by Eduardo Galeano
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream
of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will
suddenly rain down on them- will rain down in buckets. But
good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter
how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is
tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or
start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The
nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits,
dying through life, screwed every which way.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the
police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
One reply on “The Nobodies”
Wow! What a strong poem! It’s brief, but says so much. It’s makes you think about how important language and words are when it comes to describing “the nobodies.” Words marginalize and isolate “the nobodies” so persistently. A lot of us mostly think about words like, “the Third World” or “developing countries,” but this poem makes me realize that there are so many other words, and that it’s easy to subconsciously spread the marginalization. The last verse, “The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them” reminds of a very similar statement I heard in a film about the Rwandan Genocide (either Hotel Rwanda or Sometimes in April), where one of the killers was saying that the Batutsi and their supporters are not worth bullets so it’s most efficient to kill with machetes. We are increasingly becoming efficient in the ways we kill. “The nobodies” aren’t worth bullets, so we use all sorts of bombs to kill them, even phosphorus bombs. Sigh.