Andrew Graham Yooll is deceased | Journalist, historian …

With death, we are like children, thinking that those we love are eternal. And then the message comes, the one who warns that Andrew Graham-Yooll had a last failure in his cunning heart in London, that we lost him. We all lost it, those who read it, those who were his friends, who did not even know that this language existed as a bridge between their two cultures. Everyone said "English", but you can rarely find anyone more Argentinian
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Graham-Yooll was a pbadionate journalist, historian, translator, poet and broadcaster of Argentines and Argentineans in Britain. He lived by binding threads to obtain another anthology of our theater, another collection of poets. Born in the south of Buenos Aires in 1944, with a Scottish father and an English mother, he had a difficult childhood that left him a few things to grow. One of them was an intense rebellion, which resulted in teenage breakouts in Uruguay, a country that has always loved the loyalty of its family and by far, Britain, almost unreal. This kid left the man with remarkable inner courage, an ability to lower his head and continue, knowing that he could go on. And a joke, that he repeats in his teaching: never miss a good fight …

Another thing the child has left to the writer is the task of constructing identity, common to all immigrant children, but it is complicated by those in their corner of the ring. The British have a tradition of being born there, wherever and in any language, but being British. It was a rebellion that lasted the whole life of Graham-Yooll, that of being Argentinian, that of considering beer as a soda and wine as the real drink, to make chorizo ​​steak the basis of a kitchen. At lunch time, English was criollazo.

After so many things come and go, almost without formal education, Graham-Yooll became a journalist at Buenos Aires Heraldthat in 1966, he occupied a prominent place among the many Argentine newspapers still unpublished in Castilian. Añares later explained the move ironically and modestly, saying that if we were Anglo-Argentine, there would be networks to get conchabo in banks, transport lines or railways. But if one was useless, they sent you Herald. In fact, it was a newspaper of Argentine and North American owners …

The most famous scene of this newspaper and its protagonists came, that of being a focus of light during the dictatorship of Onganía and then under the ferocity of Videla and his bag. Threatened, watched, hurried, journalists from Herald they counted under the English umbrella things that others do not have. Graham-Yooll found an original way to attack him: he was sued for interviewing the ERP board of directors, a subversive act in and of itself. Eventually he had to be evacuated with his wife Micaela and their first two children, their children, in a car directly from the French Embbady to a British Airways plane.

Then came 18 years of exile, the first books, work in the Telegraph, the guardian, the magazine South and this remarkable patriada called The index on censorship, whistleblower of human rights abuses and censorship worldwide. Graham-Yooll discovered that in Britain no one remembered things like our English invasions and that he had started as a historian with Small imperial wars. And he also took a lot of pains when writing a clbadic, State of fear, tell the world what it means to live under the violence of state terrorism
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In 1994, at the age of fifty, Graham-Yooll left his English life and eventually returned to Argentina. The children, the house, the career, everything was left behind and when they asked him why the answer was simple: he did not give anymore, he wanted to become Argentine again. He returned to his city, Herald, write more books, see friends, find new fights and write. There were trips, separations, another son, reports and reviews published in Page / 12. Then the surprise of an order from the British Empire, worth seeing the Herald and the political columns of the Buenos Aires Times.

Finally, a last house is made in Larroque, Entre Ríos, a province he had fallen in love with. It was green, with a garden and his books, time to write, hand in Buenos Aires, cardiologists from the British hospital, friends, dear sister Joanne.

Thursday, Graham-Yooll left for London with joy. A granddaughter was getting married, he was going to be a great-grandfather. He had copies of his latest book, Spanglish. On Friday, he felt bad and was operated on urgently. This time, he did not resist.