Genesis (Memory of Fire, Volume 1)
is a monumental work that makes for a rich education. Eduardo
Galeano includes more than three hundred entries, each about a page in
length, capturing events, happenings, or short tales taken from the
Americas, mostly Latin America, beginning with the first voices prior to
Columbus and continuing up to the year 1700. Eduardo Galeano has his
own way of expressing what he reports, often incorporating humor, irony,
or satire. However, whatever he writes, a perceptive reader can detect
great nuggets of wisdom in each and every entry.
Here are four quotes from Eduardo's Preface that set the tone. I've also includes my modest comments.
"Poor
History had stopped breathing: betrayed in academic texts, lied about
in classrooms, drowned in dates, they had imprisoned her in museums and
buried her, with floral wreaths, beneath statuary bronze and monumental
marble.
Perhaps Memory of Fire can help give her back breath, liberty, and the world."
As
they say, history is the story told by the winners. When Eduardo was a
youngster sitting in class, he had the good sense to know what the
teacher was saying amounted to nothing more than a pile of deadly lies
students were being forced to memorize. When he raised any objection, he
was either told to keep his mouth shut or, more usually, ordered to
leave the classroom.
"I am not a historian. I am a writer who
would like to contribute to the rescue of the kidnapped memory of all
America, but above all of Latin America, that despised and beloved land:
I would like to talk to her, share her secrets, ask of what difficult
clays she was born, from what acts of love and violation she comes."
This
surely counts as one of the book's charms: Eduardo is not a historian
or academic; he's a writer who knows the way something is told is
equally important to what is told, the subject being addressed.
"Memory of Fire
is not an anthology, clearly not; but I don't know if it is a novel or
essay or epic poem or testament or chronicle or . . . . Deciding robs me
of no sleep. I do not believe in the frontiers that, according to
literature's customs officers, separate the forms."
Call it what
you will, but Eduardo has written a work of great literature that will
take its place on the shelf alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos
Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Amado.
"There is nothing
neutral about this historical narration. Unable to distance myself, I
take sides: I confess it and am not sorry. However, each fragment of
this huge mosaic is based on a solid documentary foundation. What is
told her has happened, although I tell it in my style and manner."
Tell it like it is, Eduardo! In Memory of Fire,
as in each of the author's many works, he speaks out against hatred,
greed, stupidity, regimentation, violence, repression, and exploitation
in their many repugnant forms.
THE RAIN
There's dozens of short passages from American societies and civilizations addressing things like The Creation, Time, Day, The Flood, Resurrection, Magic and Laughter.
The event or subject will always have a connection with nature and the
natural world. And why does it rain? We're given a sweet tale of a
little girl who suddenly discovers she's alive. One day, on a rocky
mountain, when she went to fetch water, snakes were about to eat her up
when the little girl sang. “From far away, the thunder birds heard the
call. They attacked the rocky mountain with lightning, rescuing the
prisoner, and killed the snakes.
The thunder birds left the little girl in the fork of the tree.
“You'll live here,” they told her. “We'll come every time you sing.”
Whenever the little green tree frog sings from his tree, the thunderclaps gather and it rains upon the world.”
1531: A LETTER
“Fray Bartolomé de las Cases is writing to the Council of the Indies. It would have been better for the Indians, he maintains, to go to hell with their heresies, their procrastination and their isolation, than to be saved by the Christians. The cries of so much spilled human blood reach all the way to heaven: those burned alive, roasted on grills, thrown to wild dogs.”
This
short passage sets the tone for much of the history of Europe's
invasion of the Americas from 1492 – 1700. Europe seeks all the gold and
other resources from the New World. As for the native peoples, if they
are unwilling to submit to slavery or do things like spend their lives
toiling in sugar fields or breaking their backs in silver mines, better
they should be tortured and murdered, pagans that they are.
To
underscore this dreadful point, another entry from 1531 relates that a
Bishop Zumárraga was “guardian of the branding iron that stamps on the
Indians' faces the names of their proprietors. He threw the Aztec
codices into the fire, papers printed by the hand of Satan, and
destroyed five hundred temples and twenty thousand idols.” Most
unfortunately, it wasn't until deep into the 20th century that scholars,
historians, and archeologists began to appreciate the culture and
artworks of the rich ancient civilization of the Aztecs.
1538: BLACKBEARD, REDBEARD, WHITEBEARD
Eduardo
includes a humorous episode of three armies meeting in the Valley of
Bogotá, prepared to slice one another to pieces before claiming the
golden city of El Dorado as their own. “Then the German bursts out
laughing, doubles up with mirth, and the Andalusians catch the contagion
until the three captains collapse, floored by laughter and hunger and
what brought them all there, that which is without being and arrived
without coming: the realization that El Dorado won't be anybody's."
1666: NEW YORK
As
with many of Eduardo's entries, we can learn a number of shocking facts
about history. I'll close with this entry that can serve as a prime
example. How many people, especially Americans, know how Wall Street,
the hub of the financial district in downtown New York City, got its
name? Eduardo lets us know back when New York was New Amsterdam
belonging to the Dutch, the industrious Dutch ran the most important
slave market in North America – and Wall Street is named after the wall
built to stop blacks from escaping. 
Eduardo Galeano from Uruguay, 1940-2015
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