When I proclaim that history is in need of creative revision, I don’t mean that we need to make stuff up. Quite the opposite. I mean that novelists, poets, and creative nonfiction writers can write work that sets our historical records straight, and that’s exactly what our culture needs right now.
For years, leaving history solely up to the historians gave us tales of white men, tales of winners, tales of immortal heroes who were actually composite figures distilled from the works of many forgotten hands and minds.
Where are all the women in history? All of the people of color? All of the progressive communities? The perspectives of the oppressed, ignored, and unnoticed many are just as important to the story of humanity as the perspective of any scientist or king.
I’ve endeavored to write a work of revisionist history, a history of everything, actually, and one thing I learned during my seven years researching Us From Nothing was that history is made of truths, not facts. We don’t remember what happened, we’re told what happened, and in every telling, opinions, limited perceptions, and lies creep in. Truths grow over time, collecting other truths, and we forget more facts in each retelling. Nationalist “truth” grows out of the mere fact we live near each other. The racist lie grows out of the mere fact that we don’t look the same.
Since the first day of history, 5,000 years ago in what is now Iraq, when a person used a sharpened reed to write symbols on a clay tablet, the recording of events has been tied to business, not creativity. Those first symbols were tax ledgers, and that first writer was a tax collector.
Ever since, most of what humanity has written down, our historical record, has been authored by big business. In Iraq and the Indus River Valley and in Mesoamerica 5,000 years ago, the first big business was religion. Next came nationalism. And then colonialism. The ideologies of power have told our stories in world-building ways since the beginning of recorded time.
Creatives didn’t really arrive on the scene until very late in the game. Early human creativity was usually devotional, tied to spreading religious beliefs. Even 4,000 years later, many of humanity’s masterpieces were Bible fanfiction. Secular creativity didn’t really take off until The Plague years around 1350. By now, we live and write in a world that has been rewritten again and again by forces of power. Our language today remains less creative and more business oriented, less imaginative and more commodified – our words are only so much money. It’s been 13 years since the Supreme Court ruled that political spending is the same as free speech.
We creative writers need to wrest language away from commodification and capital, and tell new stories that can stand against thousands of years of toxic imperialist myths.
A text that guided my work as I wrote Us From Nothing was Aurora Levins Morales’s “The Historian as Curandera,” a brief and brilliant treatise about curing the historical record of its toxic imperialist undertones and overtones. As a cisgender white man striving to write “medicinal history,” I had to reckon with my own privilege and try to root out my unintended biases wherever they lay.
One medicinal move I made in my epic was to eliminate Christopher Columbus from his place of importance in our human tale. In fact, Columbus didn’t discover anything, and the supposed “merging of East and West” had already been accomplished by Viking sailors many years before. Much more central to history was how the nascent beginnings of global capitalism drew the Portuguese and the Spanish and other nations out across the globe. Columbus’s journey was just another chapter in that more important story.
Likewise, I discovered that Ferdinand Magellan wasn’t the first person to circumnavigate the earth. He died before he could complete the trip. But Magellan’s interpreter, an enslaved Pacific Islander named Enrique, did in fact finish the journey. It’s Enrique who deserves the real credit. The Straits of Enrique!
A modern curandera, or healer, must work to revise imperialist narratives, decenter ideas of white supremacy and male dominance, and expose the ways in which power has corrupted history. Especially in this era of misinformation and fake news, we need our truths to be more inclusive, to include those facts that power made us forget.
We need a new understanding of the official version of history. We need a cure. Can creative writers take up that call?
Geoff Bouvier is the author of three books of poetry, most recently the prose poetry collection Us From Nothing (Black Lawrence Press).
