Stories of conquistadors who meet a just fate or “go native.” Saints, priests, nuns, and missionaries who address the injustice in various ways, many of whom courageously face a bad fate with the Inquisition. It mostly sticks with the Spanish, but embraces comparable looks at stages in the Portuguese subjugation of Brazil and the British in North America.Īmid all the stereotypes of greed and violence among the conquerors and the abuses of slavery and economic repression of the peasants for agriculture and mining by the colonizers, other stories wend their way into the book with a much more hopeful outlook on the humaneness of humanity and hope for the future. In one way it is a compressed history, footnotes and all, but the way it is written makes it like a cornucopia, collage, or mosaic that includes: myths, tableaus like dioramas or time-machine windows dramatic slices of lives of the invaders and colonizers, the natives they subjugated and the African slaves they imported to work in plantations and mines. It’s not a casual read, but you can take it slow, piece by piece, and then see if, like me, you get captivated by its haunting, beguiling, and ever charming succession of 2-3 page pieces. Wikipedia tells me that Galeano, who died in 2015, was a leftist Uruguayan journalist and essayist who is respected for his 1971 historical critique of colonialism, “ Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,” and that he wrote the Memory of Fire trilogy while he was in exile from the dictatorship of his country and that in Argentina. Two other volumes apply the same treatment from then up to modern times.
This 1982 book was stunning to me, the compelling way Galeano distills some turning points in Latin American history into visions and vignettes that march through pre-Columbian creation myths and the decades from the end of the 15th century to 1700.
0 kommentar(er)
