Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary, Let not our naive labours have been in vain!¹
The word‘diaspora’evokes an idea of persons not only dispossessed and mar-ginal but also in some sense having lost some of their intrinsic humanity, and this notion extends to the more particularly defined categories of‘refugee’and of ‘asylum seeker.’ Contrast the horror of such exigency with the embracing arms of national identity and community especially as created, bestowed and in-herited by the sovereign statehood of the West. Yet both‘diasporic’identities and those arising from national certainties flow principally from imaginative and symbolic streams which become hardened into‘realities’only by policy, by prac-tice, by pragmatism. This chapter seeks to explore some links in the imaginative realm as exemplified in particular by the Irish-American nexus. Through the prism not only of policies but also with an additional glance at the poetry of Derek Mahon, a poet with a reputation for dealing with the concerns of the dia-spora, it is hoped that further insight may be forged in apprehending the delicate interplay between the worlds of politics and the imagination.
Both the United States of America and the Republic of Ireland have power-ful visions of their discrete national identities, identities disseminated around the world through literature, art, film and the media. Moreover, these identities are frequently tied together, not just by historical fact but by romanticized at-tachment. Many earlier Hollywood films, from National Velvet to The Quiet Manin various ways cement and promote this vision of a special attachment and a number of scholars have explored the implications of such idealization to the politics of identity.² Moran (1999) discusses the utilization of sentimental
Derek Mahon, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”[], in Derek Mahon: Selected Poems (London: Penguin,):.
National Velvet,afilm starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney was released by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. In;National Velvet was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being“culturally, historically, or
aes-and romanticized visions aes-and images of Irish national identity in the interests of the political lobby for support for Home Rule both at home and abroad,³ whilst McCarthy and Hague (2004) explore the
[…] oblique references (via discourses of Englishness) that can only be understood within a racialized problematic […]. While we recognize that Celticism is an ambiguous and malle-able identity availmalle-able to a wide range of political projects, we conclude that in the contem-porary United States it is being used primarily for reactionary purposes in ways that make a mockery of the legacy of dispossession and injustice its adherents claim as their own.⁴ Arguably, one field of political engagement in particular runs the risk of exem-plifying such a distorted use of the idealized relationship–that of immigration policy. Indeed, current proposed American immigration policy change has been somewhat dominated by news of an Irish lobby. Bette Browne describes a “last-ditch effort as St Patrick’s Day approaches to win Republican support for immi-gration reform that would benefit thousands of Irish illegals across the United States,”⁵ while Ted Hesson (2013) referring to the same movement, notes that
“Listening to the immigration debate in the Senate, discussing visas for the Irish is a rare moment when the conversation shifts from questions of the econ-omy and‘rule of law’to sentimentality.”⁶
Lee (2009) traces a less than romantic early hostility towards Irish immi-grants to America,⁷where Irish workers lived in slums and were only marginally freer than the slave population, tied to oppressive contracts and often paid in vouchers redeemable in company shops. Nevertheless, the imaginative force of the idealized relationship continues to exert power, whilst the discrete identities
thetically significant.”National Velvet, dir. Clarence Brown, tx.(United States: Metro-Gold-wyn-Mayer,);The Quiet Man,dir. John Ford, tx.(United States: Republic Pictures,
).
Sean Farrell Moran,“Images, Icons and the Practice of Irish History,”inImages Icons and the Irish Nationalist Imagination,ed. Lawrence McBride(Dublin: Four Courts Press,):–
.
James McCarthy with Euan Hague,“Race, Nation, and Nature: The Cultural Politics of‘Celtic’
Identification in the American West,”Annals of the Association of American Geographers. ():–,.
Bette Browne,“The long fight for US immigration reform”(March,),The Irish Exam-iner http://www.irishexaminer.com/analysis/the-long-fight-for-us-immigration-reform-.
htm (acc. March,).
Ted Hesson,“Why the Irish Want a Special Immigration Deal”(May,),abc NEWS
<http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/Politics/irish-special-immigration-deal/story?id=
> (acc. Dec,).
Gregory Lee,“The Making and Maintaining of the Irish Diaspora,”DCIDOB: the Journal of The Barcelona Centre for International Studies():–.
of each, America and Ireland, are themselves built upon the notion of a liberat-ing ideal towards victims of global injustice. Yet America works to tighten the US-Mexico border, with an all-time high migrant death rate,⁸ whilst Ireland, itself the historic victim and site of injustice, displacement and religious persecution has tightened immigration policies in line with a reactionary vision of national identity– as Lentin (2007) indicates:
[T]he discursive political reformulation of Ireland as‘diaspora nation’, while explaining the narrowing of citizenship entitlement of non-citizen migrants resident in Ireland in the wake of the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, paradoxically also makes sense of the juxtaposition of
‘entitled’Irish illegals in the US with‘unentitled’illegal immigrants in Ireland.⁹
When in 1992 the Irish poet Derek Mahon was asked byThe New Yorkerto write a poem commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the first immigrant to be processed through Ellis Island on New Year’s Day 1892, it was no doubt a com-mission flowing from a rush of patriotic fervour about the origins of the Ameri-can Dream, of the generosity of the AmeriAmeri-can States reflected in the Statue of Liberty cry:
Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretch-ed refuse of your teeming shore / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!¹⁰
Such verse reflected the symbolic and semiotic power drawing upon the deeply held sentimental vision of America as a saviour of embattled and threatened
Celeste Monforton,“All-time high migrant death rate along US-Mexico border: prevention in immigration reform?”(March , ), ScienceBlogs <http://scienceblogs.com/thepumphan dle////all-time-high-migrant-death-rate-along-us-mexico-border-prevention-in-immi gration-reform/> (acc.July). According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP),individuals died along the U.S.-Mexico border induring their attempt to enter the U.S. That’s an all-time high rate of.deaths per,CBP apprehensions. It compares to a rate ofdeaths per,in, and four per,in. The data was assembled by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) in the policy brief“How many more deaths? The moral case for a temporary worker program.”At a time when fewer migrants are attempting to enter the U.S. illegally, the author attributes the escalating death rate to two relat-ed factors: () the lack of legal temporary visas for low-skillrelat-ed workers; and () the build-up of enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Ronit Lentin,“Illegal in Ireland, Irish Illegals: Diaspora Nation as Racial State,”Irish Political Studies.():–,.
Emma Lazarus,“The New Colossus”[], in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, ed.
David Lehman (Oxford: Oxford UP,):. In, the poem was engraved on a bronze pla-que and mounted inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
peoples.The New Yorker’s choice of Derek Mahon reflected in part his probable fealty with the first Ellis Island immigrant–an Irish girl, Annie Moore, who on passing through the “golden door” was given a $10 gold coin, coincidentally timely on the fifteenth anniversary of her birth. Mahon was also an apposite choice given his personal association with describing the experience of emigra-tion, of displacement and alienation in a range of poems. His resultant offering commemorating Annie Moore, was the poem“To Mrs. Moore at Inishannon,”¹¹ a letter-poem, representative of the missives home from the newly arrived Irish em-igrants who formed such a significant element of the immigrant populations passing through the“golden door.”The poem is placed in the centre of a collec-tion namedThe Hudson Letter– described by McKendrick (1996) in theTimes Literary Supplementas
[…] perhaps [Mahon’s] least even achievement so far, but then evenness is not, it seems, what Mahon is after […].“The Hudson Letter”, in 18 longish sections, his longest poem to date, shows the poet once more coming into his own […] what is most courageous and moving about the poem is the way the images of urban dereliction are tied explicitly to a personal crisis, a hard-earned fraternal feeling for the down-and-out […]. Out of this absence he writes from lower Manhattan, addressing, in ramble or vigil, his absent lover, his children in London, Auden, Yeat’s father, and other cosmic vagrants,“clutching our bits and pieces, arrogant in dereliction.”In the eighteen sections of“The Hudson Let-ter,”the gabble of a dockside bar, voices of a recycled Sappho and of an Irish immigrant girl reassuring her mother in Inishannon, and the midwinter, all night sounds of the City inter-sperse with the voice of the poet–lively, witty, poignant, elegiac, humane, and thoroughly human.¹²
Mahon therefore elects to‘place’the commissioned icon within a larger context of predominantly more modern alienation and self-examination and, perhaps paradoxically for some, links the contextual materials and thereby himself, to the larger literary and predominantly masculine, canon of Ovid, Yeats, Auden and Ginsberg. This context may be regarded as somewhat problematic to the re-alization of Annie Moore, whose“letter”is oddly placed amongst such canonical reverberations.
The poem begins with a quotation which references the nascent odour of racism tainting the romanticized context of the Emma Lazarus poem – “Give me your tired, your poor / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” inscri-bed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Mary Gordon, Irish-Italian-Jewish New
Derek Mahon,“To Mrs. Moore at Inishannon,”inThe Hudson Letter(Wake Forest, NC: Wake Forest UP,):–. Further references in the text, abbreviated with“MI”.
Jamie McKendrick,“Earth-residence,”(London) The Times Literary Supplement(April,
):.
Yorker, academic and author of a host of books and essays reflects upon the con-flicts thrown up by Irish Catholicism in its engagement with art and life in her book Good Boys and Dead Girls and it begins with a quotation from this text that Mahon selects as a position statement for his poem:
The statue’s sculptor, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, reacted with horror to the prospect of im-migrants landing near his masterpiece; he called it‘a monstrous plan’. So much for Emma Lazarus […]. I wanted to do homage to the ghosts ¹³
In the tradition of the epistolary or letter-poem, the communication from Bridget Moore to her mother, Mrs. Moore is prefaced by the business-like record of ad-dress and date and initial reassurance of survival: “No. 1, Fifth Avenue, New York City, Sept. 14th, 1895 / And Mother, dear, I’m glad to be alive / After a whole week on the crowded Oceanic /–Tho’I got here all right without being sick”(MI, 1–4). The sea voyage is oddly accompanied by a seagull hitching a lift all the way from Ireland to Long Island, a creature seemingly used to this commute since, on arrival it“vanish’d with the breeze / in the mass’d rigging by the Hudson quays” (MI, 11–12). Mahon captures the workaday practicality of the young woman who finds herself“install’d amid the kitchenware”thanks to“Mrs. O’Brien”(MI, 19–20). She is a servant in a“fine house in Washington Square”owned by“Protestants, mind you, and a bit serious / Much like the Ban-don sort, not fun like us /”(MI, 21–23). Here Mahon references the religious di-visions still evident in the history of the Irish Republic, where the town of Ban-don still has traces of a Protestant incursion in the 1600 s and with a nod to a cultural sense of phlegmatic Protestants compared to a mischievous Catholic mind set.¹⁴ The poem goes on to demonstrate the comic irony and assumption of superior insight, even in the inexperienced young Bridget, who notes the American obsession with“eagles and bugles”and “simple faith” in the stars and stripes to the point of “life and death,” ending with the arch humour, or is it irony? of her own simple faith– “As if Earth’s centre lay in Central Park / When we both know it runs thro’ Co. Cork” (MI, 35–36).Towards the end of her letter, Bridget reveals a moment of spiritual yearning – “Sometimes at night, in my imagination / I hear you calling me across the ocean;”(MI, 37–
38) but then she quickly composes herself reverting to her workaday, practical self, appreciating that“the money’s good”and sending“ten dollars”home to her mother with a promise of more to come given the evident wealth of the
Mary Gordon,“Good Boys and Dead Girls,”qtd. inMI,.
For a more recent reference to the Protestants in Bandon see Peter Cottrell,The Anglo-Irish War: The Troubles of–(Westminster, MD: Osprey Publishing,):.
New World since– “here, for God’s sake / They fling the stuff around like snuff at a wake”. Signing herself off as“Yr. loving daughter–Bridget Moore”(MI, 41–
46), the imagined sender of the letter fades back into the mass of immigrants whose individual idiosyncrasies are buried in the greater social obscurity.
Critiques and researchers of the poem have acknowledged Mahon’s own par-ticularity in researching for himself some of the details of what the experience might have entailed – he checked on the authenticity of the“mass’d rigging by the Hudson quays” for example, yet there are differences of opinion as to the poem’s merit. Adam Hanna argues that the poem,“far from‘ridiculing the girl’s naïve and sentimental attachment to her native place’(Elmer Kennedy-An-drews, 2008), enables Mahon to explore and comment on the values of his new environment,”and to compare them with those he had left in Ireland. ¹⁵ Yet I would argue that, though this poem may have answered the requirements of the commission in the sense of including critical signifiers – the statue, the sculptors artistic xenophobia (a signal as to the more correct feelings of gener-osity to be fostered), the rough passage, the teeming downtown population, the impact of the great icons of the New World, it does clearly‘place’the girl as essentially parochial, howsoever humorous (“as if Earth’s centre lay in Central Park when we both know it runs thro’Co. Cork”) and ultimately domestic and trivial in her concerns. This may perhaps have met, entirely, the iconic vision of the‘wanted’immigrant, the domesticated female, pragmatic, adaptable and unsophisticated, the‘tabula rasa’upon which the New World would write and who would lend her washerwoman arms to the continued building of the great global economy.
Yet perhaps the poem does not quite meet the potential magnitude of the commission, for it is an opportunity to reflect on much greater themes, signalled only rarely in lines such as“Sometimes at night, in my imagination, I hear you calling me across the ocean.”No doubt a good number of such emigrants were similarly unambitious in the scope of their thinking but the true violence of the experience, though not always reflected in correspondence, is retrievable.
A letter from Mary Garvey, written in an earlier decade back to Ireland makes constant reference to sickness and death, not only in America itself but particu-larly an almost obsessive anxiety as to the health and continued life of all those
Adam Hanna,“Through an Emigrant’s Eyes: Annie Moore and Derek Mahon’s Perspectives on America”( March ), New Perspectives on Women and the Irish Diaspora <http://
womenandtheirishdiaspora.files.wordpress.com///speakers-abstracts.pdf> (acc. July,
); the source referred to in the quotation is Elmer Kennedy-Andrews,Writing Home: Poetry and Place in Northern Ireland–(Woodbridge: Brewer,).
back home. It also reflects a lack of sentiment about the‘home country’ – indi-cating the extreme privation:
I feel very uneasy about you all for fear that you may be sick or dead or that you may be suffering for the want of the comforts of life […]. Dear Mother I should like to have you come over here very much if you think that you would be strong enough to stand the voyage. I hope you will leave that starved country and come over here in the spring.¹⁶
Now although the worst of the“famine”conditions were over by the end of the nineteenth century, the recent historical experience of dispossession, the repres-sive social and economic culture and sheer privation was certainly what drove the majority of people to leave their homes. In addition, the‘large’themes of the diaspora as they arise in the law are not effectively addressed– not only the central one of wholesale identity displacement or negation, but also those specific to gender and to faith. The happenstance of the iconic immigrant being female, even and perhaps particularly, at such a young age, meant that she was representative of a whole range of threats, apparent then as now– of sexual exploitation, of passing from subjection under one patriarchal force to but another, the dangers of childbirth, of unwanted pregnancy, of the particular-ly limited opportunities of work and movement available to women.
For Annie Moore, the first Ellis Island migrant on whom the poem is based, though the recent statue and museum dedication to her celebrates her new-found symbolic significance to the American dream,¹⁷ she actually died in her forties, having borne eleven children and was buried in an unmarked grave.¹⁸ Nevertheless, leaving the aboriginal form of oppression of the village and its ‘bi-ological’patriarchy may have offered the best chance of some level of liberty for such women, especially in their flight from a Catholic country. Insofar asThe Hudson Letteris also a discourse upon the threats and displacements of modern contemporary life, the continuing debate upon the influence of this conservative religious culture upon the lives of women might therefore have been signalled–
Letter from Mary Garvey, Irish immigrant, to her mother, (October),RUcore : Rutgers University Community Repository. <http://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib//> (acc.
July,).
For an official recognition of the status accorded to Annie Moore see The Statue of Liberty– Ellis Island Foundation Inc.,“Annie Moore: first Immigrant through Ellis Island”(),The Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation Inc.
<http://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/annie-moore> (acc. July,).
Ray O’Hanlon,“Putting Things Right”(February),The Irish Echo<http://irishecho.
com///putting-things-right/> (acc. July,).