between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Okay, that last post acquired way more attention than I expected. I'm not entirely comfortable with that, but I guess if I'm rambling my opinions all over the internets, it's one of the risks.

An addendum, of sorts: I don't want to give the impression that I have a romantic view of Irish history, and its entanglement with our local imperial power, or of Irish identity. My discomfort with romanticising Irishness comes from the simplistic and often binary interpretations placed on Irish history and identity by such groups as modern Sinn Féin and, to a lesser extent, Fianna Fáil. ('Soldiers of destiny'. Now there's a name for a political party.)

Said discomfort also comes from the sterotyped notions of Irishness found in some British media productions, and the romanticised notions of Irishness sometimes found among certain North Americans. (And certain types of fantasy - not to point fingers, or anything, but why are elves nearly always 'Celtic'? I'm fairly sure they're more Germanic, originally. And why is 'Celtic' always vaguely - almost always stereotypically - Irish and/or Scots? What about the Welsh, the Manx, the Bretons, the Cornish?)

I do not want to be a data-point reinforcing romanticisations and false binaries. The nature of, and opinions about, the matter and worth of Ireland - and of Irishness - amd experiences thereof is quite incredibly diverse, for such a small island, with such a seemingly homogenous and parochial culture. This seems a small thing to point out. And yet the individual experience of being is not reducible to simple statements.

I have a very strong sense of attachment to this country and its history, even as I feel an equally strong sense of alienation from its present expression. And, you know, I do a good bit of thinking out loud here, and attachment and alienation are dichotomous things. And all this is closely tied to responsibility, and trying to figure out a way to talk about ambivalent identities without tying myself up in knots, giving in to the inclination to simplify and romanticise, or confusing the issue more than it is already. And talking about invented and reinvented identities and mythologised history with at least a nod to the understanding that well, hey, it's ours? But the ways in which it is ours are multifarious and complicated and strange, and just maybe it's okay to look at the past itself rather than the accepted narrative thereof, and pick the bits we'd like to keep and let the damn narrative go.

If that makes any sense.

Having sometimes to qualify oneself even to oneself gets old.

Lengthy addendum. Okay, now I'm done.

---

Today, I got a)blood tests, b)lunch out, c)a new jacket, d)a walk, e)told by my grandmother I need to lose a stone, f)most of the day off college work.

So that was mostly a good day.

I probably shouldn't think so much, really.

A couple of days ago in college, we were playing 'more-Irish-than-thou'. It's what I call it, anyway, when people start talking about their names and where they think their families came from and how far back they're sure of. It's often fun, and can get fairly ridiculous. (One way or another, my ancestors were the oppressors. My surname is a variant of Burke and my grandfather's people, from whence I have the name, came from Mayo. And my grandmother has English and Scots antecedents.) Sometimes you'll get an O'Brian claiming to go all the way back to Brian Boru, or an O'Connor claiming descent from the kings of Connaught, which family tradition is always fun to hear about. But it got me thinking.

But I was thinking. One day, I should like to write a book that manages to engage with the tensions, or the not exactly a dichotomy, of being Irish and living through the English language; of being inculcated, at an early age, with both admiration of things British, and resentment for Britain and all it stood for.

There is no part of the history of this island that is untainted by the ongoing tensions - the sometimes-violent, always frustrating argument - between nationalism and imperialism. Even as a historical entanglement, the Anglo-Irish relationship has always been complicated. When you look at the feelings, the resonances, the myths at the root of modern Irish identity, it's that much more so.

Plantation, that ugly word. "To hell or to Connaught". Transportation. 1798 and Theobald Wolfe Tone. Edward Fitzgerald. Robert Emmet. Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stuart Parnell. 1916 and James Connolly shot tied to a chair. Patrick Pearse and Joseph Plunkett shot hours after his marriage and Eamonn De Valera and Michael Collins and.

I know the names. Even some of the dates and significances. But as a whole, I know more of English history than of Irish for any period before the modern, and I know it with more certainty.

Cúchulain and the Ulster Cycle and the Táin are retold in English. Deirdre and the sons of Uisnech. Fionn and Oisín and the Fíanna, Diarmuid and Gráinne. I know the names and the stories, almost. Halfway. And I can speak in English, with fluency and drive, of loss and longing and pathos and the always bittersweet triumph in those stories. In so much of Irish history, Irish mythicised history, Irish identity.

I can speak in English, but in Irish I am mute.

I have no ear for it. I have no tongue for it. In my mouth it becomes clunky and without music, full of awkward solecisms and embarrassed pauses.

And there are a great many people who might disagree with me, but I can't help account it a loss. I have fourteen years of schooling in what could have been my native tongue. English is certainly of more practical use in a nation whose best and brightest have so often gone elsewhere, but.

But. (And that is a complicated but.)

I'm not particularly proud of my Irishness. It's part of me, like the smothering unexorcised Catholic demons that still infest the glories of our church and state.* I don't like or admire my country, particularly, or my fellow citizens, or my government, or the mess that is this modern state and all that has led to it.

But.

Behind me, us, is history, like a dam stopped up, all those silent generations. Who, besides scholars and schoolchildren and a handful of gaelgóirs in the Gaeltachts, still reads poetry in Irish? aislings? Histories? Stories in the language in which they were told? Nearly everyone knows Heaney, Kavanagh, Yeats. Who came before them? Aogán Ó Rathaille? Art McCumhaigh? Dáibhí Ó Bruadair?

I don't even know where to look to find editions of their work with accompanying translations for someone as unfluent as I am. And I feel that by my muteness, by my inability, I am helping silence them, and all those voices of the history I don't like to look at too closely, because it hurts.

Because I am here because of them. And this country is here because of them. And there is no way to talk about identity and place and nation and culture without entering into that tangled argument of nationalism and imperialism and violence and accommodation and how we got to be here, today. The things we leave, left, along the way - which include for so many of us a distinct language, if not quite a distinct culture - are they worth reclaiming?

Because I hate the way that the 'green flag', so to speak, has become so much the property of the ugly species of nationalism. And so I am ambivalent, for myself, about participating in an active attempt to reclaim markers of Irishness from the indifference of history. Because markers are what humans use to exclude, and do various other shitty things, and I think nationalism in all its varied forms is a fallacy, and a failure.

But there is that other hand, there, that says I shouldn't be embarrassed to want to participate in Irishness, in the argument about what the myths of this country's identity should be, in the interrupted, weird, strange, human transmission of myths and literature and ideas that goes back to bunches of Iron Age cattle thieves sitting around a hearth telling each other how great they were.

I'm not sure I'm using the right words. I'm not sure I know how to use the right words. All I know is, the more I dislike my nation, the more I feel inclined to roll around in the historical underneath of my country. Which is nearly the same thing as 'nation', but not, quite.

Or, to borrow from Seamus Heaney,

( Read more... )



And the more I learn, the less I know.

...This kind of got a little more personal than I intended. Well, context is everything, I suppose.

---

*Shadows, not substantial things.