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1492: What Is It Like to Be Discovered?
World-class art and poetry on the colonization of the Americas.
160 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1991
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July 16, 2019
"1492 What Is It Like to Be Discovered?" is not just a book but a piece of art. It is subversive literature disguised as a coffee table book. Deborah Small and Maggie Jaffe have wrapped their politically explosive poetry and prose in brown paper like cheap vodka from a package store destined to be a Molotov Cocktail.
The brown pages are printed chiefly with the sixteenth-century engravings of Theodore de Bry whose book with Girolamo Benzoni, "Great Voyages", and Bartolome de Las Casa's "Narratio Regionum" illustrate and graphically detail the atrocities of the European invasion of America. Other historical images are pulled from Amerigo Vespucci's "New World" and various pop culture sources from films to Columbus Day advertisements. Bridging these prints and montages are the poetry of Jaffe and the imagery and text from three of Small's NEA fellowships: "1492", "New World [Women], and "Empire/Elan/Ecstasy". The work begins with Jaffe's "The Opening":
"Black sand
white foam
(almost gold!)
in violent light.
Three ships:
a red-throated
songbird alerts them to land.
It is the slit -
throat
bird.
There they stand
naked.
Two men, three women,
one child left on shore:
crow-black hair,
skin the color of fired copper.
First a shot.
Their entrails stream
away like frightened fish.
The earth
they call mother
grown malignant,
strange.
They want gold
but there isn't any gold
just the sun
which might have been
enough.
For gold they
hack off hands,
hang them from trees
thirteen in number
symbolizing Apostles
and the Lord in his mercy.
Within twenty-five years
not one Arawak survives."
The brutality both illustrated and confessed in the book exposes the hypocrisy and horror perpetrated in the New World. It also exposes the horrors stilled visited on women and the marginalized today:
"It is 1942...Eliot Morison writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Columbus....Michele de Cuneo...was...'That genial gentleman adventurer never complained, but extracted interest or amusement from everything that happened'....Exploitation can be adventurous and rape can have a charm all its own....
It is 1989. 'We feel she asked for it for the way she was dressed.' A jury in Florida acquits a man accused of kidnapping and raping a woman at knifepoint. 'With that skirt you could see everything she had. She was advertising for sex, ' the jury foreman adds....
Carib islands
Carib women
Carib souls
European gallows..."
But we don't need contemporary poets and writers to condemn the Conquistadors, we have their own words captured in the text:
"While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, who the aforesaid Lord Admiral [Columbus] gave to me, and with whom, having brought into my cabin, and she being naked as is their custom, I conceived the desire to take my pleasure," Michele de Cuneo writes...."I wanted to put my desire to execution, but she was unwilling for me to do so, and treated me with her nails in such wise that I would have preferred never to have begun....But seeing this...I took a rope-end and thrashed her well, following which she produced such screaming and wailing as would cause you not to believe your ears....Finally we reach an agreement such that, I can tell you, she seemed to have been raised in a veritable school of harlots."
This is an important work of art that every American should hold in their hand and ponder our legacy and our futures in the "Me, too" and "pussy grabbing" world that we inhabit.
The brown pages are printed chiefly with the sixteenth-century engravings of Theodore de Bry whose book with Girolamo Benzoni, "Great Voyages", and Bartolome de Las Casa's "Narratio Regionum" illustrate and graphically detail the atrocities of the European invasion of America. Other historical images are pulled from Amerigo Vespucci's "New World" and various pop culture sources from films to Columbus Day advertisements. Bridging these prints and montages are the poetry of Jaffe and the imagery and text from three of Small's NEA fellowships: "1492", "New World [Women], and "Empire/Elan/Ecstasy". The work begins with Jaffe's "The Opening":
"Black sand
white foam
(almost gold!)
in violent light.
Three ships:
a red-throated
songbird alerts them to land.
It is the slit -
throat
bird.
There they stand
naked.
Two men, three women,
one child left on shore:
crow-black hair,
skin the color of fired copper.
First a shot.
Their entrails stream
away like frightened fish.
The earth
they call mother
grown malignant,
strange.
They want gold
but there isn't any gold
just the sun
which might have been
enough.
For gold they
hack off hands,
hang them from trees
thirteen in number
symbolizing Apostles
and the Lord in his mercy.
Within twenty-five years
not one Arawak survives."
The brutality both illustrated and confessed in the book exposes the hypocrisy and horror perpetrated in the New World. It also exposes the horrors stilled visited on women and the marginalized today:
"It is 1942...Eliot Morison writes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Columbus....Michele de Cuneo...was...'That genial gentleman adventurer never complained, but extracted interest or amusement from everything that happened'....Exploitation can be adventurous and rape can have a charm all its own....
It is 1989. 'We feel she asked for it for the way she was dressed.' A jury in Florida acquits a man accused of kidnapping and raping a woman at knifepoint. 'With that skirt you could see everything she had. She was advertising for sex, ' the jury foreman adds....
Carib islands
Carib women
Carib souls
European gallows..."
But we don't need contemporary poets and writers to condemn the Conquistadors, we have their own words captured in the text:
"While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, who the aforesaid Lord Admiral [Columbus] gave to me, and with whom, having brought into my cabin, and she being naked as is their custom, I conceived the desire to take my pleasure," Michele de Cuneo writes...."I wanted to put my desire to execution, but she was unwilling for me to do so, and treated me with her nails in such wise that I would have preferred never to have begun....But seeing this...I took a rope-end and thrashed her well, following which she produced such screaming and wailing as would cause you not to believe your ears....Finally we reach an agreement such that, I can tell you, she seemed to have been raised in a veritable school of harlots."
This is an important work of art that every American should hold in their hand and ponder our legacy and our futures in the "Me, too" and "pussy grabbing" world that we inhabit.
Displaying 1 of 1 review