Celebration of Fantasy

Analysis

Ollantaytambo, Peru

Context/Current Issues

Symbolism

~Other Links~

Social Watch

~Context and Current Issues~  

"Celebration of Fantasy" first struck me as an anecdotal abrazo.  It describes Galeano’s witness to the dauntless imagination of childhood, as a small poor boy relates to him the history and even the defects of his imaginary ink watch.

In the context of the rest of The Book of Embraces, this abrazo seemed initially to be rather lighthearted.  It reminded me of the thirty-second "feel-good" story strategically placed in the midst of a scandalous and tragedy-laden nightly newscast.  This abrazo had left me with a smile on my face, not with the pangs of social injustice and outrage that resulted from the majority of the other pages.  I wondered why exactly Galeano had related this particular tale.

I first concluded that, akin to the short upbeat news story, this abrazo was meant as a "pick-me-up" in the middle of a intensely sobering book   That hypothesis didn't seem to fit, however, considering that "Celebration of Fantasy" falls on page 41 of a 273 page book.  So close to the beginning, this piece was probably not written by Galeano as a kind of coffee break from the work of the remainder of his writing.  So, I thought some more.  What purpose did this story serve? 

My second idea was that this was an anecdotal writing meant for anecdotal purposes:  mainly to familiarize the reader with the subjects of the book  I thought this abrazo might be meant (especially since it was so early in the book) as a method of introducing the people in The Book of Embraces.  By telling this short and considerably heartwarming story, Galeano was letting us see the personality of the people about whom he writes.  He was helping us, his audience, to meet the poor children, so we would care about them.

It's sometimes easy to ignore a problem when its victims are nameless, faceless, and unfamiliar.  But, by relating a personal example of the imagination of a poor child in Peru, Galeano causes us to care about the poor child in Peru.  We relate that child's imagination and irreverence to the imagination and irreverence of a child we know, or the child that we once were.  Thus, we can identify with people thousands of miles away, and the rest of the book is more effective.

As I examined this abrazo more deeply, I finally came to the conclusion that it, too, despite its outward "warm-fuzzies" effect, was making an important social statement.  I thought that perhaps, beneath my first impressions, Galeano was pointing out the persistence of the human spirit, especially that of a child, even in the midst of the desolation of poverty. 

The children Galeano wrote about had nothing but ink drawings on their hands, yet they, through their imaginations, were content with their dragons and parrots, and even their watches that were "a bit slow."  There was also symbolism in the animals they requested, all beasts that could fly or attack. This idea is addressed at the page called "symbolism," linked at top-left.

The abrazo now made new and powerful statements to me.  The first was that children have very little need of material goods to make them happy.  How often do we see a child throw his new toy on the floor after ten minutes but play happily in a box for days on end?   The second was that the children in Ollantaytambo, Peru, are essentially the same as children in the United States, or anywhere else in the world.  Their focus is not on what they lack, such as a real watch, but on what they have, such as one drawn on their wrist in ink.  The third statement I gathered was the one that changed "Celebration of Fantasy" from a simple anecdote into an abrazo as full of social statement as the rest of the pages that fill Galeano's book.  The children in Peru were so much like all other children, children I know, and yet they were so poor as to be described by Galeano as "small," "ragged," and in the case of one particular child, a "waif."

The Book of Embraces was published in 1989, but poverty levels in Peru still remain very high.  Though sources differ on the overall increase or decline of Peru’s national poverty, the website of Social Watch (linked top-left), an international poverty watchdog organization based in Montevideo, Uruguay, quoted 8.75 of the country’s 24 million people in poverty (defined by Social Watch as "households unable to generate sufficient income to pay for the basic family basket") in 1997.   The poverty in Peru is still very real, and I was forced to consider those same small boys, twelve years later, now, perhaps, with babies of their own.  Were the watches that kept their time still only drawings on their wrists?

Thus, in final analysis, I concluded that "Celebration of Fantasy" is much more than the simple and lighthearted abrazo I first thought it to be.  It is not a story out of step with the rest of Galeano's book, serving to help us identify with the people of Latin America and addressing their hardship.  Perhaps Galeano is suggesting that fantasy would not need so much celebration if reality were made a little bit better.

Galeano, Eduardo.  The Book of Embraces. Trans. Cedric Belfrage.  New York:  Norton, 1992.  41.

"1999 country report:  Peru."  Social Watch.  2000.  1 March 2001.  <http://www.socialwatch.org/1999/eng/nationalreports99/per99eng.htm>