Awake, I am here in France.
Pádraigín Haicéad, early 17th century (from An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed, Seán ÓTuama and Thomas Kinsella editors and translators, poem #27)
When I sleep I’m in the Ireland of Conn.
Who would choose to watch and wake?
I am watchful – to suckle sleep.
Like so many Americans before me, my quest to unearth my Irish roots began with a vague, romantic notion of long-sunken coffin ships. Just glancing into books where the names and dates of my ancestors lay, I figured, I’d stir up the dust of their deaths, and in so doing, I’d activate the curses they laid on their English landlords, those greedy idolaters who sold their souls along with the bodies of the starving farmers who worked so loyally to make their masters rich…
But instead of standing with my mother on some windy mound in County Mayo, looking over the soil our ancestors once tilled, we found ourselves entering a mini-van on the Aran Island of Inishmore with a local guide and three French tourists. Our driver spoke English—well, but with the accent and syntax of someone who had learned it as a second language. “It’s strictly Irish at home now,” he confirmed for me when I asked. “With the tourists it’s English.” From the backseat of the mini-van I heard, “Oh, la la, ce sont des Amerlochs…”
“Vous êtes d’où en France?” I asked to let them know I was in on their little joke.
The eyes nearly popped out of their heads. “Beh? Le sud.”
“Quelle ville?”
“Montpellier.”
“Eh, oui, je le connais.”
The driver was pointing out a local farmer to our left. “Oh, look! There’s Paddy digging up the potatoes.” He waved at Paddy who waved back. My mother and I looked out. “It’s a bit early this year, but it looks like a good crop.”
The French tourists were mumbling something about how shocking it was to be asked to gawk at the local peasants. The driver started telling my mom about his own children. They were all in the United States: one in Boston, one in San Francisco, and one somewhere else. “San Francisco is the place they be going now,” he said. I asked him why everyone went to the States now that they had the EC passports that enabled them to work in any European country. “Some of them be going there now, that’s a fact. But not many. I don’t know how to explain why, but somehow the United States feels a lot closer than France or Italy, even if it’s on the other side of the ocean now.”
I was too busy trying to screen this through the French people’s perspective. I felt their smirk welling up behind me. They mumbled something I couldn’t understand. Something with the word “American” in it. I knew exactly what they must have been thinking: “Look! Their fucking MacDonald’s culture has taken over even this remote peasant culture. Look at this driver kissing up to these rich Americans.” They hadn’t been paying attention when the driver had mentioned that it was his very own kids who were living in the States along with the kids of almost everyone from these islands. Living there because generations of families had sought refuge there from famine…
I was getting ready to start singing the hymn of the IRA just to make some sort of absurd point, but for starters I wasn’t even sure there was one—a hymn, that is.
I just tuned them out completely and tuned into my mother’s conversation with the driver. Not terribly concerned about the famine at the moment, they were discussing the O.J. Simpson trial.
“I can’t believe he got off.”
“Nor I,” he responded.
My first impulse was to mourn the spread of the television virus to this lovely island. But wasn’t that a bit French of me, I thought? Here was my Chicagoan mother and an Aran Islander, each having experienced life on vastly different parts of the planet, yet they were able to discuss everything from potatoes to Chicago Streets to the murder trial of a black American football star without the slightest hesitation or mal-entendu. They were both passionately interested in that stupid trial, regardless of however lame it seemed to the polished sensibilities of the more aloof passengers in the backseat of which I had nearly become a member. Well, not really. I was neither up front with my mother and this old man, nor was I in the back with the French tourists who’d apparently decided that information without a direct bearing on French culture was not worth paying attention to.
A general cure for warts is to rub a snail on each wart and then impale the snail on a thorn tree. As the snail withers on the thorn, so will the wart till it drops off entirely.
from The Middle Kingdom: the Faerie World of Ireland by Dermot Mac Manus
Of the two groups, I decided finally that I would be better off with the one in the front seat, even if I had to spend a lot of wasted hours talking about the latest media garbage. At least that conversation was more free-flowing. I leaned forward. The driver told us that he was paying off his mini-van little by little. That his neighbor was a Swiss lady who’d learned to speak fluent Irish. That the perfect white wall over there was hand built by a local man, one stone at a time…
He let us out at the site of the Seven Churches. We took pictures of the monastic ruins, lost among the boulder walls that divide Inishmore like a big kidney-shaped checkerboard. Of course, the photos would never be able to give the slightest idea of the place to someone who hadn’t been there. For starters, rainbows seldom show up well in reproductions. Nor do massive layered clouds like the ones looming behind the inevitable Celtic crosses.
We walked up to Dún Aonghasa on Ireland’s scaled down version of China’s wall. We had our raincoats and umbrellas, then bright sunshine, then the umbrellas again. Photos render the jaggedness of the cliffs into scenic postcard pics, never capturing the subtlety of the difference between the ancient human forts and nature’s own abrupt walls. That beauty goes back further than the Pharaohs…