Tom Hayden - Article about 'Being Irish'

MakeEmLaugh

You may not have heard of Tom Hayden, but he is an American author, political and activist who - among many other things - was married to Jane Fonda for 17 years. Hayden is someone who very strongly identifies with his Irish ancestry.

He contributed to the collection 'Being Irish', edited by Paddy Logue, which was published in 2000, and of which I picked up a copy a few months back. His own essay was striking to say the least. He discusses his 'Irishness' in language which many may feel is strident, or even an appropriation of Irish culture.

Frankly, I think his essay was batshit crazy, particularly his repeated use of the word "race".

In general, how would Boards.ie users react to this?

When David Trimble said recently that Irish republicans need house-training, I heard my master's voice down through the ages, that of the Vikings, the British, and the WASPs, and knew I am Irish.

Now and then someone has to shit on the master's rug.

They have tried to house-train us for thousands of years. And to a degree, they have succeeded. They have occupied our souls and minds, not simply our lands. We have tried to be good colonial subjects, even post-colonial subjects, learning their language, deifying their culture, denouncing our rebels. And we have trained ourselves to shit properly. We've made vaudeville paddies of ourselves, tried to become respectable, lace-curtain, corporate, won honours for everything from prize-fighting to literature, and even elected an American president. We've tried of [sic] wash off every trace of the bog, even from our memory. We've done our best to ethnically cleanse our race.

But it's not enough, and try as we might, it never will be. The Irish soul is not British, not WASP. Those people need dogs to train. We are not dogs, nor are we good at being masters.

Plenty of Irish, of course, would be embarrassed by this whole discussion. After all our sanitary progress in becoming white Anglos, they say, let's shut the closet door on the past, or excommunicate anyone who refuses to be be house-trained. “The Filthy Irish Haven't Grasped the Hygiene Habit”, screamed a headline in the Irish Independent this year, the author complaining that we “believe tidiness is not important” (27 February 2000).

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times excels at reinforcing our shame. For St Patrick's Day this year, she recounted how she “blushed in childish embarrassment” when her parents led Irish parades in her youth. Even today, “The mere tap-tap sound that signals the approach of Riverdance” fills Ms Dowd with “dread”.

On the other side are sometimes found people of colour, applauded by self-hating Irish, who insist that we be classified with the master, that we are the Devil's kin, that we have chosen white skin privilege, and that the right to shit on the rug belongs only to descendants of Africa, Asia, Latin American and the American Indians. The Irish haven't really been tarted like dogs, they say, only like pets.

These differences among the Irish demonstrate that the struggle for the conscious of our race continues from generation to generation.

The Irish are rightly touted as a grand success story, proof of the melting pot thesis, an example to new immigrants. But the continuing price of our material success is disregarded because it spoils the myth. For the past 150 years, we have experienced high rates of schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism and domestic violence. Irish immigrants in England today have the most serious rates of suicide and mental illness of any immigrants in Europe. Even the sanest among us have lost our bearings because our history has been forgotten or sanitised. Our major universities rarely tell our story, filing us instead under British or European civilisation.

The most extreme measure of running from our past can be counted by the thousands of Irish Americans who visit the old country without ever entering the North. It is not a fear of violence that keeps them out – but a denial of our roots, and a preference for a more acceptable, if fanciful, identity.

We must re-inhabit our history. We are an old culture, ten times older than the United States. Our deepest identity is bound up with resistance to foreign domination. But we are more than warriors. Our forebears at Newgrange charted the universe through apertures that caught the rising sun on 21 December, the solstice. They were great scientists and dreamers long before they were yoked by colonialism to a shrunken concept of themselves. Our Celtic ancestor John Muir noted the conquest of our consciousness very well when he wrote that our God image “become very much like an English gentleman [who] believes in the literature and languages of England, is a warm supporter of the English constitution and Sunday schools and missionary societies.”

Why do I love being Irish? Because it makes me feel alive with all the possibilities and contradictions of the human conditions. We are both tragic and triumphant. We have assimilated but not submitted. My hope is that we assimilate in a new direction. It is not being fully Irish to assimilate only into the “English-speaking world”, as if that is there we belong. Because we have been colonial victims ourselves, we should identity with the non-English speaking world of indigenous cultures who live under oppression all to [sic] familiar to the Irish.

Our destiny is to be a global race, not a master race.

johnnyskeleton

Not sure this is a political issue Im afraid. The fact that one guy has a romantic notion that we are a nation of rebels who can eschew modern culture is all very well, but what exactly does he want to do about it?

OP please fill out the thread with a political dimenson or else I may have to close it.

zeffabelli

johnnyskeleton wrote: »

Not sure this is a political issue Im afraid. The fact that one guy has a romantic notion that we are a nation of rebels who can eschew modern culture is all very well, but what exactly does he want to do about it?

OP please fill out the thread with a political dimenson or else I may have to close it.

I can see how this is a political thread because the left is now all about identity politics, and race and gender is now politicised. Identity = lefty politics.

I think what the author is exploring is the contradiction in being both white and also historically an oppressed people and how this plays and competes within the narratives of multiple racial histories. For example talking about white male privalege....seems ironic to lecture the Irish about that.... they were also part of a slave trade across the Atlantic...

Immigration is always political and how these groups integrate, don't integrate and how the perceptions of the group identity then leave footprints for the children and descendants of that particular legacy within a political/economic dynamic.

glacial_pace71

I haven't read the book so can't comment on a chunk of text without a lot of caveats ... but ... Hayden seems to be conflating many different issues.

Firstly the Trimble example isn't a great one to use. Trimble felt he had potentially pro-Agreement unionists in his back pocket already so had moved on to the donkey-in-heat braying to meet the DUP-leaning hardliners. The 'house-trained' was an echo of Lord Brookeborough's "Big House" unionism condescendingly attempting to reach out to the Protestant mercantile class, i.e. in a time of unemployment he was urging them to only hire Protestants. The phrase re Catholics, "I wouldn't have one about the place", has been much recycled in political debate, and Hayden mightn't necessarily see the local NI political context. In the end many unionists (i.e. with a small 'u') got fed up, and although they voted for the 'Good Friday' Agreement (and NI Women's Coalition, Alliance etc in the first election) they drifted back to golf, rugby etc, e.g. what one Trimble adviser ranted as "tucking 'garden centre' Prods" who wouldn't vote Unionist but who still would support the continued existence of the UK of GB and NI in any referendum.

Secondly, Hayden seems to conflate the Irish-American experience with the Irish one generally. I remember about 15 years ago a chap called Ignatiev wrote a book about how the Irish "became White". But it's still contested territory: I've heard some of the most shocking racism from Irish-Americans who in the next sentence go on about discrimination, 800 years of oppression etc. And then turn around again and take pride in how all the dog-pissing-on-lamppost territoriality of the Irish and Italian communities kept Chicago from the 'white flight' phenomenon of other American cities. Btw the Irish as simian-featured neanderthals in the British Victorian 'Punch' cartoons had its echos in many mainstream US publications, e.g. WASPs still looked on Irish as 'other'. (A topical example might be O'Donovan Rossa, the term 'guerilla' being a pretext for many US papers to portray him as a gorilla).

On the related matter of the Irish in Britain, so many Irish people bristle at the term "Irish community in Britain", e.g. the 'Irish community' is the drunk-in-the-afternoon, wife-beating Mick of pick and shovel. Then many of those same non-Irish-community people find that they're not quite as 'white' as they thought they were! When I was living in England for a while I used to sometimes get a bit pissed off when someone would refer to the "Potato Famine", i.e. as a natural disaster killing off some potato-grazing bovine species, terrible tragedy etc but no understanding of production, distribution etc. Rather than **** on the carpet or drag my knuckles along the ground it was often more interesting to explore issues, as many, many English people have no idea about history, e.g. I'd often move away from discussion of the 1840s (so 'all in the past') to the 1940s and so to the Bengal Famine. It becomes less about natural disasters and more about political decision-making. Of course the genuinely racist will go down the rabbit hole of 'ah typical Indians, couldn't organise anything' or variations of Churchill's musings when faced with releasing food stockpiles intended for a future liberation of Europe, i.e. his preference for choosing "sturdy Greeks over yet more hungry Bengalis". Although many Irish, Scottish and Welsh would laugh, there is actually within English culture a strand that honours the sense of fair play, the championing of the underdog or praise of the amateur. But many people Irish people in Britain do find it difficult to work out the distinction between general English-Irish (anti-Irish) banter and genuine racism.

Where Hayden is correctly touching upon something is the collaborationist nature of some elements within Irish and Irish-American culture, e.g. the "they're field servants, filthy, drunk and violent ... I'm a respectable house servant. I can accompany my lords and masters in the front door ... when I walk a few respectful paces behind them, but they're good masters to have ... must keep that lot in the field under a good whip hand or they'll ruin it for all of us". In that sense yes ****ting on the carpet and mortifying the servant class is quite healthy. But it's ultimately futile.

Back to the Trimble example? The nationalists can probably safely say that they don't worry about the servants' entrance or front door: they pretty much own the house nowadays. I think in the Irish community in Britain and in Irish America to varying extents the whiteness/respectability moves in so many different dynamics there shouldn't be a rush to embrace the most simian of Irish actions/reactions under provocation etc.

johnnyskeleton

zeffabelli wrote: »

I think what the author is exploring is the contradiction in being both white and also historically an oppressed people and how this plays and competes within the narratives of multiple racial histories. For example talking about white male privalege....seems ironic to lecture the Irish about that.... they were also part of a slave trade across the Atlantic...

Immigration is always political and how these groups integrate, don't integrate and how the perceptions of the group identity then leave footprints for the children and descendants of that particular legacy within a political/economic dynamic.

Mod Note:

Sounds more suitable to humanities so I've closed this thread and people can post there if they wish.