During the era of maritime exploration and the discovery of the Americas, assumptions were made of the land likening it to not only a paradise, but one that was overrun with cannibalistic natives. These suppositions led to a desire to explore the lands and conquer the savages that posed a threat to man and civilization itself. The consequences of this mass colonization and dehumanization of the natives paved the way for literary pieces that pose as critiques of the era when viewed through a post-colonial lens. When looked at through a post-colonial perspective, a few common themes prevail amongst compared texts. Focusing on the theme of the journey, what it means, and what is at stake, Garcilaso de la Vega’s “The Story of Pedro Serrano” and Juan José Saer’s The Witness both touch on all these themes with great severity, dissecting the purpose of the journey and what it means to be a civilized man. Vega wrote of Pedro Serrano, a man who was shipwrecked upon a small desert island for nearly a decade. A majority of the story focuses on Serrano conquering and taming the island to fit his own needs. For example, he uses turtle shells to not only catch water for his consumption, but also to build a small hut to perpetuate the life of his fire that nature threatened to extinguish. However, despite his efforts, nature eventually wins over Serrano, disrobing him and leaving him almost animal like in the view of civilized men. While this story does not focus too heavily on the journey of Serrano, it does offer an in dept perspective of what is at stake when man is put up against nature. Serrano desperately tries to recreate civilization on the island in an attempt to cling to civilization. After all, it was religion (a manmade institution)... ... middle of paper ... ...the need for a balance between man’s true physical appearance and man’s true behavior is needed. For Serrano, his journey led to his discovery of that balance and for the “Def-ghi”, it was the balance between the cannibalistic and civilized nature of man, something that frightened him so much that he confined himself to the city where it masquerades as something refined. Between Vega’s “The Story of Pedro Serrano” and Saer’s The Witness, each character discovered their own truths and purpose in life. For Serrano, his was the journey to achieve the balance between nature and civilization and twisting it for his own benefit much like he did with the resources on the island. For the nameless narrator, his journey was to gain the identity of what would end up a lost civilization and share their story with the world, ensuring that they would live on and be understood.
The knowledge and universal understanding derivative from a journey can leave the traveller positively enlightened. In Coelho’s story, Santiago is faced with recurring dreams which lead him to ‘’traverse the unknown’’ in search of a treasure buried in Egypt, the metaphor for universal connection, and in doing so, comes to the unrelenting realisation of spiritual transcendence. After arriving at the assumed geographical location of the treasure ‘’several figures approached him’’. They demand the boy keep searching for this treasure as they are poor refugees and in need of money, but as Santiago does, he finds nothing. Then, after relentless digging through the night ‘’as the sun rose, the men began to beat the boy’’ , finally relenting with the truth, Santiago reveals his dreams to the travellers. In doing so, Santiago finds out that these men had also been faced with recurring dreams measured around the place where the boy had undergone his own, both relative to hidden treasure. However the leader was ‘’not so stupid as to cross an entire desert just because of a recurrent dream’’. It is with this fact, tha...
In this section his initial thoughts show through. “But losers matter, especially in the history of early America.” Many different regions of early America are examined in their years of early conquest when native populations started their descent. The biggest theme throughout the section is the effect that conquistadors and explorers had on the native population in their search for gold and glory. The information that is given is not typical of what is learned of early America, but tries to really focus on the most important figures of the time and there voyages. For example, when talking about the Plains nations and there explorers, Coronado and De Soto a tattooed woman woman is brought up who had been captured by both explorers at different times and different places, but little is known about her. “Of the tattooed woman who witnessed the two greatest expeditions of conquest in North America, and became captive to both, nothing more is known.” This point captures the main idea of the theme and what many know of this time. Horwitz aims to point out the important facts, not just the well known
In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.
Dr. Tomás Rivera’s book, ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, tells a story about a young boy growing up in a migrant farm worker family spanning over one year. This novel follows this young boy and his family and focuses of themes of poverty and hardship.
Bartolomé de Las Casas was born in 1484 AD in Seville and died in 1566 in Madrid. In the ending of the 15th century and the beginning of 16th, he came to America and become a “protector of Indian”. In 1542, most based on his effort, Spain has passed the New Law, which prohibit slaving Indians (Foner, p. 7). In 1552, he published the book A Short Account of the Destruction of The Indies.
The poor natives who struggle with starvation contrasts sharply from Spaniards who hoard food in abundance. In fact, Spaniards kept Natives “perpetually hungry” (Las Casas, 93) whereas they ate far more than their bodies could hold. Las Casas called them “swinish butchers” (101), accentuating the way he regards them with contempt and abhorrence. Unlike Europeans, the Natives do not copiously collect food or “enlarge their limits” (Montaigne, 224). As Las Casas claimed, they are the “poorest people” who “own next to nothing”, and their diet is “every bit as poor and as monotonous in quantity and kind” (Las Casas, 10). The detailed descriptions of the lifestyle in the New World provided by Montaigne and Las Casas, show how the colonizers embody the grotesque because their souls are contaminated through moral barbarism, in addition to their bodies that are corrupted by insatiable greed and hunger (Las Casas, 128). For these reasons, Western pioneers exceed in barbarism than the
These interpretations were molded by what the historians believed to be most important from Poma’s manuscripts. In order to gain better attention of the reader, Dilke first eliminated passages which seemed to be of no conceivable interest to the reader”… and “omitting a lot of redundant passages” (Dilke, 14). Since the translation was able to effectively translate and organize the passage, readers were able to keep an interest since they experienced texts with new ways to understand it. Guaman Poma’s bringing of “attention to the Spanish Court the great merits and sufferings under Spanish rule of the Peruvian people”, is revealed by Dilke’s attempt “to throw nothing of value away” from the text (Dilke, 15). The abridged Mills and Taylor translation is less like Dilke’s, except there is a resolution presented for the problem with the Spanish Priests. Some of these resolutions encouraged that the Spanish Priests “should be proven and tested for academic preparation as well as for humility, charity, love, and fear of God and justice” (Mills & Taylor, 163). Contrastingly, Frye’s facsimile does not present ant solutions for the Spanish Priest’s corruption and primarily focusses on making it more ‘accessible’. While the Frye translation’s intent is to be more accessible to a broader audience, Mills
To the defense of the Spaniards, there was little knowledge that the diseases of the Columbian exchange had caused the widespread, mass deaths of the natives. Las Casas was pivotal in bringing to light the brutal treatment of the natives. The crown took this information seriously. If it hadn’t been for Las Casas stance on anti-brutality against the natives, change would not have come for a long
Both the video and the text correlate in their version of events. Watching the video and reading the text allows the viewer/reader to gain further knowledge and understanding of the great commission that Serra undertook and the commitment set forth to fulfill this task, even if it took his health and consequently his life. Serra's trip from Mexico to San Diego is depicted with details about his struggle and suffering, as well as his determination to follow his calling to evangelized the natives of the region. There is also information in both sources about how the natives refused to convert and accept the new ways of the Europeans. Despite repeated efforts, visits and months of work, the natives were set in their ways and did not want to give their way of life. The video talks in a romantic tone, depicting its characters and story as a quest for the good of all, characters in peril, suffering and a driven individual called to fulfil his destiny and witnessing miracles from heaven. The book shares the same story in a more factual and modern way, allowing the reader to fill the gaps in the video story. It shares the other side of the story, the native's way of life and how they are affected by the Europeans. Both text and video are a great complement of each other showing the different struggles and victories of all characters, specially how Serra worked without ceasing, and at the end established nine missions before his
“The Conquest of New Spain” is the first hand account of Bernal Diaz (translated by J.M. Cohen) who writes about his personal accounts of the conquest of Mexico by himself and other conquistadors beginning in 1517. Unlike other authors who wrote about their first hand accounts, Diaz offers a more positive outlook of the conquest and the conquistadors motives as they moved through mainland Mexico. The beginning chapters go into detail about the expeditions of some Spanish conquistadors such as Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, Juan de Grijalva and Hernando Cotes. This book, though, focuses mainly on Diaz’s travels with Hernando Cortes. Bernal Diaz’s uses the idea of the “Just War Theory” as his argument for why the conquests were justifiable
When describing native Brazilian people in his 1580 essay, “Of Cannibals,” Michel de Montaigne states, “Truly here are real savages by our standards; for either they must be thoroughly so, or we must be; there is an amazing distance between their character and ours” (158). Montaigne doesn’t always maintain this “amazing” distance, however, between savages and non-savages or between Brazilians and Europeans; he first portrays Brazilians as non-barbaric people who are not like Europeans, then as non-barbarians who best embody traditional European values, and finally as barbarians who are diametrically opposed to Europeans.
In his first voyage in 1492, when Christopher Columbus set out to search for Asia, he ended up landing in America on a small island in the Caribbean Sea, which he confidently thought was Asia. He then made several other voyages to the New World in search for riches, thinking that he was exploring an already explored land, but he had found the greatest riches of them all, undiscovered land, America. This shows that when one sets out on a mission, they face different challenges on the journey but in the end, achieve more than what they planned on achieving. The novel The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, and the novel Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, both describe two journeys where the characters achieve more when they learn about life, survival and patience, by understanding religion, tackling their fears, associating with nature, and encountering other characters from whom they learn something. The former is about a young shepherd named Santiago, who has a recurring dream of a treasure in Egypt, for which he makes a journey to achieve his “Personal Legend” by the help of a man who claims to be...
This research paper will delve into the topic of cannibalism in native tribes of Brazil during the Portuguese colonization of the South American country. My research only the topic yielded very interesting results. Some scholars suggest that cannibalism (in the instances involving the Tupinamba tribe and their ritualistic practices) didn't even occur. This isn't to say, however, that cannibalism was completely nonexistent in Brazil, but arguing that it did not occur in the “savage” ways often described. I could easily sum up the accounts of various witnesses of cannibalism, but I will focus on the material that will mostly discuss the effect that cannibalism had on colonization in Brazil.
Saramago also raises questions regarding the true nature of humans. He writes, “We know that human reason and unreason are the same everywhere” (169), meaning that fundamental moral beliefs are the same from person to person. He explores this idea by combining scenes of immorality in humans with symbols of animals for comparison between instinctual ignorance and morality. For example, in the scene in which a group of men rape women in return for food, he writes, “They were snorting like pigs,” and “They were jostling each other like hyenas around a carcass,” (p. 178-179) to convey that these people were no longer human because of their ignorance of human morals. Through these images Saramago is saying that this ignorance will be the undoing of humanity.
The idiom “revenge is sweet” appears so frequently that one might think the cliché is true, yet the nature of revenge is far more complex and may leave more bitterness in its wake. The cyclical nature of revenge and man’s inhumanity to man means it has a propensity to intensify and devastate the people in its wake including the inflictor. Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits examine the theme of the nature of revenge through the presence and significance of prominent characters seeking revenge in both Latin American novels.