I liked Galeano's approach to non-fiction here and enjoyed reading the vignettes at first. It became harder and harder for me to follow after a while, though, and I found myself wishing I was just reading one solid story instead of bouncing around the Americas each page. This is just my preference and no real fault of the text--the text is beautiful and heartbreaking and creative. I may pick up the next book in the trilogy a little while down the line. ( )

Completed book one of Memory of Fire by Galeano. A history of Americas from early beginnings of the indigenous people up to the beginning of the 1700s. History with commentary, written with perspective of the people makes it a living history story. ( )

"I was really enjoying the rich tapestry of worlds and beginnings as well as learning a lot.
And then, with you barely noticing it, that precise language begins to burn."
read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.gr/2016/03/genesis-eduardo-galeano.html ( )

"hops … into the commonplace in rounding out a theme"

(The Art of Letters) ( )

Why do white people own so many pets? We're not allowed to own people anymore.

I got that off of the Internet.

Three years ago Governor William Berkeley could proudly remark: I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have either for a hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them.

-Yorktown, Virginia, 1674

I got that from this book, a prime target for trigger-happy literature banners the world over, complete with index and 227 cited works and two sequels. Save yourselves a fuckton in tuition for those socioeconomically indoctrinated and white-washed history classes, and pick this up instead. Vollmann's got his merits, but privilege has its limits.

The poets talk and doubt:

Can it be that men are real
Will our song
Still be real tomorrow?

The voices follow one another. When night falls, the king of Huexotzingo thanks them and says good-bye:

We know something that is real
The hearts of our friends.

-Huexotzingo, 1493

When you refuse to talk about the violence, you refuse to talk about the peace. When you refuse to glance over to another side of the globe for fear of stories that are not so cultured, not so ordered, not so supportive of our aspirations towards civilization today, it is a void, and nonentity is worse than pain. Rape and murder, extortion and enslavement, the narrative of conqueror and conquered existed long before Europe drew up the maps proclaiming itself on top and to the right and used them to set sail for the left; the issue here is not of crime and punishment, but everlasting annihilation.

While his soldiers, maddened by hunger, ate each other, the captain read Virgil and Erasmus and made pronouncements for immortality.

-Bueonos Aires, 1580

But here utopia has returned to America, where it originated. Thomas More’s chimera has been incarnated in the small communal world of Michoacán; and in times to come the Indians here will remember Vasco de Quiroga as their own—the dreamer who riveted his eyes on a hallucination to see beyond the time of infamy.

-Michoacán, 1560

How many of your beloved founders owned slaves? How many of your adored thinkers viewed women as cattle? How many of those vaulted names survived due to blood money inheritance and physical type prowess? How much of you is the indelible right of lucky rapists and fattened vampires, and what are you willing to do about it.

In the twelve books of the General History of New Spain, Sahagún and his young assistants have saved and assembled ancient voices, the fiestas of the Indians, their rites, their gods, their way of counting the passage of years and stars, their myths, their poems, their medicines, their tales of remote ages and the recent European invasion…History sings in this first great work of American anthropology.
Six years ago King Philip II had those manuscripts and all the native codices copied and translated by Sahagún seized so that no original or translation of them should remain.

-Tlatelolco, 1583

Facts, thoughts, argument, acquired through books like these in the form of [Three Guineas], [The Wretched of the Earth], [Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism], and many more to come in forms long invalidated by accredited texts, traditional values, and common sense. The latter come to me with blood on their hands and money in their pockets, asking only that I submit.

Palmeres no longer breathes. This broad space of liberty opened up in colonial America has lasted for a century and resisted more than forty invasions. The wind has blown away the ashes of the black bastions of Macacos and Subupira, Dambrabanga and Obenga, Tabocas and Arotirene. For the conquerors, the Palmares century whittles down to the instant when the dagger polished off Zumbí. Yet what does the wakeful know compared with what the dreamer knows?

-Serra Dois Irmãos, 1695

I prefer to dream. ( )