinuses, causing allergies and asthma. In a profession that uses more and more toxic glues and chemicals in laminates and particleboard, we would do well to keep airborne dust to a minimum if we still want to breathe deep and smell the roses in our golden years.
The handsaw weights half a pound, the power saw ten. I used as much effort –calories- to lift and maneuver the heavy power saw into place as I did positioning and making the cut with the kataba. And even if I did have to take a little more air into my lungs, the pleasure of using a saw that has evolved over seven hundred years more than makes up for the extra time and effort.
I have several interchangeable saw blades that clip into the rattan-covered wooden saw handle: a rip blade, three cross-cut blades with teeth fine enough for dovetails and coarse enough to cut 12-inch logs, a curved blade for starting a cut in the middle of a board, a narrow keyhole blade to cut curves, and a metal-cutting blade. All these blades and one handle I wrap up in a canvas pouch. The total cost, maybe $120. I once thought to be a real carpenter I had to spend thousands on power saws. Now no more.
So I take the board I cut and go nail it into the place. Actual nailing with a nail gun takes a second. Using a hammer takes me five. But a hammer always hangs from my tool belt. It’s an easy split-second motion to grasp the handle in my palm, the head swinging. The nail gun I’ve got to lift and drag around like a dead albatross. The hose is too short, the compressor needs moving. With all that hauling around, and donning the ear protectors again, I get pretty close to making up the four seconds lost in actual nailing. Besides, I enjoy the practice of swinging a hammer with grace. Any dimwit can pull a trigger.
Consider economics again. My hammer, a Hart Decker, cost $25 seven years ago. Hasn’t broken down once. A compressor and a nail gun will cost $500. You work out the cost of repairs and downtime over seven years. Nails for the machine cost five times what ordinary nails cost. But what the hell, the homeowner pays (borrowed from the bank, so multiply the price if you include percent interest on a 30-year mortgage).
I can go on unearthing hidden costs. Injuries, for instance. I’ve never heard of anyone cutting off a finger with a handsaw, but thanks to power blades spun with incredible forces by impartial engines, there are plenty of fingerless and toeless carpenters. As for a little job-site acupuncture with a nail gun, or punctured eyeballs, or deaf ears... but hey, that’s what worker’s comp is for. This is not to say that injuries never happen with hand tools, but the severity and frequency are far less.
I focus here on economics and speed because I’m part of a culture that values productivity over process, getting it done over just doing it, completion over creation. But to get to the heart of this questioning I need to look deeper at the unquantifiable.
Carpenters were once craftsmen who knew how to make, adapt, and tune their tools to reflect their individual needs and quirks. Carpenters are now machine operators, factory workers without the factory, assembling modular units. The pride in craft is lost. No longer do we use tools of individual character, but mass-produced tools designed and marketed to the lowest common denominator. Tools that are inadaptable and too complex to repair oneself. The life cycle of a power tool is but a few years, with the years diminishing due to built-in obsolescence. My unborn children or grandchildren will not inherit my circular saw, drill, and orbital sander. But my draw knife, block plane, froe, chisel, brace –already a generation or two old- my offspring will have the pleasure of using.
No doubt about it, power tools make some work easier. Ripping a half inch off a 4 x 4 with a table saw takes a lot of less time than doing it by hand. But I noticed a strange difference in my body on days where I predominantly used hand tools compared with days spent directing power tools. I can work far longer with focus, joy, and grace using hand tools: at the end of a nine- or ten-hour day I may be tired but never drained, while after five or six hours in front a machine I am exhausted; although I spent fewer of my own calories, the juice of vitality has been sucked from me.
Why? The power these tools have to do me harm depletes me. My body –afraid, tense- on full alert turns subtle flexibility into rigid, tense muscles. Reflexes slow, the mind falters, mistakes happen, blood flows. With tense bodies, the chances of strains and wrenched backs are far greater than with a body that all day is being given a gentle aerobic and stretching workout by using hand tools. Maybe that’s where the extra vitality comes from. When my cells are regularly flooded with fresh blood-carrying oxygen and nutrients, my body responds with more life to give.
Then there is decibel fatigue from the loud screeching noise that permeates every building site. More and more, this is the predominant reason I choose hand tools over machines. Our ears, attuned to lover’s sighs, falling rain, friend’s laughter, wind whispers, are not adapted to cope with frequent loud noises. We withdraw into a shell of numbness, deaf to the world. I want to work in an environment where my timid senses emerge in the silence to partake of creation, where the flow of conversation or thought remains free to meander, explore, and fall again to silence, not censored, interrupted, broken by machines.
Much of the bad rap hand tools have gotten is justified. Without the stern vigilance of craftsmen demanding only the best, the modern tool manufacturer sells a quality of hand tool that is shameful. It is no surprise that the tool buyer turns away in disgust and resorts to electrical force to get the job done. It is a rare store, staffed by knowledgeable sales people, that stocks a wide selection of quality hand tools. But what can compare to the serendipitous pleasure of finding a quality tool at a garage sale?
With the diminishing availability of qualify tools, the wisdom of how to use them is also being lost, and needs to be rediscovered if we are going to use hand tools to their full potential. How best to clamp, fasten, hold material as I cut, chisel, or plane? How do I use the strength of my body in an efficient, graceful way so that I don’t fight the tool, the wood, but turn the work into a dance instead? This is a study, a search worthy of my attention.
Working by hand allows time to ponder: Is faster better? What have we gained with excess power? Building by hand encourages us to build more deliberately, ponderously, aware of our actions that ripple beyond us. With only direct sweat labor, would human dignity allow the building of strip malls, tract homes, McMansions, and superhighways? What happens to our souls encased by machine-made objects of dull perfection? To know we exist as humans, we need to see the touch of another in the creations that surrounds us.
I am not purist. My power tools, well used, cared for, will continue to be used, although with less frequency as I discover again the joy of using just my body to propel tools to do their magic. For there is a magic there, a mystery. I eat oats and honey, bread and cheese and red bell peppers. I breathe in air laced with oxygen transpired from trees. And miraculously my body converts all these into motion, strength, finesse. I lift a plane, sharpened and tuned, and lay it to work the wood. Then somewhere in the infinite realm between my hand and the tool, alchemy happens. Flesh, steel, wood combine in motion, and I am graced with translucent ribbons of shavings curling through my fingers, setting free the scent, revealing beauty. A gift.

Aspiration and inspiration

2008-03-05T09:10:00.003-02:00

By Sara Plaza

I don’t suppose that everybody have asked themselves what we intend to reach, professionally speaking. So, on the one side, it may be useful to check what those that have thought about it believe. The Spanish writer Juan Gil-Albert wrote: “I aspire to be as much subjective as possible. Only by talking in his name, a man achieves to agree, if not with the truth that might be a goal too abstract, at least with authenticity. To be authentic is worth as much as be true and is within our good-will reach”. However, Graham Green was of the opinion that you have to write with a piece of ice in the heart, and the British author Ian McEwan agrees with this proposal for he believes that it is of vital importance to distance him from the characters of his novels...
On the other side, I consider the line between literature and life to be so fine that it would be possible to listen to both beatings as one. In my opinion, that piece of ice would end up melting as a result of beating, for I believe that you have to be able to recognize the world and yourself before trying to reinvent any of them. It seems to me that what we do is related to whom and how we are, and taking those authors’ opinion as a starting I am going to reflect on human beings’ aspirations in general.
If the poet was right and the path is done by walking on it, blow after blow, verse after verse, what we are and what we aspire to become should have something in common with our choices and the decisions we make. For that reason I believe that it is important certain fidelity to yourself. This quality of being loyal to you should be dotted with curiosity. Curiosity that has to do with our desire to learn a bit more in order to be unaware of a bit less.
Professionals, artists, apprentices, artisans, we all have something of warlocks/witches and wizards: we all transform into someone else by changing day after day. It does not matter whether we get transformed by an enchantment, a spell or a liquid with magic powers... but it is necessary to pursuit any sort of logic or coherence through the change and also to renew our efforts and illusions with a good deal of optimism. Manu Dibango, a famous musician from Cameroon, explained it a recent interview: “I consider myself as an old man with ability ... I am a grandfather perfectly capable of many things. In Africa the elders are respected. Not in vain they are the guardians of something. You have no option: despite yourself you must have stored experiences. Every day something happens and, in addition, there is your own transformation”.
For we are getting older, instead of aspiring to be subjective, to cool down our heart or to get our production away from us when we write, but also when we compose, make music, lay bricks, work the land, manage information or have access to it... it would be better to turn back our faces from time to time while we keep on moving forward: imagining what might be possible by remembering what was impossible.
To make things
We don’t stop being human beings,
To create
We don’t stop living,
We don’t stop breathing.
For we are both: Aspiration and inspiration. [1]

[1] In Spanish, both words “aspiración” and “inspiration” can mean inhalation. But, at the same time, “aspiración” also means “aspiration”, while “inspiración” means inspiration.

Voices from the past

2008-03-05T09:09:00.002-02:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

The books than we have in our libraries are, on many occasions, voices from the past that sought refuge in writing to continue making ideas and feelings known through the centuries for ever and ever... Those voices that tried to be preserved, perpetuated and reproduced, somehow understood –at that moment- that what they have to tell was of a lot of value and could help future generations. For the world is a rounding wheel and even though history does not repeat itself –at least this is what modern historians assert- human being use to have a particular quality for making the same mistake twice.
Preparing a text about Mayan civilization during its post-classical age –I mean, the moment when the flame of such a magnificent culture started slowly to go out– I come across a story that is worth remembering. I found it in the pages of one of the “Books of Chilam Balam”. These pages deserve to be commenting on in their fullest extent on other occasion.
After the Spanish conquest of Mayan territories (placed in Mexico and part of Guatemala), Catholic priests taught reading and writing skills to Mayan people in order to facilitate their conversion to Christianity. However, their “pupils” used that power to collect their old knowledge –which, recorded in codices until that moment, had then disappeared thanks to the memoricide carried out by conquers and priests themselves-, as well as the events that were happening at that moment (XVI century). In this way, they rescued their memory from oblivion when it was condemned to obscurity by the official story.
In various regions of the old Mayan territory, a number of books were written in the native language on Spanish paper and using Latin alphabet. Those manuscripts written in northern Yucatán (probably by Mayan ethnics groups Itzá and Yucateco) are called, in general, “Books of Chilam Balam”. Some important passages from nine or ten of those books have come to the present moment, identified by the name of the city where they were written. I found the story I am going to speak about in the book of Chilam Balam written in Chumayel, one of the most complete works.
This book mentions an event that happened in Chichén Itzá many years before the Spaniards arrival; an incident that, due to its importance, was transmitted orally, by word of mouth, saving itself from being consigned to oblivion thanks to those writers who remembered it and noted it down. Chichén Itzá was one of the most powerful state-cities during the Mayan post-classical age. Settled in the Yucatán peninsula, the old Itzá land (Mexican, at present), it was –and continues being- famous for its beautiful architecture and, especially, for the so-called “sacrifices well”.
This well was a natural opening as many of the holes so abundant in the yucateca peninsula, where limestone is easily bored through by rain creating collapses, caves, caverns and large open mouths in the surface filled with water. Named “cenotes” by modern archeologists (from Mayan “tsonoot”), those wells sometimes were used sometimes as the place where sacrifices were offered to Chaac, god of the rain, one of the most important gods for a people dependent on agriculture. This was the function of the Chichén Itzá well. This cenote was so important that the city was named after it: Chi Cheen Itzá, “Itzá side of the well”.
The greenish waters of that well received propitiatory adornments –copal resin, golden objects, feathers, jade earrings- and human victims that had been previously selected. It was supposed that the well leaded directly to the realms of Chaac: there, the god would welcome the persons killed and, had he anything to communicate to the livings –waiting at the top of the well- one of the sacrificed would be allowed to come back with his message.
Regretfully, as it is to be expected, nobody, ever, came back being the divine messenger. The victims, drugged before being sacrificed, gripped by fear of the impending death, were swallowed by the boggy waters before they were able to think how to float to the surface.
Nevertheless, the “Book of Chilam Balam” tells that a young nobleman –named Hunac Ceel-, had a revealing idea after watching those sacrifices. Tired of those events that shaken the political life of that region at that moment, he headed for the platform where offerings were thrown into the waters –votive and humans- and, before people and priests staring at him in astonishment, threw himself into the well. The greenish surface stood still for some minutes and then, beneath the bubbles and foam that had been formed, the man appeared on the surface with difficult breathings. Faced with the amazement of everybody and the incredulity of some, he shouted that the god Chaac had spoken to him and had said that, from that moment on, he, Hunac Ceel, of the House of Cocom, would be the regent of that state-city.
The people acclaimed him immediately. Bounded hand and foot by their customs and traditions, knowing how clever and cunning the nobleman had been at getting what he wanted, priests and members of the nobility –not being able to contradict their religion- had to put up with that “divine” decision swallowing their rage and pride. What followed was one of the most relentless dictatorships that have ever been supported by Mayan people at that time. Hucan Ceel and those of his House handled the threads of the political intrigues and the wars against their foes.
With his court settled in the city of Mayapán, he led his forces towards Chichén Itzá, and, according to some historians, it was he who destroyed it to the ground, turned it into the ruins –magnificent, but ruins after all- that it is today.
The story has all the ingredients that a novel needs to be written. Although the “Book of Chilam Balam” adds many other legendary events to this account, the detailed study carried out by modern searchers also reveals the historic facts. The story was true, as it was true the serious consequences of what happened, a sort of madness that served the character right for running away with a power that did not belong to him.
Stories of this kind should make us reflect on the present time. Hunac Ceel would not be the first “leader” passing over his people using his society customs. Seeking protection in them, totalitarian guys rule over the life of their nations abusing their authority. Taking advantage of civil and legislative codes, electoral laws, customs and habits, they abuse their position as principals and forget our rights and needs, using and exploiting us...
Our libraries are a constant reminder of all this, of all that happened and still happens... So many books had to be written with a purpose. We should make an effort to remember as well. Only knowing the past we will be able to understand the present and plan our future. However, human memory is extremely fragile and it seems as if we are not very familiar with the books resting on the shelves of our closer library.

To have or not to have prejudices? Is this the question?

2008-03-01T09:46:00.002-02:00

By Sara Plaza

A couple of weeks ago I was reading quite an old English edition of “The travels of Marco Polo”, and in chapter XLI of Book First “Of the province of Khamil” I came across a story that reminded me of another from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “A hundred years of solitude”, for both of them have to do with fertility: the former refers to plants growing well in a particular region and the latter is connected with animals having a lot of young. Seven centuries and a good number of geographical features separate one from the other; however, they share certain reasoning regarding the gifts humans are awarded when Nature looks happy with their infidelities, what lead me to believe that they might be the reason we remain faithful to ourselves through history. I would like to share with you that chapter about Khamil, though it is my purpose to reflect on prejudices rather than on deceit...

Khamil is a province which in former days was a kingdom. It contains towns and villages, but the chief city bears the name of Khamil. The province lies between two deserts, for on the one side is the great desert of Lop, and on the other side is a small desert of three days’ journey in extent. The people are all idolaters, and have a peculiar language. They live by the fruits of the earth, which they have in plenty, and dispose of to travelers. They are a people who take things very easily, for they mind nothing but playing and singing, and dancing and enjoying themselves.
And it is the truth that if a foreigner comes to the house of one of these people to lodge, the host is delighted, and desires his wife to put herself entirely at the guest’s disposal, while he himself gets out of the way, and comes back no more until the stranger shall have taken his departure. The guest may stay and enjoy the wife’s society as long as he likes while the husband has no shame in the matter, but indeed considers it an honor. And all the men of this province are made wittols of by their wives in this way. The women themselves are fair and wanton.
Now it came to pass during the reign of Mangu Khan, that as lord of this province he came to hear of this custom, and he sent forth an order commanding them under grievous penalties to do so no more but to provide hostelries for travelers. And when they heard this order they were much vexed thereat. For about three years’ space they carried it out. But then they found that their lands were no longer fruitful, and that many mishaps befell them. So they collected together and prepared a grand present which they sent to their lord, praying him graciously to let them retain the custom which they had inherited from their ancestors; for it was by reason of this usage that their gods bestowed upon them all the good things that they possessed, and without it they saw not how they could continue to exist. When the prince had heard their petition his reply was “Since ye must needs keep your shame, keep it then,” and so he left them at liberty to maintain their naughty custom. And they always have kept it up, and do so still.

It seems as if such custom was not of Marco Polo’s liking, thought we do not know whether he came to know about it from others or from his own experience while journeying throughout Persia, in the XIII century. The book about his travels is full of similar anecdotes. Some of them affect him deeply, others make him shudder. While he finds some of them commendable, considers others to be regretful. He agrees that some of them deserve to be mentioned and feels sorry for not saying a single word about others, and... Always gives his opinion about them, always judge them, always challenges whether they are moral or immoral. Religion is present everywhere and while he praises the one he professes, is not very understanding with the rest. Accordingly, the same happens with those who follow one or the others. Neither intended our traveler to be objective nor seemed neutrality to have played an important role among their worries.
However, both concepts are of a lot of concert to some education and library professionals, who pretend to educate and manage information in an aseptic manner, as if such a thing might be possible. As if the matter of not having prejudices when they are next to the shelves or a blackboard was in their hands. We all have prejudices and it is worth asking ourselves about ours and trying to find them out: firstly, to become aware of them; secondly, in order to avoid the sort of discriminatory practices they may induce us to carry out; and in third place, to give ourselves the opportunity to overcome some of them: preventing them from getting in our way and not allowing them to obstruct others’ path. We do not have to necessarily agree among all of us, but for being conscious that we think different from others, it is mandatory to know what we think and what the other thinks, and therefore to try to get to know each other... Marco Polo observes and tells. He tells whatever he sees and also which his opinion is about it, and I do not believe this to be wrong. Precisely for it let the reader the unfinished business of contrasting his lines with those written by other authors to build up our own opinion. And this is fantastic. I assure you that it is an exciting adventure to start doing some research and developing critical thinking.
Particularly, if you decide to take a few old maps out of the drawer and trace out the route followed by the Venetian, I believe you will not regret it. And if you prefer any other author, era or horizon, I imagine you will not be disappointed either. Travels’ books are delightful. You will find yourself laughing sometimes and going red others. There will be occasions when you feel like running behind the main characters’ steps and moments later you would rather take the opposite direction on others. It is impressive what those characters were able to attain and it is difficult to believe all that happened to the inhabitants of those remote areas. Nicolas Polo’s son has no reason to be envious of the authors of travel guides such as “The Lonely Planet” or “El trotamundos”, for at that time he was able to estimate how long a journey would be, how much it would cost and also the most interesting trading posts, exactly as modern guides indicate picturesque settings.
All in all, after reading about travels it is not difficult to notice that one has read about something else than the routes followed to go and return, for there are many paths and shortcuts in the middle, which use to be full of surprises. Once you have finished the book, you feel an irresistible wish to take your backpack, a pen and some paper and leave, ready to note down everything you see and listen to. I do not dare to encourage you to try and touch everything, since these are difficult times and you would have to pay a surcharged bill afterwards. Anyway, what I suggest you to do is to travel and read with your prejudices aside, which is not the same as without them, and to allow those how are heavier to get lost along the way. By experience I can tell you that it is easier to travel and read when one does it light. In addition, there will always be free space to bring new knowledge back home.

Un populu diventa poviru e servu quannu ci arrubannu a lingua

2008-02-23T09:19:00.001-02:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

God’s Punishment. That was it.
It seems that, in the beginning, all men and women spoke the same language. But one day, it occurred to them that it would be a good idea to construct a city and build a tower so high that it could reach Heavens. In the believe that punishment should fit the crime of such presumptuousness on their part, God confused them with many languages in a way that they could not understand each other and were impossible for them to keep on making that building higher and higher: the well-known Tower of Babel.
This is the story written in the Genesis (xi, 9), the most read collection of ancient Semitic oral traditions of all times. Thousands of languages and speakers: all of them different from each other, all of them incomprehensible to the rest. God’s Punishment, no doubt.
This impressive variety of ways of speaking, words, grammars and sounds make up an important part of our cultural diversity, which is one of our major treasures as species, according to the UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2002, link). However, as it usually happens with humankind, we are destroying this miracle with our own hands at every turn. Just have a look at the following data from 2005 provided by UNESCO itself to confirm my previous statement:

... only 4% of the languages are used by 96% of the world population; 50 % of the world languages are in danger of extinction; 90% of the world’s languages are not represented on the Internet; some five countries monopolize the world cultural industries trade.

(Source: Knowledge versus information societies: UNESCO report takes stock of the difference, link).

Certainly, the use of some languages as means of exchange (e.g. English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese) in order to overcome linguistic barriers and facilitate communication can help us a lot. However, these languages have stop being a “vehicle” to become “dominant speeches” by pushing the rest aside and successfully removing many of them from the face of human memory.
What happens when a language is lost? I would like to share a poem with you, “Lingua e dialettu” (“Language and dialect”), written by Ignazio Buttitta in his mother language/dialect: Sicilian.

Un populu
mittitulu a catina,
spuggghiatulu,
attuppatici a vucca:
é ancora libiru.

Livatici u travaggghiu,
u passaportu,
a tavula unni mancia,
u lettu unni dormi:
é ancora riccu.

Un populu
diventa poviru e servu
quannu ci arrubanu a lingua
addutata di patri:
é persu pi sempri.

Chain up a people,
divest it,
cover its mouth:
still, it is free.

Steal its employment,
its passport,
the table it eats at,
the bed it sleeps on,
still, it is rich.

A people
becomes poor and slave
when it has the language inherited
from their parents stolen:
it is lost forever.

Without the words we speak and use at a daily basis, our life has no sense at all. Many concepts that are unique to our cultures, many ideas that were born in our hands and later adopted by others (even by using our own language) would disappear. As the word dies the idea does so, no matter how hard other languages try to reproduce it. What would Latin American music be like without local words such as “joropo”, “huapango”, “cueca” or “huayno”? How do we name many animals and plants if terms like “ñandú”, “vicuña”, “quirquincho” or “colibrí” are taken away from us? How will Inuit people manage to name its surroundings if we replace all the words they use to refer to the many colors and textures that frozen water has, with the general term snow? Our language is the vehicle for expressing our culture, a custom-made vehicle that meets all its requirements. Without language we would be nothing at all; because a people without its language cannot find its north and become lost.
There are many peoples that have lost it already, many peoples that have had to adopt foreign languages and have forgotten the sounds of their parents and grandparents. Latin America is a great continent full of broken memories and subdued voices. We should know, better than any others, how a people felt when has its language stolen and which the consequences are of such a lost: something that also happens in Africa, in Asia or among European minorities.
As librarians, as information managers and culture advocates, what do we do about it? Our collections, are they home for all languages spoken in our community, in our country, among our users? With all due respect, I doubt it. Resources, spaces and budget cuts make it easier to commit ourselves to “dominant” leanings. What is “small”, “little” or “slight” –valuable as it might be- has no importance at all. The same can be applied to the mass media, publishing companies and many other culture and information channels. The world has been organized –in every single aspect- to fulfill an “evolutionary” obligation: only the strongest will survive. What is referred as “minority”, “weak”, “insignificant” does not count at all and, consequently, must disappear. And in no time it would be removed from the face of the earth, unless we become aware of its real value.
The good news it that there are many people who do not resign themselves to being quiet, and there are a good number of others who, in an independent way and risking a lot, commit themselves to study, recover, publishing and disseminate their endangered languages and literary traditions. And we are also many getting in love with their work and with the sound of words that we never heard before. For those of you who have an interest in the linguistic diversity of our planet, and want to learn more about it (features and problems alike) I highly recommend you to have a look at the following online sources: the websites Omniglot (link), BBC Languages homepage (link), CoE Euromosaic (link), and Linguapax (link), Terralingua project (link), French initiative Babel (link) and UNESCO’s MSST Clearing House Linguistic Rights (link).
For those who want to learn a foreign language, the Internet can be a privileged environment. Those with exotic likes may have a look at the UN Peace Corps handbooks, which allow you to learn quickly languages such as Romanian, Guaraní, Estonian, Filipino, Wolof, Uzbek, Azeri, Ukrainian, Arabic, Swahili, Kazakh, Bulgarian, Russian or Armenian. You can download all of them from ERIC free of charge.
There are plenty of pages with linguistic resources, and this announcement is addressed to special libraries dealing with languages, which use to strongly depend on the books they store and “dominant” resources, without noticing that there are thousands of documents in Open Access archives that can be easily accessed by their users.
You may think that mine is a utopian discourse, and also think that if you know your own language plus a more general one (that is to say, English) it will be easy to move around the world without problems. Perhaps you are right. However, I have traveled a lot and, even if I am fluent in English and have reached an intermediate level in a set of “known” languages, I always try to learn as many sentences, expressions, and words as I can of those other languages that nobody would learn because are “minority” idioms. And I can assure you that they have always been of use to me: in Korea, in Malaysia, in Sweden, in Norway, in Ecuador... For not everybody speak English, Spanish or French, believe me. We may wrongly believe that those languages are “minority” idioms but their speakers do not agree. Either, would I if one of them was mine.
We should not forget that using a “dominant” language as vehicle is only that: a bridge. If we really want to understand other people and come closer to their culture we should learn their language (and the other way round). Bridges join peoples as long as they cross them together in both directions.
A world where many different languages can be spoken does not necessary mean a lack of communication as homogeneous and totalitarian discourses pretend that we believe. The lack of communication has nothing to do with the number of languages, but with our incapability to listen to their speakers and understand their ways of thinking. As long as we preserve this linguistic plurality, understand that our identity is “ours” because others have their one identity as well, and feel proud of our cultural joins there will always be a way to demolish those walls that are meant to separate one from each other day after day.
And, if in the end it was a God’s punishment, we have now the opportunity to make the best of it and demonstrate that the story can be told in a different way: “fortunately, the author of this punishment did not attain his purpose”.

So, tolerance wasn’t that good?

2008-02-16T09:27:00.001-02:00

By Sara Plaza

No, it was not and it is not. Let’s say that it is not good enough, that it is not that much. Let’s say that it was meant to be good but could not, it intended to be good but did not work. And that’s it: we continue talking about accepting others, about acknowledging the difference, even about valuing it. However, we do not take any step further. We are quite comfortable with just an underlying note of folklore in our homogeneous, global and insipid systems; a colorful mark in the grey standardization of our uses and manners, of our customs; a subtle touch that lightens or darkens the pastel drawing without stridencies in which we are immersed. We behave as if everything was right. It does not matter if, in fact, everything is wrong. It makes no difference whether we have any intention of getting it better either.
A few weeks ago, I read some lines in the newspaper from the Peruvian writer Iván Thays, in which he recommended:

Withdraw from use the word “tolerance”, much of the liking of these writers eager to tolerate, with good sense of humor, those who they consider hegemonic or excluded minorities, and let’s propose “plurality” instead. And better than arguing for being falsely united around a duty, do it for defending others’ difference.

His thoughts were related to the fuss about nothing that a number of Peruvian writers kicked up a few months ago when they intended to decide which of them, “hegemonic” vs. “excluded”, or “Creole” vs. “Andean”, best represented their country’s literature. However, I believe that his lines are equally appropriate to other fields, not only literature. Precisely because, as this author born in Lima stated in the same article:

Just read any biography of writers, or any story of an age, to know about quarrels and more quarrels. Actors change, arguments change, everything and whatever changes, literary and human quality change, but it never changes the instinct for confrontation and the need for defeating (with or without arguments) the other.

Will it be necessary to tolerate at first in order to defeat later? Will tolerance be the first step towards victory? Let’s imagine it: we come closer, get into confidence and zap! break it into pieces; everything with a smile, of course.
This is what I was doing, analyzing with humor all kinds of meaning that my dictionary suggested for the word “tolerance”, and deciding whether it seemed worse to me “the difference that is permitted” or the “willingness to admit the way someone is, does and thinks different from me, especially regarding religious issues and practices” – I had previously rejected “body ability to withstand higher doses of a drug”-, when I turned a few pages back and came across the not very enlightening explanations about “plurality”. Then, I remained thinking whether “the quality of being more than one” was really better than “the action of tolerating”, what forced me to also look up “to tolerate”: to stand others with indulgence [doing something that you disapprove]”. Quite honestly, in case of doubt dictionaries enlighten as less as priests. If you do not believe me, ask Ramón, the main character in Mario Benedetti’s novel “Gracias por el fuego” (Thanks for the fire):

I have not committed any sin, I said at the confessional. Son, you should not be such a haughty boy, have you not thrown your schoolmates a sinful look? From that moment I decided to get rid of my haughtiness. I had not looked at the girls. However, the following day, I did everything possible to look at them sinfully. Today I can confess a sin, I said on Sunday at the confessional. This priest was older that the previous and looked at me with suspiciousness. Which one? I threw my schoolmates a sinful look. I was brimming with satisfaction because I had defeated my haughtiness. You do not have to be haughty, said the older priest, you should never be proud of being a sinful person. I said quickly the thirty Lord’s Prayers and got out of there running. I opened my dictionary at the word sinful: event, say, desire, thought or omission against God’s Law and its precepts. Yes, of course, I had looked at the girls with omission.

Yet smiling, I shared my findings with Edgardo (reading in silence has never been of my liking and I use to make comments on every line with those who surround me, showing very little respect, I have to admit, towards whatever they intended to concentrate on), and a bit later I sat down to do it also with you. So far I had already heard about “getting charity wrong” or “not understanding charity correctly”, and Edgardo and I have continued our after-lunch conversations longer than expected discussing about cultural plurality, multiculturality, transculturality and so on, but never had I start to think of many other terms –and the actions, abilities, capacities, etc related to them- that are not pertinent to talk about how things should be, and which, however, define perfectly well the long list of those that remain as they are and are not as they should.
The power to name is extraordinary, but I am not trying to suggest that we have to be more careful with what we say than what we do, maybe the same. However, we have to pay attention to the purpose of our words. It matters a lot, perhaps too much. To be conscious of their strength may help us to use words better, to know exactly what we are saying and why we are saying it. Nevertheless, there is more to words than their intention: they put our thoughts behind bars though we do not consider them as prisoners.
Allow me to finish with a few more words from Ramón, in the already mentioned Benedetti’s work:

It has stopped raining. However, it is not colder. The Old man corners him as many times as he wants. For doing so he makes use and abuses of his elegant arrogance. Last night he wanted to force him to support his political attitude. Afterwards, little by little, with smiles, with ironies, with jokes, with plays on words, even with some arguments, he discouraged him as time passed, leaving him speechless and feeling resentful. Suddenly I became very fond of him, not the sort of mild fondness that I usually had for him because he was my son, but an active, renewed and militant fondness. The Old man is not sure, but he demonstrates a lot of security. Gustavo is sure, but he does not know how to explain his own security. The Old man is a veteran, a champion of controversy, a master of his tricks. In this sense, poor Gustavo is still on milk. Nevertheless, how much I wanted to bet on him. In the centre of his lack of experience there is a conviction.

About yawns... and some other “mysteries”

2008-02-09T10:23:00.000-02:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

Do you manage to know why it is that we yawn?
This is one of the many questions that I made myself when was a child. I was a very little person in the making when I started tormenting my parents, acquaintances and teachers with this sort of questions. “Mum... Why is it that we ‘cry tears’ when we are sad?” (Mum’s answer: looking at me in surprise + open mouth). “Dad... Why is it that we laugh at something funny?” (Dad’s answer: “Just because”). “Teacher... What is fire made of?” (Teacher’s answer: “Civallero, do not disturb, please”). “Uncle... Where do magnets hide their strength?” (Uncle’s answer: silence + shrugging his shoulders).
Please, allow me to repeat my first question once more. Do you manage to know why it is that we yawn?
No, do not bother seeking. Nobody knows it yet. There are a number of theories, one more surprising than the other. Some people say that it is to cool our brain. Others think that it is a physiological answer when we feel tired... Some elder believe that it announces something wrong and harmful, and from ancient Maya people we have the following explanation: when we yawn we unconsciously show our sexual interest in someone who is close to us at that moment (this one seems quite interesting, I’ll keep on doing some research...). Finally, some others consider it as a simple reflex action. In fact, you are probably yawning at this moment, or do it in a short time: if you do not get bored, you will do it as a reflex action.
What are my words aimed at? I want you to notice that those basic, simple and “childish” questions are the ones that we have not been able to answer yet. Can you believe this? In a “civilized” world where scientists have made it possible that men travel to the moon, have read our genetic code and have successfully sent words and sound across the planet in a few seconds we still have to find a good number of answers.
We believe that we know everything in this “Knowledge Society” (the Argentinean humorist Quino would write something like “Zoociety”); however, the most important answers seem not to be anywhere. At least, this is my feeling after working as a librarian for some years. “I only know that I know nothing”, as Socrates (a very realistic guy) said.
Daniel Quinn, in his novel “Ishmael” –which was an austral summer gift from our close friend and North American colleague Elaine Harger- states that man, by knowing so little, does not even know how he should live. The progressive deterioration of the environment and a good number of other visible failed attempts at living in a “civilized” world that you can read in the news are the best example of it.
Going one step further –and forgetting this interesting matter that we may know a lot but we still fail to know very basic things-, another feature of the human knowledge systems that I want to point out is the fact that the available information (I mean, what we already know) is fragmented, spread, scattered all over the world. Not even modern information networks have managed to make all information accessible. This point reminds me of a tale from the Ashanti oral tradition, a people from Ghana, in Western Africa.
Ashanti people tell that Nyame, the Heaven’s God, gave to Anansi (The Spider, Ashanti cultural hero) a vessel where all wisdom had been kept. Anansi was meant to distribute it among all human beings. However, Anansi wanted to keep it only for him, and made the decision of hiding that big container in the top of a high tree for nobody could steal it from there. Whether she was in a hurry or did not pay enough attention, it happened that the vessel fell down while Anansi was climbing the trunk, and it broke into pieces on the ground. As a consequence, fragments of wisdom spread all around the world. Men and women got some of them, but many were lost and, in the end, nobody could be the owner of all wisdom. From that moment onwards, in meeting each other, men and women exchange the pieces of knowledge they have found, trying to rejoin the original set.
Let’s sum it up: we do not know basic things (though we have been very busy learning other not that necessary). What we already know is scattered. In addition to this confusing situation, the socio-economic system we are immersed in makes it really difficult to successfully exchange the scarce knowledge that men and women could recover after Anansi let the vessel fall from the tree (I am talking about copyright legislation, locked information, very expensive books, etc.).
It can be concluded that ours is a complicated profession: we intend to manage fragmented information that is not always accessible.
The good news is that humankind is like water. Before a wall it stops, but slowly begins to look for some chinks in it to leak through them. And this desire to exchange knowledge, to acquire more knowledge, to find out new things, to learn, to make culture alive and multiple it, can never be stopped (no matter what international laws and companies’ interests have to say about it), because this desire is as old as our species. It was accomplished first through everybody’s lips and later by means of books and records interchange. Now we call it “sharing” and it happens across the digital universe surrounding us. A myriad of free platforms make it possible to upload any kind of information (books, music, images), skillfully avoiding legal barriers, and making it accessible to everybody else. It is true that we do not know what is unknown, however, there are many of us intending that what it is already known by a few can be known by all, can be exchanged, and that it can flow and be free... There are many of us striving for allowing intellectual and artistic human production to reach everybody’s hands, eyes, ears, hearts and minds...
Of course, many of you can have a different opinion about it, and some may point to me the fact that there are authors making a living from their own production who will not agree with my perspective either. Right, nonetheless, there are very few who can earn their living as writers, painters, musicians... On the contrary, there are many who have decided to edit their work online, to promote their production through the web, to share it. Surprisingly enough, these authors have noticed that those who discover their work in this way begin to track it. There are many users that, after knowing what the artists do, go and buy their books and their music to thoroughly enjoy them, or go and see their exhibitions, attend their conferences, get tickets for their concerts...
I believe that, in this sense, a new paradigm is being developed, which, in the near future, will be able to deal with the present barriers of the copyright. These barriers, and many others, in addition to be a trap for culture consumers, has also become a jail for authors themselves, who are kept in the interested hands of a few (who are the ones making a real profit).
If you want to know more about this, you may find the following work very interesting. It is the Copy/South Dossier, which has been elaborated by the international research group Copy/South, based in United Kingdom. You will find a number of strategies, analysis and reasons that are meant to skillfully handle copyright-related issues. It also has a curious poster series that this week you can download from our images section. I highly recommend them.
Following the line that we have maintained up to the present moment, and remaining faithful to our principles, we will continue improving our posts in this blog with different links that allow you to download diverse cultural material (books, music, images), mainly from Latin America, as well as adding references to other valuable digital sources when they can be accessed.
And about yawns... what else could I say? I have been unable to dispel my doubts yet. Meanwhile I will keep on putting my hand over my mouth (for evil spirits cannot find the way in or count my teeth and make me loose a few years of life as ancient tradition tells). No matter how unlikely it may seem to discover the answers, I will also continue asking myself other “difficult” questions.
And, in revenge for the many silences that I have obtained since I was a child, I hope to find the response to other people’s doubts (provided that information was available and can be freely accessed).
Now you can yawn in peace... A huge hug from Córdoba, Argentina...

Note: Resources to be shared can be accessed through our “Free Zone” section (have a look at the sidebar). On a weekly basis, you will find the summary of those materials in the “What’s going on?” section (have another look at the sidebar).

- And... What are you going to do now with all that money?...

2008-02-02T10:45:00.000-02:00

By Sara Plaza

... Frin’s father asked him kindly. And this question meant several things: they won’t ask him for the money, he would spend it and nobody will tell anything, and they won’t meddle in whatever he did with that money. He went three days without knowing how to spend it.
-See, Frin, if you save it you’ll get more each time (his father explained to him).
-And, what for?
-For being able to buy more once you have save enough.
-(Frin shook his head)... no, I prefer to go buying and I’ll buy more likewise.
Lynko did not get tired of making suggestions:
-See that ball, Frin!
-(No)...
-See that fishing pole!
-(No)...
-A backpack for going camping!
-(No)...
-And, what are we going to take with us on Sunday, then, Frin?!
Finally he saw the volume of an encyclopedia in a bookstore and knew what he wanted. It was an encyclopedia that also came out in installments and Arno always took it with him when they had to look something up in class. He went into the bookstore and bought the first volume. To his great surprise it cost less than he believed. The money was enough for buying another book. One about rare phenomena happened through history. That way he spent his first wage.
When we arrived at home placed the volume of the encyclopedia in the small library in the dinning room and sat down in the courtyard to read the other book. A bit later Alma came in through the courtyard door. She liked to see him with that book open, which he hold with a hand while the other resting on his head. Since he didn’t notice her presence she went on looking at him for a while. It was beautiful that he was so concentrated. He looked more important. He was so serious. Never had she seen anybody to read that way: it seemed as if he was in a different world.
-Hello, Frin.
-... eh? Hi.
-What are you reading?
-Look! In 1953 a ship with all its crew disappeared.
Alma sat beside him. Frin kept on reading aloud and she paid attention to what he was saying; but it was also nice to be there with Frin. Close, while he was reading aloud to both. Frin’s voice wasn’t unpleasant. A ship has disappeared with all its crew. Moreover, it was a very nice voice. And it didn’t sink. And he read very well.

These lines belong to the children book titled “Frin” by the Argentinean writer, actor and musician Luis María Pescetti. A fantastic work that captivated Edgardo and me the first time we got our hands on it and our eyes could witness, page after page, what this young character did, thought and felt while he was at school, met a new friend, liked a girl from his classroom, got his first job... We thought it was a magnificent history and almost devours it when we took it from the library of the Centro de Difusión e Investigación de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (CEDILIJ, Diffusion and Research Center on Children and Young Literature). With the same illusion as Frin spent his first salary on the first volume of that encyclopedia, which was even enough for buying a second book on rare phenomena, we wrote to The Three Wise Men asking for his adventures in print. When we opened our presents the 6th of January, nobody was more surprised than us noticing that they had brought us not only “Frin” but also “Lejos de Frin” (Far from Frin) by the same author and “Los selk’nam. La vida de los onas en Tierra del Fuego” (The selk’nam. Onas’ life in Tierra del Fuego) by the French anthropologist Anne Chapman. Edgardo had asked for Pescetti and Chapman was my election, but we never imagined that we would get everything we wanted to.
That morning we begun to read our presents and like Alma, we spent a few minutes looking at each other in silence, observing his/her seriousness, his/her smile, his/her surprise... Each one in his/her world, in a different world, in another world... While one of us was remembering his childhood, the other recovered the memory of an extinct people; both of us turning back our faces, Edgardo a few years only and I a couple of centuries (Chapman’s informers were born in the XIX century and all of them died during the XX). In a way, we both were looking back, to the own past and to the past of a people who knew about their defeat at the hands of white men from the very moment that they arrived at the Island with the aim of staying (around 1880). The newcomers smoothed the path for themselves by destroying an original culture and killing the people who, along the centuries, kept it alive and passed it down from generation to generation. There was nostalgia in Edgardo’s eyes and I could listen to his laugh from time to time. In my case, not a word passed my lips all morning and my sight was lost in any of the four “skies” that selk’nam people knew.
A couple of days later, we interchanged our books not allowing them to rest even a night next to the other books that are part of our beloved library. My smile reappeared in a moment and Edgardo’s lips froze walking across any of the haruwen (pieces of land) in which the Island was divided were the onas (the name that first travelers gave to the self-named selk’nam) lived there.
Is it not fascinating how books can take us with them, their power to catch us, to draw us into new places, different times, unknown cultures, our own childhood...? Is it not incredible to follow other steps through their pages and discover horizons that we never dreamt to reach? Is it not marvelous to travel light and be always well-equipped? It took Frim three days to decide on what he wanted to spend the money he had just got, and we needed a few hours to write the letter to The Three Wise Men. We three chose a book and each of us lived a different experience when opened ours. The three of us had to think first what we wanted most, and once we got it, each one had to concentrate on their own reading. It is almost certain that, in our own way, we three re-wrote some passages, invented and dreamt them; that, at some moments, we forgot where we were staying and almost, who we were; that, in more than one occasion, we turned one page back or moved forward two or three, even several chapters because we were bursting with impatience...
Since with a book in our hands we can achieve so many things, live a lot of adventures, discover countless stories... it would be fantastic if we do not have to “spent all that money” in order to place in our own small libraries a new friend, and to allow each of us to find what we like, need and have an interest for us, in the big libraries that belong to everybody. Considering that The Three Wise men have many other requests to attend and that they only come once a year, books should be made more accessible to everybody and that way we could also ask librarians, booksellers, our parents, our children, our friends and teachers for them. I strongly believe that to read is a wonderful need and books are the essential accompaniment to every good meal that we eat every day to grow up (in any and all possible senses).

On holidays

2007-12-26T08:42:00.001-03:00

We’ll be on holidays during January, preparing new contents for 2008.... Until we’re back to this virtual home of ours, we send you our best wishes...
From Córdoba, Argentina...

Sara & Edgardo, Edgardo & Sara

The world belongs to the baddies

2007-12-17T09:02:00.000-03:00

Will imagination be the goodies preserve?

By Sara Plaza

It was the 59 anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights; 2007 Nobel Prizes had just been awarded, which, as Dr Marckus Storch said during the opening discourse “this year … [Nobel Prizes] can be seen from a different perspective … from the research applied to social development”; and in Bali it was being celebrated the Climate Summit (10 years after Kyoto Protocol signature), which should reach an outline agreement on the 25% - 40% drop in greenhouse gases emission, in 2020. At first sight, we would think that one week ago our planet, as Hemingway’s Paris, “was a party” with so many things to celebrate on its international agenda… However, in my humble opinion, there are too many unresolved matters, and while I was reading the news in the paper I could not avoid kicking and screaming and getting angry because I still do not understand too many things (or maybe I do, but I cannot believe them), because there are a lot of unfair situations, because day after day more examples of actions threatening our common sense, even our own life… My continual comments and complaints did not allow Edgardo to keep on working, so he stopped his writing, sat next to me and asked me why I was so angry. Then, I made him a summary of the general issues under the headlines, and gave him a few more details about the opinion matters; finally, I reviewed with him both national and international issues. When I had concluded, he looked at me with a smile (mine had disappeared with the fit) and said: “What do you want? The world belongs to the baddies”. I went quiet for a while trying to digest those two sentences slowly. I kept on reading here and there and found that this year Literature Nobel prizewinner, Doris Lessing, did not have shown too much optimism either when she denounced in Stockholm (throughout a text that was read by her publisher, because she could not be present at the ceremony) the visible line, the deep gap that separates those few who have everything from those many who have nothing, and criticized the fact that despite the lack of textbooks and chalk in many Indian and African wretched schools, there was a great interest in reading. In relation with literary creation (though, in my opinion, it might also be an ingredient for daily life), she observed:

Let’s suppose that water flooded our cities with the rise in the sea level; narrator will remain, because fantasy is what enriches us, what supports us., what creates us, for better or worse.

On the one hand I could not avoid getting back a number of pages and read again the article Contaminemos como los ricos. India reivindica su modelo de fuerte crecimiento con alto coste ecológico[1] (Let’s pollute as rich countries do. India claims for an economic growth rate with high ecological cost). The last paragraph states: “… climate change effects have reached at India: a number of hours far from Calcuta, on the coast of Western Bengala State, two populated islands of the Sundarbands archipelago have immersed in the water leaving thousands of refugees as a result of the temperature increase”.
On the other hand, I sought for one of my old writings that I had prepared as collaboration on the collection that a Ecuadorian university librarian was publishing in order to let students, through brief essays, know more about the life and work of main characters of culture, education, social struggle, etc., in Latin America. Among my lines I quoted many written by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, and found ones very special to which I have always gone back for moving further:

To accept in the essence of human nature, historically constituted, the need of dreaming seems fundamental to me. I find dream as a core project of historical individuals … Today I defend, with the same strength as I always did, the right to dream.

Talking about advocacy, I remembered when Mario Benedetti defended joy, and his poetry took me up to the doors of utopia and, once more, before Freire’s words:

Revolutionary utopia tends to be dynamic more than static; tends more to life than to death; to the future as a challenge to men and women creativity rather than to a repetition of the present; to love as individual’s liberation not as pathological possessiveness; to life emotion more than to cold abstractions; to living together in harmony instead of living gregariously; to dialogue rather than to silence; to praxis more than to “law and order”; to men and women that organize themselves thoughtfully for action, rather than to men and women who are organized for passivity; to creative and communicative language more than to prescriptive codes; to thoughtful challenges rather than to domesticating slogans; and to values that are lived more than to myths that are imposed.

Little by little, at the end of the morning, I still thought that maybe Edgardo was right and the world belonged to the baddies, however, it was doubtless that Lessing’s imagination and Freire’s dreams belonged to everybody who still believes in our own capacity to imagine and dream, to those men and women, children and elder who still get angry and protest, and are not satisfied with a reality that, even dressed in fancy clothes to celebrate statements of the past and agreements for the future, continues to fail its most important goal: the present of millions of people who live badly today and will hardly survive tomorrow.
It depends on us to make use of our imagination, to put our dreams into practice, to take utopia one step further. I do not know whether this makes us good guys, not even better, but it will make us more human and will give us opportunities to feel alive and to defend our life, our illusions and our joy without ruining millions of other people’s.

[1] Newspaper EL PAÍS, Tuesday 11 December, 2007. Internacional Edition

What our books tell

2007-12-09T10:51:00.000-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translation by Sara Plaza

“None of the other indians from the Río de la Plata area were more implacable in their hatred, more cruel in their revenges nor more terribly anthropophagous.”

This sentence refers to Guaraní people, and was written by the Jesuit Father Guillermo Furlong in his book “Missions and their peoples of Guaraníes” (Buenos Aires: Theoria, 1962, pp. 72-75). I have kept Furlong’s book in my library for a long time, as an example of total lack of comprehension. It is curious to know that the texts written by this Jesuit Father continue to be included in many bibliographies about original peoples. Do we know what is inside the pages of our books? Do we know whether the knowledge kept in them is true or false? Would we be able to orientate a user’s reading through pages similar to the ones I want to show you in this post?
The Guaraní call themselves Avá, which in their language (Avá-ñe’é) simply means “mankind” (the name of their language means “the language of mankind”). The epithet “Guaraní” means, in their language, “warriors”, something that they were really and truly along the many centuries of their history, which was never written by themselves but by the fountain pens of those who visited to them, who knew them, sometimes better and sometimes worse. Guaraní people belong to a bigger phylum, the Tupí-Guaraní, a linguistic family that covers a wide territory inside South America, from Brazil to Argentina and eastern Bolivia. The first Jesuit missions in the southern part of the continent were placed in their ancestral lands, which turned into a true empire (following the words written by the Argentinean writer, Leopoldo Lugones during the first part of his life as intellectual). Practices that some people consider to have had a “civilizing” influence on the original dwellers, while others think of them as a good example of “acculturation”, took place in those “reductions”. The detailed examination of such different perspectives, in order to understand more about the missions result in many contradictory statements inside the books that we are checking.
It was in those settlements where the first printing press within the Río de la Plata viceroyalty was built, which afterwards would be moved to the city of Córdoba, from where I write now. There, in those missions, the first books of the region were printed, written in Spanish and in Guaraní. They were mostly dictionaries, vocabularies and sermons, which would have been very useful for missionaries to continue with their work of persuading people to become Christians, and keep on being of much help for all of us who want to recover the customs and linguistic characteristics of Guaraní.
There are a lot of historians, anthropologists, and linguists who describe the Guaraní language as one of the richest and sweetest of the continent.
The beauty and the poetry that impress its construction can be appreciated in the variety of Guaraní idioms at the present, from the Avá-ñe’é from Paraguay (official language of this country that is also spoken in the Argentinean provinces of Corrientes and Misiones), to the Aché, the Pai-Tavyterá, the Kaiwá, the Avá-Chiriwano and the Sirionó. Its melodious pronunciation and the many possibilities that are open with its vocabulary, tell us a lot about a wonderfully complex language that is still alive. It would be said by another Jesuit, the Father Ignacio Chomé:

“I should confess that I found it very estrange to discover its sheer majesty and its energy. Each word is an exact definition that explains the nature of what it intends to make understandable, and every one gives a clear and distinct idea of it. I had never imagined that, in the middle of the barbarism [sic], it was spoken a language, which, to my judgment, for its nobility and harmony, is not inferior to the ones that I had learnt in Europe. It has, on the other hand, its delicacies and likes, and it demands many years to be able to achieve it to perfection”.

At the same time, the different literatures (oral and written) and the Guaraní cosmogony are highlighted by their exquisite richness, by the use of metaphors and by the possession of a very complex cosmology both magic and religious. In addition, the universe, its origin and its development is enclosed in the language: the words have power and also a sort of spirituality, as it was signaled by Lucía Gálvez in her book “Guaraníes y Jesuítas. De la tierra sin mal al paraíso” (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana).
If we continue with the quotations from the book of Furlong, I would like to note down a long fragment, which explains by itself the prejudices that many religious men (and non-religious as well) carried with them when they came –and still come- near to the original peoples.

“During a century and a half, missionaries were intimately connected with those Indians, and we do not have found a single offensive statement towards them among the many writings, anuas [a very complete report written annually], accounts and letters that we have had in our hands. However, a few years after the Jesuits were forced to leave the continent [1767], a man to whom some people have incorrectly given the name of ‘wise’, treated with some Guaraní persons, and this supposed wise came to classify indians not among the rational beings, but among the four legged animals. After writing down a series of incongruities, Don Félix de Azara continued with his unconcerned attitude: all of these qualities seem to approach them to the quadrupeds; at the same time, they seem to have a sort of relationship with the birds on account of their sharpness and sight. The language unity among the Guaraní who occupy a large part of the country, an advantage that none of the learned nations have managed to achieved, similarly indicates that these savages have had the same teacher of language who taught dogs how to bark equally in every country.
Azara doubted, at the end of XVIII century, whether Guaraní people belonged to the human genus, incurring a manifest philosophical aberration and showing, in passing, his complete misunderstanding of everything made by those indigenous people in the reductions.
Other ‘wise’ men, made of the same raw material as Azara, have pointed out the total parity between the indian man and the European, since the former, once he had left the forest, was able to think, speak and do in the same way as the latter. Today, science has proven how childish were those statements, and more than four centuries of history firmly rejects them. The absolute abandonment of any kind of mental effort, the neglect and the idleness of countless generations, the inveterate vices through centuries, the wild environment in which they had been born and lived, and many other recurrent factors, had degraded the indian man so much, and it was humanly impossible to promote him to the European normality all at once.
Historical reality is, on the other hand, quite eloquent. After four centuries, and despite of the worthy efforts on the part of the governments and the missionaries, the American indian man, from the one who inhabits the surroundings of the big cities of the United States to the ones we have met and treated in the Patagonian valleys, and the ones who are in the deep narrow valleys with step sides of Jujuy, as well as those who dwell in the plains of Chaco, continue to be as much indian as they were when Columbus first set his foot on the American lands. The fact that they get dressed in European clothes, or know how to scribble down a few letters, what some ones call to write, does not modify in substance what has been said, and the indian man is what he was centuries ago”.

Far from stopping at these “appreciations”, which were similar to reasons that made famous debates to happen, such as that one of Valladolid, in the XVII century (where took part the well-known Bartolomé de Las Casas, supporting the principles on which he based the theory that indian people were human beings as well), Furlong (who writes in the second half on the XX century, at a time when indigenous peoples were still included, in some Argentinean primary school books, in the Zoology section) keeps on putting his opinions in writing:

“None of the missionaries ever doubted, as Azara did, whether Guaraní people were true human beings; however, with relation to them, similar to what the Father Cardiel acknowledged, ‘their understanding, their capacity was, and is, very restricted, like the one of a child; their spoken discourse was very weak and faulty. When we asked them a disjunctive, v. gr., where are you going, to the village of San Nicolás or to the village of San Juan?, they answered: Yes, Father; what did not allow us to find out to which of the two parts the ‘yes’ or the ‘no’ was referred, and having to make our question once more, asking for one of the parts only’. This is what the Father Cardiel wrote in the middle of the XVIII century, a century and a half after the existence of the reductions, and half a century ago, the Father Lozano had written down that they had not managed to understand yet the fact that our death was something natural that would happen to everybody; however, they persuaded themselves into believing that it was something fortuitous with external causes. They thought the same about illnesses, whose causes, in their opinion, were always external and beyond the very human nature”.

The misunderstanding of the philosophical structures of the “other” (whoever he or she is; in this case, the Guaraní people), and the analysis of their linguistic patterns with the European languages logic (completely different from the logic of the native languages) as if that logic was the “only” and the “true” one, is clearly expressed in Furlong’s discourse. However, do not misjudge the importance of the previous lines: it is a discourse that continues to be present and active in the Latin-American society in general (and in Argentina in particular). The indigenous customs, habits, ways of life, attitudes and idiosyncrasies are fiercely criticized, forgotten and discriminated, even made fun of in a wide range of contexts, from the political to the scholar, and along the social as well. All of these perceptions “over populated” with pre-concepts continue feeding the walls and the racist remarks written on them, and regretfully make it possible that the intercultural dialogue collapses and ends in a complete disaster…
Let’s expect that our steps and our actions in the future will allow us to overcome such barriers and divides…
Best wishes from Córdoba, Argentina…

The house of words

2007-12-02T17:43:00.000-03:00

3rd anniversary - (see intro)

Helena Villagra dreamed that poets came to the house of words. Words, kept inside old bottles of glass, were waiting for poets and offered to them, mad keen to be chosen: they begged poets to look at them, to smell them, to touch them, to lick them. Poets opened the bottles, tasted the words with their finger and then, they smacked their lips or pursed their nose. Poets were looking for words that they did not know, and they also sought words that they knew but had lost. In the house of words there was a table with colors. Colors were offered to poets in big dishes, and each poet served the color he needed: lemon yellow or sun yellow, sea or smoke blue, bright, blood, wine red…

Excerpt from ‘El libro de los abrazos’ (The Book of Hugs) of Eduardo Galeano

Edgardo and Sara also went to the house of words. However, there have passed many years since poets crossed its threshold and the old bottles of glass had fell and rolled around, and words were now scattered on the floor. They had to tread carefully among them, squat on their heels, clean the dust that covered them and bring them closer to their ears in order to listen to their sound. There, crouched in a corner, they two discovered the paths that words had walked, the trail they had left behind, and their influence on spoken and written languages, literatures and cultures. Among their whispers, both of them could open their eyes in surprise, grit their teeth with fear, smile or tremble. They could find forgotten tales, contemporary legends, creation myths and death premonitions; they could meet urban chronicles, rural settings, lullabies, declarations of war, peace treaties… They could be up all night listening to the words’ stories and awake dreaming about them to fill the empty pages of their log later.
The table had disappeared and the colors had set off in search of new horizons: flying on the dusty broom of a some mischievous witch, entangled in the twisted stick of wise shamans, hidden under the pointed hat of a gnome, climbed on the single horn of the only blue unicorn lost, playing with the strings of an old troubadour’s guitar, embracing the canes of Andean panpipes… And exactly there, Sara and Edgardo found them: touring the open veins of a continent, crossing the seas that separates it from the other four, pointed with their fingers those thousands and thousands of white bells that always made a little prince laugh and covered the sky of the five…
And with those words and colors, they have drawn the pages of this weblog: Edgardo started to sketch them, three years ago and more than one has passed since Sara drew her first strokes. Each one with a style, for the things they tell him are different from those said to her, and the colors have nuances that are not the same for blue and chestnut eyes. Week after week, spring, summer, fall, winter and… spring again they both have shared what they thought about, believed in, dreamt about, what made them unhappy. And here they are, they continue walking and telling: with the same curiosity as ever, with more doubts than never, tiptoeing into the house of words, stealing colors from the horizon to outline their own path…

Info diversity, Utopia and a trip to Mexico

2007-11-24T09:10:00.001-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

While you are reading these lines, I am on my way to Guadalajara, Jalisco capital city, Mexico… lands and towns that, even without being known by many of us, sound familiar thanks to popular songs coming from this region (among many other things, of course)… Guadalajara is a big city placed in Atemajac Valley; and is the second place most populated of Mexico, with more than 1.5 million people. As it is said, it is well known for its traditions, gastronomy and cultural and recreational attractions; among the last ones, the International Fair Book of Guadalajara (FIL) is a very good example. It is the biggest in Hispano-America –according to the number of publishers and visitors attending to it-, and the second worldwide, after Frankfurt Fair Book. At the same time that takes place the Fair, will be celebrated the XIV International Librarians Symposium (‘Info diversity: library as multicultural center’). I have been invited to participate in it with a workshop on ‘Infodiversity and libraries role’ from the 26th to the 28th of November.
If you already have noticed that ‘infodiversity’ (translated from Spanish ‘infodiversidad’) means ‘information diversity’ or better ‘information in a plural world, culturally speaking’, congratulations on your shrewdness, which is admirable. It was not so clear to me, thus, before giving an affirmative answer to my Mexican colleagues, I made the decision of studying the term in detail to be certain that the subject I was supposed to deal with, was within my knowledge field and, therefore, if I was going to be able to give a workshop –or any other similar activity- with the seriousness that it deserves.
While studying, I came across some valuable documents written by the Mexican Estela Morales Campos that allowed me to find out that –considering my working experience- I would be able to give a workshop on the subject mentioned. Basically, the term –and the concept behind- recovers the importance of diversity and human plurality, perfectly embodied in all the information produced by the many different cultures around the world (understanding ‘culture’ in its widest sense). The workshop that I will give in Guadalajara will focus on showing the role that libraries may (and/or should) play in a world where ‘info diversity’ is threatened all the time.
Threats? Yes, definitely so many. On the one hand, the enormous pressure of dominant languages and cultures, which leads to 96% of the planet speaking only 4% of the existing idioms and 90% of the world languages underrepresented on the Internet. In these circumstances, ‘digital revolution’ and ‘knowledge society’ (and its great influence on the contemporary world) are a potential threat to local minority cultures survival. ‘Global’ culture –that is to say, dominant nation’s culture- is literally smashing regional cultures. If you do not believe me, make the attempt to find out, for example, how many different web pages there are in Quechua language (spoken by hundreds of thousands people in South America) on the Internet… or how many songs, tales, customs, and traditional stories of Castile (the Old)… or how much music played with ‘gaita’ and ‘chicote’ from Colombia you can download… or how many recipes from the Chiloé Island (Chile) or from northern Paraguay you can find… You only have to compare these findings with the examples representing the dominant culture on the Internet
Of course, these means and technologies can be used in favor of less represented groups (since they are the ones that endow our culture with its wide diversity; without them we will be a world quite homogeneous and grey). On how to use such instruments –this is the question- there is nothing resolved yet, and will be necessary to design plans and strategies in advance…
On the other hand, digital divides continue to grow and widen. It does not have only to do with the fact that still there are regions in our planet where a computer can not work because there is not electricity supply, or there is not telephone line, or simply there is no money to buy the computer. Mainly it has to do with information illiteracy, with how inappropriate it seems to make use of these elements by a great part of our planet… Other barriers also turn into threats: copyright is a good example.
Once again, these walls can be slowly pulled down. They do not have necessarily to be threats. Maybe they can become opportunities. Nevertheless, up to the present moment, the progress done in such ‘erasing’ has been slow.
More threats? Urban cultures (and information) measuring their strength against the rural ones, and many other ‘cultural battles’: ‘politically correct’ against ‘alternative’, the ‘stronger sex’ against the ‘weaker’, working age people against children and elders, ‘official’ history against ‘non-official’… All these under pressure fragments belong to our identity, they make us be what we are... If they disappeared, one part of us will go with them.
What can a library do? It can offer its space to let all voices sound; to recover, organize and disseminate them. For urban punks and peasants be present equally; for anarchist and official leaflets have the same informative value; for indigenous and western knowledge can be accessed in identical conditions, for different languages from the official be not part of ‘special collections’…
My workshop will deal with these issues and I hope that, with the proposed activities, we be able to recover experiences, opinions and ideas that develop participants’ awareness of the power they have in their hands. I will tell you more about this in following posts… In the mean time I will extend a bit more this one.
I find too many colleagues –and no colleagues- who think that facing up to dominant streams –those that have been presented above as ‘threats’ to diversity and plurality- is nothing less than a ‘utopia’. I really love that word, but I feel tired of listening that any thing attempted against the establishment is a sort of delusion. If we make the decision of throwing in the towel and chose to stand there doing nothing with a challenge opposite, and if we believe that it is not worthy to swing against the tide because it is useless or tiring… then, we will live in a world of destruction and forgetfulness. A world where Bush administration and his allies will continue to lay waste with everything that lie in their path, devastating countries, killing civilians with impunity (because, who will oppose them?); where we will end up speaking a language that is not the language we learnt at home (because ‘everybody speaks it, and it is the best way of communicating with each other’); where we will read, learn and do whatever someone else tell us to do (because ‘that is what is correct’); where to be different from the standard will be as if someone had put a course on us; where to be a woman, a child, an elder, a poor, a black, a Latino, an Arab, a peasant, an indigenous or many more things, will sentence us to survive behind the line (the very same line that separates so many things and so many people)…
If we keep on considering that face those things is ‘impossible’, then, let’s put our arms down and start to run like lambs of a flock, waiting for the time when we had to present our neck to the slaughter man’s knife. The time will come as it happened to many unlucky people before us. Or perhaps we decide to adapt to such ‘non-existence’ that means to become something that we did not chose to be and do not like to be…
On my part, I prefer to believe that a plural world is possible and defend it with what I do. I prefer to stop thinking of ‘utopias’ as dreams and turn them into ‘possibilities’: chances that are worth fighting for, at least if we want them to have the opportunity to come true.
With these ideas in my mind I set out for Mexico. Stay with me: I’ll let you know what is going to come of this and how things work out…
A huge hug from Argentina…

To throw in the towel

2007-11-18T10:46:00.000-03:00

By Sara Plaza

A few days ago I came across the brilliant answer that the Cuban writer Leonardo Padora offered in an interview conducted by the journalist Mauricio Vicent for “El País” newspaper: “If one throws in the towel, s/he can only throw it over his/her head, and that is not an option.” I liked it so much that I was putting the idea the right side out and turning it back in my head for a while, since I had always thought that if at any moment I decided to throw in the towel, I would do it over somebody else’s head, never over mine. So, I spent some time thinking in Padura’s answer and started to understand that maybe the Cuban author was right and, sure enough, when someone throws in the towel, the only thing s/he does is to cover his/her face with it. And of course, this is not an option. How is it going to be an option to hidden? Because, what else would we be doing by covering our face with a towel but stop to see? What else would we hope but try to get others could not see us?
The problem -there is always one- is that we are the worst judge of ourselves and we can not deceive ourselves (neither am I sure whether others are so easily fooled, although some attempts have been more than successful through history). I do not know whether you remember your parents, or to your grandparents, telling you something like “a lie has very short legs” or maybe like “you will catch earlier a liar than a lame person”, when you were children. I heard my parents saying both of them many times and, little by little, I saw for myself how certain they were. However, since in life nothing is what seems to be and almost everything looks like something else, I also learned that lies have subtle ways of stretching their legs, and that liars can move quickly in this reality that so many times invites us to throw in the towel.
But no, a lie is neither an option, nor is it deception; forgetfulness was never an option either and silence won’t be. They are no options because following their footprints we will find nothing but our own defeat. And nobody likes to lose, especially when our life is at stake. I am not saying that to walk those paths is right or wrong, I am only stating that they take you to nowhere. I believe that most of the people choose to tread one of those paths at a certain moment in our life. Human beings are never satisfied with others’ experiences; we want to walk the way, to come up against our own problems a thousand times if necessary, and overcome them as many. That’s why, when we realize that we are going nowhere, that we are stuck (something that is not simple and does not happen so quickly), we go round and round looking for the way out.
We can cover our faces and pretend that there is no exit, but we would be finding one already: to give up. Or we can cool it down with fresh water, blink a few times and look further. The last one seems to me an option and, no doubt, the best way out: to keep on moving. What for? Which reasons? Which proposes? Perhaps we cannot find them at the beginning, but it is convenient to think that there are some valuable ones, that they are there though we cannot see them, and that they are certainly worth the effort. Above all, it is advisable to seek them in the very simple things, in what we most love, what is important for us, what we like, what we can do, what we can manage to learn and, in case we are still in doubt, we can always remember what we don’t love, what is not important for us, what we don’t like, what we don’t know and what we don’t want to learn either. It is not easy, but neither is it too difficult. Love can’t cope with everything, but don’t be mistaken: money does not talk either.
I prefer commitment, willingness, and determination. I certainly go for joy. All of them are good tools in order to try it once more, to not throw in the towel. I am addressing to all those men and women who work to stop reality being as it is, to change what does not work, to redress a number of imbalances, to make distance smaller, to stop different divides getting bigger and bigger; all those men and women who hope to get everybody can find their own place in the world, can say their own words and listen to other’s. I only hope to give you a gently prod with these lines, for every one continues doing their best in such direction. Any time we feel tired, and we are going to be exhausted on many occasions (to swing against the tide is really tiring, however, it does not mean we are wrong), is advisable to sit down for a while, to get our breath back and to keep on working for what we believe is worthy, for whatever we defend. And it is recommended to do so alongside those who believe and defend something similar, though they do not think exactly the same, though on many occasions we do not agree. There is not a single way of doing anything, neither is it clear that a particular manner will be always better than other: let’s allow us not to be true at certain times and to listen to others; let’s give us permission for being wrong and for finding out how others did it right…
It is a great success to have tried it, but it “tastes” much better to continue doing it. And, of course, from time to time, it is important to achieve what we had previously set out. So, if we agree that to throw in the towel is not an option, the best thing to do next, is to use the towel for drying our face after cooling it down, and keep on moving, managing to keep our spirits up, let’s say at the same height we should always place our heart…

“We have to keep our heart up for it never sinks, for it never goes away, and in order not to go to pieces oneself.”

María Zambrano

A library... what for?

2007-11-11T10:18:00.001-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

Many Australian aboriginal communities that live in the Torres Strait Islands, an inlet that separates the great country from (quite unknown and isolated) Papua New Guinea, make themselves this question… This is also an excellent question for librarians to think about, since we use to provide standard answers (drawn upon the book we have read and the theory classes we have attended) and, sometimes, those explanations are not very convincing… even for ourselves.
Through my field work in northern Argentina I have come up against this question, also within indigenous communities, and even in many of the workshops I have taught in Latin America and most of the conferences I have given here and there… The question is repeated in many places and every time I find more and more reasons for thinking it twice (or more times if necessary) before giving an answer.
Through my research work on library services in rural areas and indigenous communities, also through this weblog and through many discussion spaces on library and social issues, I have managed to earn many colleagues’ friendship worldwide. Those people work in very different places, from University teachers and freelance researchers, to State Library Systems managers and colleagues behind a reference desk. Perhaps, for my own nature, I maintain a more fluid relationship with those ones working in rural areas, with very scarce resources and in such situations that almost nobody would love to replace them in their jobs. A handful of them work in the islands named above, and are of aboriginal origin, Melanesian to say it properly. They are called Torres Strait Islanders, and have been subjected to secular persecution by colonizing forces (British, in that part of the planet) and have suffered the pressure of successive Australian governments until recent times, when the so-called “reconciliation acts” attempted to minimize the damage caused and aimed at reaching peace, balance and equity.
From a conciliatory and multicultural perspective, State Libraries, such as the one placed in Queensland State (NE Australia, to which straits islands belong), have proposed policies, strategies and services –very well designed, by the way- directed toward the achievement of offering information access to local aboriginal communities. The State Library of Queensland (SLQ), particularly, has developed an excellent network of Indigenous Knowledge Centers (IKCs), which have been placed within aboriginal communities in order to serve not only as a library but also as a meeting point and cultural house.
Some librarians, working in the IKCs situated in the [remote] islands of the Torres Strait, are some of the colleagues whom I share my ideas and friendship (when the Internet allows us to do it, of course).
The fundamental approach of this Australian proposal is fantastic, and I really want to celebrate the experience. However, behind those good initiatives and wishes, an overwhelming reality appears: the potential users seem to strive to continue being just the same: potential. They do not visit the library. According to initial evaluations, they do not find in it anything that be useful (in spite of the good number of photographs that show them reading and enjoying the warm library atmosphere), and keep on considering it as “whites’ stuff”. From time to time, they make use of the Internet, but the access to this means of communications turns difficult and expensive in those regions, what demonstrates, once more, that the Digital Divide does not only exist between North and South. And people responsible for those units –who are human resources recruited and trained within the community itself- find little support. In fact, one of the most ambitious projects of the SLQ that aimed at providing continuous education suggested sending graduated librarians to those communities for a period of about six months in order to support local staff through training work. Only a dozen of volunteers turned up, and none of them stayed longer than four or six working weeks.
These comments do not try to criticize a library system that I believe, alongside New Zeeland, the best worldwide with regard to indigenous services. They do only attempt to express the need for a serious thought, which allow me to understand why it is so difficult to find a satisfactory answer, when it comes to the question so many times raised by those I have encountered in my way over the last years, specially when I speak about rural, indigenous or disadvantaged populations (of which Latin America has a good number of examples).
“A library... What for?”.
“For reading, for finding information, for gaining knowledge, culture, for learning about yourselves and about the world” I answer.
“The information that is placed in those bookshelves or on the Internet does nothing to do with us; neither is it in our language, nor helps us with anything. So, a library... What for?”
“For supporting children schooling, for maintaining your own culture in a bilingual way, for promoting interculturality” I answer.
“In the school and in the library, our children face acculturation and constant pressure, as it happens to us in the streets and in our working places. Multiculturality is a tale: it has high quantities of dominant culture plus a light touch of minorities’ culture in order to be ‘politically correct’. And, anyway, we and our culture are not represented in books or on the Internet. At least, we are not well represented. So, a library… What for?”
“For promoting literacy campaigns, for learning how to read and write...” I keep on trying.
“And who is going to teach us how to read and write? Librarians, who hardly manages to deal with other tasks? Volunteers, who come and leave as quickly as they can, as if we stink out or pass on poverty? And… about teaching us, are they going to teach me the language of the country, mine, both or none of them? The library has not taught us anything. So, a library… What for?”
“For having a good time?” I try timidly.
This last attempt of answer pays me back with a smile, a sad smile, perhaps ironic in a way: nothing else and nothing less.
I end up feeling very tired of so many reasons, which I know that are true, though I must also acknowledge that they can hardly be certain every time and everywhere. Regretfully enough, those examples of libraries that work out in spite of the “complex” populations they give services to are a few ones.
In the meanwhile, in my inbox, I receive a lot of emails from friends and colleagues who, maybe without attempting to, help me to understand that the reason for my impossibility of finding an appropriate answer to such a difficult question can be in the disconnection existing between the official and theoretical library on the one side, and the real users on the other. In those emails I read about virtual libraries, which have been scheduled for populations that can not read or do not have electricity; books sent to aboriginal communities that are written by no-aboriginal for no-aboriginal persons; librarians who do not know the features of the community they are going to serve through the library activities and who, with their attitudes, perpetuate discrimination and exclusion; tale hours during which only are read Perrault’s classical tales and the self traditional stories are set aside…
There is a dreadful disconnection between the theoretical / official ideas and projects, and reality. And it is clear to me that reality continues turning down proposals that sound strange to it and do not respond to what it is searching for. That is way people worldwide keep on raising the very same question I am dogged by.
“A library… What for?”
It will be necessary to find a convincing and realistic answer soon, although a great deal will be demanded of us on this issue: breaking our obsolete mental and professional structures and building new ones. At least, I believe that such step has to be taken if we want to achieve the success that would deserve our efforts and proposals

Uses and abuses in the name of the language

2007-11-04T11:06:00.000-03:00

By Sara Plaza

“It is badly expressed”, “you can not say it that way”, “this is not Castilian”... these are a few ways in which a good number of teachers sanction (for it does not seem to me that this is the way in which someone “corrects” anything) the manner through which their students make questions, give answers, try to explain themselves, intend to tell something, give examples, make any comments… I listened to them when I was a child, while I went to primary school in my little village; I repeated them when I was in my teens in order to criticize the spoken language of my parents; I suffered them when I was a young woman in my twenties and, being with some friends of mine who have grown up in the city, they laughed at my “vulgar”, “from the country” way of speaking.
Because no matter how much my elementary and high schools teachers did penalized the linguistic marks that featured the spoken language of my community, my family and myself, I have never been able to get rid of them completely and, in many moments of my daily life, when I am in a relaxed atmosphere and take part in casual conversations, they are part of my way of saying, telling, thinking, interpreting… Precisely because of this, for they are the marks where on I first rested in order to communicate with my parents, with my grandparents, with my schoolmates, and with the shopkeepers of my village.
If I do not concern myself about it, I mean, if I am not much aware of this fact, those marks slip through my formal writing, my explanations, my most elaborated opinions. So, I spend most of the time with a dictionary in my hands and I always doubt about the correct form of saying this or that… This makes me feel a bit sad and quite disappointed, much to my regret: not because I have to use the dictionary all the time, that is a very good exercise, but considering what makes me I feel much sorry: the fact that through the education I received in the classroom I only learnt that some of the things that I said (and the way I said them) were right and some others were definitely wrong. In the class, neither there was space, time or opportunity to find anything out about the different linguistic varieties that exist of any language, nor to understand that all of them are valid, valuable and necessary, and that its true extent of rightness will depend on the moment and the situation; on what we are trying to say and whom we are talking to; on the circumstances, on the purpose… We can continue and make this list longer, however, the idea is always the same: there is not one unique, right and true manner of speaking in our language, but a wonderful diversity of different ways of communication through it.
Concerning my own linguistic marks, and the good number of smiles that they are drawn on my interlocutors’ face through the years, I must make it clear that the pass of the time has smoothed the bitterness of the sort of grimace that I discovered in the lips of my urban friends when I was younger, and has let my eyes find others much more beautiful in Edgardo’s mouth. Now, it is wonderful to see his sheer joy in the curve of his lips, when I let slip a saying of my land, and I should admit with absolute delight, that I have also come across very funny smiles on many elders’ faces, who recognize in my marks the linguistic variety of that Castilla (Castile) named “la Vieja” (the old)… Undoubtedly, it has been the joyfulness of all of them what has allowed me to value my identity (and not only the linguistic one), what has made me turn my face and look back with a lot of tender love, and even with certain pride, to the place where I was born and to my childhood in a rural area.
In addition, as time has passed, I have been more and more conscious that the goings and comings between my village and the city during my teens and my twenties, allow me now to move freely from one place to another and to “get on” quite well with both contexts. Fortunately, in the last few years, I have increased this ability to establish a constructive dialogue between different (sometimes even opposite) realities thanks to having lived in more than one country. I know how lucky I am of having let my eyes become able to see different sunrises; of having listening to the grass rustling under my feet, some times making an army of crickets fell silent, and awaking a handful of toads bigger than my hand others; of having turn my palms red after clapping in delight to show how much I had enjoyed the music of those many instruments that I was not able to name when I first met them…
It is not strange that being far away –and I do not only refer to the amount of space between two places- we understand better the value of what had been close to us up to that moment. Sooner than later, the life is in charge of making us know about this fact. However, I believe that it is a shame that school does not teach it to us much earlier. I consider that it is highly regrettable that such institution continues to deny –still on too many occasions- our identity and keeps on sanctioning our way of speaking, penalizing those linguistic marks that distance any variety of a language from the standard. .
I thought about all these things a few days ago, while I was reading “Hacia una educación intercultural en el aula” [1] (Towards an intercultural education in the classroom) publisthed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Argentina. On several occasions I turned back the page I read the lines written in the chapter number four by a teacher named María Mercedes Sosa. I would like to finish with her thoughts, since I have found in them all that I would have been delighted to discover a long, long time ago…

… It is true that school is the place where the teaching of the standard language should take place, since its knowledge will allow students to become involved in situations that may require formality. Nevertheless, to attain this goal does not mean to consider unworthy or devaluate the dialect of our children; to intend to achieve this aim does nothing to do with “erase” from the child the linguistic marks that feature his/her place of origin: of birth, of age, of social class, of sense of belonging.
To reject their variety, is the same as rejecting their identity. The mother tongue, the language that the child first heard from his/her parents, from his/her grandparents, from his/her elder brothers and sisters, from his/her community, is used as a communication and emotion tool. Through it, the child learnt to build his/her world. The word “mother” linked him/her to the world; the popular song, the prayers, the chants, the stories, the jokes, the silences, made him/her gradually become a human being and connected him/her with the community.
Then, what should we do? Basically we have to show respect for our children and for ourselves, assume that teachers also have a social and cultural background and, because of it, we have linguistic marks as well. […]
Teaching language is not the same as teaching how to speak; the child already knows how to do it when s/he arrives at the school. Teaching language is not the same as giving mechanical and functional rules; teaching language is to contribute towards the language development, to help creativity; is to make available to the child all the possibilities that the language offers in order to communicate with each other in different situations.
Teaching language should not show a red card all the time: if we do this, nobody will want to play –in this case to express him/herself- for fear of being wrong.

[1] Lasala, M. y Sosa, M. M. “Hacia una educación intercultural en el aula”. Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Educación, Ciencia y Tecnología, 2006.

La revo kiu neniam povis realig’i

2007-10-28T10:37:00.000-03:00

(A dream that never came true)

By Edgardo Civallero

Translated by Sara Plaza

Esperanto. It means “the hopeful”. Even if I prefer an alternative translation:
“In the hope of...”.
This is the idea after which the artificial language was named. It came to birth with the aim of becoming a universal code that allowed human beings to communicate with each other beyond political barriers, mother tongues, and the different races and religions that exist in the world.
Such a kind fate –and the dream that formed the basis for it- never happened, though.
I learnt Esperanto many years ago when I was in my teens. It had been a proposal considered by Spanish and Italian anarchists along the track of their comings and goings, and maybe that was the reason for my interest. However, it might also have had something to do with my liking for languages since I was a child. I remember that I got a small Sopena [1] dictionary –which I still have, threadbare but proud, in my library- and in one morning I learnt the grammar. No, it is not a tale of any heroic deed: what happens is that Esperanto was designed –like any other good artificial language- with a very simple structure, which can be summarized in 16 basic rules. Once you know the grammar rules, the only thing to be done is to start learning the vocabulary. That is the most complex part of the language, but it is not worse than in any other one.
The simplicity of Esperanto can be exemplified by writing down a few grammar points. For example, all the names end in “o”, the adjectives in “a”, the verbs in “i” and the adverbs in “e”. This fact, which seems too simple, endows Esperanto with an amazing richness. Knowing the root of any word, let’s say “hom-“ for example, we can create “homo” (human being), “homa” (human), “home” (humanly) and even “homi” that has not a translation in English but would express the idea of “being human”. Thanks to this feature a lot of terms can be created that do not exist in any Indo-European language, and, in a very simple way, can also be explained concepts that would imply many words and very complex constructions in our languages.
On the other way, the vocabulary is clear and concise: the best dictionaries do not have more than 10.000 roots, and from each root, as it was mentioned above, different type of words can be created. In addition, the creator of Esperanto added 40 prefixes and suffixes –whose number is always increasing, even though some of them are not officially accepted- that allows you to compose new words by deriving them from the root. In that way, from the root “bibliotek-” I can obtain “biblioteko” (library), “bibliotekisto” (librarian), “bibliotekistestro” (chief of librarians - male) and “bibliotekistestrino” (chief of librarians - female). And from this last term I can also build the adverb “bibliotekistestrine” (in the chief of librarians (female) manner) and even a verb and an adjective, though they might not have any sense in our language. As any one can notice after reading the examples given in the previous lines, from each root a minimum number of 20 or 30 words can be derived…
Pronunciation is quite simple as well: it has sounds that do not exist in English but they can be found in others Indo-European languages (e.g. French), what should make it not very difficult for us to try them. The good news is that any letter has only a sound, which stays always the same and does not change under any circumstance, a feature that is not easily found in many natural languages.
Once I had learnt the language, I read a lot in it because I was lucky to study it when the world enjoyed a sort of Esperanto “revival”. At that time I had access to many texts and books, and much later the Internet allowed me to find even more. I found absolutely beautiful words, explaining ideas that were impossible to say in Spanish without building a very long and too complex sentence. Esperanto is an intense, expressive and wonderful language, and to use it properly demands a kind of endowment, a sort of artistic ability which refers to creativity and a strong desire to communicate with others…
Esperanto was invented by Dr. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof (1859-1917), of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, who was an ophthalmologist and philologist born in the present Polish territory under the Russian dominion. He concluded his work in 1878, but only was able to publish it in 1887, in Warsaw, with the title “International Language” under a pseudonym: “Doktoro Esperanto” (hopeful Doctor), after which the language was named in the end.
Zamenhof invented Esperanto combining roots and grammars from different Latin languages (Spanish, French, Italian…), Saxon (German, English, Scandinavian languages…) and Slavic (Polish, Russian…). He also used terms from Greek and Latin. Esperanto is, therefore, a mosaic. It is a language that has a very detailed vocabulary, which avoids homonymous as far as possible: so dream (a series of images, events and feelings that happen in our mind when we are asleep) is said “song’o”, but dream (a wish to have or be) is said “revo”. And the same happens with the many different verbs, with animals, with the diverse tones of colors, with flowers…
Zamenhof’s intention was to create a universal language (an aim also pursued by Volapuk and other artificial languages later on) as a means of international communication that contributed to peoples understanding of each other. His personal life and the dark times through which it went by were the frame and the basis that led him towards the invention of Esperanto. The scope of this project was such that in 1954, the UN, in response to 19 million signatures, recommended all member countries to teach and use the language. The library of the “Brita Esperantsta Asocio” (British Esperanto Association) had, in the 60s, over 30.000 volumes, and a great deal of literary works, essays and journals were translated into Esperanto, as well as books of Science, Technique, Policy and Philosophy. Many clubs and regional and national associations were created, and a good number of conferences (around 700) were celebrated in order to exchange culture and experiences among people interested in the language and with a good knowledge of it. Millions of letters marked with a green star (the symbol of Esperanto) crossed the seas at that time and allowed many people to communicate in this gorgeous language with others far away.
To learn Esperanto did not consist only in knowing a new language. It meant, more than anything else, be part of a dream, of a philosophy, of a hope. The speakers of that language were, all of us, “people in the hope of something”. We believed in the possibility of a world of equals, where, as a first step, we would communicate with each other in a universal code, avoiding the dominion of one natural language over the others.
Nevertheless, the dream had one objection. Zamenhof did not have invented exactly a “universal” language: he had created a pan-European language, if it can be explained that way, a language that had quite an easy pronunciation and sounded familiar to European ears, but was extremely difficult for speakers from other parts of the world. For an Arab, Chinese or Quechua speaker, to learn Esperanto was even more difficult than study English, and to put things worse, English was not only more useful, but it was widely spread and was more “important”…
As time passed, Esperanto was slowly forgotten. It felt silent when the voices of their speakers faded into a whisper and the dream of its creator withered like a flower.
It may be spoken yet and continue to be a number of Esperanto thought: national and international associations have not disappeared. However, this number is neither high nor enough.
Few libraries have books written in Esperanto, and there are even less librarians who know the language, its background, the philosophy behind… There are almost not libraries specialized in the language and the handful of them that I know are placed in Europe. There is still a number of people that keep on writing letters (or e-mails) and marking them with the well-known green star, which was (and continues to be, I suppose) synonymous with peace, solidarity, nearness…and hope: the sort of hope held by Zamenhof (when invented it) and his followers (when decided to use it) that would help us to create a new world, based on tolerance and mutual understanding.
The philologist developed a tool that would make it possible the world he wanted very much to get. However, the real world decided to walk in a different direction.
At the present, if we want to be understood by a foreigner, we end up speaking a language that has nothing to do with ourselves. We end up searching the web, whose 80 % of information is written in English. We end up spoiling our own languages with terms that are not connected with our cultures. When I see this, I feel full of sadness and cannot avoid thinking that perhaps the dream should not have died. I also think that a library in a language shared by everybody –in addition to the titles in our own one- rich and easy to learn, would have allowed us to know each other deeper and to learn more and better from each other.
If you have doubts about what has been said in the previous paragraph, you only have to consider the great number of books that we cannot read because they are written in dozens of empowered languages that we cannot dream of learning; you may also take into account all those colleagues and friends we cannot speak to for the same reason; you can even think in all the valuable information that remains out of our hands on the basis of such circumstance…
The person that is writing to you still revises, from time to time, the couple of Esperanto books that has in his library. He wants to believe that someday the dream will grow and mature again: maybe in a different way, perhaps with other words and new rules, but he awaits that it flourishes with the same intentions and hopes behind.

De la plene floranta urbo de Kordobo, mi sendas vi miajn pli bonajn deziraj’ojn, kun tiuj vortoj kiu mi ankorau’ rememoras, malgrau’ la forgesaj’o kiu falis sur ili.

(From the heavily populated, with hundreds and hundreds of flowers, city of Córdoba, I send to you my best wishes through these words that I still manage to remember, in spite of the cloak of forgetfulness that has covered them).

[1] Spanish publisher

Sorry about my love for literature...

2007-10-21T17:39:00.000-03:00

By Sara Plaza

I do not really feel ashamed of my reading passion; however, I do feel certain degree of remorse when the pages of a novel trap me and I can not break free from their hug. I spend days and nights embarked on somebody else’s boat, like a stow-away in the belly of a ship that an author headed for the open sea and takes me in its bowels toward waters deeper and deeper… I love books, stories and the life that slips through the paragraphs of a novel when its characters unweave it before my eyes.
I have got the last novel of Almudena Grandes [1], “El corazón helado” (The frozen heart), which makes me think, once and again, of a sentence that I came across when I was reading page number 409 or 410 “(…) the astonishment that consolidates itself becomes a skin much more astonishing, and the only miracles that are worthy are the ones that can be repeated”. So many times a book has amazed me, so many times literature has seemed to me a miracle, that I am sure of having touched the skin that Grandes mentioned, in many occasions. I am almost sure of having also carved it with a smile, with a bunch of tears, with a good number of silences and with more than one comment. I have been able to feel it under my feet and in my hands many times and it is worthy, of course it is…
A bit further on, the author reminded me of a wonderful picture of Degas, which poster I got in the Tate Gallery of London when I still was a secondary student, and fastened it to my bedroom wall with four drawing pins. It was called “After the bath” and showed a woman beside a bath, wrapped in a towel, with her naked back and shoulders, who was drying her long hair. While I kept on reading I asked myself whether or not Almudena Grandes would had had the same picture in her home, since her lines took me back to my sixteen years of age with a extraordinary easiness and I saw exactly that: “(…) a young woman was washing her hair, and a shell, hard, dry and aware of its own clumsiness, fell noiseless onto the floor, useless in before the power of those naked arms, armed only with their nakedness”. And, once more, I fell completely in love with her writing, because of everything, with everything and having nothing to stop it.
It happens to me every time I take one of her books in my hands; however, on this occasion reading “The frozen heart” it is taking place in a very special manner and in a different way as well. Their pages hurt, hurt a lot. Inside them the writer does not only tells about a war, The Spanish Civil War that broke out in 1936 and finished in 1939 (although, like any other war, was hatched up in advance and lasted longer); she also shares a good number of stories which make up “only a Spanish story, one of those that spoils everything”. And one starts to understand, as the characters do, that after that war the man or the woman who went back to Spain “had not arrived at a pacified country, but at a captive one, an occupied country where there were not winners any more, but masters”.
And one also understands better the joke that was published by the cartoonist Máximo, a few days ago, in EL PAÍS journal. He wrote in a small piece of paper a sort of announcement by the Abbreviated Historiography General Direction where anyone can read the following four points:

1. La guerra ha terminado. (The war has finished)
2. La posguerra, casi (aunque) (The postwar, almost (but))
3. La transición, bien, gracias. (The transition, well, thank you)
4. La memoria, Dios dirá. (The memory, God will say it)

It would make me laugh if it did not bring so much shame on all of us. A very deep and bitter shame that spreads not only around Spain but also through the world, which tears to bits entire continents because “there are strange moments in life, moments when everything is forgotten, everything that has always been known, everything that should never have been forgotten” as one of the main characters of the book remembers us.
When I wrote before that the novel hurts and hurts a lot, and maybe it hurts me more because those 900 pages are, in fact, another page of the many that make up the history of the country that saw me to be born and grow, the country where my grandparents and my parents were also born and grew; where the former had to fight and that was inherited by the latter. Of which country their children and grandchildren will be simple and forgetful offspring [2], unless we do something to change the current state of things. Where do we think that we will arrive if we ignore the place where on we are? Where did our predecessors set out from? How further did they go?
In another sentence of the book that I am talking about, another character refers to his grandmother, a socialist teacher during the II Republic, as the woman “who plucked up enough courage to write that, even though she thought to be doing what was correct and did it for love, she might had been wrong anyway. I believe that this is a good reason for defending a country against fascism, for fighting in favor of its women, of the education offered by the “Institución Libre de Enseñanza”, ILE (Free Institution of Teaching) as well as in favor of the children of the former and the students of the latter.
Here I would like to make a marginal comment, and mention the fact that during the Civil War, many schools were shot and yet nobody knows how many teachers were assassinated. So the secondary school teacher Iñaki Pinedo, and the journalist Daniel Álvarez, have named their documentary “La escuela fusilada” (The Fussillated School). It was shown in Madrid a few days ago after being presented in a number of Spanish cities. The film has got each prize in the film festivals of Aguilar de Campoo and Cantabria and it is expected to take part in the Bogotá film festival. An excellent piece of news, without doubt, which takes me back to the last quote that Almudena Grandes has included in her novel:

... para los estrategas, para los políticos, para los historiadores, todo está claro: hemos perdido la guerra. Pero humanamente, no estoy tan seguro... Quizás la hemos ganado.

Antonio Machado [3]
(December, 1938)

... for strategists, for politicians, for historians, everything is clear: we have lost the war. Humanly speaking, however, I am not so sure... Maybe we have won it.

And before ending this post I would like to point out a discrepancy –that maybe is not such- between the author and me. Although in many occasions we can feel as “a satisfied subject of the slow and demanding tyranny of the slowness that governs the time in the libraries”, I believe that the literature we can find in them will always make us freer, and will turn us into the true heroes of their bookshelves

[1] She was born in Madrid in 1960. Author of the novels Las edades de Lulú (Lulú ages, which was awarded with the XI “La Sonrisa Vertical” prize), Te llamaré Viernes (I will call you Friday), Malena es un nombre de tango (Malena is a “tango” name), Atlas de geografía humana (Atlas of human geography), Los aires difíciles (Difficult winds) y Castillos de cartón (Cardboard castles). She has also written a fantastic compilation of articles, Mercado de Barceló (Barceló Market), and two books of tales, Modelos de mujer y Estaciones de paso (Woman models and Passing stations).
[2] Almudena Grandes quotes at the beginning of her book the following words of José Ortega y Gasset: “Lo que diferencia al hombre del animal es que el hombre es un heredero y no un mero descendiente” (What makes the difference between a human being and an animal is the fact that the human being is an inheritor not the mere offspring)
[3] The writer to whom the author says thank you, por todo y por el título (for everything and for the title) in her last words at the end of the book.

Publishing a book is one big adventure

2007-10-11T17:28:00.000-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translation by Sara Plaza

Let’s see if the following words remind you of something... We sit down in front of the papers, the keyboard, -or the typewriter, since still there are many who maintain such a healthy custom- and begin to write all the words that we have been building through several months (or years) of experiencing, researching, seeking, discovering and failing. All those many words we have been looking for, chewing, digesting and thinking out inside us before being able to tell them to somebody else.
We all know that any researching process is hard and hazardous, even for the most accustomed and best prepared professional. Sometimes it leads to walk in circles, to get lost among one’s own and somebody else’s doubts, to get disillusioned, to spend days and weeks reading and noting down, and to steal hours from our work, sleep and family time. Writing in order to be able to show the result of our research –the final step of this process- means, for the researcher / writer, to put into words everything we have learnt and found. Anyway, we do not have to forget that those who decide to write are not only researchers: novelists, poets, essayists, teachers and any one who has something to tell ends in front of a piece of paper developing their talent as writers. For all of them it was also necessary –I would say even “vital”- the process of searching (the words) and maturing (ideas and feelings) with all the problems and risks connected.
Then we begin to write. And nobody –not even oneself- knows how much time this task will demand. To put into words what our thought dictates is one of the biggest challenges for any human being, a process through which we have to take off the accessory clothes of what we think and turn it into word, into written word in fact, into orthography and grammar. I believe Socrates was the one who said that when we turn what we think into word we lose almost everything, and when we pass from the spoken word into the written one we lose much more. Only the greatest ones in the art of writing know how to counteract (wonderfully, by the way) the effects of what seems to be a universal law.
Let’s presume that the process of writing –with its high dose of emotion, effort, scarify, tiredness and unpleasantness- has already finished. We have the manuscript in our hands, the resulting product of our work… Congratulations! At that very moment we have to answer the big question:
“And now, what am I going to do with this?”
In order to be read –the aim pursued by the majority of those who have decide to write- it is necessary to multiply our manuscript by ten, hundred or thousand, and put it in our readers’ hands. Being aware of the business that those following steps might represent, publishers took a step forward in the direction of their own benefit.
No, I am not going to criticize publishers in these lines. Business is business, and this is one of the many that “inhabits” our world (less condemnable than others such as health, education or rights). What I am intended here is to describe, in short, the adventure of getting your book to be published.
The very fist step: find out a number of publishers. There are international, national, regional and local publishers; they can be bigger or smaller, famous or unknown… There is a wide range of possibilities so it is important to have the ability to make a sensible decision after carefully considering all them.
Let’s say that we are looking for a publisher that publishes LIS texts (I am so sorry, this is “professional deformation”): the spectrum reduces drastically. There are not so many and nor very well-known. Their lines of business –more or less specific- are collections and books about librarianship, documentation and information sciences.
After seeking and finding them –with names and surnames- we have to review their proposals, their collections, the titles they have published, which should be announced in their catalogues (usually on line). And now it is time for a second judgment: Does any of them publish books on the subject of our work? If none of them do it, welcome to the club of those who keep our manuscripts in a drawer! However, if any of them deals with our topic, we will have to propose the text for its edition, telling to the publisher about our work and also about us. This last point is very important: both in sciences and in literature, it can be said that on many occasions it sells more the name than the content. Once more we have to remember that this is business and “nobodies”, despite the quality of their production, sometimes do not sell…
The publisher may give us different answers. For a start, they can ask us for the original in order to have a look at it; they can also refuse our offer… or they can say to us that they do not publish anything concerning the matter (despite the fact that our topic appears in their catalogue), which, far from being a contradiction, is a simple and quite diplomatic way of telling “we are not interested in you nor in your production”.
However, if they accept the original for its examination –by a stroke of fortune- we send it to them, always thinking and remembering (this is the case of the suspicious authors like me) that there are some examples of publishers, which decided to go on publishing very interesting texts with other name, forgetting the true author’s, who, by the way, did not have his work protected by copyright… Sometimes, it might happen that in addition to request the original, publishers want to know our opinion about the market for our book, and they might also question us on the reason they should publish it for (this is to get their work done by someone else).
Anyway, a few weeks or a couple of months later (it all depends) you receive their assessment of your book. If they reject it, we can try with another publisher, and if there are not more options… again, welcome to the club of those who keep our manuscripts in a drawer!
On the contrary, if they decide to accept our work, they will send a contract to us. The terms of this document may be very different depending on the publisher, and once more, we do not have to forget that this is business. Generally speaking, the publisher holds the copyright on the author’s work: s/he has to make it over to the publisher for a period of time. If the author wants to do something with her/his own text after having signed that contract, s/he has to ask for their permission to use it or any part of it (and publishers may give it or not). In addition, the publisher establishes the number of copies that they will publish (which use to be limited to 200 or 400 in the case of LIS texts) and the quality of those copies (in general the most economic, that it to say, the one that cost less to the publisher in terms of paper, ink and binding)
And finally, the bonus has to be decided also in advance: how much money the author will receive after publishing her/his book. Broadly speaking, the percentage is over the 10 % of the selling price (at least in my own experience, but this amount may be different as well). This point can be illustrated with an example: after two or three years doing research and writing a book on the results got from it, I send the original to any publisher that wants to publish it. They print over 200 copies (very simple ones) that will be sold, let’s say, for 10 U$S each. I will receive 200 dollars, while they will have earned 1800.
We have to admit that both novel researchers and writers –the ones who make such low number of copies- do not seek a healthy profit on what we write. We would like to be read. After months and months moving from one publisher to another, being badly affected by their unpleasant comments, lies, silences, tricks and so on, one ends up asking him/herself if the fact of seeing your book printed onto paper is worth so much effort when there are a few more options that we can choose in order to be read.
One of them is called POD, Print on Demand. It consists of companies that print a small number of copies of your book at a very reasonable price, according to the author’s interests. The books are not of very high quality but… sometimes, neither is good the product of the big publishers. The author (sometimes the publisher itself) has to request the ISBN (a very simple step) and get the copyright for her/his work, and once the copies are ready (the minimum number of copies is about 30), s/he can present the book personally in libraries, bookstores, meetings or conferences.
The other is the e-book, in whose elaboration there is a number of enterprises working nowadays (one of them is Wayrachaki editora, in Spanish by the moment). For many people, an e-book is a book that does not exist. Nevertheless, it is one of the most versatile forms of spreading knowledge. In this case the author does not pay for the printing but for the design. S/he requests the ISBN, gets the copyright and then is able to do with her/his book whatever s/he wants (since s/he never hands her/his copyright over anybody else, neither the publisher): to spread it on the Internet, self-archive in Open Access portals, upload it to different websites, send it, store it in virtual libraries, sell it or even print it on demand. And those readers who want to have it printed onto paper, can download, print and use it (being always respectful of the conditions imposed by the author on her/his rights). In the case that the author wants to sell the book, all the profits made on the deal will be for her/him (though we should admit that try to sell our own work is not that easy).
Will the publishers disappear? No, I do not think so. We all enjoy and take advantage (intellectually, I mean) of their work. However, it is probably that we, authors whose material is not exactly “profitable” or “likely to be sold”, begin to explore new possibilities, consider different spaces and open doors never knocked before. And I believe that it is necessary that something of the sort happens. Because if things continue to be as they are at the present, we will continue to read only what is business. That’s all. In my opinion that will be really worrying.
Best wishes from behind this keyboard, where I have not got tired of writing yet. Outside, behind the window and the smoke of my pipe, the world blooms in spring….

A plurality of opinions: between doubt and contradiction

2007-10-07T12:34:00.000-03:00

By Sara Plaza

I must confess that I have read a lot of journals lately, newspapers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (I should admit, however, that nostalgia tied me up alongside the pages of an old quay [1] most of the times), and pieces of news from all the shores of the world. I have put my foot on the five continents at the hands (though I should say the fountain pen) of journalists who showed me the hazardous paths through which they have trodden before. I have seen peoples of different class and conditions with similar problems, here, there and in all the “corners” of our spherical planet. I have found diverse opinions about the same topic and they raised a huge number of doubts about the matter that was being dealt. I have discovered a great deal of controversial lines under the same headline, which would have also added new unknown quantities to the confusion state that I just mentioned above, which was increasing as days kept on going… When I got fond of reading newspapers –during my years at the Faculty-, I told myself that I read for knowing more; a few years later, I can say that I know almost nothing about what I first believed to know.
Which, I think it is not that bad, since my ignorance increases my curiosity and makes me keep on reading… Nevertheless, I do not believe that reading the daily news leads me to understand what is written by those who affirm to know what is happening. The same as Fernando Savater said in an interview, I “understand those who do not understand” [2]. The Spanish philosopher stated in those lines that “I am closer to those who are ignorant because of my own ignorance.” And he added: “most of the manuals are very boring because those who write them believe that there is an obligation to read them.” I do not know if this will be the case of the newspapers that, in some way, make us feel under any obligation to read them in order to be informed. And when I write “to be informed” I want to say exactly that: to be informed; since I would not want my words to suggest to the readers that it is the same as knowing about something, not even as feeling certain about the truth of the matter; I simply wish to point out that by reading what is written in the journals one can be, more or less, aware of what is said to be happening.
However, it is necessary to be able to understand certain linguistic register. Here I would not be only talking about a more formal or less formal style -even vulgar sometimes-, inside the standard way of writing, but also about the double-edged comments and what anyone can –and should- read between the lines to discover a meaning that is not openly stated… Regarding the differences in the writing style (that in many occasions become almost idiomatic differences), the writer Juan Goytisolo exposed a number of very interesting considerations in the article called “La fractura lingüística del Magreb” [3] (The linguistic break in Magreb). The author made a comparison between the current uses of the classical Arab (which is used in religious contexts, parliamentary assemblies, official ceremonies, almost the majority of the written literature, etc.) and the popular language that shares the people from Morocco and Algeria, the darixa, “named condescendingly, by the doctors and the ‘living forces’, dialectal or colloquial Arab, not to say ‘vulgar’”. For Goytisolo, that popular language, far from being “coarse”, had surprised him by its “constant creativity” since, without forgetting its origin, the classical Arab, it has continually included voices from other languages. However, the author indicated that “the disparity between the formal and the spoken languages affects all the social, political and cultural life orders”. Despite this statement, he permitted himself to be optimistic and concluded that “given the fact that the Maghrebian identity is multiple and mutant –as it happens with all the identities, no matter what constitutions and official texts say-, the darixa and the Berber common to the Atlas and the Cabilia will grow roots, sooner than later, in the field of knowledge and culture, how ever strong the resistance offered by the learned and the factitious powers might be”.
The writer did not focused his article upon the desirable use –on the part of the media- of the language spoken by over the 99 % of the Maghrebian population, but he did mention them when reminded us of the prosecution against Ahmed Benschemi, the editor of the journals Nichan and Tel Que. Benschemi had published in the former an open letter to the king Mohamed VI in the language darixa instead of doing so in classical Arab. There is no doubt at all that languages and their different uses (and abuses) are a worry for many media. Another example that I have found surfing the newspapers during the last few weeks will illustrate this. In a sketch entitled “Lenguas contra personas” [4] (Languages against people) it was stated that: “the language white-collar workers’ passion for regulating so strictly what people speak makes a complete nonsense of it”. Those words were written about the Cristina Peri Rossi dismissal from Catalunya Ràdio (Catalonia Radio) program. She is a Uruguayan writer settled in Barcelona more than three decades ago, and this was her second period participating in the program. Peri Rossi was dismissed from her job for speaking in Spanish. “(…) Vocational censors might have thought that it would damage the rights of the Catalan language, and have decided to damage the labor rights of the writer instead”. A number of pages ahead this note (that shows the linguistic fervor of some people) is amplified under the headline “La CCRTV [5] endurece el uso del catalán en los medios públicos” [6] (CCRTV hardens the use of Catalan in the public media). In my opinion, this official position, as it was assessed in the sketch mentioned, “contradicts the argument that in the social reality there is no problem, since there is an spontaneous linguistic co-occurrence, which allows all the civilians to participate in the public life whatever their communication language might be”.
When at the beginning of these lines I wrote that I had found a lot of contradictions through my readings, the following one might turn to be another good example of it. Esteban Beltrán [7] affirmed in his article “Voltios sin control” [8] (Out-of-control voltage): “in the USA, the Taser-like guns are used with too much frequency in situations that the use of lethal force is not justified (...) the recent images of the student who was tased by security agents on the seventeenth of September, in the middle of Senator John Kerry conference, at the University of Florida, are an example of it. He was neither a dangerous delinquent, nor wanted to attempt against the Senator. A current of 50.000 volts passed through him because he was very insistent on making a question.” Curiously, when I turned the page I discovered by chance a letter to the editor entitled “La verdadera libertad de expression” (The true freedom of expression), where the author explains, in relation with the recent celebration of the UN General Assembly in New York, that: “it has been an incomparable spectacle to see how the media and the students [in the States] have interrogated the Iranian President in a number of occasions, while in his country this is simply impossible”.
I guess that things can always be worse... And it is to this fear that Fernando Savater referred when, under the title “Del dicho al hecho” [9] (Actions speak louder than words), he talked about the big political parties: “they know that the majority of the population have to choose between a party that they do not like and another that they hate, and each provost is awaiting for his party to be the one that they only do not like.” I have been reading this philosopher for years and cannot stop wondering at the clarity in his explanations. With respect to the new and polemical subject in the Spanish school curriculum, “Educación para la ciudadanía” (“Education for Citizenship”, which has already been adopted by 22 countries in the European Community and it is called “Civic Education” in Argentina), the author stated in the same text that “it has been proven that there are still citizens who consider an inadmissible abuse the explicit and reasoned establishment of a series of common civic values, which do not depend on the moral of each one, but on the ethics of living together in equality. Laicism consists precisely in this, and it is as indispensable in democracy as it is the universal suffrage.” Among those citizens that Savater mentioned, might be the spokesman of the Spanish bishops, Juan Antonio Martínez Camino. He declared, in the article entitled “Los obispos reprenden a los colegios católicos por la asignatura de Ciudadanía” [10] (Bishops reprimand Catholic schools for the subject of Citizenship), that neither the Government, nor the Court, although they are democratic, have the right to meddle in “the education of the consciousnesses”.
I definitely consider that reading the newspaper, if you do it with a bit of humor, may offer you a good number of surprises, in addition to many doubts and numerous contradictions as the examples shown in this page. I am not going to deny that I use to laugh less than I would like to when I have a journal in my hands; however, I make an effort to allow news to provoke in me such a healthy effect that is laugh, if we have to believe the words of Juan Goytisolo when he affirms that “(laugh) has always signaled the direction that all the peoples wishing to gain their freedom and their progress try to follow, whatever obstacles they have to overcome in their way.” [11]

[1] Through these lines I will mention a number of different articles published in the international edition of EL PAÍS at the end of September 2007.
[2] From the article “Entiendo a los que no entienden” (I understand to those who do not understand), in the international edition of EL PAÍS, Friday 21st, 2007, in the “Cultura” (Culture) section.
[3] In the international edition of EL PAÍS, Monday 24th, 2007, in the “Opinión” (Opinion) section.
[4] In the international edition of EL PAÍS, Friday 28th, 2007, in the “Opinión” (Opinion) section.
[5] Corporación Catalana de Radio y Televisión (Radio and Television Corporation of Catalonia).
[6] In the international edition of EL PAÍS, Friday 28th, 2007, in the “Sociedad” (Society) section.
[7] Director of Amnesty Internacional Spain.
[8] In the international edition of EL PAÍS, Friday 28th, 2007, in the “Opinión” (Opinion) section.
[9] In the international edition of EL PAÍS, Friday 28th, 2007, in the “Opinión” (Opinion) section.
[10] In the international edition of EL PAÍS, Friday 28th, 2007, in the “Sociedad” (Society) section.
[11] From the article “La fractura lingüística del Zagreb” (The linguistic break in the Magreb), In the international edition of EL PAÍS, Friday 28th, 2007, in the “Opinión” (Opinion) section

Oral tradition and Incan memories

2007-09-30T11:57:00.001-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero. Revission and translation by Sara Plaza

This week we are re-inaugurating the web site “Oral Tradition” (in Spanish), which, in a new format and with reviewed and extended contents (that will be regularly updated) provides concepts, techniques and bibliography to all those who wish to approach the captivating world of orality

We live in a continent where the spoken world has not lost its traditional channel of information and learning role yet. In each corner of our geography appear, unexpectedly and unsought, those stories and memories that, even though they were never written, codify a part of our history and our identity.
One of the first written pieces on the oral practices in South America was carried out by the pen of the Hispanic chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, a character with a very hazardous life who ended his days almost forgotten by his contemporaries, and whose last great heroic deed was to intend to colonize the inhospitable coasts of the Tierra del Fuego (a fruitless attempt, by the way, which cost numerous lives). Sarmiento de Gamboa’s best known work is “Incan History”, written in 1572 (we have a copy from 1942, published by Editorial Emecé in Buenos Aires). From this book we have extracted a quite large fragment, which we would like to share with you as a sort of tribute to the “oral history” and an old testimony of a practice that, in spite of the passing centuries, has not disappeared at all: it continues to be alive, certainly at other levels though.
The Spanish chronicler tells us, in this text, how the Incan aristocracy had quite precise oral systems that perpetuated their history through generations. At the present time, many other histories are also preserved going round from one mouth to another and from some hands into others. Certainly, our fondness for writing and books leads us, in many occasions, to have a low opinion of orality, since we presume that it is not accurate or objective enough. However, are not the history books touched by the subjectivity of the historians who write them? Do not our libraries tell what the authors of the works that we preserve wanted to note down for the future? Do not they silence what those authors decided to put aside? Do not we continue to hear in the street bits of recent histories that our official records do not want to recognize, no matter how real they are?
Orality is as full of errors and forgetfulness as writing. Maybe, in the comfort of our books, we have lost the faculty (or the custom) of remembering and telling what those memories remind us. Nevertheless, by doing so, we have sacrificed a great part of our reality as human beings, a great part of the experiences that we have had, of our past and our identity. We are allowing others to write down (and save from silence for the future) only some fragments of our complex world. The rest will die with us. What a very sad fate for such a large quantity of knowledge!
Argentinean writer Alejando Dolina once wrote: “We should remember, remember all the time”. We should also tell, listen and share. We have to recover the voices that are being muffled, the sounds that are made quieter and less clear day after day, if we do not want them to be lost. In the end, we are no more than the memories we left once we have passed on. If those memories, those little histories are lost… who will know about our way through the world?
We leave you in the company of Sarmiento de Gamboa and his description (the original it is written in old Spanish, so we have done our best effort to translate his lines into English) of the Incan techniques and methods of preserving the past for the future.
A huge hug from both of us… We look forward to meeting you in these pages next week.

“Before moving further in the Incan History, I want to advise, or properly speaking, to lessen a worry, which might be a matter of concern to those who do not think this history to be true, since it has been elaborated on grounds of what this barbarians retell; those people might believe that without literacy, their descendants can not keep in their memory so many particularities as the ones that I write here, which date from very ancient times. To this, it can be answered that, in replacement for their lack of literacy, these barbarians had a great and true curiosity, and ones to others, from parents to children, they have gone on transmitting their memories until nowadays, repeating them many times, as we do when we have to learn a lesson, and making the listeners to repeat them as well until they had fixed those stories in their minds too. This way, their descendants continued to communicate their annals in order to preserve their history, their achievements, their antiquities, and the number and names of peoples, villages and provinces as well as of days, months, years, battles, deaths, defeats, fortresses and cinches [“Sinchi”, headman].
Finally, it is worth noticing that the most remarkable things, which consist of content and number, were –and still are- noted down in a sort of thin ropes, named quipo [“khipu” or “quipu”], where a number of knots are made. They are able to know what is written along the string by observing those joins and the colors used in tying them, as if they were reading letters. One cannot avoid admiring the amount of information that can be stored in those ropes. In fact, there are masters of quipos among the Incans, as skilled persons at writing surrounding us.
In addition to what has been said, there were, and there are still, particular historians of these nations, a profession that is inherited from father to son. It was thanks to great diligence of the ninth Inca, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, that most of the old historians from all provinces and kingdoms were called to the city of Cuzco for a long period of time, through which he was asking them about the antiquities and the origin and most remarkable past events of those kingdoms. It was immediately after knowing those many histories when he order to paint them on big wooden boards, and chose an enormous room in the Sun House where those boards –covered with gold- would be exhibited in the same way as we show our bookshelves. This Inca encouraged the establishment of a group of scholars who would know how to interpret and explain them. Nobody, apart from the Inca and the historians, could enter in this room without the Inca permission.
In this manner it was known and collected everything concerning the ancient times, and today it is remembered by almost every Indian, even thought in some cases their opinions can be different attending to diverse interests. It was by considering very carefully a great number of elders from different conditions, and finally choosing the oldest and most judicious ones, who are thought of more authority, that I discovered and collected this history, referring each of them the declarations and sayings of their enemies, and asking them to remember their past and the past of the rival faction (since they were grouped in different factions). And these memories, which I have in my hands, compared and corrected with their opposite ones, were, in the end, ratified in the presence of all the factions and ayllos [“ayllus”, clan, large families] who had to take the oath in front of an authorized judge. What is written here was translated by faithful experts in general languages, also under oath”.

Thirsty for freedom to walk among pictures, books and trees

2007-09-23T13:06:00.000-03:00

By Sara Plaza

It was during our last trip to Buenos Aires, the place that Gieco [1] calls city of fate, goblin of a destiny, in his LP “Rural bandits”, when soaked to the skin we toured a small piece of the history of its wet corners. If the memories I have of that day are not wrong, our first steps along Defensa Street took us to San Telmo… We wanted to arrive at the History Museum of the City; however, in the Tourism Office that we found under a bridge after crossing Belgrano Avenue, a very kind person advised us about the fact that we will find the Museum closed because a few days ago someone has stolen a clock that belonged to General Belgrano… As announced by the Tourism officer, its doors were closed and we could only admire the cannons placed in the yard, with the same raindrops that drenched us streaming down their black bellies. We went for a walk around the Lezama Park and touched the roots of its ancient ombúes [2], which to be made of the very same mud that covered our shoes. The Café Británico offered us a small table next to the window, and a couple of very hot black coffees (mine bitter, and very sweet Edgardo’s one) turned our cheeks red again and put the smile back in our lips. We strolled around San Telmo Market and went into the Defensa passage, ex-house of the Ezeiza family, with its drainpipes flooding the floor of uneven stones and withered colored slabs, making it very slippery. Then, we went back to the Manzana de las Luces (The Enlightenment Block) and visited, almost alone, the Ethnographic Museum. My delight was sheer when I discovered that I was able to understand what the showcases in front of me described, without having to stop for so long beside them, in order to read every small piece of paper explaining what was exposed inside. The handful of readings that I have been doing about the native peoples in Argentina, their legends, their tales, their daily struggles and their ways of living, together with our visits to different museums along the Andean Range, and the direct observation of the people who inhabit today this endless continent, plus the many kilometers journeyed with Edgardo while we went through its diverse landscapes, thirsty some of them, almost intoxicated with the water of their falls others, in addition with our collaborative work, allowed me to recognize what I had previously learnt along the path of our life together.
It is a marvelous experience to become aware of certain traits of the past, which make it possible to understand a bit better some features of a present that you don’t know in full measure, yet. At least it was such an experience for me. I am completely conscious of the vast continent where on I stand, and continue to discover it day after day. As much as I like to listen to the people who inhabit it today, I also enjoy reading the pages that talk about those who inhabited it in the old days; I get the very same pleasure from stopping next to the paths that they trodden many centuries ago, as from doing so in front of the showcases that keep a small piece of their history inside…
Later, we went to know the library named Ávila and its literary coffee downstairs. We were delighted to search carefully for old magazines in its wooden drawers, and smiled to each other while we blew out the dust that covered the first editions that rested on the shelves.
In Plaza de Mayo we said hello to a very grey sky that darkened the Cabildo walls and covered the Casa Rosada with a cloak of mist… The same darkness covered San Martin Square when we crossed it and went downstairs under a very thin curtain of raindrops dripping from the leaves of the tipas [3]. We kept on walking until we were near Retiro, but before arriving at the Train Station we turned left towards Recoleta. We went through Francia Square, empty of people and stalls under the persistent rain, which also frightened the runners that use to run around the Lakes of Palermo at that hour of the day… It was dark when we arrived at the Museum that the tourism officer we had met in the morning encouraged us not to miss before leaving: the MALBA, Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires. I must confess that we doubted whether to come in or not, since the building in front of us (and also under our feet, reflected in the surface of the puddles) was very modern and bright and seemed too noisy to us after a long day of walking alone through the old Buenos Aires… Nevertheless, our curiosity and the cold we felt were stronger than our bad first impression of it. A wide and clear space welcomed us and, for a moment, we felt more lost that we have been in the narrow streets of San Telmo. We asked for the price and, with surprise, we smiled to each other when the person made us the following question: “Do you have student card?”. I really wanted to say that we did not have the card any more, but we would be students forever; however, considering the fact that teachers got the same discount, we decided that would be easier for him to believe this second option, even though we had neither brought with us our university title… He gave us two tickets for teachers and once we left our backpacks and coats in the locker, we went upstairs and discovered quickly many of the works of art we would find through that unforgettable evening. We moved from one surprise into another during the two hours that we spent at the Museum. Both of us felt very lucky to be able to look at pictures that would be kept in our memory forever, to listen to music and “hum” it with our feet, to give a wink to the children next to us, to applaud, to laugh, to play, to make faces showing that we did not understand, to shrug our shoulders showing that we did not know, to push each other with our elbows in front of some sculptures, to sit on some others… We enjoyed a lot. The Museum celebrated with the visitors the joyfulness that meant to have brought together a bunch of works of art made by Latin American authors, whose originality and commitment with reality and imagination at the same time, should always be highlighted. The Museum was like a party and a very enjoyable one, for we found a pair of “murgueros”[4] who reminded us of Ruben Rada’s song, “Candombe for Figari”, in front of one of the pictures of this Uruguayan artist. But it was also like a party because children were moving from one place to another and nobody was angry with them; because their grandparents tried to explain to them what this or that was, on the shelves of the Museum shop; because some works of art could be touched; because the ones that can only be seen seemed to be watching you as well; because you could move freely around; because you went forward and backward, got lost and finally found yourself; because you were free to experience whatever emotion those works made you feel… Because you could speak slowly and smile, and choose whether be on tiptoe or sit on your heels, because you could enjoy either of what you understood and of what does not make any sense for you, of the colors, of the forms, of looking at a picture for a long time or of immediately turn your back on it… Because, well, you could laugh at or get angry with you in front of the works that others made being sometimes happy and other times deeply sad…
Going downstairs, we encountered the biggest surprise of that evening. One of the sculptures that was shown there, consisted of a couple of bookshelves, one opposite the other, with self-help books on their shelves. The books were of second or third hand, they were not very much attractive, creased, with some pages fold, some of them turning yellow, quiet the majority… However, we seen how a number of people stop in front of them, sat in between, and grabbed those pages, opened, had a look and read them…
Edgardo and I thought of the many empty libraries and could not believe what our eyes were seeing. If someone stood up and left, another came in and sat in the vacant place… Those old and “shabby” books were being touched gently again and we could not stop feeling shivers down our spines while we asked ourselves what was happening in those places were books multiply by thousands and, nevertheless, are placed far away from the curious eyes of their readers…
We finished our visit spending a few minutes more in the Museum library and, once more, we had to nip at each other’s arm when we saw the wonderful place occupied by those wooden shelves full of books from the bottom to the top of the room. It was really nice and there were many people there taking out and putting books in the shelves, watching photographs, speaking in a very soft voice, showing someone else the discovering that they had made among those pages…
Going back on our steps we became aware of the fact that the pictures in a Museum, the books in a library or the trees in a park, have to be close to our hands, to our steps, to our eyes, to our lips... We have to be able to touch them, even though we can only do it with our sight in some cases; we have to be able to taste them, although we can only do it through the smelling of their colors, of their lines, of their leaves… If we hide the works of art behind a fence, the books behind a wall and only admire the nature in a postcard, we will be moving away from ourselves, turning our back on our history, condemning us to a very unhappy loneliness and a very deep silence that will make it impossible for us to listen to each other, to talk with each other, to understand each other…

[1] León Gieco is a well-known Argentinean singer and songwriter.
[2] The ombú is a tree typical of the Pampas region of Argentina, with visible roots covered with a sort of wrinkles and a lot of knots and big dark-green leaves growing from its enormous branches.
[3] The “tipa” is another typical tree that can be seen in many Argentinean cities. Its trunk has deep scars all around. Bunches of leaves grow from its dark branches, and people get rest in the summer in its fresh shade.
[4] The “murga” is a Uruguayan rhythm very funny and noisy that is played in Carnival. The murga consist of many people, some of them playing instruments, others singing and telling a story… Those people are called “murgueros”. Some authors believe that the “murga” stems from “candombe”, the only rhythm with black background that still survives in the La Plata River area. Others relate it to the Spanish Carnival in the southern province of Cádiz.

About libraries, native peoples and Declarations

2007-09-16T11:02:00.000-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero
Translated by Sara Plaza

After 22 years of strong opposition on the part of a great number of so-called “developed” countries, the UN publicly announced on Wednesday, 12th September 2007, the “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”, a group of 46 articles concerning 360 million people all over the world, which is similar to the “Universal Declaration on Human Rights” but related to the Indigenous Peoples. In this new Declaration are recognized their basic rights to their own culture and identity, but are also acknowledged their right to self-determination, to the management of their lands, to their own socio-political organization and to the governmental consultation before making any decision about the use of their resources.
Maybe, these last few guarantees –above all, those that facilitate self-determination- were the ones that fostered such fierce opposition along these years, and perhaps, they continue to be the reason for the 11 abstentions and the 4 against –USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia- inside the UN, in spite of the 143 countries voting in favor. Those four countries have a very strong presence of indigenous people among their population and, regretfully enough, are famous for the unfair and unreasonable treatment that they give to those communities, which has been denounced as such to the existing international organisms on many occasions (if you take a look to some reports written by the Indigenous Peoples Committee of the UN, you will discover unimaginable cases concerning this fact). Since this Declaration has, for its signatories, higher status than the one given to the national laws, to sign it implies the acknowledgment of some rights that the non-signatories do not want to guarantee, for they would disagree with the (o)pression, discrimination and socio-cultural exclusion policies that continue being in force within their borders.
The enforcement of this international tool does not mean that its principles will be put into effect inside the territories of all their signatories. It will be necessary that the regional indigenous organizations continue to struggle and claim for the recognition of their rights and the fulfillment of laws that deals with them. It will be a path similar to the one trodden after the Convention 169 of the ILO, which acknowledges many indigenous rights but, up to the present day, continues being only another piece of paper.
My work in LIS –theoretical as well as practical- has been focused, from the very beginning of my career, on the libraries placed in indigenous communities, covering all aspects of this topic. Through my work, I came into contact with a reality that clearly presented the violations and abuses I have mentioned in the paragraphs above. Those situations are not too far from our daily reality: they are in front of us, no matter how distant they seem to be…
Forgetfulness, exclusion, and discrimination towards indigenous societies are not away from our professional environment. A few days ago I did present, in the Latin American professional forums, a proposal which is being currently reviewed by the Revision Advisory Committee of the UDC (Universal Decimal Classification), for adding almost 400 native ethnical groups and languages of our continent to the tables 1c and 1f (languages and ethnics groups) (see my proposal). Those peoples –our peoples, part of our history and our identity- had never been included in the documental languages of classification. There are very few thesauri with indigenous terms and they hardly collect or normalize the names of each people…
Regretfully, it does not only consist of a documental forgetfulness. There are almost not LIS high education programs in Latin America that include specific information concerning services to the native peoples, or the indigenous languages, especially in regions where those idioms are spoken by a high percentage of the population (a good example to follow might be Bolivia). Neither can we find more than a small number of papers, books, manuals, guidelines, national proposals or searching programs related to this topic …
However, in spite of not having accurate or enough information, and considering the scarcity of resources highlighted in the previous paragraphs –which should not be overlooked- it is noticeable, when one works within this field, how many voices are risen above the silence and make noises about this subject. In a certain number of particular cases, they remind me of those “experts” who, as were defined by the management specialist Henry Mintzberg, “every time know more about fewer things, until they finish knowing everything about nothing”[1]. Perhaps, thanks to the existence of those characters –and to the credibility and support given to them- we are where on we stands and have what we deserve, since we would be ensuring “apparent consistency to the wind”, as was told by George Orwell. And while we continue listening to empty words, great discourses, and keep on attending courses, seminars and workshops on the topic, presented by individuals who know nothing about what they are talking about, and neither have any related experience, there is a growing number of problems around us at very different levels.
It happened while I was working on the proposal of languages and ethnics that I considered should be included in the UDC –whose Revision Advisory Committee I belong to, since 2005- that I became conscious of realities that made a strong impression on me: dozens of languages and peoples have disappeared in the last decade (no, I am not talking about the XVIII century or about any European conquest, I am talking about our most recent history); histories and memories that will not sound any more; slaughtered populations, forced to leave their own lands because they inhabit in areas where petroleum, minerals, water, forests, etc., have been found; human rights systematically violated; libraries that do not serve to their users and collaborate actively or passively in their acculturation… One of the examples that impressed me the most was that of an indigenous people from the Peruvian eastern rainforest, to whom a bilingual and intercultural education program was designed… Shamefully, the project was set up in a language and from a cultural context that were not their own ones.
(In my conferences I use to put an emphasis upon the great amount of money and resources which are spent in projects doomed to failure because nobody did in advance an assessment of the situation, including the users and their needs. The case that I have mentioned above can be an excellent example of it).
All walks of life continue, with or without us treading them… It is in our hands to take and be part of such life constantly moving in front of us, to stop listening to sirens voices and work for what we believe that is worthy. For many of us it can be referred to indigenous peoples or rural communities; for others it might have to do with children women or the elders; for another group, it might mean to be in contact with students and teachers; for many others, with people with special needs… Behind the “Declarations of…” –which, perhaps, will be of little use, but are a step forward anyway- we have to be made aware of the opportunity that each of us has to change reality and to turn our work worthwhile.

(Shortly it will be published all the materials and documents related to LIS and indigenous peoples resulting from the collection, research and field experience of the author, addressed to all those who have an interest in the subject).

[1] The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, Planners. Free Press, NY, 1994.

A Qom tale

2007-09-09T20:04:00.000-03:00

By Sara Plaza

KATALÓ THE GIANT, AND HIS WIFE THE QUEEN OF THE EPIDEMICS [1]

Kataló, the giant, has a wife who is in the mountain.
They do not live together.
She is the queen of the epidemics, of the different types of diseases that are in the mountain.
Kataló favors people.
Kataló is a king who has the power to save or to give that power to somebody else for him to save a third one.
His wife lives inside the mountain.
In this couple, they do not have the same job.
There are piogonak [2] who belong to us and other who belong to Christians.
However, the remedy provided by Kataló never finishes, neither the diseases because this queen always send them.
Kataló never runs out of medicines, which he always give to the piogonak for them to cure people.
He cannot stop everything.
Neither can she send everything.
That way one intercepts the other.
She is Latée na Nalolga (the diseases’ mother), or Nalolga Laté; also named Kataló Lua, Miss Kataló.
And Kataló is Nkalga Lataá (the salvation’s father).
When Kataló knows that his wife sends different kinds of diseases, he calls the piogonak who is in contact with him and tells him how and with what he has to cure those who are ill.
That is it.

In the previous post of this blog we said that we should not give time the opportunity to pass in vain. We said that our hands have to work for it does not happen, and that our imagination should give us the necessary ideas to mould the clay in which we sculpt our daily actions. We talked about maintaining alive our libraries, our curiosity, and our willingness of thinking, telling, doing. We talked, why not, about moving further without stop being at the side of who is the true heart of the house of knowledge, of culture, of history, of games, of music, of legends, of recipes, of craftworks… the house of doubts, of questions, of so many treasures that can be found between the pages of a book, the lines of a map, the sounds of a cassette, the images of a video, the fibers of a textile, the carvings of a ceramic…
We spoke, in the end, of not forgetting that the reason of our culture and our knowledge is placed in every single person that treads the life day after day, of those who journeyed it before and those who will walk along it in the future… Because those goods belong to us; we have created them together and they are part or what we were, of what we are and of what we want to become. Because there is not a unique true knowledge, on the contrary, there are many forms of knowing and all of them are valid. Nobody was born knowing already what s/he was going to know later, and we all continue to learn every day…
The library and the school are marvelous entities if they manage to join us, if they allow ideas to be interchanged, if they help us to move our projects forward, both personal and professional, daily ones and those we dream to make true some day... They have to become the germ of new desires to know about something, the seed of a constructive dialogue among people who always know something and always has something to teach to the other and to learn from him/her. They have to permit us to tell whatever we want to share, at the same time that they allow us to ask whatever we do not know, we have never seen or heard, he hardly have dared to dream… They should value our needs, our customs, our peculiarities. And they should give us the opportunity to reach new ways of looking, new manners of hearing, and new forms of grabbing, holding and touching a book, a drawing, a photograph, a song, a dream gently…
The tale with which I began this post only intended to show, with a bit of poetry, our fragility and our enormous courage. Both of them go together, hand in glove, interlaced as the diseases are twisted together with their remedies. They are joined as the roots to the ground, the trunk to the roots, the branches to the trunk, the leaves to the branches, the wind to the leaves, the wings to the wind, the dreams to the wings, life to the dreams, death to live, memory to death, history to memory and so on… That is it. They are joined, but each of them with a different work to do, and both of them necessary. And they are the ones that remain in each of us, the ones that we can always notice through our actions. They are also the ones that are present in our libraries and our schools, in the small handicrafts and the great architectural features of many works. It is with them that we have to work. All of us count with our fortitude for not giving time the opportunity to pass in vain, taking advantage, instead, of anything good that our society may offer to us in order to walk the life not in a hurry, but without pause. A good example might be the library and the school, as long as we can continue shaping them until they fit us well, exactly the same as we continue to shape ourselves until we look like the ones we want to become… We already know, because we have learnt it from the Qom people, that Latée na Nalolga, the diseases’ mother is going to keep on reigning in her mountain, as we also know that her husband, Kataló, the salvation’s father, is going to help us always. They will continue to manage the diseases and their remedies, and we will have to keep on overcoming the former and taking advantage of the latter ones with the help of the piogonak, of the library, of the school and of our own hands…

[1] By José Benítez, from Qom indigenous people. Collected in “Lo que cuentan los Tobas” (What Tobas tell), a compilation by Buenaventura Terán published by Ediciones del Sol, which belongs to its collection Biblioteca de Cultura Popular (Popular Culture Library) (n. 20, Buenos Aires, 1994)
[2] The shamanism of the Tobas (who call themselves Qom, which means “the people”) is mainly male. As Terán writes in the above mentioned book, the piogonak (shamans) cure singing, sucking, with tobacco, fats and medicines. [...] become shamans when they encounter a theogony or powerful entity in the mountain, because other shaman (generally a relative) transfers to him the power through a collective initiation called welán or through a dream.

We do not have to give time the opportunity to pass in vain

2007-09-02T10:59:00.000-03:00

By Edgardo Civallero & Sara Plaza

What León Gieco’s song “Aquí, allá, hoy o mañana” (“Here, there, today or tomorrow”), one of our favorite Argentinean singers (author of the well-known hit “Solo le pido a Dios”), exactly says is something like “You should not give time the opportunity to pass in vain”. The sentence, beyond its poetry, draws in the horizon a line to be followed, a goal to be attained, not only in a personal, but also in a professional way…
Time that passes in vain... How many days, how many months have gone gliding past, smoothly and quietly through our hands, not knowing how to catch and use them, how to turn them into an excellent harvest of fruits and results? The question, a bit abstract without a context, becomes more real when we think in all those libraries that die in silence, with the shelves full of books whose spines won’t be touched by readers. Libraries that do not invite their user to come in because they suffer from a regretful shortage of services, ideas… Don’t you know any? We do. We have seen them and have been sitting in them. The weeks pass, the years pass, and those units –that should be changing something of the context where they are immersed, however small the different would be- continue to be there, standstill, frozen, while their managers and staff allow time to pass in vain…
It happened during the last few days: we were speaking and remembered together our learning at university. It came to our minds the explanation of libraries as systems, a group of elements intimately related that work for the achievement of an aim, producing “outcomes” (products, services) and catching “incomes” (information, opinions, needs).
After leaving university, we learnt many more things, and we understood that any library is (or should be, if it wants to successfully serve to its community) an entity quite similar to a living organism: it responds to the changes of its environment, adapts itself for surviving, is flexible, evolves, grows, even reproduces and replicates itself. And, sometimes, stays there, paralyses with inactivity, falls ill and dies.
The life cycle of any system follows a series of steps and closes, sometimes in order to start again, others forever. And all the living systems avoid dying by instinct and try to survive despite the worst imaginable adversities. This basic as well as vital rule can be also applied in our libraries: they have to struggle and do whatever is needed and possible to be alive. To turn them into a simple store is to kill them in advance, to assassinate their spirit without delaying, to doom to failure a project that might have been wonderful and useful for a small or a big group of people.
The library becomes a mere warehouse of goods stored and useless materials when it does not have users. At that moment, it loses its reason for existing. A library is neither a building, nor a collection or a group of people who works in it: it is a service, simply that. And a service, as the word says it, should serve to an addressee. When it does not serve, when the final user considers that there, in that institution, there is nothing for him/her, the time has come to question itself and its managers why it is that all of them failed.
Time follows its way, insensitive to human circumstances. And each minute lost never comes back.
When can it be said that a library walks towards its failure and its death as a system? In general terms, it happens when it offers to the user something that him/her does not need, and also when, on the other hand, does not provide him/her with what they urgently need. And this, shamefully, is something that occurs in every corner of our professional universe. Even though this last statement seems senseless or foolish in a moment of “evaluations”, “users’ survey” and “LIS management”, still there are libraries that insist in implanting into their reality a particular model, not being aware of the risk involved. As the living system that the library has to be, it is the unit itself that, first of all, should consider very carefully the requirements, circumstances and possibilities of its environment, changing whatever was necessary to make it suitable for their users.
To replicate pre-established models can be useful in some cases, especially because it means to walk an already trodden path and it might seem more secure and avoid unexpected and undesirable surprises. But, do not mislead ourselves: what is good for someone, or what successfully worked in a place, does not have to work, obligatorily, in another. In general, existing models –and not adapted to the new conditions previously- use to be considered as artificial implantations and are usually rejected and, consequently, fail deafeningly. Therefore, it is important to listen to the needs and the voices in need, to know the human and spatial context, to look for the most suitable solution and implement it with the existing resources, at the side of the people involved.
The library works in, because of, for and with the community. This sentence should never be forgotten. There are many information units that put themselves in the middle of inhabited places and continue to be there, useless, empty. In their pride, they think of themselves as saviors, heroines that are able to shape people into their particular liking and give them what the dominant society thinks that is convenient for them. Very few times the users want that. The process should be the other way round: the library is like clay, a type of earth that people are going to mould into the desired form. Only then, they will drink from the pot all the knowledge that it keeps inside. It won’t be in other manner. Never, will it be in other manner.
We should not permit time to pass in vain. On the contrary, we should use our initiative, listen to our community, give the voice back to the users and allow them to actively participate in their library. We should turn the library into the cultural and information space that it is meant to be, responding to the inquiries that are really made instead of giving answers to what never was and never will be asked. Only in this way, those systems will keep on living, reproducing, regenerating… Only in this manner, we will continue to learn a bit more day after day… Only following this path we won’t see so many dead libraries, though they insist in making us think how alive they are…
Such is a library, only using our imagination and allowing users to make use of theirs we will get together that time won’t escape from our hands as sand among the fingers…

Democracy...

2007-02-13T10:28:00.000-03:00

Democracy: ¿’life assurance’ or enlargement of its expectancy?
Chronicle of a wait

By Sara Plaza Moreno

Why it is so difficult for us to understand it? Why are we interpreting it worse each time? Where did those many adjectives we dress it with –after having taken off its real meaning- come from? Is it for unknown or for fear? Are we afraid of it, maybe? What does it happen with democracy that we take it from one place to another, neither knowing where to put it, nor where to place ourselves? Where do we always choose to stand aside? Why do some look at it with disdain, others with distrust and the majority with certain reluctance?
I do not know if we ever knew that democracy should neither be subordination, nor submission; it does not consist of blindly obey the rules; neither it implies a unique thought, nor it means to grant our rights; and, of course, it should not be the goal, but the path trodden step by step to. Democracy ought not to defend the public against the information, neither to hide it, nor to spare or censor it. Democracy, if it has to do with something, it is with taking part, with critical thought, with the protection of our rights and the subsequent responsibility. Democracy is path, a philosophy of life, a vital project.
United Nations ex secretary, Mr. Kofi Annan, during his speech in Istanbul on the occasion of the presentation of the Civilizations Alliance report, stated: “the problem it is not in the Koran, the Torah or the Bible, the problem is not our faith but the faithful and the manner they treat each other.” Neither do I believe that the problem is democracy, at least not the entire problem. The problem has to do with the behavior and the attitude of citizens. We behave as it democracy did not really matter to us. However, we expect it to fulfill our deepest longings, even the answers to the questions that we never made to ourselves.
“How it is possible that something like this happens in democracy?” This is the only thing that worries us, but we never wonder how is it possible that in an organization system, where it is said that the power lies in the people, I do not have anything to say? And I do not have anything to say because I am waiting for others to say it. Because “I already voted for them”, because “anyway, in the end everything remains the same”, because “all of them are thieves”, because “it has nothing to do with me”…
Following the logic of this stream of thought, we come to the conclusion that in democracy things happen, and we do not seem to be at all worried about the whys and the wherefores, since we only ask ourselves once and again how is it possible? That is, we presume that certain behaviors are impossible in democracy. Are they? We should not forget that there have been many different democracies. For some people the first example of democratic system was in Athens in the V century BC, whereas many others consider that there were earlier examples in ancient civilizations and in the tribal organization itself. Sometimes as political system, sometimes as social organization, democracy has had different senses: there have been direct, representative, deliberative and participative democracies; elections had been held and the rule of the majority has been accepted; rights declarations have been written and freedom has been defended…
However, where are equality, justice and the rights of the minorities? Democracy for not being too much democratic and we for not having studied about it enough –we use to get tired when half of the work is finished, the half that benefits us, of course-, it does not seem that we are going to agree in the way we want to live together. Here is where the impossibility of some actions might be. I do not think that democracy is a bad idea. Neither I believe that we are idiots, but many times we behave as if we were. With its failures and our negligence we are condemned to wait for a long, long time with our arms crossed. Do we really want to wait? Do we really want to stand aside? Do we really want to be quiet?
If we want to defend our life and deserve it, if we want to live it with dignity, we will have to think twice some of the limits that exist in any democratic system and develop a responsible citizenship. It should be desirable to abolish and exile demagogy, paternalism, the instrumentation of people, dogmatism and indoctrination. We should not allow to be told what to say or do, to be banned to discuss, to be used, to be treated with pity, to be flattered or subdued. We do not have to necessarily agree, but we should know why we do not agree. Neither are we equal, nor we need the same, however, we are not so much different and what hurts us is quite similar.
Since we do not want to be deceived, we should not be mistaken by ourselves. The person we are and the person we want to become some day should not walk aside from each other. A democratic system, as a way of living together, should come closer to people, humanize its institutions, tread where women and men left their footprints, not only outline the silhouette of their dreams. Democracy can not be and must not be a “life assurance”. How are we going to invest in something that tomorrow we will not have? It will not be worthy enough to try to live today? It is not a utopia, or at least, it should not be.
It we are talking of living what about working for enlarging our life expectancy? But not under any conditions, of course, not at any price either. And not by any manner of means, condemning the life of the rest. Democracy is a way of interpreting our citizenship. Throughout humankind’s history and probably through our own history –we do not have to forget that each one should be the author of it- we have verified that there are other manners of explaining it that in addition to be less desirable are absolutely harmful. Different forms of totalitarianism, imperialism, fanaticism, terrorism, dictatorial regimes or military governments, in order to enumerate only a few examples, mix up stability with subordination. It is our duty not to confuse those two terms. And, above all, we do not have to fear that something bad might happen to us if we decide to change, shake or stir obsolete and out of date structures that serve us little and badly.
Whatever we have to say, our critic ought to be constructive, because under the squared stones, though we are not going to find the sea shore, we should be able to discover a fertile land. And if we populate it with working hands, rather than insisting in overheating and deserting it, our children will be able to pick up its crops. Only if we believe that we can, they will be able to continue believing. We will have given them back the hope which we seem to forget in any place by an oversight. If we stop waiting for what democracy has to offer to us, perhaps someday we will write the chronicle of its trail. If we manage to save our boat from sinking and we do not continue throwing ourselves overboard, maybe we reach in a good harbor. We can not live alone, though sometimes we pretend to be the only ones who are sitting at the feast. Let’s look for the best way of doing it together and if one day we have something to celebrate, that it be the life not the death of a system that it is not perfect but comes closer to what many dreamt of and what many fought for.

Texts written by my mate...

2007-01-31T20:45:00.000-03:00

From broad spread disillusion to an inventory of failures. But, what will be next?
A time for trials, a time for achievements

By Sara Plaza Moreno

It has always been easier for us –though never too simple- to name what than to explain how. Perhaps our blind confidence in what we see neither allows us to observe under what light each thing shines, nor the shadows cast by a reality, which stays as it stays, but can –and should- stop being as it is[1]. Today we know that things are not going very well, and we can even enumerate every single failure of an engine that imperfect, unjust and unusable as it is, still turns to be useful. It is useful for those who take advantage of how “badly” it works increasing the realms of their power. It is useful because its dreadful arrangement of gears only permits some of its pieces to be in good conditions, destroying –not out of fear, I guess- those which do not suit it at all. And it is useful where no other machinery has resulted in a better distribution of resources and wealth.
No matter how shameful and humiliating the former statements seem to the ones who believe and defend the idea that another world is possible; we, in a certain way, continue feeling sorry about them without putting a stop to such madness. We continue denouncing them in the streets and in the big squares of many cities, in classrooms and auditoriums, in silence and shouting them out, stood up and sat down, but when are we going to start moving ourselves in order to put an end to so much misery? The sort of misery that each of us keeps inside him or her, the same misery that marks ourselves and stains every corner of this planet. Many books have been written, many laws enforced, many treaties signed, many agreements sealed, many judgments passed, and many people have been declared guilty and subsequently condemned. All of this should have taught us something, however, where is our learning? Many things have changed, some of them have even improved, but what happens with the many things that day after day get worse? Those are many more and we do not seem to find the proposals that should deal with those problems. I wonder if we have even proposed to solve them some day.
A few days ago I was reading a book published by UNICEF, OMS and UNESCO several years ago, a book called “FACTS FOR LIFE. A communication challenge.” A book that neither defends it nor challenges “every kind of communicators” and, for sure, it is not addressed to “all those who can help in making this information belong to the basic health care knowledge heritage of all the families.” At least it made it clear that the book “is both for women and for men.” I write this because the authors never went to the places where that life does not have any value, does not count for anybody, where that life is killed by leaving to die. Or, if they were there, never drew back the smoke curtains which permitted them to see what can be done but did not allow them to discover what must be accomplished first. They wrote a book for “politicians, educators, religious leaders, health professionals, company managers, trade unions, volunteers associations and mass media”, the ones in charge of transmitting its contents to those who were dying because they ignored them.
Among its town criers they forgot to name librarians, for example. Perhaps they did not considered libraries as places for the sort of change that it is not only necessary but also possible for our society to make. They also forgot about the fact that in that society –the one that will have 8.000 millions of people by the year 2025- almost 2.000 million people “will suffer from severe water shortage”[2], and the same number “do not have electricity yet”, and, as the same sources state: “even if we multiply by 100 the present development rate, it would be necessary at least 400 years for those people to get it.”
When in that book it is written that “many mothers do not feel confident about suckling their babies and need stimulus and practical support on the part of the baby’s father, the health agents, the family and friends, the groups of women, the mass media, the trade unions and the employers associations.”, did the authors think at any time that those women might not be living with the father of their baby because they were raped on many occasions? Did they think that the health agents usually are situated very far from where those women live? Did they think that their family and friends turned their backs to them? Did they think that the mass media are in the hands of economic and financial power? Did they think that the trade unions, in many places, forgot where they come from and serve only to the very same power? Did they think that the employers associations would never offer a contract to those women, precisely because they are women? No, they never thought about it. Mothers who do not feel confident about their skills at suckling their babies? Yes, that is exactly what their mates, the health agents, their families and friends, the mass media, the trade unions and the employers associations think of them, and what those women think does not matter, nobody has asked them their opinion, nobody want to know it.
In Spanish it is said that the real blind is the person who does not want to see, as the true deaf is the one who refuses to hear. I did also read one time that “Every poet is a heir to the fairy-tale hero who can hear the grass grow”[3]. I imagine that if we do not want to remain blind, nor deaf, some day we will have to dare to see and hear, and maybe some other day we will turn to be poets as well. Nevertheless, with imagination alone we will not manage to get anything. What about being aware of what we need to build our own path rather than following the steps of the fairy-tales heroes? What about listening to those who have historically been kept in silence in addition to reading those ten points for life that organizations such as UNICEF, OMS and UNESCO have published? They are neither dumb, nor quiet. Their poverty, their misery, their sickness, their hunger and their thirst are a shout, a cry, a scream, a yell, a call. Neither our wealth, nor our education or our health systems have made us better, since we have permitted --and allowed it day after day- that the majority continue being much worse than us.
I want to say once more that we already know what does not work, why it is not working and, though many have been the teachings and not so much the learning, we also know how we should start to put it right. Until now we did not have tried it enough, and when we did so, we did it badly. Miracles do not exist, but miraculously men and women are still on their feet, no matter how many times they have run into troubles. Why are we so determined to break our nose when it is what allows us to smell corruption? The rotten smelling of those who have the power stinks. When will we be aware of that? If we put our hands in their dirty businesses we will end being so miserly. From being accomplices we will become the authentic guilty party. Is it what we really want?
Fernando Savater tried to explain to his son Amador that he was in charge of providing a good life for himself[4]. The Spanish philosopher was intending to make us understand that there is a sort of selfishness that suits us perfectly, does us good, and humanizes us. If we have got disillusioned enough, and we have understood the need for writing an inventory of the failures of the world that we are building together, why do not do now what is the most convenient for us. It does not have to do with anybody else but ourselves, it is our choice, our responsibility. There was a time for trying it, but now the time for achieving some of our goals has come. We should place ourselves in the reality that surrounds us, the one before our door and the one behind it, the one in the journals pages and the one in the stanzas of the poems, mine, yours, our reality. They are many, however, they are not so different and they are not placed so far away one from each other. We should occupy the position that let us protect our life and be in favor of it. We should take part in the existing organizations or create alternative ones. We should give our opinion. By doing so, sometimes we will smile and on other occasions we will cry. Do not allow anybody to tell us what we have to do when we already know –or should have known- what is good for us. We have to defend the ways and the manners which allow us to accomplish it, and we have to achieve it. For another world is possible and the possibility is in our hands.

[1] Paulo Freire. Brazilian pedagogue. Expert in popular education. Author, among others, of the books La educación como práctica de la libertad and Pedagogía del oprimido.
[2] Le Monde Diplomatique. El Atlas II. Buenos Aires: Le Monde Diplomatique, 2006.
[3] Gaston Bachelard.
[4] Fernando Savater, in “Ética para Amador”.

Library 2.0

2007-01-29T11:34:00.001-03:00

Translated and commented by Sara Plaza.

Brief introduction to the term

“Library 2.0” term is a model –barely defined until now, that is to say, under construcción- that suggest a transition in libraries structure, especially in the way information units deliver their services.
The concept is derived from “Web 2.0” and “Business 2.0” and respect some of their underlying philosophical ideas.
“Library 2.0” model mainly includes an increase in the information flow from the user towards the library. It is intended that users will be part of the librarian services planning as well as of its implementation, appreciating some feedback on their part and actively encouraging their participation. This way, librarian services would be constantly kept up to date and reevaluating themselves for better meet their community needs, from a grassroot perspective.
Those proposing this concept look forward to replacing the traditional, monodirected, service model that has characterized librarianship for the last centuries.

A short history

The term was coined by USA librarian Michael Casey in his weblog “LibraryCrunch”, though some people point out that it was use firstly posted in the weblog “Librarians without borders”, the 26th of September, 2005. Anyway, it was Casey who defined it, suggesting that libraries, especially public ones, are spaces where many features of Web 2.0 have a value to be assigned inside the users’community, whether to do it through digital or traditional services. He particularly describes the need for libraries to adopt an overall estrategy for ongoing change, promoting the active participation of their users for being successful.
The official presentation of the term took place on the Internet Librarian 2005, in October 2005, with Michael Stephens, from the Public Library of Saint Joseph county, who echoed the idea referring it to the typical libraries web-sites and the need for changes oriented to encourage users’ participation in making decisions, planning and the developing services.
“Library 2.0” has become a topic for discussion in the librarian blogosphere, and it is being taken into account by main publications and sites on new information technologies. Some of us argue that the underlying ideas of this model are not new in LIS (though not too much used, I agree) and they have been the philosophical basis of many reforms in our profession since XIX century. Those who currently support this model (colleagues such as Stephen Abram, Michael Stephens, Paul Miller and many others) have respond that, even though the ideas may be not new, the present concurrence of all of them in a unique model did not exist before.
Other people are asking for more concrete examples: they would like to know how libraries can put this model into practice. This is the work that is being developed in these days: applying those ideas to finding their practical use in our contexts through realistic guidelines.

Finally... What is it about?

The Internet has suffered a series of modifications through time. Tools and working instruments have been developed, allowing the active participation of final users in the creation of new contents. Weblogs have been, in this sense, revolutionary elements, whose popularity has had a rapid and dense growth. This active participation on the part of the final user, has changed the working practices on the Internet, in such a way that, today there are encyclopedias made by their readers (wikipedia and the rest of the “wikis”), open access archives maintained by their users, sites where receivers attach labels to the contents they read (like YouTube) and inmense spaces where videos, audios and other kind of multimedia archives are shared. Internet has become a new social phenomenon, fed by society itself, which is the only responsible for makig it work. This new paradigm is called Web 2.0.
The first application of Web 2.0 to libraries was obvious: to take advantage of these new tools to improve their services. The thing is that when they did so, it was clear that with those instruments users might –the same as on the Internet- gain control and do what they wanted: making decisions according to their needs, actively participating in those decisions as well as in the design of services and activities, and many more things.
In this moment this new possible way of working is being compared with the traditional one, which was followed by thousands of libraries through the last centuries, and a great difference can be made. It is noticeable that, up to now, services have never been in the users’ hands; librarians few times have worked with a vocation for service or have listened to the needs of those who, in theory, they should serve. Additionally, librarians in general are not very fond of the change itself.
In this way, this new proposal would be proclaiming something like a small “revolution”, a revolution that, however, had already been declared by many people, groups and librarian movements from the XIX century up to now (with not much success, that’s true).
What it may be considered curious at the present moment, is that all of these ideas –social software, librarian programs, even new buildings- are being unified, and librarians’ voices are sounding higher in the matter.
“Library 2.0” as a model, establishes that the librarian space (not only the virtual, but the real one as well) should be more interactive, involving people working together and having an influence on each other... It encourages bilateral social relations between the library and its community. It requires the pro-active participation of users in the debelopment and the maintenance of services, so they perfectly suit its communitarian needs. It sets up the necessity for evaluation and ongoing change/modernization in order to grow together with the user, at his/her pace.
In this sense, the librarian paradigm should migrate from a processes and technologies based model, to a model centred around users and services, problably with much less emphasis on the economic profit of Information Society. With information and ideas running free in both directions, services will have the opportunity of developing gradually and improving on a constant and fast base. Users are participants, co-creators, builders and consultants, either it refers to the vitual or the physical final product.
I would like to insist on the fact that, even though “Library 2.0” has been born from virtual proposals, it has been transferred to every librarian scenary, as a kind of change philosophy.

Some elements and principles considered as the keystones

According to the model creators, the basic principles and the keystones are the following:

- OPACs and web sites that include Web 2.0 developments.
- To make the user take part either in the design and in the services. Users should be able to design and change the provided services.
- The model is that of continual change. Ongoing evaluation. Rigidity feeds error.
- To include and gather ideas and products from peripheral fields (interdisciplinary actions)
- “Library 2.0” is a disruptive idea.
- To intend global thought and local action, being aware of diversity and variety in users’ culture to better suit their needs.
- To improve vocation for service, being polite, thoughtful and keen, a true guide and learning companion for users.
- To take advantage of new Internet services –when accesible- in order to have fluent communication with users, especially those which are free (instant messages, blogs, open sources, open access).

This model is under current definition; trying to say the last word on this subject, at this moment, would be completely sober. Nevertheless, it has to be taken into account that “Library 2.0” should not leave any library users outside. It can neither place emphasis only on new technologies, nor on youth, nor on the rights of some people... It has to be an egalitarian proposal.
Many ideas are being suggested in different forums, especially in English-speaking countries (and in Spain also) in order to allow librarians worries –hoarded up for a long time- to be said aloud, and build an structure that can respond to the needs of everybody.
Maybe what it is indended to reach can be put into a single sentence: “better library services for more people”. It is not a matter of libraries. Actually, it is a matter of people: of how librarians do their job, of obstacles and nonsense rules under which the library and librarians operate, of what human beings are, of how much solidarian they can be, of how they can make and reach compromises, of how they understand (or do not) and listen to their users’ voice, who, in the end, are the only reason for them to go on working. “Wherever the heart takes a library user, there should be placed the librarian.”

Travel diary (23-28 out of 28): Quito, Lima, La Paz, La Quiaca, Córdoba...

2007-01-26T09:59:00.000-03:00

[Diary of the journey by land across the ancient Inka Empire, from LIS Meeting to LIS Meeting, through Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and NW Argentina, from November 5th to December 1st, 2006]
Translated and commented by Sara Plaza

Sunday, 26th of November found us at dawn in some place of southern Ecuador, without having slept at all thanks to the dreadful service offered by the bus company “Rutas de América”, which miraculously made extraordinary efforts to show worse conditions than our famous and detested enough “Ormeño”.
After crossing the Babahoya River and fields and more fields with banana plantations, whose deep green was interrupted here and there by the bright whiteness of some herons, we arrived in Puerto Inca, a typical sylvan population where stopped many lorry drivers carrying bananas and the very few travelers who crossed this region northwards or towards the Peruvian border. The dirtiness of that place might have been the perfect ingredient for a novel about “underdevelopment”. However, the settlement has certain charm and character: those many cooks placed outside, the fruit stalls were we haggled the prices with a very young salesgirl who was not eight years old, the long distant travelers and the people commuting from home to their working place…one place to another
More banana plantations followed; huge irrigation channels and narrow sandy paths that got lost in the thick emerald green; the classical silhouette of flocks of “cebúes” (bovid that resists very hot and humid weather better than cows); settlements with spear houses built over wooden columns to avoid the turbulent waters of the countless rivers running below… Sara wrote down in her diary…

“Hills covered with clouds, very high trees, many rivers, properties, fruit markets, lots of people eating in the streets, whole families sat on the back part of small old lorries swallowing dust and smoke, a great amount of cloths hung on the shore of small rivers and irrigation channels…”.

We crossed the Ecuadorian-Peruvian border –mentioned in previous posts as of the most problematic- between Huaquillas and Aguas Verdes the very same day presidential election in Ecuador was being celebrated. Once in Peru things were completely different: we suffered a couple of retentions of behalf of the police and were literally locked up behind bars while our luggage and the bus were carefully revised... At midday, behind the dirty glass of the bus windows we could see miles and miles of rice paddies, and later the sea again, and the desert shortly after, the same sea and the same desert we had discovered a week before and featured the entire Peruvian coastal line. It was late in the afternoon when we arrived at the beach and stopped for having lunch in Máncora, the well known tourist center in the north of Peru. From that point onwards there would be only desert in front of us and, from time to time, the view of the coast and the outlines shapes of “rabiahorcados” in the air…
It was very late at night when one of the pistons of the engine was broken near Trujillo. Few hours later, after a sort of rebellion attempt on the part of the passengers, the drivers decided to repair it and we finally could continue our journey to Lima.

On Monday, 27th of November, dawn found us in the central coast of Peru. We were crossing desert and more desert while we stood, in freezing conditions, a stinking bus and a pestilential toilet without water, the unbearable sound level of the films, and the dictatorial manners on the part of the drivers. We stopped to have breakfast 16 hours after Máncora, in a hidden petrol station placed in the middle of nowhere. The best qualifier for the food might be “filthy”, but we were really hungry.
At midday we arrived, finally, in Lima. The city did not show us many more surprises with the exception of the governor election result, which, at least in the capital, had been favourable to the reelection of Castañeda. We found a room in the same hotel we had been the previous time and, after having a shower and put on clean clothes we went out to look for something to eat. The sky was dark and the streets were grey but our dishes on the restaurant table looked as tasteful as to illuminate our faces. We decided to taste Peruvian beer and try “cuy” (though it must be written “quy”, which is the Quichua name for a guinea pig, a type of rodent similar to the hamster but bigger that is breed for its meat) From pre-Hispanic times, this little animal is eaten roasted or grilled and you can find it in most Andean inns and restaurants menus from Otavalo to the north of Chile.
After such a tradicional meal, we resigned ourselves to buy in “Ormeño” the following bus tickets for La Paz. We would be leaving the day after in the morning and the journey would take us 27 more hours which we thought that would not be so horrible according to the ticket price. We took advantage of the evening to have some rest and we had dinner with our friends Ada Sosa and Julio Santillán, with whom we shared our last hours in Lima chatting and laughing in a “chifa” (popular name of Chinese restaurants in the Andean region).

On Tuesday, 28 of November, we set off for La Paz early in the morning. Still we passed more deserts going southwards. Again, before our eyes, poverty marched on: impoverished populations, mountainous settlements with the sea at the back and the houses covered in dust and sand covering everything… On the one side we crossed walls and walls painted with the names of the political candidates, on the other we could gaze some private beaches and some public ones, adorned here and there with the silhouette of few rich houses and many poor ones…
The oasis that men and women had created in the valleys astonished us once more. There were fields sown with carrots, cotton, potatoes, corn and even vineyards in the middle of that immense desolation. We passed Ica and crossed again the grounds where the archaeological Nazca lines are drawn… Outside there were houses made of adobe, street markets, “mototaxis”, small carts with fruit, traveling sellers… Sara wrote down in her diary that churches there had the very same colour as the sand, the very same colour that had everything actually. Behind the glasses of the bus all was covered with dust, completely covered in dark grey and dull brown… Desert would be with us for a long time, sand, stones, curtains of dust would accompany us the following hours… Near Palpa Sara described the landscape behind our window:

“What a pretty thing the serpentine that made us bending and twisting among sandy mountains to, after the last curve, found ourselves in the middle of a fertile valley, with fields of corn, cotton, reed, and the extraordinary diversity of trees, and small houses made of adobe looking at the extremely thin trickle of water still flowing down the wide riverbed!”.

We had lunch on the bus, and the service happily surprised us due to its good quality.
It was almost sunset when we started passing fields of olive trees next to the sea. On both sides of the road we could read the advisory message “sandy area”. The road was only an instable fine line over a field of dunes that were moving constantly as they were nomads and they wanted to occupy again the space that the road had stolen them. We crossed the small village named Tanaka, and from Chala, we turned west towards Arequipa… At dinner time we stopped somewhere under a starry sky that invited us to lay down face up on the sandy quilt of the desert.

On Wednesday, 29 of November, we got up in the heart of the highlands, lands covered with short pastures and “ichos” that the cold wind bended and did not allow to grow higher. That region was the Collao land, a large area of high flat land that separated the different Andean ranges, and where Titicaca Lake appeared as the great puddle formed by the tears of the sleepy gods and goddesses that one day inhabited inside the mountains that surrounded its crystal waters. It is the highest navigable lake in the world. The name of this inner sea, actually written Titiqaqa, means “feline stone” in Quichua. The populated areas of this region were small groups of huts made of adobe and with roofs covered with reed in the traditional Andean style (or with much more modern calamine slates). Around the small houses animals were grazing and the small cultivated fields spread. Further on the communal fields extended over the horizon and were sown with the help of the entire community. The “pirqas” (short stone walls without mortar) divided slopes and dales: from our position they looked like irregular seams in a sort of canvas made of patches.
Early in the morning we arrived in Puno. At last we could see Titicaca Lake from its very shore. It is one of the main “Mama Qucha” (mother-lake) of the whole Andean range.
The houses came down the slopes, the mountains where the frame where the violet and grey tints of the water were immersed. On the shores a couple of “caballitos” (little horses) were resting. They are the traditional aymara rafts made of pieces of a reed called “totora” tied together and used as boat. There was a lot of “totora” on the shores and peasants cut it and spread it on the ground to make it dry. We could also see the circular nets extended over the lake: people who live near Titicaca live on agriculture, “totora” handicrafts and fishing.
One tour later we left Puno and crossed Juli, a city that forced its way through the wrinkled coastal land. There the first printing house of the region was established in the early XVII century, and it was there where the religious man Ludovico Bertonio published his famous “Aymara Language Art and Vocabulary”. This was the first piece of writing about the “Jaqe Aru” (human language, original name of Aymara language), a work that continues being a source of valuable information for linguistics and anthropologists.
That part of the region was completely “aymara”. Women were dressed with two or three bright skirts, one over the other; they carried colourful bundles on their back and wore bowler hats over their heads with strips and pompoms that, in the old times, indicated whether they were married or not. Their long plaits were tied with tassels of wool and the cloths over their shoulders were tied with silver “tupus” or simple pins… All of them wore an apron around and their eyes were filled with curiosity…
In Juli was market day. Animals, cereals, grain, fruit, meat, cheese, bread, etc, would be exchanged along that morning in the outside market. People guided their herds of llamas and vicuñas, their small flocks of sheep and their droves of pigs that sometimes had to be carried under their arms... The market was placed on the outskirts of the city and was a meeting point for inhabitants that lived far off and during that day went down to the city and traded their products to obtain what they did not produce. It was midday when we arrived at the Peruvian-Bolivian border in Desaguadero. It was an authentic chaos as the rest of the borders we had crossed on this journey... Finally we came in Bolivia and got another stamp in our passports. Desaguadero was a profusion of colours, of dirtiness mixed with smiles, of outside stalls and little shops, of quiet smugglers and expectant policemen…
From there onwards we only found small herds and flocks cared by girls and more and more houses made of adobe: a lot of poverty wherever we turned our heads to see. The city of “El Alto” (a slum of La Paz situated in the high tableland that, because of its impressive growth, had become an immense urban area itself) announced the Choqueyapu River gorge: a deep narrow valley with steep sides where is situated the capital of Bolivia, with its houses, streets and squares hanging on those slopes. The view from “El Alto” is unusual and surprising, absolutely startling: thousands and thousands of unfinished houses exhibiting their red bricks, covering each square inch of land…
Once in the Bus Station, the first thing we did was to buy the tickets to go to Villazón with the company “Inti Illimani”. We felt too soon the “suruqchi” (“soroche”, mountain sickness): our head burst, our ears rang, and our heart beat as we were running a race...
We decided to spend our free time walking in the streets of La Paz, city that Sara did not know yet. From the centric San Francisco Church we went up Sagárnaga St., stopping here and there to have a look, play musical instruments and carefully touch the wonderful handmade textiles exhibited on the walls. We walked along Linares St., and saw the luthiers and the Sorcerers Market, full of stuffed fetus of llamas that were supposed to bring fertility to women and lands.
Crossing the invisible Choqueyapu riverbed we led our steps towards the Central Square, with the Cathedral and the Government Palace (in whose façade, along with the huge tricolour national flag, hanged the Wipala, the multicolour flag of the native Andean peoples, placed there since Evo Morales was chosen as the president of the Republic). From there, walking under the slight rain that had started a few minutes before, we went to visit the Ethnographic and Folklore Museum, where we were lucky to find a wonderful collection of ethnographic and archaeological “unkus” (traditional male piece of clothing similar to a long shirt without buttons). Then we trod along the narrow street formerly know as “of the Green Cross”, today Murillo St., passing the Ernesto Cavour´s Musical Instruments Museum and many famous “peñas” (places where people join together to play and enjoy traditional music). The houses of that little street conserved the taste of colonial times among its wooden doors, its thick walls, its iron balconies with pots of geranium, its old street lamps… Our steps echoed with the stones of the steep pavement…
We ate “salteñas” (sort of small pies stuffed with chopped meat, vegetables, boiled eggs, cheese, etc) in one of the many stalls of the market while we observed the incessant work of the shoe-cleaners, young boys that covered their face with a winter cap because they considered that their job as bootblack is discriminated by society. It was early in the evening when we went back to the Bus Station and we got on the uncomfortable, dirty, ruined, broken and cold bus without delay. Both of us knew (attending other personal experiences in similar conditions) that the journey La Paz-Villazón would neither be comfortable nor easy. It is a trip that one suffers more than enjoys. The outside freezing air came in through the windows that opened alone with the shaking movements…We cracked our heads on the back of our seats many times because the road were not paved and the rattling of bags, and bundles hitting against each other was a hell of a noise. Many children were sleeping on the floor between both rows of seats. People carried bundles and bundles and bundles of we did not know what…
It was there, in the middle of that high flat land and in the middle of the night when someone stole my suitcase where I had put my travel diary, my documentation, information related to my professional work and most of our new contacts. Nothing was said, nobody seemed to be in charge, no one moved a finger, no solidarity was expressed… I lost everything. In fact, this travel diary has been written thanks to the notes that Sara wrote down in her own notebook and my memory, and slowly I had been able to recover most of my work and the majority of our contacts. However, the experience left a nasty taste in the mouth that will remain forever.
The Bolivian “prepuna” (previous to the high flat land) landscape seemed to us more bleak and desolate than ever. There, in Cotagaita, everything looked like sad, ash-coloured, dusty... Dried irrigation channels and riverbeds, twisted trees without a single leave, a road that seemed not to have and end, and a group of travel companions that we wanted to have out of our sight as soon as possible…

We arrived in Villazón at noon, on Thursday, 30th of November. In the local police office they gave us the necessary papers to be able to leave Bolivia and cross the border. Carrying our backpacks covered with sand and dust (the bus was opened in its lowest part and we almost did not recognize our luggage when they took everything out), disappointed, exhausted, dirty, hungry and worried for the lost of my documentation, we crossed over the bridge that separated Villazón from La Quiaca in Argentina.
Without much problem we were allowed to leave Bolivian grounds, and with a few recommendations about how to deal with the loss of my documentation and avoid problems in the future, Argentinean frontier army did not ask us many more things.
In La Quiaca, Argentinean police gave me a special document whose fulfillment took me five more hours, which I spent waiting for someone who took me a photograph (there was only a photographer in the village and I had gone three times to his shop before finding him the fourth) and going from one cyber to another trying to find a printer where I could print a number that I had to present to the Police. Meanwhile, Sara remained “growing roots” at the bus station in the middle of a crowded corridor where people from Jujuy and Bolivia were camping with their many children and huge bags.
It was almost midnight when we set off for Jujuy, capital of the Argentinean province with the very same name that is next to Bolivia. We would pass the picturesque villages of “La Quebrada de Humahuaca” (declared Humankind Heritage by UNESCO), where the frontier army would stop us at one in the morning. They asked us to get off the bus with all our bags to get frozen in the cold night and be checked once more.
We would arrive in Jujuy at four if nothing else broke our journey, and at 7 would connect with another bus that, after crossing Jujuy, Salta, Tucumán and Santiago del Estero provinces (hundreds and hundreds of kilometers) would leave us in Córdoba, tired and loaded with a lot of packages the 1st of December and ten in the evening.

The return journey from Quito has lasted six days; we had spent 28 in total since we left. We had crossed four countries plus our own and five borders, toured thousands of kilometers and bore 230 hours on some of the worst long distance means of transport that we hade ever met... We had tasted most of the regional and local dishes in the most popular inns that we found; we had seen Latin American landscapes from Temuco in the south of Chile to Peguche in the north of Ecuador... We had traveled along the dorsal spine of America, crossed the old Inkan Empire, and attended three International Librarianship Congresses… We had met really wonderful people, slightly knew the social and cultural reality of the Andean world… We had listened to three different languages and many more indigenous dialects, and discovered ancient cultures that, in spite of everything and everybody, continue struggling for their identity and their survival.
We had seen misery, poverty, desolation, hunger, sickness, inequality, unbalance, discrimination and too much injustice… And, in front of all this we always wondered where the hell the hands that speak constantly of help were. We had also visited very small libraries and listened to the minimal stories of colleagues that worked in infrahuman conditions to provide the services their users really need. And it was also there where we asked ourselves where the “big names”, the “academic” people, the “professors” and the president of the “fine” National Associations with their “fine” dresses and their “fine” hands, talking of “fine” things such as “digital libraries” were... We always made us the very same questions and the answer was also the same: those who speak, those who tell, those who claim, those who publish, those live in a universe apart from reality because reality does not suit them at all. Those do not know anything about “real” services, “real” help, about the “real” problems that people face day after day, people that cannot have a shower because do not have water, people that cannot read because nobody came near to teach them… Those “great”, those “important” live inside their pink bubbles, thinking that their reality is also the reality of the rest, ignoring (as good uninformed ones) that THEIR reality is only for some fortunate only.
Through those thousands kilometers, many things were broken and many more grew again –in a different way- inside us. To the small house in Córdoba did not return the very same two persons that left one month before. Two different persons came back, more realistic, conscious of the sufferings that sow the world with sorrow and pain, disgusted with so much hypocrisy and falsehood, and ready to set their hearts on and give the best of themselves for those unknown people that, with their quiet and anonymous work make possible that many children learn to read, that many young people finish their school years, that many men and women learn a profession, and that many elders entertain their time and be informed. If the journey taught something to the two travelers that have been writing this long diary through the past two months on this blog, it is that there are a good number of people –to whom we listen with admiration and adorn with pompous titles- who should close their mouths forever if they had a bit of dignity… Because the world –the one Sara and I discovered when set off- is very different from the place they want to make us believe. It is much harder, it is much more difficult and if we want to live in it, we should look directly at its face, at that painful face full of very deep scars.
To all those who have followed our steps through the pages of this travel diary, thank you very much. To all those who have accompanied, helped, and welcomed while we had been touring along the Latin America spine, our affection and kindest regards. And to all those who still wonder “How do Civallero and Plaza do for traveling so much?”, we can add that we do it with a lot of sacrifice, inconvenience, dirtiness, hunger and sleep, as most of the poor people –as we- do it in our continent. Please, do not think that putting this into practice is easy. Nonetheless, if you believe that it is so, we invite you to try. You will see, as we wrote above- that our world is neither very nice nor too simple as some colour it.
A huge hug from these two nomads who prefer learning from reality than continue dreaming impossible chimeras.

[“The log of a librarian” will continue presenting LIS and social matters in the following posts from February onwards. Stay with us!]