MORE DIASPORA FEELS

FANTASY ISLAND #2 (PROSE EDITION)

when i finally submitted my commissioned piece for magma’s special issue on islands back in 2024, i was asked, ever so gently, if perhaps i wanted to revise the following:

at the festival, i’m asked where i’m from a total of nine times. i have come to envy, mistrust, and despise in equal measure those who have a one word answer for that question. what should i say, and what does it mean, and why did you feel the need to ask?

i did not wish to revise it. it touches, as honestly as i knew how, that prickly and sensitive place in diaspora or itinerant selfhood. i wrote that:

i make people uneasy: my voice is a fraught meeting place for sounds, for names, of territories, and for the many queasy allegiances they represent. [...] they will interpolate my other islands onto me to suit the occasion, but i cannot and do not belong.

clearly, i wasn’t having a great year. but product of profound depressive funk though this essay was, the point still stands. i tried to talk about this at the symposium, but i don’t know how well or how much it came across. putting thoughts in order, then, and in the spirit of édouard louis (’i am not afraid of repeating myself because what i am writing, what i am saying, does not answer to the standards of literature, but to those of necessity and desperation, to standards of fire’), what i wanted to say goes something like this:

for myself, and for many others within my cultural cohort, “identity” was never a given, but a belonging we came to through an intense experience of non-belonging. it is english, the english, englishness that resists and evicts us, that racialises us through poverty; that forcibly identifies us with our familial heritage. ireland in particular, is the absent other at the centre of this self; the yearned-for elsewhere of second generation diaspora and itinerant imagination. for the longest while it was also a fantasy; little more than a hollow repository of longing. or the scrim onto which we project everything we wish to be, or have, everything that england is not. can you understand this? to have no native place is to organise a sense of self around a hole, a hunger, a series of concentric losses: of language, territory, “community” (whatever that is), etc.

perhaps diaspora identity is a kind of grim paradox: you don’t have ireland, but boy, do you have irishness. everywhere you go in england it adheres to you like a positive quality; it is the mechanism by which you are criminalised, singled-out, politically profiled, socially and economically disenfranchised – mocked. and yet your grubby mongrel status keeps you from the hallowed precincts of “true” irish identity, its idealised ethnicity, its ‘postcolonial aura of privileged victimhood’ (witoszek et al, 1998). to put it another way, you are neither one thing nor the other. non-belonging runs in both directions. not english here, not irish there. welcome to head-fuck county, kids. population: you.

to be always explaining ourselves, apologising for our presence, and to meet, especially amongst the middle-classes a kind of blank incomprehension. middle-class colleagues inside english academe tell me that anti-irish antipathy no longer exists. and maybe it doesn’t, not in their world. for them (and i’ve written about this before, so bear with me) poverty – there’s always poverty, scratch the surface of any long irish family history – is an enriching story, a texturing context, a credentialing badge. it isn’t their narrative, it isn’t/ wasn’t their day-to-day. i tried to explain before: i think what happens these days is that so few people even recognise class as a foundational structure or a lived reality, that when they want to reject/ exclude/ abuse/ abject you they reach for a more readily identifiable form of difference. “irish” can become for poor white others the hook on which a virulent classism hangs. this noose hangs also from “pikey”.

i’d written in white/ other (2022) and a little in vulgar errors/ feral subjects (2023) about the semantic function of “pikey”; how this particular pejorative operates to remove its target from the hallowed precinct of “whiteness”, that is, an ideal white identity as dreamt up by white middle-class people. “pikey” is a versatile word too, can function as either a racial or a classist epithet (more often, both) depending on context; is used, in fact, to conflate race, class, and culture in a way that strands its targets outside the accepted boundaries of such categories, so that, often, “pikey” isn’t even irish, isn’t really working-class, isn’t a proper “gypsy”. “pikey” is abjected even from existing categories of otherness. this applies also to accent – to “speaking pikey”.

in the poor, accent is unforgivable when pungent of place and “out of place”. in the academy, for instance, at the conference, on the stage. but if (social) dirt is “matter out of place”(douglas, 1966), what is matter without place?

if, for instance, travel – by which i mean contact with the foreign, disorienting other of the elsewhere – demands an origin, an established home in relation to which your acts of itinerancy may be framed and comprehended, a fixed point of departure and return, then what is the disorienting other without elsewhere? what is departure for if it fails to affirm the origin, the point of departure? what is travel without departure? or as a series of excessive, illegitimate departures, travel that cannot or will not produce as home the site from which travel proceeds? what if there is no home, no “heimlich”? all of which is leading to: what is the uncanny nature of the exilic? of itinerancy? diaspora?

try this another way: home is not actually a place. or if it is a place – a nation, an institution – it must be effortfully metaphorised. home is a site of identification, what benedict anderson called ‘the imagined community’ (1983). for nation or institution to become invested with home, produced and secured as home requires an unheimlich, an other, an elsewhere, a site of not-belonging, the unhomely effects of which must be continually recuperated towards homely ends. so our problem is not that we are “other”, but that we are not other enough, having no definite elsewhere to return to, nowhere they can place us, no origin of our own. further – white, (imperfectly assimilated), passing – we disturb the very categories from which they constitute themselves, the borders of their own belonging. it is not i who is uncanny exactly, but that i make their homely place unhomely. they cannot be secure in our essential difference, we debase and profane the national home, not only because we occupy and infiltrate that home, but because we infiltrate and distort the language in which that home is articulated and framed.

it has become increasingly apparent to me over the last decade or so, that “pikey” has different intentions, different weight and freight depending on where – in terms of nationality – it is being used: in england, spoken by an english person, “pikey” over-identifies its target with the regressive stereotypes of irish national identity. meaning, not only is the insult racially inflected, but that it is inflected with the racialising baggage of, say, thirty, forty years ago. as if neither the language nor the attitudes and ideas underpinning the language ever went away, but simply lay dormant, ready to be pre-loaded and attached to a more culturally “acceptable” target. “pikey” stands for all irish people, is the scape-goat for them, represents who and what the english think the irish really are. is the mick it’s still permissible to denigrate. in ireland, though, “pikey” is used to remove its target from conceptions of the national community and associated ideas of citizenship. hostility towards ethnic nomads in ireland can be – still – profound.

so what do we have? kitsch remainders, distorted lore, partial and intermittent acceptance. and often the diaspora communities here are... weird. that is, they succumb to time-skew, temporal uncanniness, spacialised and performed in such a way (through pubs, clubs, societies, celebrations, etc.) that difference is elided, and varieties of irishness are (putting a positive spin on things) ecumenised, or (negative spin) homogenised; such spaces reify culture through an overdetermined array of signifiers and fossilise it. or else layer it up in a messy transhistorical/ extra-temporal lasagne. marty said one time that we’re obsessed with the culture and history from which we are alienated (he didn’t put it like that). and that’s half of it, sure. we’re often scholars, self-appointed custodians, historical and linguistic pedants, as if belonging were an exam we could pass, something we could graduate into. and we’re militant. fuck are we ever militant. sometimes this is muddle-heading fronting, as in bros in north london were like:

(rubber bandits, 2018). but also we meant it. because we bore the business end of that history in the form of racism. and because we understood exceptional dedication as our atonement for not being there/ not being there enough. also, i suppose, because politics is a form of “home” that travels; it’s what you can grasp, absent other more intimate and richly textured varieties of participation.

so, yeah, i’ve been thinking about this. also the way the middle-classes use/have used familiarity with the irish language as a way of policing and hierarchising the boarders of irishness within diaspora communities (wilfully forgetting the inequalities of access that drive and attend displacement and assimilation in the first place). and the way working-class men have not-infrequently been able to parlay diaspora identity into a form of dynamic masculine virtue, while women get the grey baggy uniform of institutional mamminess to wear forever, over-identified (by men) with the joyless oppressions meted out to them (by men) – slight tangent on the subject of which: have you read the novels of lisa mcinerney? do, please do. a wild and welcome exception to this representational rule – okay, back in the room.

i might be grinding out these feeling/ thoughts for a while, but other more germane updates will be upon us soon. i am struggling a bit with the heat, and with a bit of frankly unprocessable (but broadly good) news. more anon, lads. thanks for your patience.

me: having really grown as a person.