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| NEW INTERNATIONALIST 226 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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| THIS MONTH'S THEME | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Columbus on the couch Guatemala's killing
fields Eduardo Galeano considers the vagaries of our vocabulary. The pain of Mother
Earth Escaping Eden Women's wisdom Black Brazil |
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Columbus 500 |
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| FROM THIS MONTH'S EDITOR | |||||||||||||||||||||||
My first hint there was more to this Columbus business than meets the eye came months ago. I was on the phone to Hawaii trying to sweetly cajole a potential contributor into writing something for this issue. And I was having some trouble establishing my credentials. (A familiar problem: I sometimes wonder enviously what it would be like to have the instant recognition of the mainstream news magazines.) 'New Internationalist?' There was a moment of hesitation. Then: 'I'm afraid I don't know the magazine.' I took the opportunity to do my standard spiel, a two-minute potted summary of what we do and how we do it, with the usual apologies about our inelegant and slightly misleading name. In the end it went pretty well. The problem was not so much convincing the writer that we were an acceptable publication, it was his publisher's deadline. He was writing a book on Columbus and the finished manuscript was due in eight weeks. No time - end of story. When the same thing happened a week later I realized the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landfall in the Americas was not only big news, it was big business. Later, I discovered more than 200 books on Columbus-related subjects are scheduled for release in 1992. There are also at least two Hollywood films being made, countless television specials planned, lavish exhibits and 'official' celebrations in at least 30 countries. The press, too, has jumped on the bandwagon;. dozens of articles appeared in advance of 1992 and gallons more ink will be spilled over the next year. In the US, where the 'Admiral of the ocean sea' is regarded with the same warm reverence Italian fascists still feel for Mussolini, the centre of the celebrations will be 'Ameriflora 92', a $100 million international flower show being built in Columbus, Ohio. And the excess doesn't stop there. In the 'truth-is-stranger-than-fiction' category there is to be a symbolic marriage between the statue of Columbus in Barcelona and New York's Statue of Liberty. So you can understand why I had my doubts whether we would actually be able to say anything new on the subject. I'm less worried about that now. It finally struck me that the enormous amount of verbiage being chumed out on the old sailor is exactly the reason he's such a perfect subject for us. After all we're in the business of distilling alternative views to the daily swell of information and presenting it to readers in a digestible form. And that's what I've tried to do here - to fill in some of the background to the basic issues that will be debated over the next year. But more than that I've tried to give a prominent voice to alternative voices: indigenous people and Third World writers. That's one big reason why what you read here will be different. Consider this your introductory handbook to the next 500 years. |
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Letters FRONT COVER MONTAGE: ALAN HUGHES; PHOTOS (CLOCKWISE
FROM TOP RIGHT) : ALAN McLAUGHLIN / IMPACT VISUALS; PAUL DIX / IMPACT VISUALS;
BRIAN MOSER / HUTCHISON LIBRARY; P PLISSON / MARY EVANS / EXPLORER;
MARY EVANS / EXPLORER. |
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Wayne Ellwood for the New Internationalist Co-operative |
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