331 days ago, I paid for a year of Duolingo and started learning Irish. Gaeilgeoir, which I just spelled incorrectly twice, means Irish speaker, and I would hesitate greatly before calling myself that, but at least I can now say go raibh math agat, “thank you”, and is maith liom, “I like” and agus, meaning “and,” which might be the most Irish word of all. Duolingo tells me that in spite of trying to manage a lesson a day, I’m in something like the gutter ball league, duking it out with the other people who are terrible at languages, unlike my friend Sam, who I’m frequently reminded when I’m on the app seems to pick up multiple languages just as casually as the rest of us pick up viruses, or pieces of cake.
Learning Irish was something to do last year, B.C. (before cancer), while I waited to see whether or not I’d actually ever be able to travel to Ireland. For most of my life, as a non-tenured academic in the Bay Area, I just couldn’t afford international travel; I still needed to borrow money to get to Rome in my forties. In 2021 I turned 50 and was supposed to have spent my birthday in Ireland, where I’ve never been in spite of being at least 75% Irish (dad was 100% and mom is 50%, and as is the case with many Irish American people whose family records dead end right before they jumped on a coffin ship, we know they were from Sligo and Cork and beyond that it’s all kind of a mystery).
But there was a global pandemic in 2021, which dripped into 2022. I spent both birthdays at home, because birthdays are awful anyway, so without travel as a distraction, who cares. In 2023 I got cancer, and the surgeon plucked nine lymph nodes out from under my arm. Every flight I take for the rest of my life that lasts more than four hours increases the odds that same arm will swell up like a balloon and never return to normal. Thus I’m grounded for the time being, and maybe for quite a while to come. And yet, for some reason, I keep learning Irish. I’m terrible at it, have no one to practice with, and there’s no purpose in the exercise, other than some vague impulse to avoid being what actual Irish people I’ve met seem to find incredibly annoying about Irish Americans: obsessed with a country most of us will never see.
Welsh, another Celtic language crammed full of words that are impossible to spell and harder to pronounce, has a word that doesn’t translate into any other language: hiraeth, which is a longing for one’s home, but it’s a specific kind of cultural longing that overlaps with the Celtic concept of thin places. You’ve probably heard about those, but they’re the kind of places where the veil between divine and earthy is thin, where you might feel the presence of something profound. For Welsh people, that’s the mountains and valleys of Wales. For Irish people, it’s places like the Dingle Peninsula or the Giants’ Causeway (or at least that’s what I hear because, you know, never been!). For many of us in the Bay Area, it’s Point Reyes. But how do you long for places that you’ve never been, and might never go? Why care about being from a country your family had no choice but to leave? That’s the question we all perhaps have to ask when we’re descended from people ripped from the place they were once rooted to.
A few weeks ago I watched the funeral service for Shane McGowan, the singer/songwriter who spent years performing with The Pogues, the first Irish band who made me care about being Irish (sorry, but unlike many other Gen Xers, I can’t stand U2, who sounded less like Ireland and more like generic arena rock by the time I hit high school1). McGowan, born in England to Irish parents, spent his very early childhood in Tipperary, then moved back to England at the age of six and mostly stayed there. Many of his songs were about the Irish diaspora, and celebrating “the land that makes us refugees.” Like many other Irish men, including those in my own family who blew out their livers before they turned 60, McGowan – fuck it, let’s call him Shane – treated his hiraeth with alcohol and drugs, so much so that he was basically a walking corpse for the final decades of his life.
Shane McGowan’s funeral photo via The Independent
At Shane’s funeral, held in a Tipperary cathedral, a cluster of musicians were crammed into a space next to the altar, and couples danced in the aisles to Fairytale of New York, Shane’s best known song and maybe the last classic Christmas song that will ever be written in our secular age. But like so much Irish art, it’s also a song about the toll of forced immigration: loneliness, addiction, violence, poverty. All of the things I was told throughout my childhood that defined being an Irish American, although we were somewhere on the rungs of the lower middle-class and not exactly crying in prison on Christmas eve like the song’s narrator.
What do I even know about being Irish, anyway? I’m from Oakland, not Sligo or Cork, and Oakland has defined who I am much more than anything about being of Irish descent. Irishness has always just been another shade of white in California, a state remade over and over again by immigrants and by the Black diaspora. Throughout my childhood and roughly until the early 2000s, when gentrification reversed the trend, Oakland’s white population shrank while its Black population grew. In most of my childhood classrooms, white kids were the minority, and nobody really cared if you were Jewish, Irish, Italian or Greek – you were just white.
You’re probably aware that Irish people at one point were not considered to be white, but because assimilation is part and parcel with the American dream, Irish Americans wanted to be as white as the WASPS who employed them to scrub toilets. And when thousands of Irish Americans entered careers in law enforcement, the people who’d been under the boot effectively became the bootheel, and you just have to talk to anyone from Boston or Chicago to understand what passes for Irish American culture today: dyeing rivers green and boiling cabbages and vomiting on public transit. That’s what we’ve got left to work with.
I believe the above image defines what my students refer to as “cringe.” From NPR.
The persecution Ireland faced under the thumb of the British empire was real, and it cost us most of what might call a culture. The Irish language was effectively destroyed, centuries of ritual obliterated, and thousands of people killed, raped, and starved. Sounds familiar, right? At some point both sides of my family managed to get out, but was it by choice? No. It was survival, and in America they faced real social and religious bias. But it’s entirely too easy to jump from that to the idea that we were persecuted in the same ways that Black or indigenous people were, which then leads to things like the myth of “Irish slaves”, and today’s disturbing association of Celtic symbology with White Nationalism. To be an Irish American – as opposed to an actual Irish person – means that you escaped oppression, but that you also created it.
But this pattern, too, is just endemic to American history. In her book The History of White People, the historian Nell Irwin Painter writes:
Time and again, the better classes have concluded that those people deserve their lot; it must be something within them that puts them at the bottom. In modern times, we recognize this kind of reasoning as it relates to the Black race, but in other times the same logic was applied to people who were white, especially when they were impoverished immigrants seeking work.
When it comes to Irish Americans, the issue is that impoverished immigrants don’t always stay impoverished. Just ask the Kennedys2, who spun their Irishness into a personal mythology of striving that took them all the way to the White House. If whiteness itself is a social construct, so, too, is Irishness for Americans of Irish descent. A history of oppression becomes a grievance, and grievances become reasons to put other people down, and the myth of the meritocracy in America means striving, which always requires that someone else – these days, usually someone browner and poorer – gets out of your way.
But let’s return to Shane McGowan’s funeral for a moment. An actual Irish funeral, in Ireland, attended by Irish people3. In the YouTube comments, person after person said something like “Ah but the Irish, you know what we’re good at? Funerals and death.” And those posts got a lot of likes, and it made me think, you know, I am maybe never actually going to go to Ireland4, but there are things about me that are very, very Irish, like watching funerals on YouTube. Just genetically, I’m very Irish, but also culturally, there’s a stubborn streak of Irishness my father made sure would persist (and he never went to Ireland either). Catholicism? Yeah that. Also being a writer? Well some of that is just my own stubbornness, but even my gentle, much loved grandfather could recite long poems from memory into his 90s. Verbal logorrhea? Just ask my spouse. Or my students. Or anyone who’s ever met me. Maybe my sardonic sense of humor, my morbid imagination, the fact that I can hold a grudge for decades. Also, she says fuck a lot.
Some years ago my friend Laurel took me to a church in Oakland with a priest who’s actually from Ireland, who took one look at me and said “well, there’s a map of Ireland on your face.” And it’s true: ghost pale, hazel eyed, weak-chinned, prematurely gray haired, broad in the beam and short in the waist, my sturdy body was built to dig in fields all day, not to do Pilates or wear anything smaller than a size 12, but I can walk for miles and miles and never get tired. And another time I was in a car with a poet from Cork who replied to my telling him that I’m Irish American, “this is obvious.” And he suggested, gently, maybe learning the language would bring me closer to something about myself and my history that was inexorably severed by colonization and history, and that seed sat there for a few years until agus and is maith liom and go raibh maith agat.
I don’t think you have to travel all the way to a place your family was separated from to long for it, care about it, or try to understand it. But I’d like to think there are some good things about being Irish that I inherited from people who went through hell because they were Irish too. But how to honor that without turning it into just another sentimental mythology that can ultimately become a cudgel if you wield it wrong?
Maybe one solution to the problem of whiteness is for white people like myself to try and discover something about our ancestral cultures, especially things like languages lost to colonization and war. Because if whiteness is privilege, deconstructing the history of our own journeys to whiteness can help us to release some of that privilege, but only as long as we don’t allow our own histories of oppression to cloud our ability to see how we participate in it. Maybe I’ll never go to Ireland. Maybe I will. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I can somehow reclaim some pieces of what my family lost. And I’ll do it one word at a time. Words are maps, and words are windows. To all of the sturdy women and sad, drunk men who got me here, I can finally say, in the language they were robbed of: go raibh maith agat. Thank you.
Here’s a joke: Bono goes to heaven. When he sees Jesus sitting next to God, he points at God and says, “excuse me, you’re sitting in my chair.”
who with the possible exception of Bobby seem to have been pretty awful people… sorry, dad.
And also Johnny Depp, but fuck that guy.
I have occasionally thought of banging on the door of Jennifer Doudna’s lab at Berkeley and asking for her help with getting rid of cancer for the whole world.
My maternal great-grandparents, born in Cork. My great-grandmother looks like she was a riot.