PLAYING NOW: RODDY DOYLE'S "NEW BOY"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 20, Number 6 (June 2009), p. 10.

The so-called Celtic Tiger, a period of unprecedented economic prosperity in Ireland, seems now to have lost much of its bite. But its teeth marks—at least in the form of unprecedented social changes underwritten in large part by that prosperity—appear to be deeply permanent, and the title story of Roddy Doyle’s collection The Deportees (2007) provides one gauge of the transformation that occurred in Ireland during the Tiger's two-decade flourishing. Bringing back to literary life the character of Jimmy Rabbitte, Jr., the protagonist of Doyle’s first novel, The Commitments (1987), “The Deportees” is a sequel (of sorts) in that Jimmy, now married and with three children (a fourth arrives in the course of the story), still harbors the dream of managing a commercially successful group of Irish musicians.

In The Commitments, the band he organized performed American “soul music”—the songs of Otis Redding and James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett—under the premise articulated by Jimmy to the band members this way in the 1991 adaptation of the novel to the big screen, directed by Alan Parker: “Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud—I’m black and I’m proud.” In “The Deportees” Jimmy assembles an even more motley crew to perform the music mostly of Woody Guthrie, the so-called “dustbowl troubadour” whose songs both record and represent a substantial swatch of the historical fabric of depression-era American life. Besides the music they perform, the most conspicuous difference between Jimmy’s two bands is the ethnic makeup. Reflecting on the radical change that mass immigration from continental Europe, from Africa, and beyond brought to Ireland by the mid-1990s, Roddy Doyle writes in his Foreword to The Deportees: “I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one.” This is the country that Jimmy Rabbitte finds himself in two decades after the heyday of The Commitments when, bumped into and knocked over by a young Romanian on Parnell Street, then run over by an Italian bicycle courier, he experiences an epiphany that even the ultra-cosmopolitan James Joyce would have had trouble imagining exactly a century earlier. Helped to his feet by the Romanian lad and by an African woman, he realizes that his new band must literally embody Dublin’s new multi-ethnic demographic: “Jimmy’s head was hopping as he stood up. . . . But he was grinning. Jimmy had his group.”

Detailing the evolving dynamic—both musical and interpersonal—of The Deportees, the rest of the story reads as a sort of parable of multicultural co-existence in latter-day Dublin. Indeed, comprising an imposing lead singer from Africa named King Robert, a drummer from Moscow, a young woman guitarist from America, a djembe drummer from Nigeria, a woman singer from Spain, a Romanian father and son on accordion and trumpet respectively, a guitarist from Roscommon, a female survivor (still purple-haired) of Dublin’s punk scene of the late 1970s on bass, and sixty-year-old traveler Paddy Ward as an additional lead singer, the makeup of the band is fraught with tensions, suspicions and the potential for profound intercultural misunderstandings. But with Guthrie’s music of social conscience, and of social consequence, as their common denominator, The Deportees transcend their differences to emblematize—clearly—Roddy Doyle’s vision for a harmonious new Dublin.

In fact, that vision is the common denominator for the eight stories that constitute the collection, though it may be expressed most powerfully in the one titled “New Boy.” As its universally familiar title hints, this story is about a “new boy,” a black African immigrant named Joseph, on his first day in a classroom of fellow nine-year-olds. Immediately targeted for abuse by young hooligans Christian Kelly and Seth Quinn, Joseph has to learn how to interpret and to negotiate the social codes that operate in this microcosm of Dublin itself. Carrying, unbeknownst to his classmates, the emotional baggage of earlier childhood trauma in his war-torn native country (unnamed in the story), Joseph proves altogether capable of handling both the verbal and the physical bullying inflicted on him: his unruffled response to Christian and Seth actually ruffles them to the point that they come around to forming what would have seemed at first an unlikely alliance with the “new boy.” Constructed partly in opposition to the nosy classroom know-it-all Hazel O’Hara and partly in opposition to their well-intentioned but mostly ineffectual teacher (whose last name Joseph never catches), this alliance reinforces in comic fashion Doyle’s serious belief in Dublin’s—and Ireland’s—multicultural future.

Well, actually Dublin’s multicultural present, for in his typically witty fashion Doyle has the ultimate bond between Joseph and his tormentors hinge on their joint recognition of their teacher’s incessant repetition of the word “now.” Putting into the teacher’s mouth every imaginable variation on the word’s grammatical versatility—from a tut-tutting “Now now” to a general alert that there is schoolwork to be done to a stern warning regarding unacceptable classroom behavior—Doyle reminds his readers through the teacher’s unconscious verbal tic (in the course of the narrative she says the word at least twenty-eight times, with almost as many different inflections) that this story does represent Dublin now: that the city has changed utterly and irreversibly and that the entire populace must adjust and adapt and individuals must accordingly learn not only tolerance for but also generous acceptance of the “otherness” of others.

Aptly, then, the adaptation of “New Boy” as a short film by Irish-American writer and director Steph Green has been added to the roster of films available for free online viewing at the Responsibility Project website sponsored by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company as a spin-off of their publicly acclaimed series of “pay-it-forward” television commercials. The website explains: “We thought, if one TV spot can get people thinking and talking about responsibility, imagine what could happen if we went a step further? So we created a series of short films, and this website, as an exploration of what it means to do the right thing.” In an interview on the popentertainment.com website, Green explains how Doyle’s story first appealed to her: “It’s really interesting the degree to which we are strangers—and not strangers. What does it mean to have to sit next to someone? That’s the same in a classroom as on the bus. There is something about the humanity of that which I like looking at.” Starring Olutunji Ebun-Cole as Joseph, Norma Sheahan as the teacher, Simon O’Driscoll as Christian, Fionn O’Shea as Seth, and Sinead Maguire as Hazel, the adaptation was nominated for an Oscar in 2009 in the short film category. Just eleven minutes long, the film of “New Boy” can be viewed via YouTube.

McWILLIAMS AND FALLON: NEWS OF THE WORLD

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 20, Number 5 (May 2009), p. 18.

The economic news out of Ireland may be even more grim than elsewhere in the world. The government itself may be in danger of international bankruptcy. On a much smaller but no less urgent scale, after a giddy decade-and-a-half of riding high on the back of the so-called Celtic Tiger, literally countless individuals who have enjoyed prosperity beyond all imagining may be peering over the precipice of financial ruin. The higher the perch the harder the fall.

More an observer than a prophet, Irish economist David McWilliams began to chronicle both the lustrous coat of the Celtic Tiger and its dark underbelly in his book The Pope’s Children: Ireland’s New Elite, published in 2005. Both entertaining and enlightening, its mostly sardonic tone echoing the work of American political and cultural commentator David Brooks (especially his book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There), McWilliams’ book dates the turning point in Ireland’s “fortunes”—not so immediately economic as social and cultural—to the visit to the country by Pope John Paul II in 1979. Or perhaps that was the tipping point—the high-water mark of the country’s maintaining at least a nodding recognition of its traditional rural and Catholic self-identity (and accompanying “values”) before the emergence of several dominant new breeds of Irish men and women from the post-Papal floodplain of affluence generated by Ireland’s membership in the European Union.

McWilliams labels one of these emergent breeds “HiCos” (or Hibernian Cosmopolitans): the urban and urbane hybrid survivors of the war between diehard “Hibernians” on the far right wing and free-living “Cosmopolitans” on the far left who fought their battles over abortion, divorce, and immigration during the 1980s and ’90s. In 2005, McWilliams could optimistically posit these suave HiCos—with one foot rooted in the “traditional” camp and the other foot firmly placed “forward”—as the hope for the country’s future, the antidote to the bleak and cynical view of contemporary Ireland projected by the popular mass media, whom he labels the “Commentariat.” McWilliams’ optimism may be considerably diminished now, in light of Ireland’s particularly dire straits relative to the worldwide economic crisis: the future for the HiCos may be as uncertain as the future of the entire country.

Even more dire, however, may be the plight of another of McWilliams’ new breeds, the Decklanders—his name for Ireland’s rapidly increasing suburban population that during the glory years of the Celtic Tiger spread further and further out from Dublin and other city centers into housing estates with newly-constructed homes complete with every modern amenity . . . including American-style back decks. Focusing particularly on a subset that he labels “The Kells Angels,” McWilliams sketches their world thus: “they live in the outer suburbs, clustered around former market towns. For example Kells, Drogheda, Tullamore, Kildare, Naas or Gorey on the east coast, places like Watergrass Hill, Midleton, Carrigaline and Ballincollig around Cork, and towns such as Loughrea, Claregalway, Tuam and Barna in Galway. These are Ireland’s new suburbs and they will be the most vibrant part of the country by 2020, but today they are dormitories which empty out in the morning and fill up again in the evening. The great Irish suburban movie—Irish Beauty—when it is eventually made, will be based here starring an ageing Colin Farrell as a lecherous bank official going through a mid-life crisis.”

Well-educated and gainfully employed in cities as much as a ninety-minute bumper-to-bumper drive away from where they yawn and stretch at dawn and bed down at night, these Kells Angels—their long morning and afternoon commutes distancing them both literally and figuratively from the HiCos heart of Irish matters—may ultimately suffer the hardest fall as a result of Ireland’s drastic economic downturn. And then what?

Who knows? But McWilliams’ book seems to have proven inadvertently prophetic in observing the predicament of this substantial segment of the Irish populace living not only “beyond the Pale” but also beyond their financial means, racking up massive personal debt while relentlessly pursuing the never-ending materialistic dreams of the “Expectocracy”—a society in which everyone is middle-class and wanting to “trade up”: “I want the biggest fridge, the best holiday, the newest car, the loudest sound system, the healthiest food, the best yoga posture . . .”

In this respect, the “Kells” that McWilliams projects in The Pope’s Children could hardly be farther from the territory that poet Peter Fallon inscribed in “The Lost Field” more than a quarter-century ago . . . almost a decade before the Celtic Tiger came roaring into being. Read literally, Fallon’s poem is about a common-enough phenomenon in the through-other world of rural Irish property boundaries and deeds—a purchase-and-sale agreement for a parcel of land that may or may not exist: “Somewhere near Kells in County Meath / a field is lost, neglected, let by common law.” Bought from the hard-drinking and hard-nosed Horse Tobin, this unaccounted-for piece of outlying real estate has potentially costly ramifications for Fallon’s small-farming relatives who paid for it in good faith. For Fallon himself, committed to taking over the family farm in the townland of Loughcrew after returning home to Oldcastle from studying at Trinity College Dublin (“I think it exquisite,” he wrote in the title poem of his 1983 volume Winter Work, “to stand in the yard, my feet on the ground, / in cowshit and horseshit and sheepshit”), that missing plot of land is as much emblematic as actual: “My part in this is reverence.”

Originally included in Winter Work and reprinted in News of the World (Fallon’s selected poems published in both American and Irish editions, in 1993 and 1998 respectively), “The Lost Field” clearly expresses a valuing of property of a much different order than McWilliams’ “Kells Angels” would seem capable of by the turn of the new century. For Fallon, ownership is not mere material acquisitiveness but a sacred trust involving a relationship between person and place that has little connection to financial investment or commercial worth:

Thinks of all that lasts. Think of land.
The things you could do with a field.
Plough, pasture, or re-claim. The stones
you’d pick, the house you’d build.

Don’t mind the kind of land,
a mess of nettles even,
for only good land will grow nettles.
I knew a man shy from a farm
who couldn’t find a weed
to tie the pony to.

Looking to settle down not to trade up, seeking permanence not instant gratification, Peter Fallon plainly subscribes to certain “values” that, according to David McWilliams’ view of Ireland as the indiscriminately omnivorous Celtic Tiger, would soon become as lost to the Irish “Expectocratic” sensibility as that rumored “lost field” itself. “Imagine the world / the place your own windfall could fall,” Fallon writes, transforming the literal plot of land into an abstraction, an idea . . . or an ideal of unassuming and therefore, perhaps, more contented and more fulfilling living. Committing himself to the small world of Kells and environs, Fallon concludes his poem: “I’m out to find that field, to make it mine.” Is it too late for any of McWilliams’ Kells Angels to stake a similar modest claim?

SEAMUS HEANEY'S "FUNERAL RITES" AND JAMIE O'NEILL'S "FORGIVENESS"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 20, Number 4 (April 2009), pp. 16, 19.

Published in his landmark volume North (1975), Seamus Heaney’s poem “Funeral Rites” endures as a richly evocative contemplation of the sectarian violence that came to define life in his native Northern Ireland for the better part of three decades beginning in 1969. Included in part I of the volume, the poem is one of a series of poems mostly inspired by Heaney’s discovery of P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People (coincidentally published in English translation in 1969), a fascinating anthropological study of bodies buried in the bogs of northern Europe during the Iron Age and only recently unearthed, remarkably preserved, after several millennia.

Reflecting in his essay “Feeling Into Words” (1974) on Glob’s conclusion that many of these bodies “were ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess, the goddess of the ground who needed new bridegrooms each winter to bed with her in her sacred place, in the bog, to ensure the renewal and fertility of the territory in the spring,” Heaney recognized that “the religious intensity of the violence” in Northern Ireland needs to be understood not just in terms of the traditional social, economic, and political Catholic-Protestant sectarian divide in that province. Rather, it must be considered in terms of a truly archetypal “struggle between the cults and devotees of a god and a goddess”—the emblematically male crown of England, and Ireland conventionally feminized as “Mother Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the poor old woman, the Shan Van Vocht, whatever . . .”

Heaney’s first foray into the rich territory opened up by Glob’s book was “The Tollund Man” (published in his volume Wintering Out in 1972), which begins with the poet promising himself that he will go on pilgrimage to see in person the most famous of the bog bodies:

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.

The Danish city of Aarhus sounding as a homonym for “our house,” Heaney concludes the poem on a note of cold comfort indeed:

Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

“Funeral Rites” thus represents a further example of what Heaney described as his poet’s “search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament”—a search that he framed by way of touchstones lifted from William Shakespeare (Sonnet 65) and W. B. Yeats (“Meditations in Time of Civil War”): “The question, as ever, is ‘How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?’ And my answer is, ‘by offering befitting emblems of adversity.’”

Comprising three sections, each one in turn comprising eight, seven, and five slim unrhymed quatrains, the poem actually sits on the page as a visual emblem of Heaney’s overall poetic enterprise, which he described metaphorically in “Digging,” the opening poem of his first volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966):

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Coaxing the reader’s eye to scroll deeper and deeper down the page (“down and down / For the good turf”), “Funeral Rites” also takes the reader into darker and darker thematic ground belied by the relative innocence of the opening section, which begins innocuously enough: “I shouldered a kind of manhood / stepping in to lift the coffins / of dead relations.” For even while describing the common rite of passage into Irish male adulthood which involves attending wakes and serving as pall bearer at funerals, Heaney employs diction (“soapstone,” “igloo,” “glacier”) that resonates with a far-northern “word-hoard” (as he puts it in the title poem of North) that evokes not only Glob’s Scandinavian world but also the history and the legacy of the brutal Viking invasions of Ireland which began in the late 8th century and continued until the Battle of Clontarf in 1014:

Dear soapstone masks,
kissing their igloo brows
had to suffice

before the nails were sunk
and the black glacier
of each funeral
pushed away.

The auspiciousness of his word-choices notwithstanding, the second section of the poem actually goes back even further historically than the Viking invasions in search of “befitting emblems of adversity” as the local funerals become more numerous and their causes more nefarious with the explosion of sectarian violence in the North in the 1970s:

Now as news comes in
of each neighbourly murder
we pine for ceremony,
customary rhythms:

the temperate footsteps
of a cortège, winding past
each blinded home.

As telling as John Milton’s oxymoron “darkness visible” (describing Hell in Paradise Lost), that self-contradicting phrase “neighbourly murder” leads by way of the words “ceremony” and “customary” to an allusion to Yeats’s great poem “A Prayer for My Daughter” (1919), in which the poet asks: “How but in custom and in ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?” The custom and the ceremony that Heaney imagines in his time and place involves the “black glacier” of the funeral, now transformed into “a serpent,” being steered south of the border through “the Gap of the North” (the Moyry Pass, the route running out of south Armagh toward Dundalk) and on to “the great chambers of Boyne”—the series of 5000-year-old passage graves (most famously Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth) that dot the Boyne Valley in counties Louth and Meath. Invoking for the alert reader both the Battle of Moyry Pass (1600) and the Battle of the Boyne (1690), the very course of the imagined funeral procession is marked by milestones of Ireland’s violent history that must be laid to rest.

In the third section of “Funeral Rites,” the insidious serpent of violence sealed inside the passage grave by a massive stone, Heaney imagines the procession returning to Northern Ireland “past Carling and Strang fjords” (placenames reflecting the Viking legacy in Ireland), “the cud of memory / allayed for once, arbitration / of the feud placated.” Then, imagining the spirits dwelling with equanimity in that Irish burial mound, Heaney finally—directly licensed by the Nordic resonance of Glob’s book—inserts into his poem the spirit of Gunnar, a hero from the Icelandic Volsunga Saga, “who lay beautiful / inside his burial mound, / though dead by violence // and unavenged”: though slain by the mother of his enemy Atli, in Heaney’s interpretation Gunnar yet rests in peace because the cycle of violence ends with his death. Obviously, Heaney’s art of digging in this poem leads to parable-like implications regarding reconciliation and forgiveness between the “cults and devotees” in Northern Ireland.

And that is why I thought of that poem in all its richness and density when I recently viewed a very short film (8 minutes, 58 seconds) titled Forgiveness, scripted by Jamie O’Neill, best-known as the author of that remarkable novel of the Great War and the Easter Rising, At Swim, Two Boys (2001). The film links three historical figures: British-born diehard Irish nationalist Erskine Childers, executed by an Irish Free State firing squad in 1922; his son Erskine, who served briefly (1973-74) as President of the Republic of Ireland; and Kevin O’Higgins, Minister of Justice in the Free State and one of the men who had signed the execution order for the elder Childers. Not wanting to play “spoiler,” I will mention only that the film is premised on the anecdote that Childers requested of his 16-year-old son that he seek out and shake the hand of every man who had signed his death warrant. While the film speaks to a different time and place than Heaney’s poem, it nonetheless shares the poem’s concluding vision of hopefulness. Understated rhetorically and directed and acted with elegant simplicity, Forgiveness can be viewed for free on Jamie O’Neill’s website.