Medicinal History on the Eve of Our Future
My forays into writing and teaching history began in 2016 in a grad school friend’s car when I kicked aside the wrappers and cups on her passenger-side floor to reveal a book. Eduardo Galeano. Memory of Fire: Century of the Wind. I read aloud the quotation on the cover, “Passionate and lyrical … Galeano parades the subjects of history before us.”
“You need to borrow that and read it,” my friend told me.
Incidentally, that friend, Dyan Neary, has become an award-winning investigative reporter, badass political activist, and journalism professor.
Eight years on, I’ve taught Memory of Fire to a dozen college writing classes. And I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the moment in Dyan’s car when I was found by Eduardo Galeano actually changed my life.
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Born in Uruguay in 1940, Eduardo Galeano was either a journalist and historian who was also a creative writer, or he was a creative writer who felt compelled by the state of affairs in Uruguay in the 1960s to become a journalist and a historian. He tackled the disciplines of creative writing, journalism, and history equally well, and his first book, Open Veins of Latin America, made him internationally recognized at the age of 30. Although largely expository, the book shows flashes of his later storytelling and imagistic brilliance. Galeano, obsessed with actual facts, concludes about America: insofar as Latin countries remain underdeveloped, it’s because of centuries of looting and exploitation by Europe and the U.S.
Three years after finishing that book, Galeano was imprisoned during a military coup in Uruguay, and he was then exiled in Argentina where he founded and published a political magazine. But three years after that, there was a coup in Argentina, and Galeano was exiled again, this time to Spain. There, he began writing his masterpiece, Memory of Fire, a trilogy that Isabelle Allende called “a conversation with the soul of America.”
Galeano found his voice for political content by typing fervently for months about the open veins of Latin America, and he found his voice for prose-poetic form when he was able to slow down and hand-write the big history of his home continent. Memory of Fire took Galeano eight years to finish, and just as it was published in the early 80s, he was finally able to return to Uruguay after an 11-year banishment.
That book I found on Dyan Neary’s car floor was Century of the Wind, the third book in the Memory of Fire trilogy, a tour de force of using actual facts (and some beautiful writing) to overturn dominant narratives and take back the stories of the people of Latin America from their white oppressors.
On the first page, Galeano writes about “all Latin America,” where processions greet the birth of the 20th century:
“In the villages and cities south of the Rio Grande, Jesus Christ marches in the cemeteries, a dying beast lustrous with blood, and behind him with torches and hymns comes the crowd, tattered, battered people afflicted with a thousand ills that no doctor or faith-healer would know how to cure, but deserving a fate that no prophet or fortuneteller could possibly divine.”
This vivid and powerful sentence isn’t an excerpt – it’s the entire vignette that opens Century of the Wind. Did you catch the double meaning of “divine,” which means “to make holy” and “to tell”? Galeano charges both of those meanings by simultaneously reporting upon and throwing shade at the state of those poor religious followers, who don’t deserve their fate and can’t be cured by the entity who enjoys power over them, in this case, the unnamed Church. Christ stands in as a metonym who is Himself renamed as “a dying beast lustrous with blood.” And that crowd, though faceless, takes on many titles – “tattered, battered … afflicted … deserving” – and they walk “with torches and hymns,” holding the flame and also speaking/singing with one voice. It’s an imagistic touch so deft and concise, I missed the synesthesia the first time I read it.
Perhaps what I love most about this piece of writing is the tone. Call it sincere irony, or better yet, ironic sincerity. Almost all of Galeano’s lines sing with a double incredulity – “Can you believe this?!?” together with “Can you believe you’ve hardly heard this before?” That incredulous tone at once repudiates and repossesses the facts. Galeano begins his book by denying holy reverence and taking back early 20th century Latin America from the religion which had professed it could “cure” people and “divine” a god. Can you believe it?!? And how come we haven’t heard enough tales like this before?
Mark Engler in The Nation called Galeano an “innovator of experimental literary vignettes” who authored “historical snapshots.” Galeano himself wondered if the form of his great historical books was “anthology (or) novel or essay or epic poem or testament or chronicle or …”
I still can’t tell what form I’m reading when I pore through Memory of Fire, but the form of Galeano’s writing makes me actually enjoy history. Which is striking, because I hated the subject when I was young; it was all memorization – names and dates – with little relevance to the life I live, outside of that old saw about learning from the past or being doomed to repeat it.
With Galeano, I find myself consumed into history, reliving it. I’m steered through past events made present by an author who is able to change, page after page, the way that I think about the world.
“For the world today,” Galeano writes, “America is just the United States.” But here’s the thing: there are 57 countries in America! Century of the Wind is a retelling of the American 20th century from the perspective of all of America.
The book also contains over 500 vignettes, with almost as many primary sources, and still, it’s only one-third of Galeano’s capacious Memory of Fire.
A vignette from 1942 tells a piece of our medical history. Here it is, in its entirety:
“The war accepts blacks, thousands and thousands of them, but not the Red Cross. The Red Cross bans black blood in the plasma banks, so as to avoid the possibility that races might mix by transfusion.
The research of Charles Drew, inventor of life, has finally made it possible to save blood. Thanks to him, plasma banks are reviving thousands of dying men on the battlefields of Europe.
When the Red Cross decides to reject the blood of blacks, Drew, director of the Red Cross plasma service, resigns. Drew is black.”
Just 91 words, yet it succeeds, with that mic drop ending, in taking down an entity who enjoys power – in this case, The Red Cross. The writing reveals and renames: Drew becomes “the inventor of life” and The Red Cross is perceived anew as an institution that, unlike war (the irony!), won’t accept Black blood. What this vignette reveals and renames ultimately are the details of an institutional hypocrisy so glaring, so heinous, that it requires little editorializing from Galeano himself. The ideas about racial injustice and colossal hypocrisy are executed in such a way that you hardly feel like you’re being preached at, or that you’re even learning history.
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In 1998, the Puerto Rican feminist writer and poet Aurora Levins Morales penned an essay that shows us how to read into the narratives that dominate cultural discourse. Morales says that when we aim to retell stories of the past – stories like Magellan sailing victoriously around the globe and Columbus “discovering” America – we should work hard to find actual facts that almost certainly lie buried behind those tales. The Historian as Curandera lays out a program for writing what Morales calls “medicinal history,” wherein a people might cure their relationship to their own past by exposing the falsities of dominant narratives and presenting the facts those narratives have buried and tried to destroy. Morales’ program for the historian who aspires to be a curandera (which loosely translates as “medicine healer”) includes: telling untold stories, centering women, identifying and contradicting misinformation, making absences visible, embracing ambiguity, revealing hidden power relationships, and restoring global context. That’s a nightmare list for the mythmaking forces behind God, country, heteronormative masculinity, and whiteness.
Morales’ ideas, which were born from her reading of Galeano, have become a guiding text in my Creative Writing from Research classes. I’ve had a student write about the Russian Revolution from the perspective of the bullets used during the Red Terror. I’ve had a student write about the Partition of India and Pakistan through the eyes of two families who went through that harrowing experience. I’ve learned from my students about the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland and the first Chinese immigrants in Canada. In every case, these young writers were doing the work that Morales codified and Galeano pioneered — working to become curanderas of history – historical healers who try to change the world by making the world more aware.
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It so happened that the scene in Dyan Neary’s car occurred a month before Galeano’s death. It felt like the Uruguayan sage had called to me just before passing. I started showing up at grad school parties with a working table of contents for a poetic history of my own, asking my friends what they thought should go onto a list of the most important touchstones in ancient and human history.
I may be a descendant of those who upended facts and wrote others out of history, but I can try to make good on that past. Responsibility for righting the wrongs of history shouldn’t fall solely to writers of color, or to women, or to the oppressed, or to survivors of oppression. The responsibility of medicinal history is a collective one, one that includes us white men, the villains remade and repentant.
I was driven to research and write my own history of everything by a conviction that we need more stories to help us see ourselves as interdependent, interconnected, having a purpose, and having a place.
I was driven by a feeling that we need more stories that show us how there is no “them,” there is only “us,” even though some of us have tried very hard indeed to subdivide humankind.
In the foreword to his first book, Galeano asks, “To awaken consciousness, to reveal identity — can literature claim a better function in these times?”
I wanted to write a tale that would take up Galeano’s torch and hymn, and tell us who we are, how we got here, and where we’re likely going.
A few years into researching and writing, I told a student what I was working on and she said, “It sounds like you’re trying to write that one book humanity should put inside a time capsule satellite seeking life in distant galaxies.”
Later, I told a colleague about what I was working on and he said, “Oh, a popular history. Like H. G. Wells’ A Short History of the World.”
I had never heard of the Wells book, from 100 years before, and when I found it online, I was happy to see the differences and similarities. I also discovered that Wells had written a much longer and more popular treatise called The Outline of History, which was the book that had actually launched the genre of popular history and made H.G. Wells an international name. The thing was, the deeper I looked into Wells’ Outline, the more I saw the need for some historical medicine.
According to A.B. McKillop’s well-researched and well-told The Spinster and the Prophet, Wells stole the idea and the template for his Outline from a Canadian woman named Florence Deeks. It appears that Deeks had written her own history book and left it at Wells’ publishing house while under consideration. Eventually, Deeks was told that her book wasn’t good enough, and then Wells’ version appeared. Deeks sued, but an unknown woman stood little chance against the most popular author in the world. The Outline of History sold millions of copies, and H.G. Wells would never have to work another day in his life.
Part of me wants to dedicate my book – now that I’ve finally finished it – to the forgotten mother of popular history. Here’s to you, Florence Deeks.
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850 Common Era: Gunpowder
In Chang’an, the most populous city on the planet, Taoist alchemists meditate evenings and mornings, and conduct experiments afternoons. For a thousand years, the Tao has taught followers the Way, including techniques for achieving immortality, which may be shown to anyone who manages to let go of worldliness and willfulness. The prefectures of the Tang Dynasty increasingly embody a debased version of Tao ideals, navigating between demonism and reason – mystic questing versus existential efforts in letting go. To reach lost souls and bring them back along the Way, a handful of elite Taoist monks, financed by the state, turn their practices to alchemy, seeking chemically what Romans called the Magnum Opus, the “philosopher’s stone.” They’re sure there must be a vital substance – some universal element – that transforms anything into anything else, including turning mortality into eternal life.
The monastery laboratory in the geographical center of Tang accommodates a cluttered organization of glass beakers and cylinders, pipettes and flasks of viscous liquids, mortars brimming with powders and crystals, stacks of arcane tomes, rolled and unrolled scrolls, logbooks inked with symbols and theorems, snaking bamboo tubes, bones of animals, human skulls, shelves of color-coded oils, a bronze globe, hanging ornate vessels, yellow satin draperies lined with green fringe, glazed tricolored pottery, a deck of playing cards with color pictures of soldiers, a chessboard, a clay pot dripping water to mark out time, rows of tortoise shells, golden dragon head decorations, two graduated scales, a bellows, burning candles, a firepit, distillation devices, scoops, tongs, tweezers, pestles, brushes, jars, cast iron evaporation pans, and a hand-powered fan with multiple wheels to clear and condition the laboratory air. The Taoist monks who work here have accepted vows of self-abnegation, to help with which, between experiments and meditations, they sip from spirits of aloe, agaric, saffron, and gentian.
The recent obsession of the Chang’an monks is xiao shi – the Romans will call it niter, the British, saltpeter – because this gritty white powder features an amazingly Tao-like trait. Although xiao shi will not catch fire itself, its presence causes other matter to burn faster. Perhaps the stuff will also magnify a person’s ch’i. The investigating monks of Tang have been adding it to various flammable materials.
With charcoal and sulfur, xiao shi completes a compound that flies into dancing sparks, ignites the beards of the discoverers, throws alchemists onto their backs, burns down labs, changes the Tang arrows into flying fires that will terrify invading Mongols, and travels the Silk Road to the Arab lands, where gunpowder propels heavy rounds of iron into warring Europeans who survive to render the technology central to future weaponry.
“850 Common Era: Gunpowder” is excerpted from Geoff Bouvier’s Us From Nothing, appearing here with the permission of The American Poetry Review in which it first appeared. To obtain a copy of Us From Nothing by Geoff Bouvier from Bookshop.org, click here.