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.