Under the Gaze of Columbus

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I am in Barcelona, which is a fine place to discover that history has an excellent sense of humor and a rather poor sense of shame.

I found myself beneath the Columbus Column, where a market had sprung up under little tents. Humanity has always been good at putting up a tent and immediately filling it with things nobody knew they needed. One fellow had old watches, another had brass Buddhas, and another had devoted a considerable portion of his establishment to Nazi memorabilia. This struck me as an unfortunate neighborhood for the swastika.

I have nothing against the swastika itself. It had an honorable career for several thousand years before the Nazis got hold of it and ruined its reputation in twelve. You find it with Ganesha, with the Buddha, and scattered through ancient cultures. I am fascinated by symbols that wander around the earth apparently without passports: the swastika, the Big Dipper, the Seven Rishis—the Vedic seers who heard the mantras before anybody had thought to bind the Vedas into books.

Antique markets are full of such migrations.

I love rummaging through them because you are really rummaging through dead people’s drawers. A person saves an object for forty years because it is precious. Then he dies, and on Tuesday afternoon it is three euros under a tent in Barcelona.

That is civilization reduced to efficient bookkeeping.

I am particular about souvenirs. In Kuşadası, Turkey, I once found a little Rumi bookmark that pleased me enormously. Here I found a Buddha and a small bronze, and was happily examining the debris of eternity when I happened to look upward.

There was Columbus.

He has an excellent view.

I have never cared for what Columbus came to represent. I once dreamed about 1492. In the dream there was an old book filled with little colored pictures showing events in Spain and Muslims being driven away. The next day I went wandering through the university library, as was my habit, and found a book containing pictures astonishingly like those in the dream. Libraries occasionally behave this way and then refuse to explain themselves.

1492 has bothered me ever since.

Like plenty of Americans, I was raised with the hazy impression that before Europeans arrived, the Americas were mostly trees waiting patiently for somebody to discover them. Eventually I investigated the matter and discovered the inconvenient fact that millions upon millions of people were already there, building cities, farming, trading, governing, fighting, inventing and generally carrying on without realizing they were undiscovered.

Years later Charles C. Mann wrote 1491, which described that enormous pre-Columbian world far better than the schoolbooks of my childhood had done.

I live in Canada now, where history has not finished arguing with the present either. In the early 2000s I listened to a radio program called Hidden from History. Survivors described residential schools, priests and nuns, children taken from their families, and children who died and never came home.

Canada has since undertaken truth-and-reconciliation efforts and acknowledged much of this history. Yet Indigenous families still contend with the consequences, including the disproportionate number of Indigenous children caught up in the child-welfare system. History is remarkably fond of changing its vocabulary while keeping some of its habits.

So I stood beneath Columbus feeling uneasy.

I cannot know what Columbus imagined would follow his voyages, and history becomes useless when we flatten different atrocities into one another. But what followed European expansion into the Americas—conquest, forced displacement, exploitation, epidemic disease and cultural destruction—was catastrophic for Indigenous peoples.

And there was Columbus, pointing magnificently toward the sea.

And there was me beneath him, digging through somebody else’s abandoned possessions for a souvenir.

Which, when you think about it, was an uncomfortable little arrangement between history and myself.