Beware of the Risen People
On my last morning in Dublin, I woke before most of the Saturday-morning crowd was up and moving at the hostel. I don’t absolutely mind staying in hostels, but it gets old after a while – especially after some folks came in at three in the morning and left the door open for light for over half an hour before they finally went to sleep. Also, for some reason, this particular hostel has a smell to it that I’m pretty sure is an institutional cleaning fluid, but to me it is the precise smell of one of the dredges that I’ve spent too much time on - and that’s not something I want to smell if I don’t have to.
I set my pack in luggage locker of the hostel, checked out, and left in the direction of the docks. Not because of the docks themselves, but because river promenade leading to them is where the famine memorial statues sit, facing out to sea. Six figures – I counted them again – and a ragged dog, forever looking toward the sea for salvation from the ravages of the starvation years. One million dead and one and a half million departed from the Irish shores, all implied in those seven figures. I wanted pictures of them, so that’s where I went.
From there I went back to Temple Bar to find a second breakfast, since the hour-long slow bus out to the airport would likely cut right into the time I would be getting grouchily hungry. I settled into the most authentic-looking place I could find, a hole in the wall playing Irish music on the radio and serving Irish breakfasts of eggs and beans and toast and potatoes. I opened the book I’d been carrying around and continued to read, realizing that the streets and the monuments and the place names that I’d been seeing outside were the same ones described into this fictionalized but historically rather accurate version of the events of the 1916 uprising and the following years of war.
And it struck me that through all places I’d seen of Dublin in the last three days, it was the jail that told the most about where Ireland had come from to get to where she is now. I suppose this is somewhat true in any nation – that you can track social trends and attitudes by who gets thrown behind bars – but rarely in the developed world is the history of a nation so completely and accurately told through the story of its most notorious prisons. The story of Kilmainham – the famine, the rebels, the civilian warriors locked and executed inside, the etching on the wall where Patrick Pearse warned his captors “Beware the risen people” – is the story of Ireland’s most terrible moments and most victorious moments, even just before the nation turned on itself and, lacking the British to wage war against any more, began to eat its own.
That got me to thinking about the famine, and how sometimes the worst times stand at the helm of a nation and steer it to the places it is bound to go. One display at Kilmainham noted that participants at the time considered the 1916 Easter Rising that sparked the war to oust the British just another episode in an 800-year occupation of Ireland by her British neighbours. Why, after 800 years of strife, did Ireland finally rise to throw off the occupiers? In large part, that can probably be traced back fifty years earlier to the famine. Partly because many of the displaced Irish happened onto American soil as our own Civil War raged, and many of those brought their mercenary experience and combat pay home to Ireland to raise the earliest trained militias against Britain. But partly also because the famine, according to many, was not so much a natural failure of the potato crop, but an act of British genocide against the Irish. Though there are also many more scholarly versions of these events, Sinead O’Connor had this to say about it:
It was with this recent memory of a million dead and another million and a half departed forever from Irish shores that Ireland finally galvanized against Britain and wrought their independence out of all but the northern-most counties, which are still the subject of much violent contention today. There’s a lesson in there somewhere – something about a threshold of mean-ness that a people can take before they rise up, and something about the way that that mean-ness comes back to haunt those who perpetrate it. And something too about the difficulties a new nation has in ruling itself fairly after years of occupation – something that might be a useful consideration for those who think that invasions and instantaneous “liberations” are an effective form of intervention against tyranny.
So as I prepare to depart from Dublin for British shores, I am no closer to the story of why my ancestors picked up and moved to America. But I am a little closer to understanding that without the famine and the Irish diaspora of the following fifty years, my French-descended grandmother would never have met a short Irishman named Eddie and given birth to my mother and aunt, who then gave birth to myself and my siblings and my cousins. To quote something that Barbara Kingsolver once said about post-colonial Africa – our legacy is a world of hurt and cross-pollination, and we take it from there.
And at least for a couple of shining generations, the dream of those who left the Irish shores a hundred fifty years ago has come true. The American descendants of the famine diaspora survived the Great Depression, went home to Europe to fight two world wars, bootstrapped themselves into the post-war boom, and gave birth to their portion of the most prosperous generation humankind has ever produced. And Ireland has come into her own too – with the rise of the so-called Celtic Tiger economy of the last ten to fifteen years, the shores of the Liffey are now lined with luxury high-rise condos that would feel right at home in San Francisco or New York or any gentrified American town. They beckon the wealth of the global economy, while the six figures at the riverside remember a time when the early tentacles of globalism left the nation of Ireland to starve while England fed her imperial armies – and warn of dangers of rising cost of wealth once again displacing the poor from Dublin’s shore.
So now I understand, when I look at those famine-struck figures on the riverbank, that when they march their eternal trudge toward the sea with faces looking forward, that what they look forward to is me, and my brother, and my sister and my cousins and the millions like us in America who descended from their struggles into something better, and the thousands like me that come back every year trying to find something they might call roots.
On the journey home, I finished reading the Doyle book, A Star Called Henry. It ends at the start of the civil war, when the Republic was still new and not yet blood-marked by the years when Irish tore at Irish for the right to determine how independence would look. The novel captured the complexity well – the way that freedom fighters often demand blood from those they purport to be liberating, the way that corruption runs the ranks of rulers and rebels alike, the way that even an oppressed people can turn their hatred on anyone less privileged than themselves. The way that history seems to like to arrange itself.
Bus to the airport. Short flight over the narrow straights that separate two island nations. Slow train back to King’s Cross. Quick walk to the west.
Back to the imperial capital. Home, for now, to London.
I set my pack in luggage locker of the hostel, checked out, and left in the direction of the docks. Not because of the docks themselves, but because river promenade leading to them is where the famine memorial statues sit, facing out to sea. Six figures – I counted them again – and a ragged dog, forever looking toward the sea for salvation from the ravages of the starvation years. One million dead and one and a half million departed from the Irish shores, all implied in those seven figures. I wanted pictures of them, so that’s where I went.From there I went back to Temple Bar to find a second breakfast, since the hour-long slow bus out to the airport would likely cut right into the time I would be getting grouchily hungry. I settled into the most authentic-looking place I could find, a hole in the wall playing Irish music on the radio and serving Irish breakfasts of eggs and beans and toast and potatoes. I opened the book I’d been carrying around and continued to read, realizing that the streets and the monuments and the place names that I’d been seeing outside were the same ones described into this fictionalized but historically rather accurate version of the events of the 1916 uprising and the following years of war.
And it struck me that through all places I’d seen of Dublin in the last three days, it was the jail that told the most about where Ireland had come from to get to where she is now. I suppose this is somewhat true in any nation – that you can track social trends and attitudes by who gets thrown behind bars – but rarely in the developed world is the history of a nation so completely and accurately told through the story of its most notorious prisons. The story of Kilmainham – the famine, the rebels, the civilian warriors locked and executed inside, the etching on the wall where Patrick Pearse warned his captors “Beware the risen people” – is the story of Ireland’s most terrible moments and most victorious moments, even just before the nation turned on itself and, lacking the British to wage war against any more, began to eat its own.
That got me to thinking about the famine, and how sometimes the worst times stand at the helm of a nation and steer it to the places it is bound to go. One display at Kilmainham noted that participants at the time considered the 1916 Easter Rising that sparked the war to oust the British just another episode in an 800-year occupation of Ireland by her British neighbours. Why, after 800 years of strife, did Ireland finally rise to throw off the occupiers? In large part, that can probably be traced back fifty years earlier to the famine. Partly because many of the displaced Irish happened onto American soil as our own Civil War raged, and many of those brought their mercenary experience and combat pay home to Ireland to raise the earliest trained militias against Britain. But partly also because the famine, according to many, was not so much a natural failure of the potato crop, but an act of British genocide against the Irish. Though there are also many more scholarly versions of these events, Sinead O’Connor had this to say about it:
OK, I want to talk about Ireland
Specifically I want to talk about the famine
About the fact that there never really was one
There was no "famine"
See, Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes
All of the other food, meat fish vegetables,
Were shipped out of the country under armed guard
To England while the Irish people starved
It was with this recent memory of a million dead and another million and a half departed forever from Irish shores that Ireland finally galvanized against Britain and wrought their independence out of all but the northern-most counties, which are still the subject of much violent contention today. There’s a lesson in there somewhere – something about a threshold of mean-ness that a people can take before they rise up, and something about the way that that mean-ness comes back to haunt those who perpetrate it. And something too about the difficulties a new nation has in ruling itself fairly after years of occupation – something that might be a useful consideration for those who think that invasions and instantaneous “liberations” are an effective form of intervention against tyranny.
So as I prepare to depart from Dublin for British shores, I am no closer to the story of why my ancestors picked up and moved to America. But I am a little closer to understanding that without the famine and the Irish diaspora of the following fifty years, my French-descended grandmother would never have met a short Irishman named Eddie and given birth to my mother and aunt, who then gave birth to myself and my siblings and my cousins. To quote something that Barbara Kingsolver once said about post-colonial Africa – our legacy is a world of hurt and cross-pollination, and we take it from there.
And at least for a couple of shining generations, the dream of those who left the Irish shores a hundred fifty years ago has come true. The American descendants of the famine diaspora survived the Great Depression, went home to Europe to fight two world wars, bootstrapped themselves into the post-war boom, and gave birth to their portion of the most prosperous generation humankind has ever produced. And Ireland has come into her own too – with the rise of the so-called Celtic Tiger economy of the last ten to fifteen years, the shores of the Liffey are now lined with luxury high-rise condos that would feel right at home in San Francisco or New York or any gentrified American town. They beckon the wealth of the global economy, while the six figures at the riverside remember a time when the early tentacles of globalism left the nation of Ireland to starve while England fed her imperial armies – and warn of dangers of rising cost of wealth once again displacing the poor from Dublin’s shore.
So now I understand, when I look at those famine-struck figures on the riverbank, that when they march their eternal trudge toward the sea with faces looking forward, that what they look forward to is me, and my brother, and my sister and my cousins and the millions like us in America who descended from their struggles into something better, and the thousands like me that come back every year trying to find something they might call roots.
On the journey home, I finished reading the Doyle book, A Star Called Henry. It ends at the start of the civil war, when the Republic was still new and not yet blood-marked by the years when Irish tore at Irish for the right to determine how independence would look. The novel captured the complexity well – the way that freedom fighters often demand blood from those they purport to be liberating, the way that corruption runs the ranks of rulers and rebels alike, the way that even an oppressed people can turn their hatred on anyone less privileged than themselves. The way that history seems to like to arrange itself.
Bus to the airport. Short flight over the narrow straights that separate two island nations. Slow train back to King’s Cross. Quick walk to the west.
Back to the imperial capital. Home, for now, to London.
posted by skylanda at 6:38 PM
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