Place Poem: "Reporting Back to Queen Isabella" by Lorna Goodison
Plus some place picks befitting this thoroughly depressing week
It’s been a disturbing week in the news, and I think there’s no reason at all that this week’s place poem shouldn’t also be disturbing. It is also, however, incredibly good. It’ll be clear once you read it why no other poem could have sufficed in this space the week of Indigenous Peoples Day.
Reporting Back to Queen Isabella
by Lorna Goodison
When Don Cristobal returned to a hero’s welcome, his caravels corked with treasures of the New World, he presented his findings; told of his great adventures to Queen Isabella, whose speech set the gold standard for her nation’s language. When he came to Xamaica he described it so: ‘The fairest isle that eyes ever beheld.’ Then he balled up a big sheet of parchment, unclenched, and let it fall off a flat surface before it landed at her feet. There we were, massifs, high mountain ranges, expansive plains, deep valleys, one he’d christened for the Queen of Spain. Overabundance of wood, over one hundred rivers, food, and fat pastures for Spanish horses, men, and cattle; and yes, your majesty, there were some people.
I grew up just outside of Providence, Rhode Island, where for the entirety of my childhood, there stood a bronze status of Christopher Columbus in a small square on the south side of the city. Although this statue is a facsimile, the original was sculpted in the 1890s by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the French artist who sculpted the Statue of Liberty.
The Columbus statue was taken down in 2020 following a series of protests and reported threats to tear the statue down. Yet just this past week, my dad—a proficient tab-keeper on the goings-on in my home state—told me that the statue was going to be re-erected on the day commonly celebrated in Italian-American communities as Columbus Day. When I heard that of all places for the statue to relocate, it was in a small city called Johnston, I was not shocked. According to the Italian American Studies Association, Johnston has the second-highest concentration of Italian-Americans in the entire country, second only to Fairfield, New Jersey.
Heritage is a tricky subject, and I’m open to a lot of different perspectives on what heritage should be protected, and by whom, and how to handle objections to celebrations of that heritage. But the adoption of Columbus by Americans, and by the Italian-American community in particular, has always confounded me a bit. As alluded to in the poem above, the mission “Don Cristobal” undertook to the New World was financed not by Italy, but by the Spanish crown. Columbus never even set foot in any land currently part of the United States.
Yet, he was adopted as a hero by many in the Italian-American community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as that community was facing significant social and economic isolation and discrimination. Historians argue that adopting and promoting Columbus, who by that time had already achieved legendary status in the U.S., was a mechanism for assimilation for Italian-Americans to get a step closer to being something approximating “full-blooded caucasians.” In a twisted sort of way, it’s some distinctly American reasoning that won Columbus this status.
Traditions and customs are not just reasonable, but necessary parts of being human, especially if we’re talking about ethnic and cultural meaning-making. But with such rich historical alternatives for personal idolatry (Leonardo da Vinci, anyone? Galileo? Vivaldi?), every early October brings with it fresh wonderment, at least from me, that we still can’t ever quite be rid of Christopher Columbus for good.
Lorna Goodison—a Caribbean poet born in Jamaica, and that country’s poet laureate from 2017-2020— gets to the heart of these bedeviling questions, legends, and contradictions in her breathtaking poem, “Reporting Back to Queen Isabella.”
The poem itself is a deliberate and ingenious bait-and-switch. Up until the very end of it, the poem reads like a sober, honor-laden historical accounting of Columbus’s triumphant return to Spain. For example, one would have no difficulty imagining the first 95% of the poem being read at Johnston’s statue-unveiling to polite applause. The language is as ornate as the triumphant presentation in court pictured in Eugene Delacroix’s 1839 painting of the poem’s scene.
Before the last half-line of the poem, the only real hint of its ironic tone and message is the traditional indigenous spelling of the land Columbus stumbled onto: “Xamaica.” But Goodison drops the true hammer-blow with the final eight words: “and yes, your majesty; there were some people.” The indigenous population of Columbus’s “new world” are presented not in celebration, nor even in disgust or loathing, but exactly as Columbus and his ilk saw them at the time: a pithy, insignificant, barely-worth-mentioning afterthought, lower on the conquering hero’s list of priorities than the “fat pastures” they’d made available to their cattle.
Even for readers who are predisposed at this point not to trust flattering, eulogistic words about Christopher Columbus, the last line drops into your stomach with the crushing weight of 500+ years of injustice. By housing the first twelve lines of the poem in the trappings of shiny, immaculate language befitting a formal presentation to a queen, Goodison pulls the rug out from under all of us with the offhanded callousness of her imagining of Columbus. The reminder at the end of the poem of the true “plunder” of Columbus’s discovery literally took my breath away the first time I read it (right before words in the ballpark of “Holy mother of God” involuntarily exited my mouth). That’s exactly what it was supposed to do.
Place Picks
Since both historical and contemporary genocide seems to be the theme of the week, it might make sense for me to lighten things a bit for this week’s Place Picks. I’ll do my best.
Music
“Cairo, IL” by Natalie Hemby (Apple Music / Spotify).
Natalie Hemby, in addition to making powerful folk music as a solo artist, is one of the founding members of the raucously awesome supergroup The Highwomen with Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires. I love the entire album this song appears on (“Lovers on Display” and “Return” are also big winners), but “Cairo, IL” is one of a long tradition of songs—many of which are likely to feature as Place Picks before too long—named after places of specific meaning to the artist.
In this case, Hemby is writing about a hollowed-out town she stops through on her drive from Nashville to the small Missouri town of Puxico where her grandparents resided, and which this album is named after. Hemby offers some more details in the link above:
As a kid growing up, it was my favorite part of the drive on the way to Puxico, and also, the saddest part as I was leaving to go home back to Nashville. Only the skeletons of buildings remain, and what was once a thriving city one hundred years ago, is now a ghost town... a relic of its beauty. But to me, it's become a landmark of my childhood.
Cairo is a town where two mighty American rivers, the Mississippi and the Ohio, join together. It’s also at the direct intersection of three states (Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri). And so, when Hemby cleverly evokes the bittersweet nostalgia of old childhood places (“Where the longing for the leaving and the welcome home receiving join”) it’s a lyric overflowing with satisfying double-meaning.
Visuals
I’ve never been much of a photographer, but figured I’d offer up a shot I came across the other day from a trip I took in March 2022 with some close friends. It’s from Red Rocks Canyon outside of Las Vegas, NV (not to be confused with the legendary Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater in Colorado), and the park, as you can see, lives up to its name.
I think many might look at this photo and see desolation, and that’s understandable. But more and more—as I approach an even five years as a red-blooded Westerner—I see the exact opposite.
Reading
“This is Where Your Old Clothes Go”, by Cassandra Sagness in Orion Magazine.
I think a lot of us relatively well-off Americans like to believe that the clothes we get rid of (and ideally donate) go to someone who needs them. I think it’s a lot to ask of most people to have end-to-end knowledge of the pipeline their discarded clothing passes through. We put our old stuff where we think it can be useful—Goodwill, the Salvation Army, the local consignment shop—and hope for the best.
In this article, Cassandra Sagness gives us some fascinating and sometimes harrowing context to the natural endpoint of many of these choices. She delves into the backstory of Inquique, a port in Chile that has become a trade hub, largely for discarded American clothing:
In 2022, the United States exported more than 150 million pounds of apparel and textiles to Chile: some is deemed ropa americana, mostly unsold merchandise from used clothing stores and charity consignment organizations. On arrival, the clothes and fabric are sorted according to quality so importers can resell it to local retailers. The excess is deemed ropa basura, garbage clothes. Local vendors make weekly trips to the port, where they buy lotes of product from importers and then start their ascent out of the city behind a sand dune known locally as The Dragon.
The result is what Sagness dubs a “peculiar and staggering monument of waste.” Yes, many of the locals—who comprise huge numbers of migrants not just from other parts of Chile, but also Columbia, Venezuela, and Argentina—buy the clothes and use them. But the micro-economy that’s emerged from the massive importations of American clothing comes with tremendous environmental costs to locals, and at the very least underscores the unfathomable gulf between the quality of life of the clothing’s original owners, and those who end up with it:
[One vendor] says that residents have to ask the municipality for shipments of water, and they’re given a thousand liters for the week. “I have my family and we’re five, and my mother lives there too, so we’re six. A thousand liters for the house for the week.”
Three hundred to four hundred of those are used in processing the unwashed ropa americana Santos receives from importers. That leaves each person in the Santos household about fifteen liters a day for drinking, bathing, and cleaning their own clothes.
By comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the average U.S. resident uses 590 liters of water a day. And each shirt Santos sells has already consumed about 2,700 liters of water even before its arrival in Chile.
It seems not horrible on the whole that our old threads are going somewhere rather than nowhere. But maybe considering where it ends up might help us think twice about whether that shirt you bought last year really needs to be replaced.