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4.27 AVERAGE
4.27 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
dark
emotional
informative
sad
fast-paced
challenging
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Misogyny, Sexual violence, Slavery, Torture, Violence, Colonisation, War
Copy via Netgalley and Open Road
This is a book you are either going to love or going to hate. There really is no in-between. And you wouldn’t know until you have read at least a quarter or more of it.
Genesis is the story of the Americas, in particular South America, and the invasion of it by the Europeans, mostly the Spanish in this book. The story is conveyed via the use of small, short mini stories. Some of these stories are creation myths of First Peoples, some are the views of the Incas, Mayas, and other tribes as the Spanish arrive, some the view of the would be conquerors, and some the view of those who stayed in the Old World. Men, women, rich poor, royal, servant, playwright and theatre grower, prostitute and nun.
The book is one that you can alternately dip into and out while at times being engrossing. The first few stories are creation myths, stories not only about the start of the world but about the birth of animals. You will never look at bats the same way. This opening salvo is peaceful and magical.
And then it ends.
What follows is the arrival of those from the Old World. The central setting is South America, so it most South America. While the majority of the chapters are about the invasion or clash of the two forces, there are some pre-contact stories, such as rise of the Incas (the section about Incan tax is my favorite).
The discovery/ invasion section is mostly on the side of the natives, but there are some nicely shaded sections. One of them is about La Malinche, the woman who travels with Cortez and who, according to Michael Wood’s documentary, is routinely cursed because of her guiding of Cortez throughout the country. Galeano’s view of her is more nuanced than that of a either demon or victim. He also looks at the role of women, both native and Spaniard, and how power shifts and changes.
The stories are brief but complex. Part of this is because of the subject matter, and part because of the shifting styles. Poetry, plays, and traditional story telling are all used. The book might a bastard version of different styles, but in many ways those of us we currently live the Americas are all bastard versions of something.
In short, the book is powerful, thought provoking, and not at all easy reading.
Crossposted at Booklikes.
This is a book you are either going to love or going to hate. There really is no in-between. And you wouldn’t know until you have read at least a quarter or more of it.
Genesis is the story of the Americas, in particular South America, and the invasion of it by the Europeans, mostly the Spanish in this book. The story is conveyed via the use of small, short mini stories. Some of these stories are creation myths of First Peoples, some are the views of the Incas, Mayas, and other tribes as the Spanish arrive, some the view of the would be conquerors, and some the view of those who stayed in the Old World. Men, women, rich poor, royal, servant, playwright and theatre grower, prostitute and nun.
The book is one that you can alternately dip into and out while at times being engrossing. The first few stories are creation myths, stories not only about the start of the world but about the birth of animals. You will never look at bats the same way. This opening salvo is peaceful and magical.
And then it ends.
What follows is the arrival of those from the Old World. The central setting is South America, so it most South America. While the majority of the chapters are about the invasion or clash of the two forces, there are some pre-contact stories, such as rise of the Incas (the section about Incan tax is my favorite).
The discovery/ invasion section is mostly on the side of the natives, but there are some nicely shaded sections. One of them is about La Malinche, the woman who travels with Cortez and who, according to Michael Wood’s documentary, is routinely cursed because of her guiding of Cortez throughout the country. Galeano’s view of her is more nuanced than that of a either demon or victim. He also looks at the role of women, both native and Spaniard, and how power shifts and changes.
The stories are brief but complex. Part of this is because of the subject matter, and part because of the shifting styles. Poetry, plays, and traditional story telling are all used. The book might a bastard version of different styles, but in many ways those of us we currently live the Americas are all bastard versions of something.
In short, the book is powerful, thought provoking, and not at all easy reading.
Crossposted at Booklikes.
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
The brutal truth of the European invasion of the America's. Hard to read straight through, but a horrific tale it is. Brace yourself!!
A type of history that bends genre in thrilling ways and a useful corrective to Anglocentric histories of the colonial Americas
Why do white people own so many pets? We're not allowed to own people anymore.
I got that off of the Internet.
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.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.
-Yorktown, Virginia, 1674
The poets talk and doubt: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.
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
While his soldiers, maddened by hunger, ate each other, the captain read Virgil and Erasmus and made pronouncements for immortality.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.
-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
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.Facts, thoughts, argument, acquired through books like these in the form of [b:Three Guineas|18854|Three Guineas|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403715336s/18854.jpg|3165312], [b:The Wretched of the Earth|66933|The Wretched of the Earth|Frantz Fanon|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394575490s/66933.jpg|865773], [b:Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism|250792|Ain’t I a Woman Black Women and Feminism|Bell Hooks|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1371539140s/250792.jpg|795426], 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.
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
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?I prefer to dream.
-Serra Dois Irmãos, 1695
As the Bible begins with Genesis, this kind of Latin American Bible Galeano has written as a trilogy, entitled Memory of Fire, begins with a Genesis. The stories of the beginning of the world, the first man and the first woman, and the flood that killed the humanity, are strikingly similar to those we know, but then the story becomes cloudy, because it comes the time of the conquest and extermination. A radical extermination because of the Aztecs and the Incas, they tried to obliterate even the memory.
No Bible for them, no revelation, only torture, disease and death.
The book consists of short stories that end with the death of the last Spanish Habsburg, the sickly and demented Charles II, with whom had ceased both the dynasty and the possession of the conquered lands in America.
Excellent reading for which I thank Open Road Integrated Media and Netgalley.
Come la Bibbia inizia con la Genesi, anche questa specie di Bibbia dell'America Latina che Galeano ha composto come una trilogia, e intitolato Memory of Fire, inizia con una Genesi. Le storie dell'inizio del mondo, del primo uomo e della prima donna, e del diluvio che fece scomparire l'umanità, sono sorprendentemente simili a quelle che conosciamo, ma poi la vicenda si intorbida, perchè arriva il tempo della conquista e dello sterminio. Uno sterminio radicale perché degli Atzechi e degli Inca si tentò di obliterare anche la memoria.
Nessuna Bibbia per loro, nessuna rivelazione, solo tortura, malattia e morte.
Il libro, composto da brevi racconti che terminano con la morte dell'ultimo Absburgo di Spagna, il malaticcio e demente Carlo II, con il quale cessava sia la dinastia sia il possesso delle terre conquistate in America.
Ottima lettura per la quale ringrazio Open Road Integrated Media e Netgalley.
No Bible for them, no revelation, only torture, disease and death.
The book consists of short stories that end with the death of the last Spanish Habsburg, the sickly and demented Charles II, with whom had ceased both the dynasty and the possession of the conquered lands in America.
Excellent reading for which I thank Open Road Integrated Media and Netgalley.
Come la Bibbia inizia con la Genesi, anche questa specie di Bibbia dell'America Latina che Galeano ha composto come una trilogia, e intitolato Memory of Fire, inizia con una Genesi. Le storie dell'inizio del mondo, del primo uomo e della prima donna, e del diluvio che fece scomparire l'umanità, sono sorprendentemente simili a quelle che conosciamo, ma poi la vicenda si intorbida, perchè arriva il tempo della conquista e dello sterminio. Uno sterminio radicale perché degli Atzechi e degli Inca si tentò di obliterare anche la memoria.
Nessuna Bibbia per loro, nessuna rivelazione, solo tortura, malattia e morte.
Il libro, composto da brevi racconti che terminano con la morte dell'ultimo Absburgo di Spagna, il malaticcio e demente Carlo II, con il quale cessava sia la dinastia sia il possesso delle terre conquistate in America.
Ottima lettura per la quale ringrazio Open Road Integrated Media e Netgalley.