The Jaguar God was asleep when the bearded ones arrived from the east; Time fractured the existence of the short, brown natives; greed compelled the strangers, whose price was the blood of the land and its peoples; at first a trickle, then a torrent of soldiers, dreamers, criminals, vagabonds, priests and nobles fell upon the shores of this exotic New World. This siamese landmass called America.

    Genesis is the first part in a sweeping trilogy (followed by Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind) that, incredibly, attempts to tell the story of the Americas, from pre-Columbian times to the present. Such an undertaking required Galeano to use a unique format, a “voice of voices;” vignettes that told certain stories, and allowed the author to leap around the continent at will to tell them all. Therefore, the book (and its siblings) can be enjoyed a piece at a time, or if the spirit takes you, as it did me, you can plough though in hungry quest until the end.

    The book begins with “First Voices” which contains the creation myths of the various indigenous tribes of the Americas, alive with respect and wonder for the mysteries of life:
“The woman and the man dreamed that God was dreaming about them.”

    There is no chronology here, only stories of how things came to be. The next chapter “Old New World,” begins abruptly with the year 1492:

    “The breezes are sweet and soft, as in spring in Seville, and the sea is like Guadalquivir river, but the swell no sooner rises than they get seasick and vomit, jammed into their fo’c’sles, the men who in three patched-up little ships cleave the unknown sea, the sea without a frame.”

    It then continues on terribly, inexorably, until 1700.

    The lack of chronology in one chapter and the emphasis on it in the next is a brilliant attempt on the writer’s part to give the reader a sense of the vast differences in the two cultures. One cannot help but feel, as the years roll by and the strangers encounter the natives, that one is caught up in a wild river that speeds faster and faster towards calamity.

    I felt an overpowering affinity with the events recounted within these pages, primarily because my heritage stems from the regions that are written about. I could see everything in my mind’s eye; ancestors failing, fighting, succeeding, and living- all the textures and scents alive within me. Though I have this connection, I still believe the writing is so evocative as to draw any reader, regardless of background, into its remarkable world.

    Galeano’s research is extensive (and carefully cited at the end of each vignette), which the reader can then use themselves to seek further understanding of these past events. Charmingly, the author admits his own weaknesses at the start of Genesis, a gentle self-effacement that seduces the reader into believing in his cause and giving him complete trust to tell the truth as best he can:

    “I was a wretched history student. History classes were like visits to the waxworks or the Region of the Dead. The past was lifeless, hollow, dumb. They taught us about the past so that we should resign ourselves with drained consciences to the present: not to make History, which was already made, but to accept it. 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 word.”

    Thus does Galeano achieve the impossible; chronicling with delicate, vivid prose the decimation of a continent & the society that grew violently from its ashes. History reclaimed for the imagination. –Vladimir Verano, 2002