Re-remembering Latin America
Eduardo Galeano, an esteemed Uruguayan journalist, uses the written word in a way that breathes life back into the suffering and exploitation that has cycled through the history of Latin America. His trilogy, Memory of Fire, offers a vivid historical perspective through hundreds of vignettes each individually set in a specific time and place. The attention to geographic location and time opens the reader to a “mode of textual confession, but one in which he whets the readers appetite with the prospect of redemption” (Lovell 2006). This prospect of redemption is continued by re-remembering Latin America through the power of language. This is a constant and never ending process. In a letter to Cedric Belfrage, the translator for Memory of Fire, Galeano writes:
My Dear Cedric:
Here goes the last volume of Memory of Fire. As you’ll see, it ends in 1984.Why not before, or after, I don’t know. Perhaps because that was the last year of my exile, the end of a cycle, the end of a century; or perhaps because the book and I know that the last page is also the first (Galeano 1988, referenced in Lovell 2006).
Picking up where Galeano left off Dr. W. George Lovell at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada encouraged his students to continue the re-remembering process through a unique assignment:
Now it’s your turn! Having heard about how prominently his work is featured in Geography 257, Eduardo Galeano has written to you from his home in Montevideo, Uruguay. A new edition of Memory of Fire is to be published, and he wants to update Century of the Wind to bring his readers through to the present. He asks you to furnish him with ideas about what vignettes of time, place, and episode to include. For the years between 1984 and the present, provide Galeano with five Middle American options, rendering them (as best you can) in the vignette format your study of Memory of Fire indicates he might prefer (Lovell 2006).
This process of encouraging students to re-remember Latin American in this creative form continues at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon by Dr. Kimberlee Chambers. Students from the classes Landscapes and Cultures of Middle America and Landscapes and Cultures of South America have compiled a working memory of Latin America through writing their own vignettes. The passion and time that the students put into the assignments can be seen in the depth and profundity of the individual vignettes. Moved by the student efforts and perspectives Dr Chambers feels that it is important for these writings to reach a wider audience. With the assistance of Willamette student Tony Zezas (W’10) they have developed this public access resource. The student vignettes are electronically published and categorized by location and year. Scroll over the map to the right and click on a country. The browser will then be redirected to a page displaying selected vignettes on that specific country. For more information on this re-remembering process feel free to contact Dr. Chambers at kchamber@willamette.edu.
References:
Galeano, Eduardo H. Memory of Fire (1): Genesis (C. Belfrage, tans.). Pantheon Books, New York, 1985. Print.
Galeano, Eduardo H. Memory of Fire (2): Faces and Masks (C. Belfrage, tans.). Pantheon Books, New York, 1987. Print.
Galeano, Eduardo H. Memory of Fire (3): Century of the Wind (C. Belfrage, tans.). Pantheon Books, New York, 1988. Print.
Lovell, W. George. Memories of Fire: Galeano and the Geography of Guatemala, Geoforum 37(1): 31-40, 2006. Print.