Who we are

This is an edited draft of a paper given at the Second Literature of Irish Exile Autumn School, Centre for Migration Studies, Ulster-American Folk Park, Omagh, Co. Tyrone (http://www.folkpark.com/events/items/item-40.html)

Introduction

Angela’s Ashes [1] is the classic emigration story. Poor boy in backward city in impoverished country leaves grinding poverty behind him, goes to America (where, like John Montague, Eamon de Valera and sundry others, he was born in the first place, but that’s not a necessary condition), onwards and upwards through trials and tribulations, writes memoir, becomes rich and famous. Miserable childhoods may be two a penny, but as McCourt himself writes, there is no miserable childhood like an Irish miserable childhood. A good publicity agent for a book also helps, especially if she is your wife. But the book clearly conveys– and this is where we can all have a piece of the action - a sense that you can escape and find the American Dream. You too could be like me, it seems to say.

No wonder, when I was in New York just after the book was published, that I saw queues of hundreds of people in Barnes and Noble on 5^th Ave. and 18^th, waiting to buy it. I saw people of many colours and ethnic origins, who can have known little or nothing of the city of Limerick, indeed probably had never heard of it before buying the book, reading it in the subway. Ultimately, this is not a book about being Irish, or growing up in Limerick, as much as it is a book about becoming American. Any immigrant can relate to this story.

Angela’s Ashes became, almost overnight, the emigration story that most Irish people knew or at least claimed to have read and the immigration story that everyone else seemed to know, remaining for many months at the top of the US bestseller lists. Significantly, it only took off in Ireland after becoming a success in America.

This should not surprise us. One or two earlier Irish examples of popular migration literature come to mind, such as Brian Friel’s play Philadelphia Here I Come[2], but they are few and far between. There are also examples of diasporic literature which experienced considerable success outside Ireland – a case in point is Pete Hamill’s Banished Children of Eve[3] but found virtually no echo in Ireland. The case of Alice McDermott, to be discussed at greater length by Professor Patricia Coughlan, is an interesting one, as her books are selling here in Ireland, but she remains far better known in the USA.

American migrant literature

Of those other countries which do have a literature which celebrates migration, it is hardly surprising if immigrant nations have grappled more frequently with the issues. When all is said and done, it is easier to engage with those present than those who have left. The end of the 19^th and the early 20^th century in the USA, a period when the frontier was finally exhausted – no more ‘free’ land to settle, or steal from native Americans – and at the same time which saw the greatest influx of immigrants until a century later in the 1990s, coincided with a tremendous creative literary outburst. Willa Cather’s O Pioneers[4] and My Antonía[5], Mary Antin’s The Promised Land[6], Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot [7], Ole Rollvaag’s Giants in the Earth [8] are typical of this formative period in the history of the USA, when identities were forged through the melding of different immigrant communities and when there were lively debates about such topics as hyphenated identities and frontier immigrant lives. In the much more recent past, for instance in the case of Canada, one may also discern a similar interest in ethnicity and in its relationship with national identity, as well as with the psychological trials of ‘becoming the other’. Alistair MacLeod’s[9] No Great Mischief is a good example of the former, while Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation [10] typifies the latter.

Is there an Irish migrant literature?

It seems worthwhile asking, in the light of the above, whether there is such as phenomenon as Irish migrant literature. My contention is that there isn’t. Notwithstanding many individual works, I don’t believe that a recognisable body of material exists – but it should now receive this recognition. In many ways we have sought to hide the migrant experience here in Ireland, taking refuge in denial or indifference. Yet there are plenty of past models and individual literary examples to choose from.

There is a medieval tradition of peregrinatio or pilgrimage, of which the best-known example is probably the voyage of St. Brendan[11]. However, it must be said that this tradition does not outlast the period in question.

The archetypal figure of Sweeney[12] in Irish folk tradition and literature (for instance, in Seamus Heaney’s well-known reworking) is another kind of migrant, in this case an internal exile, condemned to exclusion and marginalisation but shouting from the treetops, speaking the awkward truths the settled population do not want to hear.

A couple of modern masterpieces do stand out, even if ultimately they are one-offs rather than representative. The themes of James Joyce’s work, notably Portrait of the Artist[13] and Ulysses[14] and in his short story ‘Eveline’[15] in Dubliners (of which more below) are too well known to need detailed rehearsal here. Stephen in the Portrait goes to ‘encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’. Ulysses is in some ways the ultimate novel of exile - the recreation by Joyce of his home city of Dublin over many years in exile – an exile which in his case seems to have been a necessary part of the creative process. This virtual Dublin of the mind was more real than reality. By contrast, the eponymous Eveline (of whom more later) cannot escape from her homeland with her lover Frank: something holds her back at the very quay and she refuses to board the ship.

The folk tradition should not be forgotten. The well-known Irish poet Raftery may not have gone further from his native Mayo than South Galway, but he regarded himself as an exile nonetheless, and his poem Cill Aodáin, a dream of return to his native place, will live as long as Irish is spoken or studied

The anthology in which the Cill Aodáin poem appears, Filíocht na nGael (the poetry of the Gaeil) itself illustrates of the importance of the theme of exile, divided as it is into sections: patriotism, aisling (dream-poems, usually political), love, lament, exile, satire, drinking, nature, penances and hymns.

Southerners with a knowledge of Irish may remember reading as school texts Dónal Mac Amhlaigh’s Dialann Deoraí (The Diary of an Exile)[18], Donegal man Micí Mac Gabhann’s Rotha Mór an tSaoil (The Great Wheel of Life)[19], and Pádraig Ó Conaire’s Deoraíocht (Exile)[20], all of which have an emigrant connection.

Of course, many other recent Irish-born writers, such as Brian Moore[21], George Moore[22], Edna O’Brien[23], Joe O’Connor[24], John McGahern[25], Aidan Higgins[26], Glenn Patterson[27], Michael O’Loughlin[28], Dermot Bolger[29], Colum McCann[30], Deirdre Madden[31], and Emer Martin[32], have all tackled the subject. Moreover, there are many writers of Irish origin, such as Peter Carey (who has just won the Booker Prize for his novel about Ned Kelly) [33], Alice McDermott[34], Peter Finlay Dunne [35] Peter Quinn[36] and Eugene O’Neill[37], who deal with recognisably Irish diasporic landscapes.

In general, however, when we consider the canon of Irish literature as such, we don’t take much account of migrants and their work or of their place within the broader spectrum of Irish identity. (Although the recent essay collection Contemporary Irish Fiction, edited by Liam Harte and Michael Parker, is one marker of a welcome shift in this approach, including as it does George O’Brien’s essay on the aesthetics of exile, and Liam Harte is working on a major publication on the topic). There are probably a range of reasons for this, to do with exile and denial and our own inability to deal with the fact of departure, a departure on a scale and with a consistency which was unparalleled in Europe, certainly for more than a century between the Famine and the 1950s. In folksong, of course, there are myriad examples of the themes of emigration and exile, as we know from the work of people like John Moulden[38], whom we heard here last year. What is more, new songs are constantly being written – Philip Chevron’s Thousands are Sailing, Shane McGowan’s Fairytale of New York and Christy Moore’s Don’t Forget your Shovel are already classics.

In his essay in Contemporary Irish Fiction,[39] George O’Brien claims that ‘it seems only a slight exaggeration to say that without exile there would be no contemporary Irish fiction’. I would argue that it is more than a slight exaggeration. In spite of the examples given above and although exile does indeed occur as a theme in Irish literature, it can hardly be said that a body of literature exists which is recognisably Irish and recognisably ‘diasporic’, nor could it be said that any such body of material is seen as an integral part of the canon of Irish literature. The very terms (exile, emigrant, diasporic) are of course part of the problem, and I shall return to this issue. O’Brien is right, however, in my view at least, when he notes ‘that contemporary Irish writers feature, and in many cases meditate upon, the nature and experience of exile is historically noteworthy’. One might ask, why now and not earlier? It seems to me that one might at least tentatively suggest a number of factors. Guilt and denial must surely have played a part, as well as the fact that relatively few first-generation Irish migrants came from a background where there was a strong emphasis on formal creative writing. We are therefore necessarily concerned with work produced in many cases by the descendants of that first generation, yet the very absoluteness of the duality of here/there, homeland/exile, must have aided a tendency to see ‘Irish’ literature as being largely confined to work produced on the island of Ireland.

Angela’s Ashes is a story so archetypal that we take it for granted. Yet it begs many questions. Is there, for instance, a typical migrant story? If not, is there a typology, or set of categories, of emigrant, or exile, or diasporic, literature? Does it exist in the case of other countries? Does it exist in the case of Ireland and if not, why not? How has it changed over time? If there has in fact been so much attention paid to exile, emigration and diaspora in Irish literature, why do we not think of it as a ‘type’?

Towards a typology?

In thinking about this I tried to develop some kind of archetypal categories of migrant stories. My working model includes the following cases:

In the end, and I’m still working on it, I was told by a friend and colleague that the problem wasn’t material for a lecture, but a PhD, and I decided that she was right. So I’m going to put aside this draft list in favour of a simpler alternative. It’s flawed, but I want to suggest some kind of way of thinking about the literature of Irish migration which might make sense to us as readers. At the same time, I want to examine briefly why it was that we thought so little about the matter at all until the very recent past. Finally, I want to discuss how particular works, notably George Moore’s ‘Home Sickness’[40], James Joyce’s ‘Eveline’[41] and John Healy’s Nineteen Acres[42] explore some archetypal themes in greater depth, and why the modern generation of ‘diasporic’ writers are addressing a different audience from a very different standpoint.

Towards working definitions

The simplest version of the literature of Irish exile is probably that of the migrant/exile who longs for home. I can think of no more poignant, if unlikely, example than Francis Stuart, who found himself in Berlin during the Second World War. Unattractive as he may have been as a political persona, it is impossible not to empathise with this poem:

Ireland

Stuart’s poem is filled with an intense longing and imbued with a strong sense of the texture of the Irish landscape. This is not someone who has ever adjusted to life in Berlin, in spite of his bizarre political decision to choose the heart of darkness as his place of abode.

But outside the folk tradition there cannot be many modern examples of this relatively uncomplicated, if poignant, expression of longing and nostalgia. If there is a defining trait to much migrant and diasporic literature, it seems to me, it is the tension between tradition and modernity and between the communally-defined subject and the modern, isolated, self-defined subject. While this is found in all literature and at all times, the literal physical displacement of the migrant sets up specific tensions– homeland and otherland, emigrant and exile, here and there, old and new, tradition and modernity. The migrant is caught between the familiarity but also the deadness, of communal and/or tribal identity, and the freedom offered by emigration to find a new identity and make a new life.

Home Sickness

George Moore’s short story ‘Home Sickness’ in The Untilled Field [44], published in 1903, is an interesting example of this tension. The protagonist, James Bryden, works in a slum in the Bowery, where his health deteriorates; he returns to Ireland to recuperate. He is glad to be home and tells his neighbours they have an exaggerated picture of America ‘you’re thinking a good deal of America over here’. But they all seem to be poor in Ireland, and dispirited and pessimistic. It is not long before Bryden feels a sense of impatience at the repetitive stories of gloom and doom, of poor harvests and dying animals.

He realises how lonely and empty the countryside is. Yet he is well treated and can also see the pleasant side. He starts walking out with Margaret Dirkin, a herdsman’s daughter, and it is not long before it is given out in the village that they are to be married. Bryden has money enough to pay for dancing in all the houses of the parish, but he soon runs into the opposition of the local priest, who arrives one night to break up the socialising:

Bryden despises the priest but also the people for their subservience. His courtship with Margaret continues meanwhile and he learns about buying and selling cattle, preparing to settle down. Then he receives a letter from a friend in America, asking if he is going to return.

Eventually Bryden can take it no longer. He leaves his fiancée without explanation or apology and returns to the Bowery.

Eveline

Eveline Hill loves Frank, who is going to bring her to Argentina. She has had a hard life in Dublin with an abusive father and a job she doesn’t like. Frank offers the exotic: Buenos Aires, a different life and a different culture. ‘She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted’. Her father forbids her to go out with Frank, a sailor, but she does so anyway. But she feels tied by a promise made to her dying mother to keep the house together as long as she can. Faced with a choice between agency and happiness, on one hand, and the pull of duty and the past, on the other, she cannot tear herself away.

John Healy (1978; republished 1987) Nineteen Acres. Achill: House of Healy.

John Healy’s Nineteen Acres provides a different perspective. Although Healy himself was never an emigrant, the entire story is shot through with the Irish migrant experience. Healy’s family comes from Carracastle, in Mayo, and the nineteen acres referred to in the title are the ancestral family farm. His mother’s family is the dominant one in his remembered history. Remarkably, she and all but one of five siblings in her family left Ireland, although she herself later returned.

Healy’s powerful description of his own upbringing leaves little doubt about the centrality of emigration. One of his aunts died in the American ‘flu epidemic of 1919, while his own mother remembered it all her life – Healy gives it as the reason for her opposition to dancing (crowds congregating and spreading infection), although there are some reasons to doubt this. His childhood is studded with American parcels and the two annual cheques at Christmas and Easter from his Aunt Mary and from his uncle by marriage, Pat O'Neill. Another uncle appears to be something of a black sheep, joining the British Army and never returning, yet two of his sons are evacuated from wartime Britain to Mayo. Yet another, paternal, uncle opts to transfer from the RIC to the RUC in 1922 and spends his life in another kind of exile, serving in Mount Pottinger RUC station, a point which some republicans chose to throw in Healy’s own face when the Troubles begin.

Healy’s mother and four aunts are reared for export. His grandmother has a catch-phrase – ‘keep your mouth and your legs closed and send home the ticket for the next one’, until there is no next one, and then it’s ‘send home the slates’. His own mother returns in the late 1920s and marries Stephen Healy in Charlestown; her lifetime obsession is with the farm in Carracastle, which has gone to her brother Jim and his childless wife Mary Anne. Who will die first – Jim (in which case the farm with pass to Mary Anne’s people) or Mary Anne in which case it will stay with ‘the seed of the O’Donnells’?

The 1930s of Healy’s book is full of America. Clothes from America, even if they were so loud that they didn’t wish to wear them. A gramophone from America, with Michael Coleman records. The emigrant coat with the emergency fund of ten sovereigns and fifteen pounds in paper money sewn in, sent back in the post by one aunt for the next emigrant in case she might need it. Typically though, the author learns little of his own mother’s life in America – for a long period of his youth he did not even know that she had been there and when he finds out it is from his American relatives when he visits them himself.

The Mayo of the time is allegedly a place in which where there is no class distinction:

Family and succession revolve around the absolute necessity to keep the land. His mother’s worth is measured by her contribution to this:

It would be no exaggeration to say that the America of Healy’s youth was not only ever-present in their lives and imaginations, but that they literally depended on it for their own survival. Yet there is a pervasive sense that America has not been good for those who went there from Ireland and stayed:

Later, in a tribute to emigrants from Poland, Ireland, Germany and Italy (one of few references in the book, by the way, to other sending countries) who were sending money home a century before he says

In fact, Healy’s story of American emigrants is by and large a story of unmitigated disaster. By the book’s end, all but one has died of misfortune of one kind or another, usually drink-related.

Healy goes over himself in the late 1950s on a State Department Fellowship for journalists. The most powerful and moving part of the book is when he goes to meet his Aunt Mary – at an address which is engraved on his memory after many years of letters home. Instead of a comfortable ‘house with a stoop’ he finds a place that is almost a tenement, a penniless aunt and a cousin who cannot work and starts every day with a beer. The American Dream, it seems, was only an illusion. His aunt had married a fireman from Galway but he, an alcoholic, had died in a drink-related accident. Another aunt, Anna, had a sweetheart in the American Army who went away in World War 1, a man from Galway. She was killed in the 1919 ‘flu, and her fiancé, on hearing the news, drank himself senseless and was robbed; his body was fished out of the river a couple of days later.

After the shock of hearing this Healy goes to visit another aunt, Kit. Her husband Pat O’Neill is the only one who has made it, but the price has been high. Kit is an alcoholic. The house is arid and unhappy, if sumptuous. Silence, formality and sadness are the prevalent tones. Their only daughter Theresa is crippled, presumably with polio. Their son Junior is destined for an early death. His aunt ‘seemed to make formal responses to life now, in a luxurious home where she had everything but lived as if she had nothing’

Healy returns home, nor is there ever the slightest suggestion that he might have been tempted to remain in America. For him, the tribal values of land and inheritance seem to be all. Yet he is clear-sighted and unsentimental about the repression and aridity and literally barren nature of Irish life, especially for women. The uncle who got the farm has no children by his wife (although his mother, a devout Catholic, notes crudely elsewhere that he had ‘left his mark’ in a nearby village in his younger days – so ‘it wasn’t our Jim’). Pat O’Neill, the successful businessman Pat, comes with his wife Kit to visit and gives Jim’s wife Mary Anne a drink for a bit of sport:

It seems that in the end the sole purpose of the emigrants, their toil and pain and money, is to keep the land, the impoverished nineteen acres. The farm is almost the last place in that desolate townland. Eventually Healy is obliged to bring a seriously sick Jim to the hospital in Castlebar. Before they leave the house:

One of the striking features of the work is the place of its author. The narrative thread of the work is unbroken and apparently free of self-doubt. His feelings about this mother, the farm and the way of life it symbolises are seemingly uncomplicated and he is capable of being as unsentimental about the harsh realities of rural life as he is about the sacrifices made in America to sustain it. Yet, on another level he idealises rural life, although he is himself the one who has escaped through education and the life of a journalist in Dublin; when he comes back it is to revisit a part of his own past. Healy is exiled from this landscape and this life as much as any emigrant in America. Perhaps his fierce attachment to tribal family values is a kind of denial, an act of expiation for his own guilt in having left. For the harsh reality was that no modern society could survive on holdings of nineteen acres.

The modern period

Traditional definitions and categories, based on fixed assumptions about place, space, community and individual identity, are themselves coming to be questioned. Migration is no longer a question of the migrant leaving here, and thus becoming an exile, and going there and thus becoming an immigrant, necessarily seen as exotic or other in the receiving society. We now are seen to live in a more fluid universe in which the condition or state of migration itself is receiving attention – the word migrancy is increasingly used. Moreover, there is a sense in which the identity of the migrant is seen as central and is no longer seen as a fixed category but as a process of becoming. As for the "here" and the "there" it has to be recognised that, whether for good or ill, the place-specific aspects of identity have been greatly weakened by various processes of social, economic and cultural mobility. Fintan O'Toole, a columnist with the Irish Times, has suggested on more than one occasion that the would-be emigrant has already been in America, through the all-pervasive media, before visiting in the flesh.

What is particularly interesting about the shift outlined above is that it moves the migrant from the margin to the centre of a particularly modern – or more correctly, postmodern – dilemma: how are individual and group identities constructed and maintained in the face of relentless and ever faster change? In that sense the migrant is already dealing with an issue which faces all of us. One response is that instead of stressing “authentic” categories of identity (being born in a particular place or "born into" a particular and fixed culture) we now speak of syncretic and/or hybrid identities.

Displacement and dislocation, with the resulting sense of psychological disorientation, are basic characteristics of the migrant experience. Eva Hoffmann in her book Lost in Translation[45] speaks of her anxiety about identity when she voices her thoughts after having received some advice about becoming Canadian (she was born Polish):

Hoffman's concern is understandable, but in reality we are not free simply to put on identities like so many new clothes. Indian literary critic Madan Sarup comes closer to the problem in evoking some of the issues associated with the word home:

Feminist scholar Caren Kaplan[47] opens her book Questions of Travel with a famous quotation from the poet, Elizabeth Bishop:

In this view of identity and place, Caplan does not simply opt for the notion of modern rootlessness. As she says, identities cling to us, or even produce us, even though our "pre-originary space" may have disappeared. Place and space do matter in this perspective, just as myth does, even though we know the myths are myths. The important point has less to do with our ability to return to some idealised past - what she calls a nostalgic dream of "going home" - and more to do with our ability to historicise ourselves and our own various, multiple senses of identity - what she calls a way of "being at home". In a sense, it is the act of historicisation, the remembering, the performance, that constitutes the identity. To paraphrase Marx, we may make our own choices, but the circumstances are not entirely of our own choosing. There are givens over which we have no control, other than in our ability to incorporate them, and their multiple meanings, into our own landscapes of subjectivity.

Modern Irish diasporic writers – a number are featured in the extracts - show an acute awareness of these dilemmas in their work. There is in a sense no ‘home’ to go to any more. But our identities and origins cling to us nevertheless and are performed and reproduced in the tales we tell.

Extracts to be read in conjunction with From Emigration and Exile to the New Diaspora: Irish Migrant Voices

From Cill Aodáin, by Raftery

Ireland

Francis Stuart 1944

From ‘Home Sickness’[51]

Their regret was that they had not gone to America when they were young; and after striving to take an interest in the fact that O’Connor had lost a mare and a foal worth forty pounds, Bryden began to wish himself back in the slum. And when they left the house he wondered if every evening would be like the present one.

I’ve heard of your goings on, he said, of your beer-drinking and dancing. I’ll not have it in my parish. If you want that sort of thing you had better go to America.

He tried to forget the letter, and he looked at the worn fields, divided by walls of loose stones, and a great longing came upon him.

The smell of the Bowery had come across the Atlantic, and had found him out in this western headland, and one night he awoke

From ‘Eveline’[52]

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: she would drown. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on, but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

From Nineteen Acres[53]

Nothing to do with class distinction because there is no class distinction as such in rural Ireland – there is a hierarchical structure which any village or town must have – a pecking order. It is a different thing from class distinction.

..Mary could not know then, as she faced back to an America which was now her home and vastly more familiar to her than when she went as a labelled emigrant, that she would end her days on the poverty line in New York, surviving her only son who loved them and left them…

No-one will ever know the full extent of their sacrifices and how much they kept hidden from the old people who thought that America was indeed the golden land of opportunity where the streets were truly paved with gold.

But if they did, she got up and danced a hornpipe with a precision which had nothing to do with strong punch and everything to do with the long-forgotten girl in her who had once been a fine step-dancer but who had stopped dancing all those years ago when she first went as a bride to Castleduff

..Jim was conscious that it would probably be the last time Kit would ever sit by the fire (in Carracastle) again: he saw them down the road, him and Mary Anne standing on the hill. Kit was crying, for it was the same road that she went almost fifty years before and, if she had more of the world’s goods than Jim and Mary Anne, she had less in so many other ways.

There was no need to worry now about the long-tailed crowd in Barroe. Jim had survived and all would be well in the end.

The long years of slaving in Brooklyn to send home the slates had not been in vain and if the linens were gone itself, never mind… The holding was safe now for her and hers. The years of scrimping and saving in Brooklyn had not been wasted.

Slowly the enormity of it dawned on me. His was the last fire in that part of Castleduff and if it was quenched, quenched too were the last hopes of a return of his closest neighbours. It was the old belief and tradition in the power of fire: where there was a fire there was life and the promise of life. So it was when, one by one, his neighbours left for England or America, there would be a ‘wake house’ and Jim or Mary Anne, being the last to leave, would take a blazing sod from the last fire in that house, carry it spluttering and sparking across the fields of the hill to place it on their own hearth as part of the rakings. In that way, although the emigrant’s house was closed and the hearth cold, the fire which for so long blazed there, never really went out. There would be continuity, for when the emigrant came home again, he (or she) would take a blazing sod from Jim’s fire which had never gone out and, with the tongs which had carried it, bring the new blazing sod back to the old hearth and relight a new fire.

.. his (Jim’s) was the last fire and it had three fires in it, kept in trust for families who would one day come back. If this fire went out it was the last living thing which bound the neighbours to return, for he knew the word would go that Jim O’Donnell’s fire, the last fire on the hill, was quenched..

From the Introduction (by Joe O'Connor) to Ireland in Exile[54]

...You might be coming home for Christmas, or a family celebration, or a funeral, or to see a friend. Or you might just be coming back to Ireland because you're so lonely and freaked-out where you are that you can't stick it any more, and you need a break, and you'd sell your Granny to be back in the pub at home by nine o'clock on a Friday night, having fun and telling stories.

And there it is, this IDA poster, illuminated at the end of the corridoor that leads from the airbridge gates to the arrivals terminal; the ghostly faces of those beautiful Young Europeans. It always seems poignant as any ancient Ulster saga to me, this pantheon of departed heroes, so hopeful and innocent, frozen in their brief moment of optimism.

And you meet your friends the night you get home, the people who stayed behind. You talk to them of what's happening and there's loads of news. Some of them are getting married to people you haven't even met, because you don't live in Ireland anymore. Some have broken up with long-time lovers, others are still trying to get decent work. Some of them have kids you' ve never seen. You don't really know what these scandals and gobbets of gossip are, about which people are laughing so knowledgeably as they sip their pints, but you laugh too, because you don't want to be left out. You pretend you know what your friends are talking about, because you still want to belong, And sometimes there are rows, as the night wears on, because you don't keep in touch as much as you should, and they resent you a bit for going anyway, and you resent them a bit for staying, although you can't put your finger on why. But the conversation flows, as much as it can, with a couple of awkward moments. When you use the words "home" or "at home", for instance, your friends don't really know what you mean. Sometimes you don't know yourself.

... Then, about half an hour before closing time, you find yourself looking around the pub and becoming frantically uptight. You're feeling completely out of place, you don't know why. It's weird. You don't get it. But somehow, despite the ceol and the caint and the craic, something is wrong. You're home in Ireland, but you're not home really. London is still in your head, on New York, or Paris. But you're in Ireland. How did this happen? It's not that you're unhappy exactly. But it's just not right. You take a swig of your drink, and the music seems louder. You close your eyes and try to fight back the almost overwhelming urge to be somewhere - anywhere - else. And you realise in that moment that you really are an emigrant now. And that being an emigrant isn't just an address. You realise that it's actually a way of thinking about Ireland.

From In High Germany[55]

(The scene is Hamburg train station; the narrator and only character, Eoin, is talking; the action centres around the campaign of the Irish soccer team in the 1988 European finals)

...That was when I noticed the change first. Three Kerry lads were trying to get a ticket outside the ground, looking like they'd just tied up a hayrick. We gave them Mick's free and heard about the time they had hitched to Malta from Tralee, when they were on the dole, to see Stapleton get the winner. Their accents were so broad we could barely follow them. 'How'd you get here this time?', I asked.

His own voice: And so there they were like an invisible explosion. Buses from Munich and Stuttgart, three coaches from London, lads from Berlin and Eindhoven, Cologne and the Hague, all milling together with lads from Dublin, a green army taking over the steps of the town hall across from the Tivoli Gardens. I don't know why, but that night - after the Danes routed us - listening to all those people in the pubs scared the shit out of me, like an omen, like, I don't know, like the ground suddenly starting to slide from under you...

..We were the chosen ones, the generation which would make sense of the last seven hundred years. Irishmen and Irishwomen, in the name of God and the dead generations, living our own land, in our own jobs, our own homes that our fathers had slaved for us to inherit. Can you understand me? Back then in the seventies. We were not brought up...to go. We had a choice...

...We went to a Spanish bar above Stuttgart. Down below us the death pangs of the British Empire, nourished by white bread and the News of the World, could run riot on the Konigstrasse. All we wanted to do was to sit entranced and savour it, a coming of age...

(talking of the bars in Dublin) ...We would never really know what they were like that night, because, even if we went back and they hadn't changed, we would have. And I knew, and I think he knew, that now when we said us we weren't thinking of those bars any more but the scattered army who were singing in every bar and hotel in Stuttgart that night.

(At the match against the Netherlands in 1988) 'Ireland', I screamed. 'Ireland! Ireland!' I had six minutes of my old life to go, six minutes to cheat time. The crowd joined in, every one of them, from Dublin and Cork, from London and Stockholm. And suddenly I knew this was the only country I still owned, those eleven figures in green shirts, that menagerie of accents pleading with God...

..And when they were gone we turned, solid to a man and a woman, thirteen thousand of us, cheering, applauding, chanting out the players' names, letting them know how proud we felt. I thought of my father's battered travel bag, of Molloy drilling us behind the 1798 pike, the wasters who came after him hammering Peig into us, the masked men blowing limbs off passers-by in my name. You know, all my life, it seems, somebody somewhere has always been trying to tell me which Ireland I belonged in...

I thought of my uncles and my aunts, scattered through England and the States, of every generation culled and shipped off like beef on the hoof. And suddenly is seemed they had found a voice at last, that the Houghtons, the McCarthys, the Morrises were playing for all those generations written out of history. And I knew they were playing for my children to come too, for Shane's and Mick's, who would grow with foreign accents and Irish faces, bewildered by their fathers' lives.

All thirteen thousand of us stood on the terrace, for fifteen, twenty minutes after the last player had vanished...Coffin ships, the decks of cattle boats, the departure lounges of airports. We were not a chosen generation, the realisation of a dream, any longer. We were a hiccough, a brief stutter in the system. Thirteen thousand stood as one on that German terrace before scattering back towards Ireland and out like a river bursting its banks across a vast continent...

I walked down to platform B17, found a carriage by myself, and when the ticket inspector came in he saw this scarf and nodded with a new respect. I remembered my father in carriages like that, perpetually coming home to his son in Ireland. But when I closed my eyes the Ireland I saw wasn't the streets I'd known or the fields he'd grown in. I saw thirteen thousand pairs of hands moving as one, united by pride. I knew Frieda would still be waiting up, with my child, my future, a tiny pearl inside her.

'Come on train,' I said. 'Faster, faster. Take me home to her'. The lights of a dozen German towns spread out while the train sped on. And all the way here it wasn't the wheels that were chattering but the very network of tracks, carrying us all away from Gelsenkirchen, scattering us like seed across the continent, those steel lines chanting...

The extracts which follow are all taken from individual authors in Ireland in Exile: Irish Writers Abroad.[56]

"I felt more of an exile for 25 years in Ireland than I ever have in the twelve I've been out of it"

" You're Irish", she asked, making it sound as if it was a status, like being a film star. "I love Ireland very much, you know".

"A promoter had chartered a jet for the weekend, flown to Dublin, and loaded it up with traditional musicians...A van pulled up and a dozen or so men spilled out, unmistakably Irish in their demeanour and colouring. 'Ah,' said, Baxter, ' the currachs have landed'.

"She explained they were Auslander. This year the Irish, next year, who knows?"

"As Caesar had marched north, we had marched with him, with his laws, his grammar, his plumbing, his Greeks. And while we were marching with him, wer were crouched down in our forests, in our earthen forts, with our idols, our severed heads, our bubbling language, waiting for him. We were both Caesar and Vercingetorix. Which is to say we were nothing, nowhere, Auslander.."

" And more than learning anthing about Italy, I had found out more about my own country, simply by not living in it..."

"Maybe one of the hardest things is to see beyond your own society, to step out of the collective consciousness of your time, but it teaches you about things as nothing else does..."

'You know. Remember in the famine when the ships left for America they'd have an American wake the night before'.

'I mean it', he leaned forward, suddenly aggressive. 'They're dead people back there, all of them, and I'm a dead man. It all starts tomorrow at eleven when I step on that plane.'

From Elizabeth Bishop

From Caren Kaplan[58]

For many of us there is no possibility of staying at home in the conventional sense - that is, the world has changed to the point that those domestic, national or marked spaces no longer exist. So I cannot respond to Bishop’s more modernist question by “staying put” or fixing my location or promising not to leave my national borders. There is not necessarily a preoriginary space in which to stay after modern imperialist expansion. But identities cling to us, or even produce us, nonetheless. Many of us have locations in the plural. Thus, rather than assuming that we’ll never return to these homes again, rather than celebrating the rootless traveller of Bishop’s text, I suggest that the fragments and multiplicities of identity in postmodernity can be marked and historically situated. As Iain Chambers argues, historicizing displacement leads us away from nostalgic dreams of “going home” to a mythic, metaphysical location and into the realm of theorizing a way of “being at home” that accounts for “the myths we know to be myths yet continue to cling to, cherish and dream” alongside “other stories, other fragments of memory and traces of time”.

From The condition of Postmodernity, by David Harvey; London: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

"Post-modernism signals the death of such 'metanarratives' whose secretly terroristic function was to ground and legitimate the illusion of a 'universal' human history. We are now in the process of wakening from the nightmare of modernity, with its manipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-back pluralism of the post-modern, that heterogeneous range of life-styles and language games which has renounced the nostalgic urge to totalize and legitimate itself...Science and philosophy must jettison their grandiose metaphysical claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives."

"If there was something liberating about the possibility of playing many diverse roles, there was also something stressful and deeply unsettling about it..."

From Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: 1974)

For better or worse, [the city] invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a map fixed by triangulation. Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offered when we try to impose our own personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living in a city is an art, and we need the vocabulary of are, of style, to describe the peculiar relation between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. the city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

[1] McCourt, F. (1997) Angela’s Ashes: a memoir of a childhood. London: Flamingo.

[2] Friel, B. (1965) Philadelphia Here I Come. London: Faber and Faber.

[3] Quinn, P. (1995) Banished Children of Eve. New York: Penguin USA.

[4] Cather, W. (1913) O Pioneers. Online at http://www.americanliterature.com/OP/OPINDX.HTML.

[5] Cather. W. (1980) My Antonía. London: Virago.

[6] Antin, M. (1969) The Promised Land. Princeton: Princeton U.P.

[7] Zangwill, I (1908) The Melting Pot. Online at http://www.vdare.com/fulford/melting_pot_play.htm.

[8] Rolvaag. O. (1989) Giants in the Earth. New York: Harper Collins.

[9] MacLeod, A. (2000) No Great Mischief. New York: W. & W. Norton.

[10] Hoffman, E. (1991) Lost in Translation: A Life in A New Language. London: Minerva.

[11] O’Meara,J.J. (1981) The voyage of St. Brendan. Dublin.

[12] Heaney, S . (1984) Sweeney Astray. London: Faber and Faber.

[13] Joyce, J. (1977) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Granada.

[14] Joyce, J. (1937) Ulysses. London: Bodley Head.

[15] Joyce, J. (1972) ‘Eveline’ in Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 34-39.

[16] Ó Reachtabhra, A. Cill Aodáin in Ó Canainn, P. (1958) Filíocht na nGael. Baile átha Cliath: An Press Náisiúnta, p. 151-152.

[17] Raifteirí, A. Ó, ‘Cill Aodáin/County Mayo’, trans. O’Connor, F. (1959) Kings, Lords and Commons. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, p. 133 (note different spelling, same person, as preceding footnote).

[18] Mac Amhlaigh, D. (1960) Dialann Deoraí. Dublin: Clochomhar.

[19] Mac Gabhann, M. (1996) Rotha Mór an tSaoil. Conamara: Cló Iar-Chonnachta.

[20] Ó Conaire, P. (1980) Deoraíocht.. Baile átha Cliath: Helicon.

[21] Moore, B. (1988) The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn. London: Paladin.

[22] Moore, G. (1903) ‘Home Sickness’ in The Untilled Field. London: Colin Smyth.

[23] O’Brien, E. (1964) The Lonely Girl. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

[24] O’Connor, J. (1991) True Believers. London: Sinclair-Stevenson.

[25] McGahern, J. (1966) The Barracks. London: Panther.

[26] Higgins, A. (1972) The Balcony of Europe. London: Calder.

[27] Patterson, G. (1995) Black Night on Big Thunder Mountain. London: Chatto and Windus.

[28] O’Loughlin, M. ‘Frank Ryan: Journey to the Centre’ in Bolger, D. (ed.) (1991) Letters from the New Island. Dublin: Raven Arts Press.

[29] Bolger, D. (ed.) (1993) Ireland in Exile: Irish writers abroad. Dublin: New Island Books.

[30] McCann, C. (1998) This side of Brightness. London: Phoenix House.

[31] Madden, D. (1992) Remembering Light and Stone. London: Faber and Faber.

[32] Martin, E. (1997) Breakfast in Babylon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

[33] Carey, P. (2001) True History of the Kelly Gang. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

[34] McDermott, A. (1999) Charming Billy. New York: Dell Publishing.

[35] Dunne, P. F. (1938) Mr Dooley at his best. New York: Scribners.

[36] Quinn, P. op.cit.

[37] O’Neill, E. (1956) Long Day’s Journey into Night. New Haven: Yale University Press.

[38] Moulden, J. (1994) Thousands are Sailing: a brief song history of Irish Emigration. Portrush: Ulstersongs.

[39] O’Brien, G. ‘The Aesthetics of Exile’ in Harte, L. and Parker, M. (eds) (2000) Contemporary Irish Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 35.

[40] Moore, G. (1903) op. cit.

[41] Joyce, J. (1914) op.cit.

[42] Healy, J. (1978) Nineteen Acres. Galway: Kennys.

[43] quoted in O’Loughlin, M. op. cit., pp. 62-63.

[44] Moore, G. (1903), op. cit., pp. 32-49.

[45] Hoffman, E. (1991) op.cit.

[46] Sarup, Madan (1993). Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press.

[47] Kaplan, C. (1996) Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press

[48] Ó Reachtabhra, A. op.cit.

[49] Raifteirí, A. Ó, op.cit.

[50] Stuart, F. (1982) 'Ireland' in We have kept the faith: new and selected poems. Dublin: Raven Arts Press.

[51] Moore, G. (1903) op.cit.

[52] Joyce, J. (1972) op.cit.

[53] Healy, J. (1978) op.cit.

[54] Bolger, D. (1993) op.cit.

[55] Bolger, D. (1992) ‘In High Germany’ in A Dublin Quartet. London: Penguin.

[56] Bolger, D. (1993) op. cit.

[57] Bishop, E., ‘Questions of Travel’, quoted in Kaplan, C. (1996) Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press

[58] Kaplan, C. (1996) op.cit.

From Emigration and Exile to the New Diaspora: Irish migrant literature

Piaras Mac Éinrí, Director,

Irish Centre for Migration Studies,

National University of Ireland, Cork

Introduction

American migrant literature

Is there an Irish migrant literature?

Towards a typology?

Towards working definitions

Ireland

Home Sickness

Eveline

John Healy (1978; republished 1987) Nineteen Acres. Achill: House of Healy.

The modern period

Extracts to be read in conjunction with From Emigration and Exile to the New Diaspora: Irish Migrant Voices

From Cill Aodáin, by Raftery

Ireland

Francis Stuart 1944

From ‘Home Sickness’[51]

From ‘Eveline’[52]

From Nineteen Acres[53]

From the Introduction (by Joe O'Connor) to Ireland in Exile[54]

From In High Germany[55]

The extracts which follow are all taken from individual authors in Ireland in Exile: Irish Writers Abroad.[56]

From Elizabeth Bishop

From Caren Kaplan[58]

From The condition of Postmodernity, by David Harvey; London: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

From Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: 1974)