Selling Manhattan

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1987

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Impact of Colonialism

Colonialism refers to the process by which one culture appropriates the land of a different culture, a process that inevitably weakens the customs, cultures, and rituals of the nation being invaded. At the core of Duffy’s poem is the conflict between the Dutch settlers bent on colonizing what to them was an unchartered wilderness there for the taking, and the Indigenous peoples whose culture and civilization had been rooted in centuries of existence amid the natural beauty and resource-rich island of Manahatta (a word that meant “hilly island” in Lenape).

Writing nearly three centuries after the fact, Duffy understands what the Lenape and other Indigenous tribes in Manahatta did not—really, could not. These newly-arrived settlers assumed the land was ownable, transferable, a commodity that could be negotiated. Even worse, the settlers perceived the land as theirs to barter. Only in the last century have writers explored the impact of colonization on the Indigenous peoples. Here the impact is summed up in a single line: “No good will come of this” (Line 15). Two such distinctly-different cultures would never share the land mass that came to be called North America, despite the obvious plenty that would have permitted coexistence. Experts in Indigenous traditions and languages today believe the Lenape leaders negotiating with the Dutch assumed they were merely agreeing to share the land, not give it away, and that they saw the glass baubles as a gesture of friendship.

Thus, the poem echoes sentiments of the 20th-century genre of post-colonial literature: colonizers become exploitative; the Indigenous tribes of the land under siege will lose because the settled peoples never have the fire power or the military reach of the colonialists; and what will be lost is more than land, what will be lost is that nation’s culture, in this case the ancient respect for the land that the white settlers were intent on first stealing and then exploiting.

The Greed of European Colonizers

The speaker is looking back from a perspective of insight-too-late. The speaker sees what the Indigenous agents arranging the sale do not: all is lost to the trickery and, because Duffy (and her readers) live at the tail-end of four centuries of the apparently bottomless hunger for the land (and the waters and the sky, for that matter), she knows what the choral Indigenous voice does not. This bargain licenses nearly a century and a half of confiscating Indigenous territory through either outright trickery or head-on turf wars, after which white settlers’ unfathomable greed left nature itself depleted, little more than a shadow disappearing into the darkness.

There is a kind of winsome nostalgia to the speaker’s reflections of the reality of these crude white settlers bent on asserting a sense of entitlement and ownership onto land that had flourished for centuries without their presence. The colonists are determined to pillage this new world at the command of their own God, who, in the opening chapters of Genesis, just after destroying the entire earth with a flood designed to punish them for their sinning, intones: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28, King James Version). Stewardship becomes entitlement; subduing the Earth becomes ravaging it; and dominion comes to mean absolute control uncomplicated by any awareness of the fragile nature of nature itself.

The Loss of Respect for the Earth

“I sing,” the speaker proclaims, “with true love of the land” (Line 13), a love nurtured and developed across centuries, manifested in the Indigenous peoples’ respect for the earth and their perception of the importance of humanity living in harmony with it.

Cultures and even civilizations come and go, but the earth goes on forever. The problem that Duffy examines is how European settlers, living in their materialist culture ever since Europe had begun to develop its identity as an urban rather than rural culture, never took to heart God’s command to be wise stewards of the land: “Wherever / you have touched the earth, the earth is sore” (Lines 10-11). Having pillaged an entirely new landscape, the white settlers dismiss as supernaturalism the Indigenous cultures’ respect for the land as a spiritual entity, the notion that a tree is more than an object to be brought down by axes, split into planks, and then used to raise the future port city of New Amsterdam.

In misunderstanding God’s charge delivered to Adam and Eve to be stewards of this lush and fertile garden, the Dutch settlers cannot hear the wilderness, cannot speak to it, cannot appreciate its spiritual essence. To them, a tree is just a tree, its wood is merely useful. For those living on the land far before the Dutch settlers, a tree is a manifestation of a single vast organic soul that animates the entire cosmos into a grand unit of physical animation. Nature is a spirit, not a commodity, a soul and not a thing. When the choral speaker, then, asks whether “the spirit of the water has anything / to say” (Lines 10-11), the implication is that nature has been laid to waste by an inability—or refusal—to see the earth’s resources as gifts instead of possessions.