"He has/sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people."
This poem does not feature a speaker in the traditional sense. The entire textual content of the poem is taken from the “Declaration of Independence” written by Thomas Jefferson. While the poem quotes the text verbatim within individual phrases, it cuts out quite a bit of the contextual information. For instance, “erected a multitude of New Offices” appears in the gap which has been edited out in this particular passage. The removal of those six words lends an entirely different interpretative possibility to what remains. The first two lines of the poem remain entirely the work of the original author, but the poet has infused it with a modern-day relevance through the process of editing.
"We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration/and settlement here."
This entire poem operates on a level of irony, but no single line is more powerfully corrosive in its subversion of Jefferson’s original intent than this quote. This line appears in the “Declaration of Independence” within the context of those who originally founded the colonies having willfully left their homes in England to pursue a life free from religious oppression by the state. Having sought such freedom by actively accepting the potential threats that came with crossing the Atlantic and settling in an unknown world populated with unknown threats to life, liberty and security, the colonists felt they deserved more right to self-governance and a less oppressive influence by a government to which they had become only tangentially connected. The poet has completely subverted the loftiness of that claim by Jefferson in a way that is nothing less than humiliating. While Jefferson is—rightfully, it must be admitted—complaining about the oppression of the British government upon people who had chosen to live the lives they were leading, he himself was personally oppressing hundreds of Africans who had not chosen to cross the ocean and who had not chosen to live in a new world and who had absolutely no right to self-governance over their daily lives. This is what any black person anywhere in the colonies could have reminded Jefferson about as he wrote these words if only a Black person hadn’t been viewed as property by the man declaring in writing elsewhere that all men are created equal.
"He has plundered our—/ravaged our—/destroyed the lives of our—"
Jefferson’s original leaves no room for ambiguity: the seas have been plundered, the coasts have been ravaged, and the lives of people have been destroyed by the policies of King George III. Leaving the specificities unaddressed opens them to interpretation. The purpose of this broadening of interpretation is implication. It is not simply that the slave trade plundered and ravaged Africa for the purpose of stealing human lives. The plundering, ravaging and destruction left in the wake of slavery is almost impossible to describe accurately because inevitably something will be left out. And the reality is that we will never know the true extent of the devastation slavery wreaked upon the planet.
