Dazed In The Life

One of my English Literature courses this year is entitled “Post-Colonialism and Irish Studies”. For anyone who has ever studied English Literature, and particularly Literary Criticism, you will know what Post-Colonialism means. Or rather, you will know that you’re not supposed to know what Post-Colonialism means. The argument rages - admittedly, with all the violence of a damp tissue – in the critical sphere about the word Post-Colonialism: what it means, whether it can mean anything, whether it means several things or nothing, whether it’s a valid term in the first place, when exactly the ”Post” describes, even whether it should be hyphenated or not. So, riveting stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

For the non-English nerds, let me enlighten you. I’m could receive a flood of angry comments for the following, but I’m going to give you what I understand as “Post-Colonialism” in as straightforward a way as possible – and this isn’t a straightforward subject. Basically, Post-Colonial studies deals with the literature of nations which have experienced colonial rule - especially, it seems, members of the former British Empire – and explores the factors at play within that literature. Or something.

At a basic level, it looks at how culture - literature, in this case - of occupied countries evolves under colonial rule. Frantz Fanon describes three stages of literature under colonial rule: the first, when the literature is a mirror-image of the colonial culture’s literature and caters solely for that audience; second, after an awakening, begins to question the imperial rule, often looking to the past and seeking to establish a new sense of nation and a history and culture which may or may not have existed (in an Irish context, the literary revival, Yeats, Synge et al.) – that still may not cater to the entire “nation” but only to the intellectual and upper classes; thirdly, once that literature opens out and a wider national consciousness is established, there is outright literary war waged upon the occupying country.

There are loads and loads of terms and nuances and arguments which attend the discourse of post-colonialism. At the heart of post-colonial literature, however, there lies a constant search to establish the nation, to define what it is to be Indian or Nigerian or Irish. Some authors reject the former colonial literary influences entirely, others adopt and adapt them to their own hybridic ends.

And that leads me to my curious title. Ireland was occupied and ruled, in various guises and forms, by England for nearly 800 years. Tommy Tiernan’s joke in his first DVD runs as follows: “What does it mean to be Irish? It means your not fuckin’ English.” And that, it seems, was basically it. For 800 years. Ireland defined itself largely on the basis that we were a small nation being “supressed” by a bigger one. Heroes rose and fell, a history and folk tradition was created around Irishness as a romantic and sorrowful ideal. Ireland’s culture of suffering was a defining feature of our literature and, indeed, our politics. We were Irish – and everything that went with that term: repressed, downtrodden but merry, artful, sorrowful, sufferers – because the English were in our country and we were not English.

That’s Irish history in as crude, nationalistic and blatant a form as possible. But now? Can the same be said? What does it mean to be Irish now? Now that Ireland (or most of it, anyway) is independent, now the English are gone, now we are prosperous thanks to the legendary Celtic Tiger, who are we? We can’t continue to be Irish by our non-Englishness. The mythic Ireland, de Valera’s Ireland, Synge’s Ireland, Ireland of the sorrows is an underlying thread in Irish culture even now, an endemic part of us, but it is no longer our be-all and end-all.

Paul Durcan, the poet, in one of his recent collections, scrabbles around on golf courses looking for Ireland – are the golf courses the new English, do we define ourselves by them? I think it is unsurprising that the renowned Irish poets of today, those who are most widely read and who are, perhaps, most successful, are the Ulster Poets: Heaney, Mahon, Longley, Carson and others. Their most important work, their best work, the stuff we are all beaten over the head with at Leaving Cert level, was written at the height of the Troubles. The Ulster Poets were writing in a Northern Ireland gripped by violence, where the culture was one of opposition: You were Irish or English, Catholic or Protestant, Green or Orange. The nation - or non-nation is perhaps more accurate – was defined by its very indefinition, by its war, by its relationship with England and with its own history. The Northern Poets had a meaning, a focal point. Durcan has golf courses.

Down south, we are blessed in our stability but we are also wracked by something of an identity crisis. We are richer materially but poorer spiritually. We are independent Ireland but Ireland is now a multicultural melting-pot. We have a past which was a march focused on what is now our present, but we don’t know where our present is now leading. We are building a nation but destroying the countryside which made the Emerald Isle so emerald. We thought the English government was corrupt but now can’t trust our own politicians. We are great singers, artists, writers and sportsmen but we can’t bear to look at ourselves without seeing something to be cynical about.

I’m “very Irish”, as one of my English friends has pointed out. I love so much about Ireland and I would find it very difficult to leave – if only for the fact that I’d miss the rain, Barry’s Tea, All-Ireland Final day and me mammy, like any other Irish male. And yet I wonder about what it really is to be Irish. I believe that an intense awareness of our past, our suffering, our heroes and, yes, our language and legends is what makes up much of the Irish person – maybe even a bit of “not being English” when there’s a sport’s match against the old enemy! But that isn’t enough anymore. It isn’t enough to be a colonised people anymore, because that colonial enemy isn’t there – dammit man, some of my best friends are English! And I can’t bludgeon them with a shillelagh and luascadh around their dead bodies, throwing shamrocks into the air and singing “A Nation Once Again”, like in the good ol’ days. Nor do I want to – because we’re all grown up after all. As I say somewhere else in this blog, the English have played rugby in Croke Park, our colonial past has been left behind.

And where does that leave us? Turning off The Corrs CD in the Merc as we pull up at the K-Club for a quick round with Fintan and Ruairí, before a quick bite at Guilbaud’s and a few cocktails in Krystle with the Leinster rugby team? Call me flippant, but you have to wonder: Is this it? And it’s not it, of course – it’s the life of a lucky few but it seems like it’s the new dream to which the country must aspire, like independence once was. Certainly, the question remains relevant. What exactly does being Irish mean anymore? What do we want to do with ourselves? Answers please on a postcard.