TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100791/1007600.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 21.1 KB | 414 lines

                                                                                HISTORY, Page 52

The Trouble With Columbus


As the 500th anniversary of his New World voyage approaches,
a fundamental argument about its significance is growing in
stridency

By PAUL GRAY -- Reported by Cathy Booth/Miami, Anne Hopkins and
Ratu Kamlani/New York


    Planned more than a century ago as a tribute to the
landfall of Christopher Columbus in 1492, a five-story
lighthouse now, finally, thrusts itself into the sky over Santo
Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. Aggressively supported by
the nation's octogenarian President Joaquin Balaguer, the
project will cost, when all the finishing touches are completed,
about $20 million. It will also, when the switch is pulled, put
on quite a show: 147 giant beams projecting a cross of light
3,000 ft. into the Caribbean night. The lighthouse comes
equipped with its own power generators, which was a prudent idea
on someone's part. The Dominican Republic's electricity system
has virtually collapsed for lack of funding. Like the rest of
the country, the neighborhoods surrounding this soaring beacon
are routinely blacked out 20 hours a day.

    The grandiose new lighthouse already looks like an
anomaly, while the old poverty huddling at its edges seems all
too contemporary. Overarching light and enforced darkness, cheek
by jowl. The Manichaean contrast is altogether fitting for this,
the 500th anniversary of Columbus' world-shattering voyage,
which is itself increasingly seen in opposing terms of black and
white. The Columbus quincentennial officially kicks off this
Columbus Day, Oct. 12 -- but it has even now generated enough
contrast and controversy to outlast its appointed year and,
quite possibly, this decade.

    At the heart of the hubbub lies a fundamental
disagreement, not so much about Columbus himself as about the
Columbian legacy. What, in other words, did the enigmatic Genoan
set in motion when he first reached the New World? In one
version of the story, Columbus and the Europeans who followed
him brought civilization to two immense, sparsely populated
continents, in the process fundamentally enriching and altering
the Old World from which they had themselves come.

    Among other things, Columbus' journey was the first step
in a long process that eventually produced the United States of
America, a daring experiment in democracy that in turn became a
symbol and a haven of individual liberty for people throughout
the world. But the revolution that began with his voyages was
far greater than that. It altered science, geography,
philosophy, agriculture, law, religion, ethics, government --
the sum, in other words, of what passed at the time as Western
culture.

    Increasingly, however, there is a counterchorus, an
opposing rendition of the same events that deems Columbus' first
footfall in the New World to be fatal to the world he invaded,
and even to the rest of the globe. The indigenous peoples and
their cultures were doomed by European arrogance, brutality and
infectious diseases. Columbus' gift was slavery to those who
greeted him; his arrival set in motion the ruthless destruction,
continuing at this very moment, of the natural world he entered.
Genocide, ecocide, exploitation -- even the notion of Columbus
as a "discoverer" -- are deemed to be a form of Eurocentric
theft of history from those who watched Columbus' ships drop
anchor off their shores.

    Not surprisingly, those who see Columbus' journey as a
triumph of the human progress toward perfection and those who
view the same event as a hemispheric rape do not have many
kindly things to say to one another. But they are shouting a
lot, and this clamor, so far, has defined the ceremonies to
come.

    Outwardly, at least, the planned hoopla looks much the
same as that attending other big-bow-wow anniversaries, such as
the bicentennials of the U.S. Declaration of Independence in
1976 or of the French Revolution in 1989. Columbus will be
given the now obligatory PBS documentary series for important
occasions: Columbus and the Age of Discovery will spread seven
hours over four nights, beginning Oct. 6, with the whole shebang
to be repeated on Columbus Day. Furthermore, those hungering for
Columbus T shirts, watches or other memorabilia should not have
to search far to satiate themselves. The spirit of good
old-fashioned boosterism in pursuit of tourist revenues is alive
and well wherever a claim can be laid to Columbus.

    Starting next April 20, Spain will stage Expo '92, billed
as the largest World's Fair in history. The host city is
Seville, which is not far from where the explorer set out on the
ocean blue, and the extensive plans for the event include three
replica ships -- of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria --
to be moored in a re-creation of a 15th century port. Another
set of three replica ships will sail from Spain Oct. 12 and
retrace Columbus' first voyage to the New World. In Columbus,
Ohio, "the largest city in the world bearing the explorer's
name," yet another replica of the Santa Maria will be christened
Oct. 11 and then docked on the Scioto River downtown. The
city's year-long schedule of events includes performances of new
works by its orchestra, opera, ballet and theater groups, not
to mention an educational exhibit called "500 Years of
Accounting" to commemorate the Italian invention of double-entry
bookkeeping.

    And so it will go, in both hemispheres. A 14 1/2-ft.
fiber-glass statue of the explorer has gone up in Columbus, Wis.
Club Med is struggling to complete a new getaway retreat on the
Bahamian island of San Salvador, one of the many spots that
claim to be the place where the explorer first landed.
Commercialism does, of course, entail risks. Genoa, Columbus'
birthplace, confidently expects at least 2 million visitors to
attend its "Man, the Ship and the Sea" extravaganza, which
begins May 15, amid rampant rumors in Italy of corruption and
misuse of funds by the planners.

    The grandiloquently named Christopher Columbus
Quincentenary Jubilee Commission, established by Congress in
1984, has also run into some fiduciary problems. Its first
chairman, Miami developer and Republican fund raiser John
Goudie, resigned last year amid complaints of mismanagement.
Meanwhile, the U.S. recession has put a crimp in the
commission's ability to obtain public and private donations. In
Florida three separate state Columbus commissions have foundered
on a lack of money.

    This rain on the Columbus parade is nothing, though,
compared with the storm of outrage that the prospect of
quincentennial partying has unleashed among the anti-Columbians.
"Our celebration is to oppose," says Evaristo Nugkuag, a member
of the Aguaruna people, who is president of the Coordinating
Body for the Indigenous Peoples' Organizations of the Amazon
Basin (COICA), an umbrella group in Lima, Peru. On Oct. 7, in
Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, about 1,000 members of COICA and
other groups, representing 24 countries in the Western
Hemisphere, will gather at a "Continental Encounter" meeting.
One of the purposes is to determine strategies to counter the
1992 Columbus celebrations, including the establishment of an
"alternative Seville" at a yet to be chosen site in Mexico.
Nugkuag thinks such an antimainstream World's Fair can be an
occasion for reflection rather than celebration: "We want to
recover our history to affirm our identity, to achieve true
independence from exploitation and aggression and to play a role
in determining our future."

    Similar protests have been percolating, or even boiling,
for some time. When it opened at the University of Florida's
Museum of Natural History two years ago, an exhibit called
"First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the
United States 1492-1570" drew spirited opposition from Native
American activists, including Russell Means of the American
Indian Movement. "Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile
delinquent!" yelled demonstrators. COLUMBUS MURDERED A CONTINENT
read one of the placards. Last July a group of protesters
dressed as South American Indians appeared unannounced in Spain,
wearing loincloths, their faces and bodies painted. The invaders
peacefully entered the shrine of the nation's patron saint at
Santiago de Compostela. They left flowers and other offerings
and a message to ask "forgiveness for those who used his name
to conquer, murder and destroy peoples."

    Anti-Columbus sentiments are by no means restricted to the
descendants of those who were on hand when the Genoan first
showed up. Last year the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the U.S. adopted a resolution suggesting how 1492
should be commemorated: "For the descendants of the survivors
of the subsequent invasion, genocide, slavery, `ecocide' and
exploitation of the wealth of the land, a celebration is not an
appropriate observance of this anniversary."

    The charge that Columbus' arrival instigated genocide has
become a major weapon in the anti-Columbian arsenal. George
Tinker, a Native American who teaches at the Iliff School of
Theology in Denver, says of the quincentennial plans: "We're
talking about celebrating the great benefit to some people
brought by the murder of other people." Further to Columbus'
discredit, at the bar of contemporary judgment, is his identity
as a white European male. Across the U.S., academicians will be
jetting to innumerable conferences where they will give papers
on the colonial depredations and horrors that Columbus
inaugurated. Author Hans Koning, who has written a scathing
biography titled Columbus: His Enterprise (Monthly Review Press;
$8.95), sums up this school of scandalized thought: "It's almost
obscene to celebrate Columbus because it's an unmitigated record
of horror. We don't have to celebrate a man who was really --
from an Indian point of view -- worse than Attila the Hun."

    Granted, as less vitriolic modern historiography makes
clear, Columbus was not the gem of the ocean, the flawless hero
of so many earlier hagiographies. But was the historic figure
whose name was adopted by a South American republic, the
District of Columbia and countless other places and entities,
really worse than Hitler or Attila the Hun? What in the New
World is going on around here?

    For all its intensity, the Columbus controversy has very
little to do with 1492 and almost everything to do with 1991.
The peoples of the New World, the land that Columbus made
inevitable, are engaged in another convulsive attempt to
reinvent themselves, to conceive a version of the past that will
justify the present and, if possible, shape the future. In
older, fixed civilizations, this sort of cultural enterprise
would be all but inconceivable. History is what happened and
what everyone is stuck with -- "a nightmare," as James Joyce's
Stephen Dedalus described it, "from which I am trying to awake."
But bad dreams have never been popular, particularly in the
U.S., where it has been assumed they can be erased by a
different way of seeing the things that caused them.

    Ironically, Columbus drew much of his stature from one
such national mind-change. Prior to the War of 1812, he did not
figure large in the U.S. imagination. But after that conflict,
American patriots felt an urgent need to link the national cause
with non-British heroes: the New World needed new ancestors.
Washington Irving's 1828 A History of the Life and Voyages of
Christopher Columbus glorified a commanding character with an
Italian name and sailing under a Spanish flag who nonetheless
displayed virtues and characteristics that U.S. citizens, most
of them from northern Europe, could admire. Thus did the heyday
of Columbus idolatry begin -- in an early attempt to provide the
nation with the icons of multicultural diversity.

    That idolatry is now guttering out -- inconveniently, by
many people's lights -- for several reasons. The U.S.
population is not what it was during the first decades of the
19th century; it now includes a higher percentage of people, and
a number of far more vocal people, who feel they have a historic
grievance against Columbus and the European invasion he
represented. These include, most prominently, Native Americans,
many of whom have joined hands with their coevals in Latin and
South America to take a stand against a long-ago uninvited
guest; and African Americans, whose forebears were packed into
slave ships and sent across the Atlantic because the Europeans
needed their labor to replace that of the decimated indigenous
populations. Their toppling of the Columbus icon represents, at
its best, a bid to construct a new national mythology -- an urge
they paradoxically share with the patriots after the War of
1812.

    At the same time, what Columbus actually wrought by
bringing Europe into the Americas is being assessed with
increased historical sophistication. Two worlds collided nearly
500 years ago, and none of the fallout from that impact now
seems as simple as it was once portrayed. Textbooks on American
history once began with Columbus' arrival, as if nothing that
had happened before bore mentioning. Those careful enough to
note that the explorer found people already living where he
touched down did not go on to say very much about them.

    Yet there is much to say, as archaeologists,
anthropologists and ethnographers have known for a long time.
The prospect of the Columbus quincentennial not only lent new
urgency to scientific research already under way about the land
that the Italian encountered, but also suggested an expanded
context in which discoveries could be viewed. "The impetus has
changed," says archaeologist Jerald Milanich, "from a
celebration of Columbus and the triumph of European civilization
to a new theme: the people that discovered Columbus. There's a
huge amount of research focusing on the impact of native
Americans."

    It has never been a secret that the Americas and Europe
reciprocally influenced each other, although the focus in much
traditional history was on how the colonializers tamed -- or
exterminated -- the natives and resettled the land along
European models. The process worked both ways. The New World
galvanized the European imagination; knowledge of its existence
and its peoples was an important factor in the explosion of the
Renaissance, which involved not only the reappropriation of
classical learning but also the heady sense of a future yet to
be discovered. In "To His Mistress Going to Bed," written
roughly a century after Columbus' landing, the English poet John
Donne describes his lover's disrobing until her final article
of clothing is cast off and then exclaims, "O my America! my
new-found land."

    In the current politically correct climate, Donne's
rapturous recognition can easily be dismissed as a typically
white European male response toward unclaimed territory,
combining voyeurism, sex and predatory aggression. This reading
filters out all the fun and, more important, the awe and wonder
that the Americas sparked in European minds. And the New World
fed Europe more than literary tropes, intellectual excitement
and a whiff of the exotic. It fed Europe . . . food, stuff that
native Americans had been cultivating for thousands of years and
that Europeans had never heard of: peppers, paprika, potatoes,
corn, tomatoes.

    A wider understanding of this transfer of knowledge from
the New World to the Old should by fostered by the Smithsonian
Institution's "Seeds of Change," the largest exhibition ever
mounted at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
Opening Oct. 12 and running through April 1993, the Smithsonian
exhibit sets forth five "natural" elements -- sugar, disease,
maize, the potato and the horse -- the exchange of which has
profoundly altered both the New and Old Worlds in the 500 years
since Columbus' first voyage.

    The Smithsonian show and much of the other serendipitous
scholarly digging in preparation for the Columbus quincentennial
actually work quietly against the more extreme positions staked
out by those who hate or love what transpired 500 years ago.
Thank goodness. Because it is impossible, even with the best
will in the world, to find a simple common ground between the
contending notions of Civilization or Genocide, Progress or the
Cyclical Harmony of the Seasons, Mastering the Land or Living
with the Bounty That the Land Will Provide on Its Own.

    Impossible, because all these abstractions belong more to
the world of morality plays than to the messy arena of history
as it occurs. The vast amount of new information being
discovered about the New World, both before and after 1492,
actually points the way toward a genuinely harmonious
understanding of the present moment and how it was achieved. The
Columbus quincentennial deserves some credit for focusing this
energy and attention. But the worry is that if the debate grows
louder and more strident, it could obscure this increasing pool
of common knowledge in a shouting match of cliches.

    If any book can be said to summon up the passions of this
moment, it is Kirkpatrick Sale's The Conquest of Paradise,
(Knopf; $24.95). Published last year, the 453-page popular
history has become a call to arms for the anti-Columbians; it
is also the book the traditional Columbus faction most loves to
hate. Sale is a social historian whose research into Columbus'
life and travels and the explorer's contemporary world is
impressive; his narrative, especially when he joins Columbus
aboard the Santa Maria, is gripping. Sale persuasively describes
what it must have felt like for the explorer to stumble upon an
unimagined world, peopled, as the author notes, by the tribe
known as the Tainos, a European name attached to them that was
taken from their own word for "good."

    Sale goes on to note that "the Tainos' lives were in many
ways as idyllic as their surroundings, into which they fit with
such skill and comfort. They were well fed and well housed,
without poverty or serious disease. They enjoyed considerable
leisure, given over to dancing, singing, ballgames, and sex, and
expressed themselves artistically in basketry, woodworking,
pottery, and jewelry. They lived in general harmony and peace,
without greed or covetousness or theft."

    Never mind the aesthetic objection that Sale makes these
people sound suspiciously like a bunch of New Agers vacationing
in the Bahamas. Discount the fact that Sale does not mention
evidence of the Tainos' hierarchic social structure, which
included, at the bottom level, slaves.

    The deepest problem is that Sale, like others who idealize
the people whose fate was sealed by the explorer's arrival,
actually does them another kind of injury. The perfect island
race of Sale's imagination is denied its commonality with the
rest of humanity. Father Leonid Kishkovsky of the Orthodox
Church in America, who chaired the National Council of the
Churches meeting at which the controversial Columbus
quincentennial resolution was debated, is one of those who
question the notion implicit in Sale's work that evil was
something imported exclusively from Europe: "In a certain sense
this is patronizing; it's as if native indigenous people don't
really have a history, which includes civilization, warfare,
empires and cruelties, before white people even arrived."

    Lurking behind Sale's argument and that of many other
vociferous critics is a prelapsarian myth: the world was once
perfect and now it isn't, so someone or something must have
ruined it. Many cultures possess a form of this myth; it is
particularly strong in Western thought because of the Adam and
Eve story in the Old Testament. In the 18th century, Jean
Jacques Rousseau popularized a secular version of that Eden
story with his writings about the Noble Savage. And part of his
inspiration for this concept came from his knowledge of the New
World. Even Sale's anti-Columbian ideas, it seems, owe more to
Columbus than some of his readers might imagine.

    Mythology is a closed system, a revolving circle of
self-reinforcing perceptions. The true history of 1492 and ever
after occurred in a different plane of existence, where
questions like Were Savages Noble? are either meaningless or
susceptible to proof. For too long, the American myth demonized
or ignored the people whom Columbus encountered on these shores.
Must people now replace this with a new myth that simply
demonizes Columbus and Europeans? It is easy to see why former
victims might like their turn as heroes. But if that is all the
quincentennial produces, an important opportunity for
self-reflection will have been wasted.

    Celebrate Columbus? Not if that simply means backslapping
and flag waving. But it can mean more: taking stock of the
long, fascinating record, noting that inevitable conflict
resulted in losers as well as winners and produced a mixture of
races, customs and habits never before seen in the world.
Columbus and all he represents may simply provide an excuse for
finger shaking. But perhaps it is possible to celebrate Columbus
by trying harder to understand each other and ourselves.