Therese stepping in for a moment to offer a hearty congratulations to David Corbett on publication day for his latest novel, THE TRUTH AGAINST THE WORLD! If you missed David’s Take 5 interview about the book, please click HERE to read all about it. Congratulations, David!
Right around three years ago, the debate as to whether to capitalize “black” and “white” as ethnic-racial-cultural descriptions was circulating among a variety of sources, including the American Psychological Association (which had long argued for the capitalization of both), the Atlantic and Washington Post (which now decided to agree with the APA guidelines), and the Associated Press (which recommend lower case ‘w’ for white but capitalization of Black in its style guide).
One of the more frequently referenced arguments for not using a capital “w” for White was that it suggested the racial chauvinism of White Supremacy—who but White Supremacists actively identify as White in a racial sense and thus insist on capitalizing “white?”
But this reflexive rejection of “white” in a racial sense skated past a subtler, more compelling point. Up until the middle of the last century, most White people didn’t think of themselves as members of a racial group. We were “individuals” in the Enlightenment sense of distinct human agents.
There’s an inherent sense of privilege in that—by being White, I somehow magically rise above the tawdry business of racial designation. That’s for “those” people. And so you’re still in the implicit, unconscious trap of seeing Whiteness as a cultural escalator taking you upward to the racial mezzanine.
This issue hit home with particular force as I was working my way through various drafts of my latest novel, The Truth Against the World, which comes out today.
I’ve written about this previously here at Writer Unboxed, specifically of how I was warned off by an agent not to use a Black-Cambodian woman as a major character given the #ownvoices movement in publishing. (I had also made her gay, which proved no less problematic.)
So I had to ask myself: Who am I allowed to write about other than, as the old Ink Spots song puts it, we three: my echo, my shadow, and me?
I was raised a White Catholic male in suburban Columbus, Ohio. Though I had my share of family drama, boyhood fistfights, hopeless crushes and so on, I’ve never found those personal experiences compelling enough to generate the prolonged interest and focus a novel requires. (Stories, sure, but that’s another issue.) So in my newfound attempt to try to root my book in something “above me but as I am,” to paraphrase [read: butcher] Wallace Stevens, the part of my past that suggested something larger and more interesting than mere me resided in that conspicuous word: Catholic.
By my late teens I’d already shrugged off my faith, like a coat unsuited to the weather. What remained resided in the peculiar nature of the Catholicism that had pervaded my childhood: Irish Catholicism.
Now, in the genetic sense I personally can attest confidently to being only a quarter Irish.
The four Corbett brothers emigrated from County Cork in 1850, the youngest of whom was my great-great-grandfather. He married a young Irish woman named Katie and they gave birth to my grandfather, William Augustus Corbett. Check out the photo of him here with my mom as an infant and you’ll see how strong the resemblance is between me and him.
He married a young German woman from a small farm in Wisconsin, making my mom half German, half Irish, therefore my mere quarter. But given the resemblance to my mom’s dad, and the fact my mom was a classic Celtic redhead—milk-white skin, sparkling blue eyes—with a profound fondness for jokes and stories, I easily found myself identifying with that strain of my heritage.
That identification was intensified by the tutelage (read: brainwashing, grooming) I received from the Diocesan priests and Dominican nuns at Our Lady of Peace elementary and Bishop Watterson high school, many of whom were themselves Irish. I gained a distinct fascination with Ireland, its history, its legends and folk tales, its writers, its music. If I was inescapably White, this was an essential aspect of that Whiteness.
So, as I asked myself what I could write about with authority and authenticity that would both be interesting to readers and fascinating for me to explore in greater depth, that little island across the Atlantic snapped into focus.
However, even writing about what you perceive as your own cultural heritage doesn’t come risk-free. I have Irish writer friends who have particularly keen sensors for phony “Irishness” and its pretensions. I could readily predict getting slagged off by these friends if I were to march foolishly into areas I had no business entering. And the particular risk of presuming I might understand Ireland because I’m Irish-American is especially unforgivable, as it represents that peculiar form of blindness known as sentimentality.
I don’t mean a weepy fondness for the grand old songs that get dragged out every St. Paddy’s Day, though that’s part of it. I mean a failure to recognize the contradictions inherent in the Irish immigrant experience here, and how they resonate with life in the old country.
But if one is intent on ridding oneself of sentimentality when it comes to his cultural heritage, he better be prepared for some rude awakenings.
Racism and the Irish
Frederick Douglass remarked that the only place he had ever traveled where his skin color mattered not at all was Ireland. This only enhanced his astonishment at the vehement racism he encountered from Irish immigrants in the U.S.
One of the more glaring examples of that racism took place in 1863, during the Draft Riots in New York. Irish immigrants attacked Black people and torched their homes and businesses, including the Colored Orphans Home, killing over a thousand people, lynching at least eleven, and driving Blacks out of lower Manhattan and into Harlem. The reasoning: the Irish were being singled out to serve as cannon fodder in a “rich man’s war,” where someone with means could buy their way out of the draft. Even if the draftees managed to survive, they’d come home to discover that freed Blacks had taken their jobs—so went the logic from the Tweed and Tammany Hall contingent.
The self-serving notion at the heart of that justification, the idea that since we have suffered greatly we have the right to do “whatever is necessary” to protect whatever gains we now enjoy, is turned on its head by the singer Imelda May in a poem titled, “You Don’t Get to be Racist and Irish,” part of which reads as follows:
We emigrated
We immigrated
We took refuge
So cannot refuse
When it’s our time
To return the favour
Land stolen
Spirits broken
Unholy tokens of Christ
Nailed to a tree
That you hang around your neck
Like a noose of the free
(To hear her recite the entire poem, go here.)
I have elsewhere likened racism to alcoholism—it is not something one leaves behind forever, but something one struggles against “one day at a time.” Researching this book put me in greater touch with the shadowy reservoirs of my own racist thoughts and feelings, brought them into the light where I could better examine them, and strengthened my ability to recognize, resist, and reject them. But in exploring my “roots,” I could hardly ignore this element of my heritage.
Fatalism and a Reverence for Martyrdom
When over more than a thousand years you’ve been the target of multiple invasions, from the Vikings to the Normans to those ever-pesky English, and enjoyed few if any victories along the way, it’s little surprise that most of your heroes will be martyrs, a circumstance only intensified with how the Irish Catholic Church equates suffering with virtue.
But fatalism didn’t arrive with the Viking long boats. It was already there in Irish legend and folklore, so clearly represented in stories such as “The Children of Lir” and in the tragic ends of even the great heroes Cuchulainn and Finn mac Cumhal.
That pre-Christian gloominess proved impressively resilient, surviving even the arrival of St. Patrick. The fundamental focus of Irish Catholicism has remained the tragic figure nailed to his cross, not the triumphant Redeemer.
This had especially severe consequences once Ireland won its independence. When people invoke The Handmaid’s Tale to convey what an American theocracy might look like, my response is typically, “Why turn to fiction? Just look at what happened in Ireland from the 1920s to the 1990s.”
Church and state were joined at the hip, with Irish nationalism inseparable from Catholicism. The result?
- Poverty so severe and inescapable that the great Irish export remained its people.
- Women confined to second-class status, unable to work outside the home until the 1960s, with abortion and even contraceptives only accessible across the Irish Sea in England.
- The brutal, systemic abuse—sexual and physical—of children at the hands of priests and nuns, especially in the infamous industrial schools. Up until the 1990s, whenever those abuses were exposed, the Church and the government joined forces and actively suppressed the reports, blamed the victims and witnesses, and protected the perpetrators.
Learning all that made me more keenly aware of the strange, backhanded vanity that results from victimhood. It’s very seductive, like most forms of self-pity. It’s also stifling.
Quarrelsome, Clannish and Combative
George Bernard Shaw once quipped that if you ever want to roast an Irishman over a spit, you can always find another to crank the handle.
The history of Irish warfare is steeped in the lore of cattle raids, conducted for centuries between rival clans. This belligerent, tribal nature has undermined many an attempt to unite forces in the face of grave danger. Not even Brian Boru could unify the clans as he sought to drive out the Vikings
In the wake of defeat in the Jacobite-Williamite War of 1689-1690, Irish soldiers were banished from the island and went on to serve a number of Catholic monarchies in Europe, including both Austria and France, which were at war with each other. It would not be the last time Irish soldiers found themselves fighting fellow Irishmen. Irish soldiers would find themselves fighting not just countrymen but men they knew personally in the Mexican-American War, the Boer War, and civil wars in the United States, Spain, and Ireland itself.
Which brings to mind two other quotes I came across along the way:
Other men go into fights finely, sternly, or indifferently, but the only man that really loves it, after all, is the green, immortal Irishman. So there the brave lads from the old sod … laughed and fought and joked as if it [battle] were the finest fun in the world.
—Journal entry of army surgeon Thomas Ellis, as quoted in Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy by Ella Lonn
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse
What About Song, Poetry, Warmth and Wit?
Of course, not everything I discovered was so dour. Perhaps more important than the foregoing was a reacquaintance with a quality I can only describe as “otherworldly”—the understanding that the visible world is not the whole of the story. However you define it, “that which cannot be spoken” is no less real than what can.
Add to that the sheer joy in creativity, which is so prevalent in Irish music, literature, art, dating back to Celtic times.
Especially noteworthy is the love of language, specifically bending English to serve Irish cadences, and the love of storytelling that comes along with it. On that score, allow me to share the first few paragraphs of a New Yorker profile of the great contemporary Irish writer Sebastian Barry:
The Irish historian Roy Foster was recently asked to explain one of the great riddles of world literature. How was it, the interviewer wanted to know, that a sparsely peopled island on the margins of Europe had managed to produce such a hoard of canonical writers?…
Instead of reaching for grand theories to account for this remarkable literary surplus, Foster did that very Irish thing: he told a story. One summer, he said, he’d been on holiday in County Kerry when the trunk of his aged Volvo became jammed. At a nearby garage, Foster asked the mechanic if he ought to take the car back to the dealership. The mechanic didn’t think so. He gave the trunk a good whack with his wrench, and just like that it sprang open. “In matters like this,” the man said sagely, “Volvo dealers wield no special magic.”
For Foster, the words were a small but irresistible example of Irish English, the unusually pungent dialect, or set of dialects, native to his homeland …What [the great Irish writers] did was to remake English, molding the language of the ruling élite into something beguilingly subversive, an unstable compound of familiar and foreign. If you want to understand Irish literature’s extraordinary richness, Foster suggested, the special magic of everyday Irish speech is a good place to start.
I have been encouraged that several readers of The Truth Against the World have remarked on my “unique writing style” and “elegant, lyrical prose.” I attribute that to my decision to make the narrator-protagonist Irish, forcing me to at least attempt to live up to my roots.
How have you explored your cultural, ethnic, or racial roots in writing your stories? What new or unexpected aspects of your own psychological makeup snapped into clarity?
Leave a comment