Genesis (1982)
Faces & Masks (1984)
Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015)
Translated from the Spanish by Cedric Belfrage
306 and 290 pages, respectively
With sufficient remove, the history of the Western Hemisphere since 1492 can seem to have followed an ineluctable trajectory: a flood of European settlers arrived seeking a new life; they rapidly expanded their colonies by displacing or subjugating native peoples, importing slaves, and exploiting resources; and, finally, they aggressively threw off the yoke of distant rulers to form independent countries. Even in texts that acknowledge the cruel and so often deadly impacts of the past half-millennium of colonialism in the Americas, the horrific scope of the destruction can tend to fade within a broader narrative suggesting civilization’s inevitable progress.
Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano manages to upend this dynamic in his engrossing trilogy Memory of Fire. Through a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes that meld historical description and historical fiction, Galeano presents the epic and yet devastating history of the Western Hemisphere since Columbus set sail from Spain. By keeping a tight focus on particular events and people, he highlights the ruinous impact of the colonial history on individuals and communities, letting readers draw their own conclusions about the overarching course of social and political development. Galeano imposes a strict chronological order on his narrative. Each vignette has for a title the year, the place and a brief descriptor of the content, with the body, typically less than a page long, then presenting a micro-history of a moment, a person, or a community. At the bottom of each, Galeano links to the works that inspired it, by referencing a source list at the end of the book; he indicates literal transcriptions from those sources by putting them in italics in the text.
As I write this, I’ve read the initial two books of the trilogy. In the first, Genesis, Galeano opens with a few dozen pages that sample from the variety of origin stories of the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. He then shifts to his chronological rendering, beginning in 1492 with the embarking of Columbus’ three caravels west into the uncharted waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and continuing on up to 1700. Over this roughly 200-year period, the invasions of the conquistadors in search of riches give way to waves of colonizers exploiting the land and its people, and enslaved natives and Africans beginning almost immediately to rise-up against the brutality of their masters, both secular and clerical.
Already from the first moments the European’s disembarked onto the islands of the Western Hemisphere their lust for gold led them to subjugate local peoples, forcing them to work under such horrific conditions that “those who choose death by hanging themselves or drinking poison along with their children are many.” Others attempt to flee, as Galenao captures in a description of Hatuey, an Indian chief:
He fled with his people from Haiti in a canoe and took refuge in the caves and mountains of eastern Cuba.
There he pointed to a basketful of gold and said: “This is the god of the Christians. For him they pursue us. For him our fathers and our brothers have died. Let us dance for him. If our dance pleases him, this god will order them not to mistreat us.”
They catch him three months later.
They tie him to a stake.
Before lighting the fire that will reduce him to charcoal and ash, the priest promises him glory and eternal rest if he agrees to be baptized. Hatuey asks:
”Are there Christians in that heaven?”
”Yes.”
Hatuey chooses hell, and the firewood begins to crackle. (57, Genesis)
Galeano writes too of the ways in which the church was implicated in the conquering and controlling of the populations of the Western Hemisphere, and also the ways that native peoples integrated icons of their Christian colonizers with their own local beliefs. Of course, this often didn’t end well; Galeano describes the “incineration” of several men:
The six are burning as a punishment and as a lesson: they have buried the images of Christ and the Virgin that Fray Ramón left with them for protection and consolation. Fray Ramón taught them to pray on their knees, to say the Ave Maria and Paternoster and to invoke the name of Jesus in the face of temptation, injury, and death.
No one has asked them why they buried the images. They were hoping that the new gods would fertilize their fields of corn, cassava, boniato, and beans.” (51, Genesis)
What becomes clear is that in the Western Hemisphere of this time the benefits claimed by those who now argue that the project of civilization has lifted so many out of poverty remain many generations into the future.
The second volume, Faces & Masks, covers the period from 1701 to 1900. The mixing of native peoples, European colonizers and African slaves led, with the course of time and human nature, to populations in the lands of the Western Hemisphere with widely varying ancestries and experiences. While the newly arrived from Europe still felt some bond to their home countries, the descendants of Europeans, sometimes several generations in the Americas, felt an ever more tenuous attachment to the countries of their ancestors. At the same time, for the increasing numbers of mixed-race individuals, there came varying degrees of mistreatment and persecution from the European elite.
In this environment, slave uprisings that earlier were doomed from the start due to the overwhelming power and unity of the colonizing forces began to find allies among colonists interested in overthrowing the ruling European powers. Galeano describes a chaotic series of battles and allegiances, as colonies attempted to break free from their European masters, while also fighting one another for land and resources.
Not surprisingly, once European political leaders and militaries were ousted, the colonial elite shifted to consolidating their hold on power by turning on the mixed race and slave groups that had supported the independence movements. For those not intimately familiar with the history of the many lands of the Western Hemisphere over this period, Galeano’s telling of this deadly dance of shifting alliances can become challenging to follow, as generals and political leaders of various stripes and communities fight their way back and forth across the Americas.
In these first two books of his trilogy, Galeano demonstrates the pernicious and, it becomes clear, enduring impacts of the exploitation of the Western Hemisphere by European conquistadors and colonizers, and their descendants. While not ignoring the reality that conflict and subjugation existed in the hemisphere already prior to 1492, such as within the Aztec and Incan empires, Galeano’s history makes evident that Europeans considered the Americas an essentially unoccupied land, one whose resources – material and human – were available to anyone able to exploit them. He lays bare the destructive consequences of often ruthless greed for power and wealth, and the heroic, if all too often futile, resistance of those who stood in the way of its realization.
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Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
