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Blood on the Border | Reviews
Sunday, February 5, 2006
Headfirst into history: Memoirist lived through poverty, feminism, war
Reviewed by Christina Gerhardt, San Francisco Chronicle
To write from some vantage outside history is, in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's estimation, an impossibility. In her new book, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (South End Press; 304 pages; $18 paperback), the longtime Bay Area activist explains the tack she's taken in her memoirs:
"Why a memoir? Why do I consider choosing to write an historical memoir to be important? History. That battle over history. I can no longer bear to write or to read texts in which the author is ... pretending objectivity. History is never the 'objective' account found in academic writing." Dunbar-Ortiz's memoirs, including Blood, are not dry chapters of dusty history books but vivid first-person accounts of one remarkable woman's journey through American history.
The first volume of her historical memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (University of Oklahoma Press; 248 pages; $14.95 paperback) chronicles her life growing up poor in rural Oklahoma as the daughter of sharecroppers: red because her mother was part Indian and because her father's father was a Wobbly and a socialist, and also because red is the color of Oklahoma's soil. Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (City Lights; 409 pages; $17.95 paperback) relates her political coming of age as an anti-war organizer, as a founder of the second wave of the women's liberation movement and as an activist in social justice movements confronting racism, capitalism and imperialism. Blood on the Border, her third and latest, examines how the Reagan administration's CIA-backed Contras used the indigenous Miskitu of Nicaragua as cannon fodder in the war against the Sandinistas.
(Continue reading the review)
November 28, 2005, from CounterpunchContraindications
Review
by Ron Jacobs
To many of us in the United States, the US contra war against the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s seems like very long ago. Since the CIA-manufactured defeat of the revolutionary government in Managua—a defeat that included mercenary war, media manipulations, CIA and Special Forces covert ops, drug-running and arms smuggling by people paid by the US government, and a sham election staged by Washington—the US has militarily invaded Iraq twice, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. A mere three months before that sham election, Washington invaded and overthrew the Panamanian government as if warning Nicaraguans what was in store for them should they vote against the US-sponsored candidates. In addition, Washington has instigated and assisted regime change in El Salvador, several countries in the former Soviet Bloc, and a few nations in Latin America, to name just a few regions of the world that come immediately to mind. Besides these "successes", Washington has failed to overthrow the Bolivarian government in Venezuela or the governments of its eternal enemies—Cuba and northern Korea. One can be certain, however, that these attempts are ongoing. On top of all this, Washington has forced so-called free trade agreements on most countries around the world, especially those in what global capitalists like to call the developing word. These agreements are designed, of course, to maintain Washington and Wall Street's neocolonial hold.
Given all of this, it is good to see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's latest effort Blood on the Border hit the bookstores. Her memoir of her experience as a leftist indigenous activist during the contra wars in Nicaragua is not only a well-told tale of those times, it is a primer on US intentions in the 21st century. Expansion and control, by whatever means necessary. The manipulation of local distrusts, both ethnic and religious; and the transformation of those mistrusts into armed conflict. All with the only real beneficiary being the economic and political masters in Washington.
To read the full review, please visit http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs11282005.html.
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