Letter from Ireland, pt. 6

(A certain resentment has become entrenched in my character and, on reflection, I think I'll keep it.)

In the particular instance of the finicky guest, I'll keep it for definite reasons. This guest is trying to co-opt me, to get me to admit and agree to their aspersions. I am still really American, right? I must think and act as they do. They want me to collaborate against Ireland. They either assume I will collaborate with them in putting Ireland down, or they are prodding me, suspicious of how far gone I am. I think of gangster movies where the crooks force the dupe to prove his loyalty by shooting his brother. Actually, I feel akin to a colonial governor hosting an official visit. The visitor grows in suspicion until he is certain: the governor has gone native! I am made to feel defensive about what I am doing and who I’ve become (or perhaps, who I am pretending to be.)

There is a degree of hostility in such suspicion. Anyone might be forgiven for feeling that there’s no place like home. For Americans, the attitude resembles religious conviction. Classic Yankee dogma. The degree of conviction is matched only by the ignorance regarding the rest of the world. The most assured and patriotic visitors I have had are the ones who have hardly been out of the state of Massachusetts, never mind the United States, and are smugly ignorant of a wider world.

America is a vast land that dreams of itself. It is self-sufficient. It does not need the rest of the world, so to speak, and it has always been thus. Despite the growth of the U.S. into a superpower, the desire for isolation has been a norm and not an exception. Foreign involvement is viewed as an evil necessary for prosperous trade. One suspects this attitude even of some of the men who have steered the country into foreign waters. If the rest of the world could keep its act together and get on with matters of economy, the U.S. would too happily disappear from foreign affairs altogether.

Most citizens of America live as if this were already the case. They live in blissful ignorance. The entire world need have no relevance at all for the average American citizen. This is as true for east coast cities like Boston that supposedly dream of the Old World, as it is for the heartland. America is the New World. (Isn't this really the single most annoying fact to foreigners: Yes, some Americans are ignorant, and they can be.) A land where a cross-country trip can be the event of a lifetime. A land where a car passenger falls asleep driving through Texas, and awakens five hours later to find he is still in Texas, with New Mexico yet before him. It is Kerouac's America, with all those roads going, spreading behind him from that Jersey river-front pier, and dreaming in the immensity of itself.

America often has been successfully self-absorbed. Let a few select individuals dirty their hands with foreign matters--that's why we voted for them. The rest can get on with the American Experience.

In summation, that's all I want. To get on with mine.

Borders

I went north with two of my roommates and two German friends. One of my roommates was from Antrim, and we were to stay at his parents’ house over Easter. The rest of the long weekend we were staying in the empty dorms at QUB, where our host had gotten his undergraduate degree.

We drove north from Cork in a German car in a good mood, stopping to take photos of tourists’ points of interest and having lunch somewhere in the midlands. It took us the better part of the day to reach the border at Newry, and when we did, we saw it in all of its late eighties glory. There was a fortified roadblock manned by nervous looking kids who were younger than us. They had German shepherds and mirrors on long poles. They had very large assault rifles that they never put down. The kid with the thick Cockney accent approached the passenger side of the car, insisting that the window be rolled down, and assuming that the driver would be there because the steering wheel is on the other side of German cars, like American cars. Our friend Kieran from Antrim was in the front seat and rolled down the window and leaned back so the soldier could talk to the driver. The German driver was challenged with English, so we assumed the native northerner would do the talking. He never said a single word. The soldier got flustered talking over him and went around to the other side of the car. By this time his compatriots had taken the license number to run through the computer and had not found it listed, because the car was registered on the continent, not in the islands. This brought on the dogs and the mirrors. I felt bad for the kid because he couldn’t make himself understood and he didn’t know what to do with us. Then I realized that if he got too upset then we might have more problems than he did.

Eventually it was communicated that we were tourists from the south, and that we all originated in other countries. The native northerner just nodded when asked if we were all foreigners. They made note of it and let us through. Once we were through the checkpoint the driver had some very choice words for Kieran, mostly monosyllabic, but we got the gist that he was upset that assistance was not forthcoming. Kieran explained that it would have been more problematic if he had offered his assistance because they would have demanded his ID and seen his Catholic name and gotten it into their heads to keep them all for questioning until they sorted out what was going on. This guy was the most disingenuous, down to earth person who you knew could never ever, entertain the thought of deceiving anyone, but this act had come as naturally as laughing at a stupid joke to him- he was conditioned. That was our first impression of Northern Ireland; guns, dogs, tension, and conflict. For the rest of the weekend that impression was not to change.

As soon as we passed the checkpoint we could tell the country was different. It had a much bigger feel to it. There were bigger buildings, bigger houses, wider streets, working traffic lights, and the townships we passed through were better developed. The mailboxes were all red and the police wore different uniforms; the branding of the nation was distinctly different.

My memory here is imperfect, so please take the following glimpses of memory and impressions:

Helicopters: We got into the city and Kieran directed the driver through a maze of city streets precisely to the University where we would stay. Once we got into the city we could hear helicopters overhead. This was a sound we hadn’t heard for months on end in the south, because there were no helicopters in Cork, for ambulances or for reporting the traffic. The helicopters in Belfast were military helicopters that stayed low to the ground and patrolled constantly. The helicopters we had heard back home were completely different. Comparatively, the British Army helicopters were behemoths that made a terrible racket. The helicopters didn’t stop flying the whole time we were there. They made it hard to sleep.

Paisley: One day while traipsing around looking at things we saw a large gathering of people. They had gathered to hear the Reverend Ian Paisley speak. We got near enough to hear that we couldn’t understand his accent. Kieran understood him, but did not want to listen. He translated some bigotry for us and soon we were queasy from knowing that his audience believed his tripe. Kieran told us that Paisley was the safest man in Belfast because he cast his people in such a bad light for the international media. I got the idea that his people, like white South Africans or Israeli settlers, felt so secure in the rightness of their actions that they just didn’t care what anyone thought.

Police Station: There was a police station directly across from the University. It was a fortress. It had high walls and blast proof windows. There was concertina wire all around the top. The personnel going in and out were armed to the teeth, in stark juxtaposition to the gentle gardai we had seen down south, holding the leashes of attack dogs. The constant drone of the helicopters overhead completed the picture. The impression was one you could imagine from an old film about the Nazi occupation of Paris. Even I felt a psychological impact from the overt show of force. It was not left to the imagination that the “government” could perpetrate acts of violence against the population at any time.

Barfight: I saw the first barfight I had ever seen in a three story pub near the University. They had a traditional pub on the first floor, the second floor was like a disco, and the third floor had a live band. Kieran knew one of the guys in the band so we went to the top floor for a few beers and some relaxation. I got bored and went to the bogs, winding my way down the stairs to look in on the other two bars for the hell of it. While I was in the stairwell between the second and third floors (the Irish would say the ground floor and the first story) a squad of police in full body armor and face shields crowded the landing and burst into the disco level. They left one guy holding the door open, and no sooner had they entered than they were leaving, with two flushed and dishevelled young men restrained and being removed not under their own power. I looked out the window and saw the armoured car that awaited them, running and with the hatch open with an armoured rifleman standing guard. I learned that this was barfight between two individuals fighting over a woman (surprise, surprise), but that they were known to be from different camps. In my mind these police may not have been the good guys, but they were definitely professional and efficient. I returned to the third floor and raised a glass and toasted with the Irish, “Slainte,” and Kieran immediately said, “Cheers,” loud enough to be heard by anyone who had heard me. I found that I was not particularly good at being oppressed.

Attitude and Safety: By the end of our time in Belfast my American friend and I had been travelling for the better part of a week without the benefit of razors or Laundromats. We were both poor college kids who had been living in Ireland for some time. We had supplied ourselves with a lot of clothes that were appropriate to the weather by patronizing the second hand clothes stalls at the quays in Cork. Because of this we were dressed in the fashion of poor Irishmen. We are both ethnically Irish as well, so we looked very Irish. One day in the city we were away from the rest of the group and we were standing on a street corner where one of the many armored cars had stopped at a light. The top hatch gunner was riding at his post and had looked down on us and started to make the sheep noise, “Baa, baa, baa-aaa.” This is a common insult in Ireland; I don’t think I need to explain it. It struck me that he was insulting us because we were Irish, or rather, he thought we were Irish. He certainly wasn’t fooling around like you would with an old friend; he was trying to separate us from him, dehumanizing us so that us “Paddies” would be OK to shoot. After all, he had come all that way and done all that training. The light turned and the armored car sped away before we could assimilate what had happened and react. It was a good thing, too, because I’m sure one or the other of us would have done something rash. I hated him, and by extension everybody like him. In that minute I hated the police holed up in their fortress, I hated the military on the ground and in the air, and I hated all the people who looked like regular people but who were secretly hating me because of my name and my look. I was fully prepared to perpetuate the cycle of violence, because I was angry, and I didn’t even lose a family member or get wrongly incarcerated for any length of time. I had a much lower tolerance for it than I had encouraged northerners to have in prior political conversations.

Later, it may have even been that very same day, my friend and I were lost wandering aimlessly around the city. As it turns out, Belfast in ’88 wasn’t the best place for that. We wandered down a long lane that had nobody on it. The evening gloaming was coming on, and nobody was out. There were graffiti on the walls and trash in the gutters. We walked slowly, trying to get our bearings, but still looking like the world famous Irish poor. We came to the end of the side street and found light at the juncture of a larger, if not major, thoroughfare and turned to get our bearings again. In the shadows in a doorway there was a sniper crouching, and following us with his scope, his rifle trained on our backs or heads. We talked each other around the corner, and I was angry again.

We went to shop for comic books and browsed Kieran’s favorite comic shop for about an hour. Then next day, in the dorm at QUB, we saw the same wall we were leaning against on the TV news, covered with the blood of a bombing victim.

When we were in Kieran’s hometown, a village really, preparing for Easter mass, we were pretty far from any large city, but we were in the same area as Enniskillen, where a major bombing had taken place a year earlier. As we walked to church with all the other families dressed in their Easter best we were eyed by police and soldiers with rifles, assault weapons, and attack dogs. They were not there to protect us, they were there to protect themselves from us. The IRA bombing was wrong and bad, but being marched to church like a prisoner of war was also wrong.

Impact: When I returned south and spoke to my cousins about the trip they spoke to me as one would to a school child who is first discovering that the world is not fair, or to a junior high kid who was jilted at his first dance. They were life long veterans of the conflict, but in a much different way than the people in Belfast. They were tired of the Republican factions in the north trying to drag the whole country into a conflict that would surely extinguish its sovereignty. They wanted to move past the armed struggle and towards a lasting political solution, and all of their arguments were logical and well thought out, and sensible. But something I have not forgotten is the visceral reaction to the insults, the implied authority over life and death, the imposition of a false fealty to an obvious oppressor. I got the feeling that if I were raised there and had to choose between living like that or any other alternative, that I may have chosen any other alternative.

When I returned to the U.S. and tried to talk to the “Irish” in Massachusetts I got no condescension to my naïveté. They could not understand what I was talking about at all. They could not formulate informed arguments one way or the other. They had no context from which to frame their perspective. They knew generally that long ago the British had done bad things, but they didn’t know what the bad things were and they didn’t know about the bad things done by the Irish against the Irish. What I found most shocking was that most Irish-Americans didn’t realize the scope of the troubles. In Ireland we would hear about a killing in the north almost every night on RTE 1. Eventually I stopped talking about it. In the later years of my late brother’s life he became intensely interested in his Irish heritage, but by then my ardor for the social justice aspects of the originating culture had cooled.

Old Man

I used to go to a Republican bar with a “liberal” crowd when I was in school. The place was called the Phoenix, and it had risen from the ashes just as its namesake had. It was the only bar in Cork, or in Ireland as far as I could tell, that had exposed post and beam construction. It was made from the beams of destroyed British warships from pilfered Irish oak. I would sit with the crowd of activists from the environmental group I had come to know through my research. I would listen to traditional music and the stories from the experiences of the “movement” from around the globe. They flicked their ashes on the floor into the sawdust. I thought for sure the place would go up in flames. They cadged beer off of each other at every possible chance. Once a night an old man would come through the pub offering copies of a Republican newspaper for any contributions you could afford. He would move slowly through the crowd, taking the time to be noticed by each customer. When he came close he would say under his breath, “Every fiver buys a magazine for the boys up north. Twenty P will buy a bullet.”

When he go to the eclectic crowd I was a part of he tried to sell his newspaper, but they would look at the floor, look at the musicians, head off to the bogs, do anything but catch his eye. The ones who could not avoid his eye plead poverty by gesture only. I didn’t mind just telling him that I didn’t want it, but I wasn’t as constrained as they were. They had adopted radical chic and were duty bound to buy into the radical part. They were Irish, many espoused socialism as the best way to heal the dying world, and many were happy to decry the actions of the erstwhile oppressor when in their own company. But when it came time to pay for bullets to perpetrate acts of violence, they were in no position to publicly condone or aver the activity. It is one thing to sing about it, another to support it, and a third to participate.

But the old man blamed the British for Ireland’s troubles and was doing what he could to support the armed conflict. He had no qualms either way; there was no vacillation on his part. It is my opinion that Ireland has a government and an army, and that the country will speak for itself in the family of nations rather than let the belligerence of the maligned few drive its policy, but I admired the old man’s strength of character more than that of the youths who could not meet his gaze. They could talk of the barricades, but they would not man them. I decided thereafter that I would go to the North to see it for myself, and that I would live by my convictions in things I found to be central to my beliefs.

More later.

Gig

Hey.
Playing this Saturday at the Blackthorne Tavern. Come out and get a free CD. I think I have a Uilleann piper coming. . .

Cultural Success

I think this part of the letter puts something in a nutshell: the discrepancy in your ‘cultural success’ in different environments. I’d love to hear from you, Art, on this one, or anyone out there with similar experience. Putting aside most possibilities of insincere blarney that might charm a visitor into thinking that he or she really is special (not an insubstantial thing to do, the Irish sure can shmooze you—and laugh at you if you lap it up) I have had too many experiences of blending, and more than blending, in Ireland, that I rarely experience here. Okay, let me say it: For example, women. I’ve had attractive girlfriends in America, if not a parade of them. :-)

In Ireland, I have had women blatantly smile at me on buses in Dublin, approach me on the street to talk, even grab, er, body parts, in clubs. I know it might be I stick out as a foreigner because of dress, tan, etc., but some of these times I know I was in stealth mode: pale and pasty in December and decked out in Marks and Sparks. I don’t know why my mind drifts to this topic, cough, by way of example of cultural success, but it’s true. These things don’t tend to happen in the States. I can come up with more dainty topics, or maybe you can. But, what about Karma, or something, just flat out telling you where you fit in successfully?

Here’s a great topic: If you’re experienced in two places, let us know: Does one place seem to just hand success in social or other situations over to you, while another doesn’t quite seem to fit?

Letter from Ireland, pt. 5

[Currently listening to the World Cafe streaming on WUMB. Great show! Steve Earle--Revolution Starts Now.]

If they can't, or won't, explicitly communicate their reaction to me and my environment on a visit, let me say that it has taken 28 years to understand my relation to myself. And in that time I have suffered a prolonged confusion about the environment I tried to relate to, so unevenly. And in that time I never once thought about a larger picture, larger possibility, but instead internalized my difficulties as a reflection on myself. And never once considered the problem might be external, or at least considered that I was coming at the problem at an angle, askew, and that there was nothing wrong with where I was, and where I was coming from.

The problem lay in not knowing we were askew, myself and my surroundings. An immigrant, a traveler anywhere, might get homesick, but at least, amid all the strangeness, the difference, the discomfort, he knows the reason: He is a stranger, customs are different here. The difference is not cast back on himself (by him, at least.) He does not internalize that difference.

[Okay, I have to butt into my letter to editorialize: I can't help but recognize how accurately I described here what was being researched and written up during the same time: the freedom in having a reason for difference that the supposedly integrated first-generation American may not have.]

I did feel that problems of integration lay within me, and along the way I also internalized anger and frustration to match the confusion and discomfort.

So. When I sense a certain confusion or even hostility in visitors, I recognize it. And I do nothing to soothe it because amidst my past of confusion, I naturally collected this hostility and resentment of my own, and I internalized it too. My attitude does involve rejection and is not just the result of a happy circumstance of waking up to the root of my difference, saying "Oh sorry, excuse me," and going on my merry way to Ireland. Too late for that. A certain resentment has become entrenched in my character, an obstinacy, and on reflection, I think I'll keep it.

tbc.

The Found Link

My generation in my family is composed of nearly a hundred of my brothers, sisters, cousins, and me. My Irish grandparents had nine children and they all had big families. I am the last of ten. As mentioned previously, only my mother and my Uncle Jack really showed a true interest in the land of their parents, making recurring trips back to stay connected to the family there. Often, the family from that side of the Atlantic would make trips here in order to keep in contact. I was the one of my generation who travelled back and forth to Ireland.

I remember one time sitting in a pub in Dublin with my mother, uncle, and their first cousin- the man I stayed with for the summer as a youth. They asked who would take the responsibility of keeping the families on either side of the Atlantic connected when they no longer could. It was agreed that I would be the west-Atlantic representative and that my second cousin, whose room I shared that summer, would be the east-Atlantic representative.

After that year abroad I went back once or twice, before I began travelling in earnest. When I moved to Africa and then back and forth to Asia I became embroiled in my own nuclear family’s needs and affairs, and I didn’t go back. My uncle and his first cousin have both since passed away, and I have only been in contact telephonically. My cousin came to the U.S. for my uncle’s funeral, but could only stay for a day or two and had to get back to work. He came to visit my house and met my wife and daughter and showed pictures of his daughter, about the same age. We took our leave from each other promising to stay in touch, but we did not live up to our promises as fully and completely as I had intended. Things back in Africa seem always to divert our resources and attention, and daily life got busier and busier as my daughter got into school and my wife took a full-time job. Eventually, I reached critical guilt and told my wife that I felt that I had to go back to Ireland, and she told me to go.

I was pleasantly surprised when one of my brothers decided that he too would come. It is to be a trip of just us two; both of us will be leaving our spouses and children in the U.S. and going to visit the family, not the country. I remember being around the older generation when they would talk about the old days. They had stories that tied our hometown in America to the places and people of the old country. When I was very young I could hear the recounting of these stories as anecdotes intended to entertain and as reminiscences to be re-enjoyed over the shared context of a common history. When my cousin came for my uncle’s funeral we went over some of the old times that we had had, and retold the old stories leaving out significant pieces that we didn’t want the women and children to hear. Between the lines were couched the understood statements, “Man, we were so drunk,” or, “How did we ever get out of that one alive?” These stories had the same power to connect and to bind as the stories the old folks told when I was young.

Now, when I talk to my mother about our upcoming trip she wants to recount the old stories in a different way. She recites the bloodlines and marriages between the people that I never knew in a rote fashion, as if the knowledge of those connections is what makes a family. I remember listening to the oral history of the executioner clan of the Kumawu branch of the Ashanti tribe, and my mother’s recitation of who is related to whom and how reminds me very much of that. I feel that my mother wants to preserve the diaphanous connections of the old family by turning the threads of the dimming memories to trans-Atlantic cables by their codification and preservation. It is a sentiment that is common to all peoples. It is our attempt at immortality.

I, too, want to preserve the family’s history. It is important to know from whence you come in order to understand the constituent influences that make you who you are. But I feel that there should be a separate endeavor to accomplish that. The upcoming trip of my brother and me should not be intended to solidify the family’s past; it should be intended to solidify the bonds that the family shares now. It must do this by building context between the separate branches of the family and forging connections between contemporary members of the family not by playing on a debt to our common ancestors but by our unanimous election to maintain the ties for ourselves and what is in it for us, as far as relationships go.

I know my parents and my cousin’s parents understood this too even if it was never said aloud. That is the reason they had agreed to send me to live there at such a young age and for such a prolonged period. I’m sure they thought that I would build a rapport with the family there that would persist long after the experience was over. The fact that my brother and I will be going over soon to sleep at his house is testament to their foresight. Perhaps in a few years our daughters will take the opportunity to stay together for a summer either in the U.S., Ireland, or in Ghana. In this way my brother and I are acting as links in the evolution of our trans-Atlantic family, and this is a service to generations past and future. If you know someone who knows me, or if you hear any talk about this trip as a “vacation” be sure to speak up quickly and loudly that it is only in the performance of my duties to the ages that I would go and roll around a foreign country drinking stout with old friends, and that I should be commended for my Herculean efforts.

Letter from Ireland, pt 4

Visitors bring with them their "Americanness". If I were Irish-Hungarian, I suppose they would be bringing their "Hungarianness". Their presence blurs the distinctiveness of my experience. I am rotten, selfish, insecure. I don't want to share my experience. [I've already posted on jealousies of foreign experience.] Mostly, it's insecurity: Family and friends bring their definitions of me with them, and I have felt a bit like an actor for so long, in always secretly being a bit off or out of place, that now, when I am at home in my own skin, I am both resentful of having to live up to any expectation, and also insecure, about showing some other self.

Other insecurities: I observe Americans in any foreign locale, and I want to emphasize my difference from them, sort of like when a teenager suffers embarrassment about his family. Certain behaviors stand out that make me want to cringe. But overwhelmingly, the one consistent theme, spoken or implied, that emanates from virtually every visitor, is skepticism. Skepticism about what I am doing: Living away from America. Because no place can equal America, in any way. Skepticism that Irish smells, food, transportation, politics, sports, climate, whathaveyou; all of this in total is, however Romantic, ultimately suspect. Nice place to visit, wouldn't want to . . .

A conflict for me: I do want to entertain. After all, Ireland is my heart's enthusiasm, and I'd like to share it. I want to reveal the best face of Dublin, the best of the whole country. Especially since I am living here, and guests can't hide curiosity over what lured me here away from the greatest country on earth. From . . . AMERICA, where EVERYONE wants to be. Right?

So what happens? Frankly, I am not interested in your critical observations that too often sound like complaints. Yes, the air smells different. Yes, the beef tastes different. Yes, the cars and roads are different, the people smell different. Where did you think you were visiting, Cleveland?

And come, you don't really mean different, do you? You mean worse than . . . But the absolute limit is that some of this attitude is implied. Insinuated. you don't want to be downright rude. After all, I am living here. Moreover, you don't want to appear ignorant, or inexperienced, or unsophisticated. So you make comments with your nose wrinkled up, instead of making outright criticisms. But along with that is the insinuation, the comment on me. "Why are you here?"

Every insight you make on the locals presupposes my agreement, or fishes for it. In that shadow world of tacit communication, we know each other.

I feel good about recognizing your baffled irritation when it dawns on you that I am not in agreement with your assumptions. About Ireland, and maybe about . . . What else!? I understand the irritation. And, you are right. I'll say it: I am in a state of rejection. But, I'm in a state of denial no longer.

tbc.

Letter from Ireland, pt. 3

Cont'd. (from a 7 year-old letter)

I can't speak to the average experience of a descendant's return to the 'old country'. I have only my own. I don't know if every son or daughter or grandson or granddaughter of immigrants who returns 'home' feels a similar empathy. (A beautiful thing about the Irish is how they welcome you 'home', literally.) From observation, I must guess not. To a degree it depends on the removal. Are you 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation? How well do you recognize yourself, your parents, in the country and its people? Is the trip a novelty, a vacation, an awakening?

I can't speak to an average experience because my mother moved to America in her forties, and never assimilated. Not really. And because since 6 months old I have gone 'home' at least once a year, often for extended periods of time. I have grown up there, to a degree. I've lived, studied, worked; I have made friends and had girlfriends. I implicitly understand the Irish character--I trust it.

I have never pronounced "I am Irish." I'm not. That's the best pronunciation. Just a rather all-inclusive "I'm Not." To claim to be Irish would be embarrassing and false. I have not shared the prolonged intimacies and mundanities that make up a life and from which one established identity, or at least nationality.

The majority of my personal experiences are American and they have shaped and influenced me. For better and worse, like many others with similar backgrounds and experiences, one kind of inhabits a strange netherworld. But in sympathy and . . . ease of living? . . . Absence of anxiety in a social setting? . . . I am Irish(ish.)

By that I don't want to offend my Irish friends and family. Unfortunately, the image of the American Yahoo returning with his Irishisms and plastic Shamrock understandings is pervasive. It naturally irritates. We are all jealous of our individual identities. It's native to the human condition and runs deep. Place. Tribe. To insist on inclusion can be provoking, especially to a people so dogged in preserving itself, and so sensitized to hordes of returning "Irishmen". Irish for a day, a week, a year.

And the Diaspora Irish come here with no grounding and no connection, and with a parcel of cliches, seeking instant absorption. Very human to say, "You are not one of us." This is we, this is our land. That is you and yours.

In a larger way, we are all on the life-path of self-discovery: Who am I, where do I fit in? Success in this is not easy or obvious, and place and tribe can be fundamental to the job of defining. Why let an outsider horn in on that?

This same proprietorship of identity, I experience when I have a visitor.

tbc.

As Gaeilge Mas E Do Thoile

I remember the summer when I was ten years old. I stayed with my mother’s first cousin’s family in a town outside of Dublin for about two months. The family had a son one year older than me, and it was intended that we become friends and spend the summer keeping each other entertained. This was more than a simple summer trip for me. To me, it was a return to where I had originated, even though I had never been there.

My grandparents on my mother’s side were Irish, and had come over at the time of the revolution in 1916. My father’s family came from Ireland at about the time of the American Civil War. My family was hooked into the Irish-American community in our town. Every Saturday we had the radio tuned to WROR for the “Sounds of Ireland” music show. My sisters all danced and we followed them from feis to feis. Every St. Patrick’s Day we wore green, decorated in the predominant style, and proclaimed our Irishness at school as we cut out construction-paper clovers and colored in leprechauns. We would regularly tell other kids that we were Irish, in the same way that they would tell us they were French or German, even though we were all from the same block in Campello and all talked and acted like it.

My grandmother had left Ireland in 1916 and except for a two week vacation in the 1960s she never returned. She never lost her accent; in fact, she spoke without any trace of an American accent until she died. She would regale us with stories of the old country at family gatherings, remembering each detail as though it were yesterday. My mother and her eight brothers and sisters grew up knowing that Ireland was the wonderful country in which they belonged. It didn’t register with me until a very long time later that my mother’s family were made to believe that they belonged in Ireland because my grandmother felt that she belonged best there, and projected it on them. In any case, only my mother and her oldest brother ever went back.

I landed in Dublin thinking that I would automatically be accepted as Irish, with the naïveté of a ten year old. I was very different from the other kids who hung out on the village green, and they were the first to let me know it. It is the same, I’m sure, for any kid who finds himself anywhere other than his home environment for a summer, but it was especially poignant for me because I remember very clearly how it felt to no longer be Irish. I had to rethink my whole identity, on a certain level.

I remember from that experience that I was liberated too. I had the opportunity to make myself whoever I wanted to be, to be the great creator of my new self. I remember enjoying being different, not so much as an oddity, like a circus freak, but as an equal-but-separate individual. I gained a real appreciation for diversity there, and that appreciation has stayed with me.

I remember my mother’s first cousin teaching me Irish as soon as I got off the plane. He began to teach me about the history of Ireland and of the family as we rode around Dublin and later Cork. He pointed out the sites of historical interest and didn’t spare any of the truths about the brutalities and atrocities that were committed at those sites. He used to tell me that he wasn’t saying these things to make me despise the British, but that he thought I should get the full story of where I came from (indeed, didn’t he do business in London with good British men at least once a month?). He told of all the political atrocities perpetrated on the Irish by the Irish as well. He insisted that I speak Irish at every opportunity possible, so that I could learn to think like an Irishman, which, in his view was an art lost to the Irish themselves. He said that the theft of the Irish language limited the Irish to thinking in English, and so thinking like the English. I will try to remember that lesson as long as I live- it has served me so well in so many places, and it may have saved my life.

Even so, this man would remind me that I am American, and that I should never try to be anything that I was not. And then he would continue my education in Irish culture, language, and history. I think he understood that the Irish of the diaspora were a culture unto itself. I sometimes heard comments that would reinforce this, for the first time that very summer and later as an exchange student, that I should consider living in Ireland, because I was, “not like the rest of ‘em, you know.”

One night, in a dingy locals pub by the Lee in Cork the young lady I had accompanied there stopped speaking abruptly, and said,”Abair liom as Gaeilge.”

“Cen fath?” I inquired.

“Mar ta an fear in aice le tinne ag eisteach linn, ‘s ni thuigim se Gaeilge,” came the reply.

It seemed to me that the validaton of my Irishness had come full circle. An Irish native was insisting that we speak Irish so another Irish native would not understand our conversation. She too would remind me that I am American, and I would never refute the point. I felt then that the Irish nation spread past the borders of the island, and that Irish of the diaspora were evolved Irish.

Some time later I was considering what it meant to me to be American. I was in a far different place then. I had decided that there were no specific traits that qualified someone to be American except for the adherence to the creeds that Americans cherish; bill of rights, constitution, self determination, etc.. And now I wonder if it might not be the same for the Irish. If the Vikings who settled in Greenland and Iceland could still be called Vikings after having coalesced to a certain degree with the indigenous Inuit, then why couldn’t the descendants of Irishmen in Boston, New York, or Van Diemen’s Land be Irish? I decided that I probably could be Irish-American if I held to the tenets of personal freedom and thought in a way such that feelings were “on you” and your possessions were “at you”.

What do you think?

Kilbeggan Races, pt. 2

(continuing an article originally written for a travel piece in an American mag.)

Meetings are held from May to September. The forecast for this September meeting that I am attending has held up, and though the sky is cast over in gray clouds, they are not those familiar weighty rain bearers. Poor weather can ruin a race day--certainly from the organizer's and jockey's--and horse's--point of view. But more to the point, the grassy fields tramped on by disgruntled punters quickly turn to mud.

The course itself, a narrow grassy lane, comes right alongside the Mullingar road, several miles north of the village. Ten horses might be vying for position along this turn. In fact, Kilbeggan is known as a tight track. This is an attraction for some trainers, who might wish to see how an inexperienced gelding will do under such conditions. The bend here is already well into the course, so it is unlikely that a pack would be close together at this point in a race.

Clondalkin to Cape Coast

There is a song by Johnny Clegg, a white South African, called “Jericho”. In the refrain of the song he sings that, “…we are the prisoners of the prisoners we have taken…” During a concert he explained the meaning of that line. The act of taking a prisoner makes you a jailer, regardless of what you would like to be. The interaction with the “other” elicits conditioned responses, limiting you to a certain set of behaviors. He said that without the consent of the bulk of the white populace in his country the power structure overcommitted itself to become a police state.
The idea is that the commission of certain acts or the pursuit of certain policies has consequences on a societal level as well as a personal level. Often trends in society have sociological repercussions that result in crises in individual lives; suicide, deviance, or one of the all too prevalent forms of madness. Nowhere are these personal tragedies more clearly tied to societal machinations than in the U.S.A.
When my family goes to Ghana we stop in the town of El Mina to revisit the spot where my wife and I honeymooned. Without exception I see African-American tourists in either El Mina or Cape Coast, and I often overhear them talking about “these people” in terms of what “these people” eat, how “these people” treat women, or the squalor in which “these people” seem content to live. Every time I see African-American tourists they are happy to tell anyone who will listen which creature comforts they miss and how good they will feel when they get back to Chicago, or New York, or Philadelphia, without fail. The locals call them “white men”, and the African-Americans may never find out.
The non African-American Americans that go to Ghana do not complain as much. They have gone to Africa to experience destitution and life where the masses live close to nature. They are in search of adventure, and that twinge of discomfort reminds them that they have found it; or they are in the service of their Lord and welcome the opportunity to prove their piety through worldly suffering. The African-Americans, though, are expecting to be welcomed home as brethren, and they are not. The experience of the Africans of the diaspora must be similar to the experience I had when I went to Ireland to live. European-Americans call it Third Generation Return Syndrome. The crux of the syndrome is that an ego creates its identity of self based on certain attributes that are not exclusive to the self but are rather based on attributes ascribed to a second tier group, or a group that has an identity affiliation with a parent group. When generalized others from the constituency of the parent group refuse to identify with the self as a co-possessor of the common attributes of the parent group, the subject ego is immediately thrown into a crisis of self identification, i.e., I am Irish-American because I possess strictly Irish traits, but when Irish (significant and) generalized others fail to validate my Irish traits they strip me of my adjective, rendering me American alone. This occurs with some regularity in expatriated communities and there is a recognizable structure to the responses for the ethnic group abroad. The African-American community, however, has been deprived not only of the glaringly obvious connections to the parent group, such as language, indigenous religion, and major cultural traits, but also of the nuanced connections that serve to solidify personal relationships. African-Americans have had to create an “African-American-ness” based solely on the experience of the diaspora. If African immigration were to have followed the pattern of European immigration then there would be Yoruba-Americans, Akan-Americans, and Sahelian-Americans.
The world will eventually reach a level of heterogeneity such that major population centers everywhere will present such a high level of integration that the term “diversity” will be used to express the gamut of major traits of individuals as persons, such as weight, personality preference, or rate of acceleration of development. Difficulties caused by peoples’ reactions to differences in skin color will diminish with an inversely proportional relationship to the level of integration and the frequency of interaction with groups identified as “others”. By then, though, I’ll be sitting on a tropical beach with a good book and a cold beer, secure in the propriety of my relationships and confident in the progress of racial relations; at least of the ones in my house.

Other Otherings

I'd like to thank the host for inviting me to contribute to this blog. This is certainly a site that I have admired and found to be thought provoking since I discovered it. I only hope I can contribute sufficient fodder to keep all of us, not only the like-minded, thinking.

I am a third generation Irish-American who has spent extended stays in Ireland as a youth and during a year abroad at college. We have had extensive interaction with our family in Ireland, but none at all with the family in Australia.

I have lived as an expatriate in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Ireland. My year in Hawaii was not expatriation, but it was very definitely a cross cultural experience.

My first offering will follow shortly.

Gigs

Two gigs this month:

Saturday, 12/11 at the St. James Pub in Fall, River, MA. Purchase Street.

and

Staurday 12/18 at the Blackthorne Tavern, S. Easton, MA. (click the link.)

Thanks!

Letter from Ireland, pt. 2

The sense of a weight removed! A weight I didn't even know I carried. It has taken 28 years for me to come to this most simple, most obvious, and most profound realization. I am not American. When I think of it I wonder why it has taken me this long, my entire life, to discover something of such personal importance. I am not so acute, so completely out of touch with myself. I have decided on some answers.

When I say, I am not American, I am not pretending. I am not wishing I was someone else. I do not deny my past or the facts of my life. I support them. I affirm them. The amount of American time and experience is greater than the Irish, but mere quantity is nothing. A lifetime in Singapore would not make me Tai, not even in attitude and habit, if I did not allow it. Neither has a short time in Ireland made me Irish, even if I allowed every bit of it. But that time here has afforded me insight into who I was already. It has shaped me because of the resonances within me, and yes I have responded to every bit of it. My summers in Ireland, growing up, were like little pools of peace and ease in the overwhelming confusion and unease of growing up in America.

Again, I see this now; I did not see it then. I felt it. Most distinctly. And I wish I had reflected on it so that I might have saved myself some discomfort.

tbc

Letter from Ireland, pt 1

Letters we've never sent. We all have them. This one is mine. Composed in 1997 when I was living in Dublin. It describes a profound, emotional discovery about myself and my identity. Perhaps, if you are of two places, you can relate to my feelings, especially if you are emotionally tied to one of those two places in particular.

Objectively, with hindsight, I would note how accurately the studies and traits of biculturals that I have discovered and blogged on in the past year relate to the insights and emotions expressed in the letter. Also, this is an artifact. We change.

Letter from Ireland


I've decided I do not like anyone visiting me in Ireland. Since I'm from America, I mean I do not like Americans, other than my parents, visiting me. Friends or family. I suffer an unwelcome sensation during every such visit. They bring "Americanness" with them and their very presence blurs the nicely clear-cut division between my experiences in both countries.

Their very presence pollutes the integrity, blurs the distinctiveness of my experience here. Partially this attitude might result from a natural reluctance to share "my" unique adventure--a jealousy. Yet it runs much deeper than that, and the problem is as much their doing as my own.

This being said, the occasions have been of a signal importance to me. They have helped me to clarify something fundamental to my nature, to who I am, and for that at least I am grateful. To whit: I am not American.

I am not American. To actually realize, and express, the words for the first time out loud brought the profoundest relief, the sensation of a urgent dream, or the remembrance of something important but lost, emotionally lost, to the psyche. The essential word on the tip of the tongue, finally recovered and released: I am not American.

The Kilbeggan Races, pt. 1

Located in the heart of the Midlands, the village of Kilbeggan, Co. Westmeath, is near enough the centre of the Republic of Ireland not to argue. If you have ever traveled the Dublin-Galway road, then you have been in Kilbeggan, however briefly, because this is the N6, and it runs right through the village square. From this axis point, roads radiate out to the nearby towns of Tullamore, Mullingar, Athlone, and to all farther points on the Irish compass. Tullamore is the capital town of Co. Offaly, seven miles out, and Athlone, on the Shannon, and known as the ‘Capital of the Midlands’, is only thirty miles away.

You will find Kilbeggan in no traveler’s guide. Tourists on their way to well-documented attractions in the west—Galway and Salt Hill, Lisdoonvarna and Doolin—might view the village as one more brief, anonymous flash of white-wash, so common to the Irish countryside. But Kilbeggan can offer more than a bucolic flicker past the windscreen on your way to Somewhere Else. For National Hunt racing comes to Kilbeggan several times a year, and it is then that this subdued village of six hundred hosts upwards of six thousand visitors, come for the excitement of wagering, for the social outing, and for the craic.

Six thousand might not sound like a large number, especially if you compare that figure with the internationally famous Galway Races, held in August that draws hundreds of thousands. Or, with the races held at the Curragh in Kildare, the home of many world-class stables. But Kilbeggan offers something neither Galway nor the Curragh, nor for that matter any of its local midland competitors, offer: an exclusively National Hunt format. National Hunt defines a certain body of racing rules, but to what it basically refers is the type of racing: hurls and steeple-chase. Jumping. Some years back Kilbeggan committed to this dangerous and exciting brand of racing. The crowds have obviously responded. They come to wager, and witness jockey and horse soar as one for improbable seconds over hurdle and fence.

First Gen Irish Americans! (Helloooooo Out There)

I finally had a speck of time and some luck in finding some Immigration stats regarding Irish immigration in the recent past, and over the last twenty years or so. Yes, new Irish immigrants do exist, and so must their children. Whenever I Google anything Irish-related I always arrive in the 19th century: Coffin Ships, Famine, Awful, Evil Brits, and of course the Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra I-Am sites. Arrrgh!!!

The whole point of this blog, or a large point anyway, is to find out more about the current experience of being expat or (especially) first generation with strong ties to home. I selfishly want to know if I share attitude and experience with others that must be out there.

This is a precursor post to two posts forthcoming (Irish Famine lecturer and some ironies in being white first gen).

I'd love help with stats, reminiscences, comments related most specifically to the power of insight that comes with a bicultural experience of the Irish American kind. I would say we must be among the few sophisticated "Irish Americans" out there, in relation the dreadful weight of blarney and "history" that is inescapably a part of Irish America. Are you out there? Help!

New Posts

I'd like to have three done by tonight, eta ~10pm EST.

1. Some thoughts on a guest lecturer I had address one of my classes. topic: Irish Famine.

2. Blogging the self: aggrandizement. Blogging (white European) first generation experience: skepticism and irony.

3. Some comments on an essay I received via email on an African bicultural experience.

(I can) Dream on posts:

4. Discussion on the attractiveness of "Christian" liminality.

5. A story on the Kilbeggan Races (National Hunt racing--Steeplechase.)

6. An essay reply to "The Loss of the Creature" (no not cratur). Inauthentic experience, consumption, and Tourism.

7. More personal memoir reflections.

Okay, enough.