So much oppression, can’t keep track of it no moreEduardo Galeano (1940-2015) was a Uruguayan journalist and one of his nation’s most prominent literary figures. He often wrote about the history, politics, and culture of Latin America, particularly how that region’s history of subjection to imperialist conquest has influenced its modern condition. Galeano’s literary works often blur the line between fiction and nonfiction. His 2009 book Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, is written in much the same style and format as his earlier Memory of Fire trilogy: a rapid-fire string of brief vignettes depicting famous or lesser-known personages from history. Though the events depicted are real, Galeano’s scenes often contain fictionalized details, dialogue, and interior reflections, in much the same manner as historical novels. Whereas Galeano focused exclusively on the history of Latin America in his Memory of Fire series, in Mirrors he sets his sights on the entire world. Both works, however, are similarly concerned with depicting instances of oppression, intolerance, imperialism, and violence.
The worldwide broadening of scope allows Galeano to tackle the oppression of various marginalized groups, among them Latinos, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Gypsies, women, homosexuals, the poor, and even nature itself. Though the vignettes are seemingly unrelated, a certain thread pertaining to one of these topics will continue for several episodes before flowing seamlessly into the next string of horror stories of slavery and other atrocities. Despite the horrendous and tragic subject matter, Galeano often approaches each vignette with a sort of gallows humor, along the lines of “Isn’t it ridiculous the justifications that [the oppressor] came up with for torturing [the oppressed]?” Throughout the book, the Catholic Church frequently fills in the oppressor blank, as does the U.S. government and various Latin American dictators. Perhaps no one in this book, however, is charged with as many sins as the British, toward whom Galeano apparently harbors a great deal of resentment.
Mirrors is essentially a people’s history of the world that views events through a welcome leftist lens but is written in a more creative-nonfiction style than the works of academic historians like Howard Zinn. The global scope of Mirrors is less effective than the Latin American focus of the Memory of Fire books, and the reader simply learns less as a result. Often Mirrors simply reads like a catalog of atrocities, many of which are common knowledge. Though coverage of each incident is necessarily brief, Galeano sometimes reveals little-known facts and figures. This book’s most important accomplishment, however, is making the reader aware of unfamiliar individuals and events that might be worthy of further investigation in other sources. Naturally, given Galeano’s area of expertise, many of those lesser-known figures come from Spanish and Latin American history.
In many of the myriad scenes that comprise Mirrors, Galeano’s unique perspective on history is enlightening, thought-provoking, and even amusing. At other times, however, the book is just a bummer that challenges one’s faith in humanity and one’s hope for the future. A run of several pages in which Galeano ponders mankind’s destruction of the environment, for example, doesn’t teach you much and doesn’t offer any solutions. It’s just depressing. Still, the benefits of Mirrors outweigh its faults. Galeano keeps the reader interested throughout, and one can’t help looking at the world in a new way after reading his insightful take on the frequently shameful history of mankind.
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Four score and seven years of dictators, diplomats, and dissenters
Originally published in 1986, Century of the Wind is the final book in the Memory of Fire trilogy by Uruguayan journalist and novelist Eduardo Galeano. Like the two volumes that preceded it, Century of the Wind is not exactly a novel, but rather a unique literary composition of hundreds of brief historical vignettes based on fact but creatively embellished by the author. Through these myriad scenes, arranged chronologically, Galeano gives the reader a sweeping overview of Latin American history. While the first book in the trilogy, Genesis, covers the years 1492 to 1700, and the second volume, Faces and Masks, focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Century of the Wind chronicles most of the twentieth century, from 1900 to 1986.
Though the narrative pieces are arranged in strict chronological order, Galeano jumps around considerably from topic to topic and from country to country. Early on, one would think that this is a book about the Mexican Revolution since the author devotes so much coverage to the political turmoil in that nation. Other themes eventually arise to take center stage in their turn, however, such as the United States’ imperial interventions in Nicaragua and the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Galeano intersperses such political and military events with cultural developments as well, highlighting artists, writers, and movie stars, most but not all of whom are Latin American. (Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, for example, make repeat appearances.) Overall, however, Galeano’s main concern is to provide a people’s history of social injustice, and Century of the Wind stands as a record of the political oppression and brutal violence inflicted on Latin American peoples throughout the twentieth century.
The result can be both shocking and depressing, as a horrific cycle repeats itself over and over in nation after nation, not only in Mexico and Nicaragua but also in Guatemala, Panama, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Venezuela, Haiti, and on and on. Homegrown revolutionaries attempt to rise up against capitalist colonialism by fighting to establish socialist regimes. To protect its corporate interests, the United States supports reactionary rulers in crushing these rebellions. These puppet leaders then rise into full-blown dictators who rape the resources of their nations for their own profit and practice institutionalized torture and murder against Indigenous people and the laboring classes. The book is frequently punctuated by shockingly graphic descriptions of atrocities. Galeano clearly writes his eye-opening history from a leftist perspective, and not surprisingly the book is more likely to appeal to those with a similar political outlook.
One of the most valuable aspects of Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy is his extensive bibliography. Each historical vignette is typically supported by at least one cited source, but many of the scenes in Century of the Wind are missing their citations, which I suspect may be an editorial error on the part of the ebook publisher rather than an oversight by the author. Because of the way history repeated itself relentlessly in nation after nation, at times reading Century of the Wind feels like treading a brutal hamster wheel. This third volume lacks some of the epic grandeur of Faces and Masks, which highlighted several successful wars for independence over the course of two centuries. Nevertheless, Century of the Wind makes an estimable capstone to Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, the whole of which is an impressive achievement that I would recommend to anyone interested in Latin American history, literature, and culture.
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Two centuries of slavery and revolution
Faces and Masks, originally published in 1984, is the second book in Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s trilogy Memory of Fire, which chronicles the history of the Americas. This trilogy is a stylistically unique work of literature, neither fiction nor nonfiction but a combination of the two. Each book is comprised of hundreds of brief historical scenes a page or two in length. Within a strict chronological framework, Galeano literally jumps all over the map, though he mostly focuses on Latin America. Even though the narrative never stays in one place for long, certain characters make repeated appearances throughout the book, allowing readers to chart the trajectories of their lives. Galeano’s hopscotch technique is quite effective in drawing connections between diverse peoples and places while providing an eye-opening and moving perspective on world history.
Faces and Masks begins in 1700 where the first book, Genesis, left off, and covers the 18th and 19th centuries. While Genesis was mostly about the Spanish conquest of the New World, Faces and Masks focuses heavily on the enslavement of African Americans and Native Americans and highlights the various uprisings of American peoples against their conquerors. I liked Genesis, but I found Faces and Masks much more compelling simply because a lot of fascinating events took place during these two centuries, such as Alexander von Humboldt’s expedition to Latin America, the Mexican Revolution of 1810, and Simón Bolívar’s revolution in South America. Galeano briefly covers prominent world events like the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War, but he gives much more in-depth coverage to wars and revolutions in Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Paraguay, Cuba, and many other conflicts great and small. As Galeano shows, too often the violence and upheaval resulted in a nation’s nominal freedom from European political rule only to be handed over to wealthy, Euro-friendly rulers who continued to exploit Native and poor populations for the economic gain of the conquerors they just overthrew.
Memory of Fire is very much a “people’s history” of the world, told from a Southern Hemisphere perspective. In his beautifully written historical vignettes, which combine poetic prose with insightful social commentary, Galeano is equally adept at illustrating the greed and excesses of oligarchs or the tragedies and miseries of slaves, farmers, and freedom fighters. Sadly, the downtrodden underdogs are nearly always the Native inhabitants or working-class laborers of Latin America. Galeano’s narrative, however, is by no means one-sided or preachy, and not all of his heroes are Latino. Historical figures of all races and classes make appearances in Faces and Masks, and the author judges them fairly on the basis of their actions. The ensemble cast features not only politicians, military leaders, and revolutionaries, but a surprising number of artists and writers as well.
Even North Americans who consider themselves reasonably well-versed in the history of Latin America will find much to learn from this Uruguayan man of letters. The Memory of Fire books are not so much a replacement of traditional history books as they are an appetizer for them. Each mini-chapter inspires the reader to want to learn more about the interesting personages and surprising incidents depicted, and Galeano’s extensive bibliography would be a fine place to start. After Faces and Masks, I am looking forward to reading book three, Century of the Wind, but it will be hard for the 20th century to top this.
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Scenes of New World conquest
Genesis, a book by Uruguayan novelist and journalist Eduardo Galeano, was originally published in 1982 under the Spanish title Los nacimientos. It is the first book in Galeano’s trilogy Memory of Fire (Memoria del fuego), in which he chronicles the history of the Americas. Though Genesis is certainly historical fiction, it isn’t quite a novel, but rather its own unique form of fiction. The book consists of hundreds of brief historical scenes, each only a page or two in length. These vignettes are arranged in chronological order but don’t necessarily lead sequentially from one to another in the way chapters of a novel do. Each scene is based on historical fact, but Galeano fictionalizes the history by adding dialogue, interior monologue, bits of folklore and myth, and poetic description. Snippets of poems and songs also appear sporadically. Though unlike a novel it has no protagonist per se, certain “characters”—historical personages such as Christopher Columbus, the pirate Henry Morgan, or Mexican scholar and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—make recurring appearances throughout the book, allowing the reader to see the progression of their lives.
Though the trilogy is often described as a history of Latin American, its scope is actually broader than that, encompassing the entire Western Hemisphere. While most of the chapters deal with Mexico and South America, it does include glimpses of North America as well—the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies, for example, or the Haida in the Pacific Northwest. Galeano also elaborates on the history of the conquerors with many scenes set in Spain. England and France are also covered, as is the slave trade in Africa. Genesis begins with a series of creation myths from Native American cultures, then chronicles the years 1492 to 1700. The second and third books, Faces and Masks and Century of the Wind, will continue the narrative into the 1980s. Galeano omits the history of Native American civilizations prior to the arrival of Columbus, presumably because his main concern is the conquest, colonization, and clash between Old and New World cultures.
Though the scenes jump all over the place in terms of location, culture, and tone, all are united stylistically by Galeano’s consistent narrative voice, skillfully translated by Cedric Belfrage in the English edition from Open Road Media. Galeano’s descriptions of the brutality of conquest are often bluntly graphic, but his prose is suffused with a gallows humor, as if speaking from the perspective of a centuries-old inhabitant of this world where violence and slavery were simply facts of life. He points out the laughable absurdities of the Spanish Inquisition, for example, without sugar-coating the atrocities. His treatment of the conquest is admirably even-handed and matter-of-fact, eliciting pathos without succumbing to preachy condemnation. His intention is neither to shock nor to castigate but rather to examine how modern America arose from such reprehensible beginnings.
Reading Genesis inspires the reader to want to find out more about these characters and events. Therefore, one of the most valuable aspects of this book is its bibliography. Each of Genesis’s vignettes ends with a numerical reference to one of the 227 cited works Galeano consulted in writing the book. Unfortunately, in the ebook edition from Open Road Media, those reference numbers are not linked to the bibliography, so the reader has to search for them.
I will admit that at times I lost my patience with Galeano. He can get long-winded and venture off into fanciful asides, but overall I’m glad I read the book and plan to read the other two volumes in the trilogy. Readers may find themselves resistant at first to the book’s unusual composition, but once one lets go of conventional notions of what fiction should be and just accepts Genesis for what it is, the book is a profound and educational reading experience.
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