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?