“Leif Erikson” is the haunting final track on Interpol’s haunting 2002 debut Turn on the Bright Lights. The band and album both are heavily associated with the post-9/11 era of New York City Indie-Rock (alongside fellow New Yorkers The Strokes, The National, and TV on the Radio); their brooding anxiety absolutely nailed the mood of not only the City but the nation entire in the immediate aftermath of the twin towers. Yet curiously, despite its strong cult following and massive influence, the record has largely been spared by the cranks who imposed obsessive 9/11 readings onto Radiohead’s Kid A and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot during this same era. Perhaps Interpol’s lyrics were too cryptic to read a 9/11 prophecy therein.
Or maybe it’s the opposite: Bright Lights’ lyrics were too straightforward to be read prophetically. These really are just a collection of break-up songs. It is perhaps only a happy coincidence that these tracks–written and workshopped and road-tested well before September of 2001–resonated so much more after that fateful Tuesday, since they are not about the collapse of physical structures, but only personal ones.
The “Leif Erikson” that closes out the album is one such song: the singer describes a lover who only prefers to make love to him “with the lights out;” who treats her own life as “such a big joke;” who “feels that my sentimental side should be held with kids gloves;” their relationship is apparently based not on mutual attraction but fear of loneliness (“We’ll collect those lonely parts and set them down”); he offers to save her on “my lifeboat,” but doesn’t even know if she’s as anxious about their relationship as he is (“That is supposing that you don’t sleep tonight,” he croons—because he’s well aware that maybe she’s sleeping just fine through the collapse of their relationship).
Overall, the track makes no lyrical allusion whatsoever to the Norse explorer of the early-11th century AD that gives the song its title; rather, given the band’s NYC origins, the title appears to instead be a subtle allusion to Leif Erikson Park in Brooklyn—the exit for which anyone who has ever taken the Belt Parkway from JFK airport to Manhattan has passed by on the right. The park itself is named for a Norwegian-American immigrant community that thrived in that corner of Brooklyn decades upon decades ago, but which gradually disappeared due to the implacable forces of gentrification, and then was finished off for good when so many of these neighborhoods were demolished to create the Verrezzano-Narrows Bridge in 1964, which finally connected Brooklyn to Staten Island. Leif Erikson park is the only remaining vestige of that long-lost neighborhood. The slow-then-sudden disappearance of a once prominent immigrant community in New York City perhaps struck the members of Interpol as a fitting metaphor for a relationship that was also fading away.
That Staten Island bridge, by the way, is named for Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Italian navigator who first charted and explored what is now New York harbor in 1524, only a generation after Columbus. The Italians in general have gotten the lion’s share of credit for “discovering” the Americas (the Americas themselves, after all, are named for the little-known Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci). The immense Italian-American population in the New York/New Jersey area obviously likes it that way; it’s how they were able to assimilate into the U.S. mainstream and become “white” after being slandered as “guidos” and “wops” bringing crime to our shores and stealing jobs from “real” Americans when they began to immigrate en masse over a century ago. (All similarities to the way Latin American immigrants are currently slandered in the U.S. are strictly intentional.) It’s why Columbus Day is an actual paid state holiday in New Jersey.
All this, despite the fact that—at least as far as Europeans go—the Italians were at least five centuries late to the Americas: Leif Erikson, after all, was the Norse chieftain who first landed in North America around 1000 AD. He famously set up the colony of “Vinland” (after “Greenland” and “Iceland”) somewhere in what is now Newfoundland, Canada. Archeological finds have confirmed the remains of a long defunct Norse colony there, and the geographical content of the Icelandic sagas corresponds to present-day knowledge of North America. Yet Leif Erikson is not the one with the holiday in October; Leif Erikson‘s ship is not the one first graders color pictures of in elementary school; Leif Erikson is not the one with a statue in Central Park that was targeted by protestors in 2020. Like the Norweigian neighborhood displaced by the Verrezzano bridge, the history of Leif Erikson has been largely displaced by the history of the Italians who arrived a solid half-millennium later.
But then, why am I so stupidly fixated on the Europeans? The by far most egregious and horrific example of mass-disappearance in the Americas would be that of the Native Americans themselves–90% of whom had already been disappeared due to European-brought plague, slavery, and slaughter within a generation of Columbus’s first contact (the reason why Africans were kidnapped to the Americas in the first place, recall, is because the Europeans were swiftly running out of natives to enslave). Leif Erikson, give him credit, was never responsible for any sort of trans-continental genocide when he tried to settle the Americas; and it is perhaps to our condemnation that Columbus did, yet he’s the one we specifically go out of our way to honor.
I must per force tread carefully here, because Latter-day Saints are highly protective of Columbus; many of us quote 1 Nephi 13:12, “And I looked and beheld a man among the gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many water; and I beheld the Spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land,” as evidence for the divine approval of Columbus’s voyage, which in this reading was part of the long-range plan of God to bring about the Restoration of the Fullness of the Gospel in these Latter-days, in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ, by laying the foundations for a nation of freedom and equality where the restored Church might be established. Certainly I’ve had this scripture thrown at me many times before whenever I’ve pointed out Columbus’s horrifying record on slavery and human rights, which shocked even the Queen of Spain within her lifetime.
But there are several rather obvious difficulties with citing 1 Nephi 13 as a defense of Columbus—beginning with the fact that Columbus’s name is never once mentioned therein. If you believe Joseph Smith was the true author, it should’ve been easy for him to slot in the Italian navigator’s name; if you believe God Himself revealed Columbus in vision to the prophet Nephi, it should’ve been easy for the Almighty to reveal his name, just as He already had Christ’s and Mary’s. Any assumptions that this is passage is solely about Columbus is exactly that, an assumption. Why do we not instead assume that Leif Erikson is perhaps the man divinely inspired and revealed to Nephi? Or why not Verrazano, since he actually explored North America—not the Caribbean of Columbus—where the U.S. and the Church itself would actually be established? For that matter, why not assume it’s a reference to Bartolome de las Casas, the 1500s Spanish clergymen who argued vociferously for the humanity and rights of the indigenous after serving in what is now called the Dominican Republic—earning him the honorific “Protector of the Indians”? That is much more obviously a righteous man inspired by the Holy Spirit.
Especially since the “Indians” are the true lords and inheritors of this land, as no less than the Book of Mormon—as spoken from the mouth of the Savior Himself—makes explicitly and repeatedly clear:
3 Nephi 16:
8 But wo, saith the Father, unto the unbelieving of the Gentiles—for notwithstanding they have come forth upon the face of this land, and have scattered my people who are of the house of Israel; and my people who are of the house of Israel have been cast out from among them, and have been trodden under feet by them …
10 And thus commandeth the Father that I should say unto you: At that day when the Gentiles shall sin against my gospel, and shall reject the fulness of my gospel, and shall be lifted up in the pride of their hearts above all nations, and above all the people of the whole earth …
13 But if the Gentiles will repent and return unto me, saith the Father, behold they shall be numbered among my people, O house of Israel.
14 And I will not suffer my people, who are of the house of Israel, to go through among them, and tread them down, saith the Father.
15 But if they will not turn unto me, and hearken unto my voice, I will suffer them, yea, I will suffer my people, O house of Israel, that they shall go through among them, and shall tread them down…
[…]
3 Nephi 20:
[Jesus addressing the Nephites and Lamanites]
14 And the Father hath commanded me that I should give unto you this land, for your inheritance.
15 And I say unto you, that if the Gentiles do not repent after the blessing which they shall receive, after they have scattered my people—
16 Then shall ye, who are a remnant of the house of Jacob, go forth among them; and ye shall be in the midst of them who shall be many; and ye shall be among them as a lion among the beasts of the forest, and as a young lion among the flocks of sheep, who, if he goeth through both treadeth down and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver.
[…]
3 Nephi 21
21 And I will execute vengeance and fury upon them [the Gentiles], even as upon the heathen, such as they have not heard.
22 But if they will repent and hearken unto my words, and harden not their hearts, I will establish my church among them, and they shall come in unto the covenant and be numbered among this the remnant of Jacob, unto whom I have given this land for their inheritance;
23 And they shall assist my people, the remnant of Jacob, and also as many of the house of Israel as shall come, that they may build a city, which shall be called the New Jerusalem.
As Stephen Fleming asked rhetorically in a recent TimesandSeasons post about these passages: “whose land is this according to the Book of Mormon?” Logically, if we wish to be spared the wrath of the Almighty in these latter-days, who should we be aligning ourselves with: the colonizer or the natives? And if Latin Americans are intermarried and descended from the Natives of this land—and therefore the rightful inheritors of all the promises of 3 Nephi—then who are we to deport them?
Because the Book of Mormon is also concerned with the disappearance–complete and utter–of two separate civilizations who were brought to the Americas long before Columbus: the Jaredites and the Lehites. They were both genocidally wiped-out without a trace, and for the exact same reason: their complete and utter lack of charity. Such in fact is the overriding thesis of the Book of Mormon. And the Book of Mormon was not written for either of these civilizations, but for us explicitly, “that ye may be more wise than we have been” (Mormon 9:31), because we are under the same constant threat of total disappearance if we do not repent of our viciousness, selfishness, and cruelty—that is, our lack of charity, for the immigrant, for the refugee, for everyone.
And these total disappearances occur quite regularly: Back in 1992, a German toxicologist named Svetlana Balabanova discovered traces of cocaine, cannabis, and nicotine in the hair of several Egyptian mummies buried during the 21st dynasty somewhere around 1000 BC (a solid 2,000 years before Leif Erikson). These finding were highly controversial: because either the environment in ancient Egypt was vastly different 3,000 years than from now, or there was even more ancient contact between the “Old” and “New” Worlds so-called than previously assumed. (“So the Egyptians got cocaine from the Nephites?” I remember a mission companion asking; “Well, the Lamanites…” joked another missionary.)
Numerous skeptics have sought to find alternative explanations for this transatlantic hypothesis, seeking more sensible “Old World” explanations—even though those explanations would be no less astounding, since they would require a radical rethinking of how different the climate must have been only 3,000 short years ago. That is, no matter which explanation is true, the fact remains that whole entire worlds that have been lost to us, which happens far more frequently than we care to contemplate. As just earlier discussed, an entire immigrant community in famously immigrant-heavy New York City disappeared within less than a century, on the outer-edges of living memory. “Look into the Bulk of our Species,” wrote the 18th-century essayist Joseph Addison, “they are such as are not likely to be remembered a Moment after their Disappearance. They leave behind them no Traces of Their Existence, but are forgotten as tho’ they had never been.” Heck, our own Nauvoo–a city verified to have once rivaled Chicago as the largest city in Illinois–has almost entirely vanished just within the brief history of these United States, and is now reduced to a tiny Midwestern town on the constant verge of disappearing back into the prairie grass completely. And of course on 9/11 itself, we were reminded yet again just how quickly two mighty towers can disappear from the skyline, suddenly, in a moment. (Suddenly the Tower of Babel didn’t seem so far-fetched.)
And as Interpol also reminds us, each of us, just individually, can recall a relationship, a date, or a crush, that only you remember anymore, and that will be forgotten by you and with you. Even our own private worlds are constantly vanishing from us. Yes, we believe in the resurrection and in the restoration of all things; but something can only come back from the dead if it is allowed to die in the first place. These are all the brooding senses of disappearance that “Leif Erikson” by Interpol invokes.