Selling Manhattan

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context: The Manhattan Deal

“Selling Manhattan” uses as its centering event the 1626 purchase by Dutch settlers, led by general director of the Dutch Trading Company Peter Minuit, of the southern tip of what was then called New Netherlands from representatives of a co-opt of local Indigenous tribes, primarily the Lenape. The negotiation meant nothing to the Indigenous representatives, as they had no legal system that conceived of the land as something ownable, much less transferable.

The swindle began what would become a century of rapacious European invasion and their plotting to steal land from peoples who had lived there for centuries. The Manhattan deal—historic records list only glass beads valued at 60 guilders, or roughly $24.00 (today roughly $33.00) proffered in return for signing over a massive tract of land at the mouth of the Hudson River to develop as a trading outpost to be called New Amsterdam—becomes in the poem a harbinger of the creep of European settlers who would, within a century and later under the guise of Manifest Destiny, justify a land grab that in the end destroyed Indigenous civilizations. “Now get your red ass out of here” (Line 4) crudely but accurately summarizes the historic context of Duffy’s poem.

That sense of lostness is suggested in the poem when, in Stanza 5, the speaker introduces the comparison of the Indigenous peoples to the salmon heading mysteriously out to the open sea, leaving no tracks, no trail, no evidence they had ever lived. The selling of Manhattan as the poem’s historic context suggests how that deal reveals the bottomless greed of the capitalist invaders and the inevitable doom of the Indigenous peoples, their lives, and their entire cultures, ways of life kept sacred now only in the silences of the “great stones” (Line 24) and in the “ghost” of grasshoppers and buffaloes (Line 25).

Literary Context: Eco-Literature

Although the poem decries the treatment of Indigenous peoples by European colonializing, the poem offers a much wider perspective on the impact of the loss of Indigenous cultures. The poem suggests that the white settlers viewed nature only as a commodity, something to be bought and sold, something to be owned and used without respecting the integrity of the land or being sensitive to the spirit of the earth they were so committed to use to make them wealthy.

As such, “Selling Manhattan” is an expression of eco-literature, a genre of contemporary writing, fiction and non-fiction. In the fin-de-millennium decades emerged a global outcry over the threat posed by centuries of mismanagement of the environment, most notably the dire implications of global warming and climate change. Unlike the alarms raised (and summarily addressed) a generation earlier about the precipitous spike in air, land, and water pollution, these scientific findings revealed a systemic and very real threat not to the earth—it will survive, even thrive, without humanity—but rather to the fragile ecosystem that alone assures humanity’s survival. The reality of the impact of catastrophic climate change coming within decades rather than centuries, forecasts documented by shelves of scientific findings and climatological extrapolations, stirred an international response, an urgency that united the global community in ways that recalled a half century earlier transnational efforts to control the threat of nuclear weapons.

Writers have become an important part of this global response. Eco-literature seeks nothing less than to broaden our perception of nature itself and, in turn, to encourage humanity to re-approach nature with genuine humility, restoring its ancient sense of wonder, mystery, terror, and awe. Eco-literature allows nature to unsettle us, but to encourage activism risks becoming, as “Selling Manhattan” does in its closing stanzas, an elegy for the earth itself. Given the remote possibility that humanity will suddenly turn from its ways, Duffy’s poem confirms only that the logic of the Manhattan land swindle still drives our perception of the earth as a commodity.