entwyn 's review for:

The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow, David Graeber

5.0

challenging funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective relaxing slow-paced

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5 stars two reasons:

1) hoes mad
2) abolish border

in all seriousness i think this book is best treated as a polemic (i know nothing about archaeology and barely anything about anthropology and some people who seem to say the sources are misused), and it’s a damn good polemic.

or: a good way of thinking about history that i can use to piss off men

here is a poem.

my review of the dawn of everything: a poem

Time does not exist for us, it happens to us. Or rather upon us.

To survive we must defy the very laws of nature, 

defy nature:

strip the casing from an innocent green stalk for brick,

castrate plant life and fling it into piles and bury its children.

And then from the seedling coffins, wrestle life from the earth with mud-soaked fists,

and for all that work, we are called a force immeasurable,

an endless ebb

not woman, but history,

immemorial

There are no guns here, but there are fists and hair and teeth

and tiny, swelling statues,

(now a subject of debate).

And in a heap of it all,

over layers of rubble and concrete glaze,

I am 

here. From a seedling coffin

upon its afterbirth, no,

on its leg stretched out over its heart,

crushed,

splattering everywhere, and then a rust smear

lost to porous brick 

and the fingerprints of the tiny hands who formed it.

And we go!