Selling Manhattan

In focusing on a single historic event so much a part of pop culture that it has become a cliché, even if the event itself may be of doubtful authenticity according to historians expert in the settling of New York state, “Selling Manhattan” uses that (in)famous land deal to bring together two apparently-unrelated hot-button issues facing Duffy’s fin-de-millennium culture: the harsh reality of ethnic cleansing and its impact on the integrity of a culture’s identity, and the relentless development of the land (and sea) and its catastrophic impact on the environment.

The poem is most obviously about the conflict between two radically-different cultures: the Indigenous populations, separate and distinct nations that were often perceived by European settlers as a single entity, against the invading Europeans. The two groups share no common culture, no common history, no common religion, not even a common language. As world history, with its chronicles of colonialism and exploitation, testifies, different cultures actually sharing a land mass equally rarely happens.

At the troubling emotional core of ethnic cleansing is the disrespect a dominant culture feels toward the so-called “lesser” cultures that it feeds upon and willfully and arrogantly dismantles. Duffy’s focus, the two-centuries long assault on Indigenous cultures by the ever-expanding and unapologetically-rapacious European settlers, is far from the only expression of ethnic cleansing. The histories of all civilizations record how one culture refuses to share a land mass with another culture and uses any method, most often brute force, to ensure their domination.

Duffy encapsulates that disrespect in the opening italicized stanza. The reader hears first-hand the bigoted, arrogant thoughts of the Dutch settlers even as they conclude the bogus “deal” that will secure vast, strategically-rich acreage from individuals who have not a clue how badly they are being hoodwinked. The stanza captures the crude racism of the settlers, their disinclination to accord the peoples who already inhabit the land they want as anything but a problem that requires solution. Take your pretty glass beads, the opening suggests, mimicking the internal voice of the Dutch settlers, take the worthless beads and get “your red ass out of here” (Line 4). The empire, they tacitly suggest, is coming—get out of the way.

Stanzas 2 and 3 record the after-effects of the “cleansing” of Indigenous peoples. The speaker, the collective voice of the displaced, records the impact of these invasive settlers. Their pursuit of wealth has destroyed not only the Indigenous cultures, with their ancient respect for the spirit of the land, but also has ravaged the land and the sea: “I wonder if the spirit of the water has anything / to say. That you will poison it” (Lines 10-11). The land deal recorded ironically in the opening stanza has led to the marginalization of Indigenous cultures, their displacement, and ultimately, their destruction. In the bogus deal struck to secure what will become the anchor-city of this European invasion, the poem sounds an elegy for the displaced cultures and reveals the sorrow implicit in such insensitivity, the impact of ethnic cleansing.

It is the particular insight of Duffy’s argument that the displacement of Indigenous cultures by the invading Europeans not only signaled the destruction of these ancient civilizations but also began the slow-burn destruction of the land itself, the land that these settlers so blithely stole. This reality accounts for the poem’s emerging elegiac tone. There is more lost in this land deal than a thousand acres of prime wilderness. There is more lost in this land deal than culture: “The evening trembles and is sad” (Line 26). This beads-for-land deal represents what has become, four centuries later, the hard reality of climate change, the environmental crisis that now threatens within a generation or two the species itself.

In this way, the land deal that Duffy uses begins a kind of cultural suicide for the very people who think they are so cleverly outwitting others. Karma, Duffy intones without joy, is alive and well. As the settlers take, so shall they be robbed.

Unlicensed, unsponsored, ill-considered land grabs mark the Western perception of the land as a commodity that condones greed because it perceives nature as a thing with an expiration date. Use it until it is gone, the instruction manual for climate change. To the trusting “savages” who agree to the deal, who believe they are agreeing to share this glorious and abundant wilderness, comes the difficult insight with which the poem closes: abuse nature, use it for narrow gains, and what will be left of its animation, its stunning forces, will only be a “a little shadow” disappearing, ever receding, until at last nature itself is gone, lost in the “darkening pines” (Line 28).