heritageatplay

Posts Tagged ‘irish-american’

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On being Irish-American (Part Two)

In Culture, History, Reflections on July 7, 2010 at 2:38 pm

I want to be Irish. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s simply of consequence of American buffet style identity politics. You must be something in America, and it’s very hard to be American. No one is American, unless, well you are Native American and that’s not exactly American is it? American is the identity that some (white) people forced over those Native Americans, a supra-identity that was more club membership than a definition of character and heritage.

So friends and teachers and employers always recognized me as Irish. It was my “Mc” name and my brown hair and my writerly disposition. Americans have reacted to me as though there were some intrinsic Irishness that I couldn’t root out, a genetic expression rendered subtly in my personality.

But the Irish remind me I am not Irish. That identity is past recollecting, except in the general abstract recollection of the entire Irish people. Except in being Irish rather that from Cork or Munster or members of the Fianna (once upon a time). This is why St. Patrick’s Day is so popular in America: it isn’t just that “everyone’s Irish” on St. Patrick’s Day, it’s that on St. Patrick’s Day it is perfectly acceptable to honor your heritage in the most abstracted manner. No one remembers the feast days for the patron saints of their villages, everyone celebrates Patrick, and drinks Guinness (rather than a more local brew) and laughs about fairies, lepherchauns, and green things. One day for an identity lost. Raise your glasses!

No, my family were not there to be Fenians in the late 1880’s or Provisionals at the Easter Uprising. They didn’t wage guerilla war on British Black & Tans. They did not defiantly speak Irish. They did not ratify the treaty that bifurcated Ireland. They never voted in an Irish election.

I have never heard a family member recite Irish. We speak English. We hold American passports, and vote in American elections.

And all the while, we carry forward names whose previous holders we can only thinly see as we look back over the sea wondering at an origin.

-ZM

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On being Irish-American (part one)

In Culture, History on July 7, 2010 at 10:03 am

My grandfather was the son of an Irishman. No one knows from where in Ireland he came, although popular tradition claims it was County Cork. I have never doubted that my grandfather was Irish. The family photographs make him look as regally Irish as Ronald Reagan, who was once welcomed to a tiny town in rural Ireland where Reagan’s own grandfather had- so they say- once left for a new life in the States.

My grandfather’s father does not survive in photographs. But the house he built to raise his American children in still stands. In a Real Estate listing it has been described as a three bedroom single family home, but in the early 1920’s, over eight family members lived together there.

My grandfather is a beloved figure in family memory. He never drank, despite his heritage and its stereotypes, but he did love pubs and the social scene they offered. He was a man of stories- so they say- who could find the charming and the remarkable in old homes, busy cities, quiet towns, or old saloons. On the GI Bill, he took college courses for over forty years, grabbing seminars at Georgetown, Columbia, and Brown, before finishing his degree at Harvard University and walking with the 21 year olds as a 60-somethng year old college grad.

His diploma, gorgeously framed, is in the attic in the home his father built. I have seen it. It is a fact.
But my grandfather’s father is someone who sits just over the edge of the horizon in family memory. What can be said of him? Who could know something of him to say something? And his Irishness, likewise out of sight over a sea of memory, is at best an abstract thing. We are Irish, yes, it seems obvious. But what of that Irishness? What stories have we who are so American we go looking and hoping for something of that old heritage we ran away from?

Could we even be Irish?

The modern Irish I know have told me quite clearly I cannot be Irish.

“Have you ever been to Ireland?” they ask. “Do you have family there? Do you speak Irish?”

I haven’t. I don’t. I can’t.

There is no Irish to recover in me or my family save the oddest remnant of heritage: pride.

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