Diaspora Grief

On yearning for the 'missing limb' that is Ireland

Photo by Kat Kelley on Unsplash

Her shoulders shook from the weight of her sobs and the effort trying to control them. She turned her whole body away and towards the window, not wanting me, the middle-seat stranger, to see her tears. I averted my gaze, gave up my last view of the patchwork West of Ireland quilt below as the plane took off from the runway at Knock. I wanted to give her a hug but I also wanted to save her dignity. So I stuck myself into a book and left the window-seat-woman in peace with her grief.

Grief was what I felt from her. From the moment she tapped on my shoulder pointing “I’m there” to the seat on my right, to the brief conversation were I assured, “Don’t worry, I’ll help” when she worried about getting her bags down from the overhead locker after the ‘Special Assistance’ officer put them up, I could feel it from her. Loss pained her face. She was frail with age but also with aching.

“She must have been over in Ireland for a family funeral,” I theorised to myself.

The plane came in sideways to the runway in Birmingham, bufetted by strong winds left over from Storm Bert. We discussed the weather as the plane taxied to its gate. “It’s to be much nicer in Ireland” she said, and then in a half-choked whisper, “I don’t want to be here.”

“Here, in England”? I said.

“Yes, I might sound English, but I’m not. I was just born here, but I’m Irish, all my family are Irish,” she explained. I nodded, I knew exactly what she meant — how an accent and a place of birth means nothing compared to where your bones call home.

“All my siblings have gone back,” she continued “And I don’t want to be here, I’ve never wanted to be here. As soon as my children were raised that was my plan too, to go back. But it hasn’t worked out, it’s not going to happen now. I think someone up there must hate me,” she said, looking to the heavens. She was grief-stricken and she had given-up and I didn’t know what to say to her.

She told me about the pyrite in the concrete that struck down her sister’s house where she was going to move. Dashed all hope she had of the life, the real life, she had always planned to begin in the West of Ireland in her later years. The grief was fresh and raw, and it was a grief for Ireland.

Call it a curse or a blessing, but strangers tell me things. Their pains and their beliefs, their dreams and their hopes. Maybe because I don’t shut them down. I listen. And in the ten minutes we spent in a taxi-ing, docking plane she told me much.

How her mother-in-law had always hated her because she insisted on her Irishness.

“‘They drink and they fight. They’re bad people with fierce tempers,’ my mother-in-law would say, and I’d say ‘If you want to see how hot a temper we have, keep saying that to me.’”

“The Irish people are the best people in the world,” she continued. “I can tell when people have Irish in them, and they’re always the loveliest people.”

“I’ve always felt Irish, never ever British. I am Irish. I did a DNA test recently and it said I was 99% Irish.”

“Well, you did better than me then,” I replied, “I was born and raised in Ireland and my DNA is only 33% Irish, the rest is English, Scottish and Welsh.”

“Ha, I’m better than you” she laughed thumping my shoulder so hard with delight it actually hurt, before telling me she had been annoyed by the 1% (Scottish).

We moved from genetics to griddle bread. How I could easily eat a whole loaf, slice-by-slice, dripping in butter when my Mum makes it. The food of home. She remembers her grandmother’s made the proper way on the griddle over an open fire. Summers spent with her in Ireland, getting dressed and washed by the light of the paraffin lamp. Carrying water from the pump at the back of the house. Her grandmother washing everything by hand. How immaculate the house was, from the flagstone floors in the kitchen, to the crisp-white sheets on the bed — the outcome of her grandmother’s physical labour. It was such a classic romantic image of the West of Ireland cottage, I felt almost cynical, but I could see how talking of it lit her up; that this was her childhood reality, the memory of it was visceral.

“A tough life for your grandmother,” I said “I’m sure she was delighted when the electric light came in.”

“Oh she was, but I didn’t like it. I liked all the old stuff. I loved the smell of the lamps and the baking bread on the fire.” “I just want to be in Ireland, I don’t want to be here,” she said looking out the window at the urban hardness of greater Birmingham, her body slumping as grief extinguished the brief joy that had filled her in her childhood rememberings.

I stood up and passed down her duty free. Big bags of Tayto for her, and Irish whiskey for friends and family — the taste of Ireland.

“Will you be okay carrying all that off”? I asked.

“Yes, I think they’re coming to get me” she said, with a nod to the plane staff.

“Okay. Take care then… And don’t let the candle go out on your dream, you never know what might happen,” I replied, attempting some final hope. She gave a valiant smile and I walked off the plane feeling I had just, for the first time in my life, witnessed a person who had truly given up; reluctantly accepted an unwanted fate.

I wished I’d said something better. Left her my details to get in touch. Had I just walked casually away from a woman who had resigned herself to melancholy and grief; a person about to waste-away for the heart-break of Ireland? I was distraught for her.

There would have been a time when I wouldn’t have been able to fully meet her in that conversation. The full depth of the grief she was revealing in oblique stories of what she had left behind in Ireland would have passed me by. I would have been too wrapped up in the affront of being told by a woman with an ‘English accent’ that she was more Irish than I was. That her genetic rating somehow out-ranked my entire lifetime of socialisation into and conditioning by Irish culture and society.

But the Women of Ireland Project has changed all that for me. Well, to be exact, interviewing women of Ireland who are of the Irish diaspora, changed all that for me. I could hear, really hear and feel the depth of what she was expressing because I had heard it before.

As soon as she said “I don’t want to be here” I immediately recognised her grief as ‘diaspora grief’ (please help me develop this definition further and more precisely).

Diaspora Grief:

The inexplicable and overriding sense of loss and mental anguish you feel for the place the marrow of your bones yearn for

Amelia, an Irish-American who shared her story to the Women of Ireland Project, explained that to be part of the Irish diaspora is to be acutely aware of the presence and the absence, of the strong presence of Irish culture and tradition in your life, but the absence of it too, and most especially the absence of the land of Ireland:

“I am very fascinated by the presence and the absence… and there is something to be said for the absence; you need to fill it…. It seems like a lot of us in the US who are not Native American feel this. We know our bones are not from that land…. we aren't on the lands that our bones are from…. I still need to get better at describing the presence and the absence, but like you can only describe how Ireland feels by also knowing what it feels like to not have Ireland in the United States.

Which is; it's an emptiness there's a disconnection and a silence, a fuzziness, like someone put noise cancelling headphones on your ears…. We have a totally different relationship to the land [of Ireland], because we have been removed from it. And it feels like, what is the syndrome? Like phantom limb, where it's like you lose the limb but you still feel it.”

That is a grief. That is a sadness stemming from a deep awareness that something is absent or lost. Ireland—not being able to live in Ireland—was the lost-limb which pained window-seat-woman to a point of such intense anguish I can still feel it as I sit here now, thinking of her on that plane a week ago (wishing I had given her that hug).

I think most of us ‘born and raised’ in Ireland are ignorant to this. We are unaware of the grief and pain potentially emanating out across the world in the millions of people that make-up Ireland’s far-reaching diaspora. It’s energetic field pulsing back to Ireland, yearning for it. And when we do encounter it, we eye-roll.

Amelia, who has followed the call of her bones back to Ireland, nearly a hundred years after her great-grandmother left, told me how explaining her presence in Ireland, to other Irish people, as a need to fill the absence is something which has gotten her “massively made fun of”:

“Every single time I listen to [Irish] trad music for the past 30 years of my life, I get overwhelmed. There's just this… it's something that would get me very badly made fun of as an Irish-American, but I can't explain it to someone who hasn't been removed from their lands. Like it's not something that we're putting on, that you feel home in your bones.”

Jean, a second-generation London-Irish woman I interviewed, whose sudden recognition, mid-interview, of how she unconsciously described her move to Ireland as “moving back” (and enabled me to fully recognise window-seat-woman’s description of her English-born siblings as having ‘moved back’) gave her immense joy:

“I've just realised I said ‘back.’ Which gives it all away doesn't it. Because it feels like you move back [even though] I hadn't actually been to Ireland until I was 11…. [And that] first time that I came to Ireland, when I was 11 —I had never been here— I had the palpable sense of coming home. And I still remember it. This many years later”.

She also expressed similar experiences to Amelia’s of how that ‘coming home’ feeling can be confused and marred by the born-and-raised Irish persons who refuse to see beyond their accent and accept them as being of Ireland too.

Can we please count everyone, who is part of our diaspora as Irish? If they come home, it might have taken them four generations, but they made it back. Because I'm sure when they left. I mean, the families must have known, they weren't going to see them again. But there must have been that glimmer of hope of maybe they'll come back”

(Jean, Women of Ireland Project Participant).

There is a grief, a very particular grief, inherent to being neither of the land you were raised in (the land your family settled in) but also not being fully accepted by the place your bones call home.

Professor of Irish Studies, Mary. J Hickman, says that we need to re-think all of this; how you frame where people are from and the boundaries of their nationality:

“We need a reformulation of the concept of society in order to rethink the boundaries of social life. We need to imagine there being no contradiction for migrants between the incorporation of individuals into nation states (places of settlement) and the maintenance of transnational connections (with the ‘homeland’ and across the diaspora)”.

That we need to think of the diaspora as a people who exist within ‘diasporic space’: A hybrid place made up of the interactions between their ‘home country(ies)’ and ‘place of settlement’, whether it be through direct lived experience or exposure to the place or through the carrying of cultural symbols and customs.

Few of us in Ireland, I feel, have been willing to meet those ‘whose bones yearn for Ireland’ in that ‘diasporic space’. But it exists and it is real and it deserves to be acknowledged. For I sat beside window-seat-woman and I felt it: her missing limb. Her Ireland. And I wish I could have met her better in ‘diasporic space’.

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