by Thomas Lynch
It’s only now, months later, the conference come and gone, the kindly stipend paid and spent, that it occurs to me what I should have said.
What I should have said is that ethnography seems so perilous just now, no less the everyday; that “life and letters and the field” seem littered more than ever with the wounded and the dead, the raging and the sad. That ethnicity, formerly a cause for celebration, now seems an occasion for increasing caution. That ethnic identity—those ties by which we are bound to others of our kind by tribe and race, language and belief, geography and history, costume and custom and a hundred other measures—seems lately less a treasure, more a scourge.
WHEN I BEGAN this book, I had in mind something that would help my family reconnect to our little history as Irish Americans, something that would resonate with other hyphenated types who’ve come from every parish in the world. I wanted the names and the records kept—a text my grandchildren, not yet born, might dip into someday for their own reasons. Something like Roots for the freckled and redheaded set, the riverdancing and flash-tempered descendants of immigrants—the seven million “willing” Irish men and women who have crossed the Atlantic in the last four hundred years, seeking a future in this New World that had been denied to them in the Old. From the first Scots-Irish, tired of the tithes and rents in Ulster in the seventeenth century—Davy Crockett’s people, westward pressing, sturdy and curious—to the hundreds of thousands of oppressed Catholics in the eighteenth century who would fight in our revolution and help to shape our nation, like the man with my name, from South Carolina, who signed the Declaration of Independence; to the million Famine Irish, sick with hunger, fever, and want in the nineteenth century, one of whom, my great-great-grandfather, came and returned, and another, my great-grandfather, came to stay; to the rising and falling tides of Irish who washed ashore here in the twentieth century, building our roads, working our Main Streets, filling our senates and legislatures, rectories, schools, and universities; to the sons and daughters of friends in Moveen who left home in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s—Anne Murray and her sister Kay, a couple of the Carmodys, Downses and O’Sheas. They are still going out to America, although now they come and go as they please on 747s that every day fly over Moveen on their way to and from the airport at Shannon. Ultimatum has become an option. American Wakes have become bon-voyage parties as the young in West Clare become, like the young in Michigan, working tourists in a smaller world full of portable opportunities and multiple possibilities.
By the time Alex Haley’s Roots was published in 1976, I’d been back and forth to Ireland three times. Haley’s hunger for knowing and reconstructing and reconnecting with the past was one I’d got a whiff of in my early travels. When the TV series the book inspired was aired in January 1977, I watched with a hundred thirty million other Americans who, thanks to Haley’s gifts, saw, in the struggles of his family, something related to their own. For white Americans, it humanized blacks in a way that federal laws, however just and long overdue, had failed to do. For African Americans, it ennobled their struggle in a hostile world by connecting them to a formerly untold past.
When the African held his infant son, Kunta Kinte, up to the firmament and spoke his name into the dark face of creation, I understood the power of naming and keeping track of things, why all holy books begin with a litany of “begats,” and how much each of our personal stories owes to the stories of our families and clans, our kind and kin. Second only to the forced migration of the African slave trade, the tide of Famine and post-Famine Irish marked the largest single wave of immigration in U.S. history.
SO, I WANTED a book that honored those who stayed and those who went, to bridge some of the distance that always swells between people who “choose” a different path, or find some footing in a life with few choices. I wanted to understand the man who left, the better to understand the man who returned to Moveen, to understand the ones who went between and who would follow after.
I wanted something chatty and jaunty like a good night’s talk. Something that would find its market among even a fraction of the forty-some-million Americans alive today who trace their place back to the thirty-two thousand-square-mile island in the sea at the westernmost edge of Europe.
My agent and publishers oughtn’t to be faulted for thinking of a kind of travel memoir, something with a little something for everyone, something that would earn back its advance and then some. Something that would offset the losses on poetry. Truth told, it’s what I was hoping for, too.
The brother (about whom more anon), ever the raconteur, suggested at the outset a regimen of weekly audiences with himself and tendered Wednesdays with Patrick as a working title. “Or maybe Paddy—you know, for the folksy crowd—like that Paddy whiskey, easy sipping with a little bite. And maybe Thursdays, Tom. Yes, Thursdays with Paddy. That’s just the t’ing.” And the truth is I’d have no problem with that. He’s a great man in all ways with a skeptic’s temperament, a heart of gold, and a “fierce big brainbox,” as Martin Roche once said about J. J. McMahon, our neighbor in West Clare.
I wanted it all to be a gift, in thanksgiving for the gift that had been given me, of Ireland and the Irish, the sense of connection, and the family I found there and the house they all came from that was left to me.
SEPTEMBER 11 CHANGED all of that. The book I first imagined was no longer possible. Just as our sense of safety here, protected by oceans and the globe’s largest arsenal of weapons and resources, was forever shaken, irreparably damaged by the horrors of that day, so too was the sense that ethnicity is always and only quaint and benign.
Lost too was the luxury of isolation and purposeful ignorance of the larger world of woes, a taste for which I’d acquired in my protected suburban youth and overindulged throughout my adulthood—fattening, as Americans especially do, on our certainty that it will all be taken care of by whoever’s in charge.
I remember telling prospective tourists, fearful of what they’d heard about the “Troubles” in Ireland—the last century’s longest-running war in Western Europe—not to worry about a thing. Belfast and Derry were distant concerns, small towns in a tiny province—“little more,” I’d assure them, “than a bar fight in Escanaba or Munising.” I’d acquired the Irish gift for strategic understatement, too.
The day that terrorists bombed embassies in Africa, was it?—killing dozens or hundreds, I couldn’t say—I was shopping in Kilrush for kitchen things at Brews and Gleeson’s, certain that the troubles really didn’t concern me and that out by Dunlicky the mackerel would be plentiful and the walk to the sea would do me good, and nothing could be better than fresh fish and tea.
So maybe what I should have said is that ethnography, which formerly seemed a parlor game, seems more a dangerous science now, especially “the ethnography of everyday life,” because life, everyday life, here in the opening decade of the new millennium, constantly obscures, daily nullifies, and relentlessly confounds the needful work of such inquiry. The subgroup we were about to study is suddenly removed or written off by the first drafts of a history that our all-day-everyday news cycle proclaims.
“A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity,” proclaims the headline in the New York Times on April 8, 2004. Marc Lacey reports from the capital, Kigali:
This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinction by decree.
Ethnicity has already been ripped out of schoolbooks and rubbed off government identity cards. Government documents no longer mention Hutu or Tutsi, and the country’s newspapers and radio stations, tightly controlled by the government, steer clear of the labels as well.
It is not just considered bad form to discuss ethnicity in the new Rwanda. It can land one in jail. Added to the penal code is a crime of “divisionism,” a nebulous offense that includ
es speaking too provocatively about ethnicity.
As elsewhere, there are the politically incorrect.
A Tutsi woman, who was raped in 1994 by so many Hutu militiamen in the village of Taba that she lost count, said she has difficulty interacting comfortably with Hutu.
“I don’t trust them,” said the woman, who, identified only as J. J., testified about her ordeal before the international tribunal in Rwanda.
Tutsi and Hutu—such neighborly words—equal in syllables and vowel sounds, trochees and pleasantly fricative “t’s”: who’d ever guess that they accounted for eight hundred thousand deaths in a hundred days a decade ago, most by machete, that the rest of the world largely ignored.
While marking another anniversary of the Rwandan genocide this year, we are avoiding naming what is happening in Sudan’s Darfur region as “genocide.” That particular noun requires verbs—by international convention, something remedial would have to be done—whereas atrocity or ethnic cleansing leaves us options. The systematic rape, pillage, and slaughter of tribal Africans by Arab Janjaweed militia, armed by the Sudanese government, are, like the atrocities of the twentieth century—Armenians in Turkey, Jews of the Holocaust, Cambodians, Kurds, Bosnians, Nigerians, Bengalis—all lamentable mostly after the fact.
Asked whether the recent run of genocides might finally get it to “stick in people’s minds” that we’ve responsibilities, Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell, replies, “I think we tell ourselves, though, that that was the product of peculiar circumstances. ‘Oh, that’s Africa, you know, the tribes, they do that.’ ‘It’s the Balkans, this stuff happens in the Balkans.’ There’s a way that we otherize [my italics] circumstances that challenge our universal premises.” (Atlantic Unbound Interviews, March 14, 2003)
How do we otherize our fellow humans? How do we mistake them for something other than our kind? In what ways has our ethnicity poisoned the well of our humanity? Why must our religions so miscalculate our gods? If there is only one God, as all Muslims, Christians, and Jews believe, then isn’t the One we believe in one and the same? If there is no God, aren’t we only off by one? And if there are many, aren’t there plenty to go around? In the wake of that godawful September, after bombing the bejaysus out of Afghanistan, after bombing, invading, and occupying Iraq, a book about the forty shades of green I’d encountered driving around the Ring of Kerry seemed a little like a golf-bag urn—plastic, silly, curious, but idiotic. All I saw was forty shades of gray, and in each of them still forty more.
FROM THE POST-FAMINE cottage of my great-great-grandfather, to the Moveen my great-grandfather left in 1890, to the West Clare that Dorothea Lang photographed in the mid-1950s, to the Ireland I found in 1970, the greatest change in a hundred years was light—electric light. So says my neighbor J. J. McMahon, a scholarly and insightful man. It illuminated the dark hours, lengthened the evenings, shortened the winter’s terrible hold. Folks read later, talked later, went out in the night, certain their lamps would see them home. Still, life remained circumscribed by the limited range of transportation and communication. The immediate universe for most small farmers extended no farther than town, church, and marketplace, distances managed by ass and cart, or horse and trap, on Raleigh bike, or on foot—shank’s mare, as it was locally called. Communication was by gossip and bush telegraph, from kitchen to kitchen, with the postman up the road, with the men to and from the creamery, with the priest or teacher on their daily rounds, with women returning from market stalls. Talk was almost entirely parochial. The “wireless”—electric light’s chatty cousin—brought news of the larger world in thrice-daily doses whilst newspapers were read aloud, entirely. Still, these were one-sided communiqués. There was no escape, no geographical cures, no way to get out of the local into the world. Folks had to live with one another. This made them more likely to bear fellow feelings, to understand, to empathize. However much familiarity bred contempt—and it bred its share—the neighbors shared a common life experience, the same perils, the same hopes for their children, the same borders and limitations. They formed, if only by default, a community.
In the kitchens, shops, and snugs of those remote parishes, the visitor or stranger or traveler was, much like the bards of old, a bearer of tidings unheard before, like correspondence from a distant country, or a missionary or a circus come to town. The new voice at the fire relieved the tedium of the everyday, the usual suspects in the house, the same dull redundancy of the Tuesday that followed Monday, which in its turn followed Sunday, where the priest gave the same sermon he had last year at about the same time.
I was such a Playboy of the Western World, in the months of my first visit to West Clare. Deposed for hours on a variety of topics (music, money, presidential politics), and my opinion sought on all manner of things (the war in Vietnam, who shot Kennedy, the future of Ireland), I thought I must be a very interesting specimen indeed. It was years before I understood that, during those blustery winter evenings in Moveen, I provided only some little relief from habit and routine, what Samuel Beckett had identified years before as “the cancer of time.” I was not so interesting as I was something, anything, other than the known thing.
But today, the easier communications become, the easier it becomes not to communicate. The more rapidly we travel to the ends of the earth, the more readily we avoid our nearest neighbors. The more communing we do, the more elusive a sense of community seems. We are each encouraged to make individual choices, to seek personal saviors, singular experiences, our own particular truth. We make enemies of strangers and strangers of friends and wonder why we feel alone in the world.
Americans seem terribly perplexed at all the hatred of us in the world. Where, we wonder, are all those happy Iraqis who were supposed to greet us with smiles and flowers after we had liberated them? Where have all the flowers gone? Anthology? Antigone?
In his unstintingly titled How the Irish Saved Civilization, historian Thomas Cahill comments on page 6 on the tendency of one “civilization” to miss the point of an “other”:
To an educated Englishman of the last century, for instance, the Irish were by their very nature incapable of civilization. “The Irish,” proclaimed Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s beloved prime minister, “hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion [Disraeli’s father had abandoned Judaism for the Church of England]. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry [i.e. Catholicism]. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry [!] and blood.” The venomous racism and knuckle-headed prejudice of this characterization may be evident to us, but in the days of “dear old Dizzy,” as the queen called the man who had presented her with India, it simply passed for indisputable truth.
If this sounds a little like the conventional wisdom of the day, the policy and approved text on our “enemies in the war on terror,” then perhaps we should be on the lookout for “venomous racism and knuckleheaded prejudice” of our own.
Cahill goes on to make his case of how Irish monks and scribes kept the candles burning and the texts illumined through the Dark Ages and recivilized and re-Christianized Europe from west to east in what he calls a “hinge” of history. Cahill’s “hinges of history”—he has since done for the Jews and the Greeks what he did for the Irish—sound more than a little like what the German existentialist Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” from 800 to 200 BC, when most of religious thought was formed, an age marked by violence and upheaval.
Maybe it is time we looked to Ireland again for some clues to the nature of our ethnic imbroglios, our jihads and holy wars, and to how we might learn to live peaceably in the world with our “others.” Surely the Shiite and Sunni of Iraq have something to learn from the Catholics and Protestants of Belfast and from the citizens of the Republic of Ireland. For here is a nation with a history of invasion, occupation, oppr
ession, tribal warfare, religious fervor, ethnic cleansing, sectarian violence, and the tyrannies of churchmen, statesmen, thugs, and hoodlums. And yet it thrives on a shaky peace, religious convictions, rich cultural resources, and the hope of its citizens. It is a kind of miracle of civilization—where the better angels of the species have bested the bad. Such things could be contagious.
ON AUGUST 28, 1931, W. B. Yeats wrote “Remorse for Intemperate Speech,” a line from which this book borrows for one of its chapters and organizing principles. “Out of Ireland have we come./Great hatred, little room,/Maimed us at the start.” Yeats had witnessed and worked at the birth of a new Irish nation, had served as a Free State senator, and, after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, was at sixty-five the country’s public man of letters. An Anglo-Irishman who had ditched his people’s High Church Christianity in favor of swamis and Theosophists and his wife’s dabbling in the occult, he was likewise deeply immersed in the fledgling nation’s Celtic twilight, and torn between the right-wing politics of between-wars Europe and the romantic, mystic past of Ireland. His poem confesses and laments that reason and breeding, imagination and good intention are trumped by what he called “a fanatic heart.” The remorse is real. Surely the age in which we live requires such self-examination. In a world made smaller by its benign and malevolent technologies, out of whatever country we have come, great hatred, little room, maims us at the start. Regardless of our heritage, we carry from our mothers’ wombs our own fanatic hearts.
