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Americas

TRAILS OF TEARS

Alexis De Tocqueville, in DEMOCRACY

IN AMERICA, witnesses an event

on the Trail of Tears: the expulsion

of the so-called Five Civilised Tribes –

Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee,

and Seminole – from the Deep South.

They were expelled to make way for share croppers,

gold prospectors, cotton plantations.

The government promised the people asylum

on what it described as empty grasslands

to the west of the Mississippi.

 

In December 1831

De Tocqueville is in Memphis, Tennessee.

The snow has frozen hard, and immense ice floes

are moving fast down the Mississippi.

He watches a large family group of Choctaws

arrive, among them are old people dying

and newborns. Their possessions are only

what they have been able to carry

on the long exhausting walk from the south east.

They are silent as they pass him, knowing

their injuries are beyond remedy.

There is no room for their dogs in the vessels

that will take them across to the west bank.

As the boats leave the shore the dogs begin to howl,

then enter the icy waters to follow them.

 

***

 

De Tocqueville’s sympathetic testimony

seems the exception that proves the following

rule: that it is some sort of hubris makes

those of European heritage

record and justify – almost by default –

in detail, and with self-righteousness,

their settler-colonial iniquities,

their removal of people from their homelands,

their furtherance of capitalism,

whether by cavalry, cannons, starvation,

litigation, fraud, whether in

the Americas, Ireland, Siberia,

Australia, Algeria, New Zealand,

Indo-China, Malaya, Kenya,

Tanzania, Uganda, Rhodesia,

South Africa…

 

 

GOOD HOPE

Pegram's Point, Cape Province, SA
Pegram's Point, Cape Province, SA © Sylvia Selzer 2009

At her back, the South Atlantic’s rolling seas,

those ice blue waters, break, skittering

on the silver sands. Burgeoning with child,

she smiles for the camera, as always

optimistically. Mussels encrust the rock

she leans on, kelp bobs like seals on the foam

and Southern Right Whales blow almost out of sight.

Due west, across the unbroken miles,

is Buenos Aires and the teeming hectares

of the Americas. We turn inland. An ostrich

high steps through proteas and heathers,

a tortoise navigates the undergrowth.

Some flowers bloom only after fire. Good choice

to be here on this cape of storms and wrecks.

She carries so many of our pasts –

refugees and indigenes, blacksmiths

and architects, poets and sea captains…

That first image of the future, of something

commonplace, something extraordinary,

will surface without summons, rise instantly,

engulf her forever.