Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriquenas

by Aurora Levins Morales

Book Overview

Remedios presents the history of the many women -- and cultures -- who have met at the crossroads of the island of Puerto Rico. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0896086445
• ISBN13: 9780896086449
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: South End Press
• Length: 235 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Know your history, know your healing

Interconnection is real. Earth is real. The violence of patriarchy, colonization, anti-semitism, and genocide are real. Our lives continue to be shaped by these violences; both intergenerational and contemporary. Healing grows organically and is nurtured by roots of understanding, storytelling, compassion, courage.These are some of the ideas that clarified for me in reading this wonderful book full of stories that saved my soul from amnesia, numbness, and ignorance. I am a white woman now on her own path of unearthing stories from my past that can tell me who I am, where I come from, and how to heal a legacy of racism and sexism that still persists.Read about Jigonsaseh, a Seneca woman alive around 1560 who served as a peacemaker who helped to form the Iroquois Confederacy. Read about the Hammer of Witches, a treatise written in Germany in 1487 that outlined various marks and signs by which a woman could be recognized to be a witch and how to torture the Devil out of her. Read about the 1097 invasion of Muslim Syria by the Franj, Christian invaders from the north and south.Most of all, enjoy the beautiful prose of Levins Morales..."We are the ancestors of whom no record has been kept. We are trace elements in your bodies, minerals coloring your eyes, residue in your fingernails. You were not named for us. You don't know the places where our bones are, but we are in your bones. Because of us, you have relatives among the many tribes. You have cousins on the reservations. Do not forget how wide your roots are in this America. Do not forget." (92).