I'm sitting here, on a Sunday morning in Ottawa, Canada, having just read your piece wanting so say so much; while at the same time feeling a sense overwhelm and unsure of where to start. So, instead, I wish to offer a heartfelt míle buíochas. As an Irish-Canadian woman who has been feeling the 'calling home' from within my bones for sometime now, your piece offers glimmers of validation for what my body and spirit have known (and been feeling) for quite some time now.
I have also saved your piece to circle back to. As an artist and sacred storyteller, the spirit of the next story that swirls around me is called 'De thír mo mháithreacha / Of the Land of My Mothers'; inspired through diasporic grief and cultural belonging, this story tells the tale of one Irish-Canadian woman's search for belonging. Upon returning to the lands of her ancestors, and held within the wild the embrace of Éire [Ireland], she re-members that the magic and wisdom of the Irish matriarchs is alive and well within her (where ever her feet may call home).
I feel blessed that I will be in County Kerry next year for a residency to explore the heart and bones of this piece upon the land herself. For I know connecting with the earth and the language of Ireland is (and will be) particularly poignant for me personally - especially when tending to the threads of diasporic grief that rest within me.
So, from across the sea, on an overcast Sunday morning, go raibh maith agat.
Erica, go raibh míle míle maith agat as do chuid focal. Lovely to connect with you across the ocean and also to learn of the work you are doing. I would dearly love to hear that story you are working on one day.
I am an Irish-descended American three generations removed from our family's diaspora and yet, the bone-deep longing you describe is a haunting and ever-present feature that I've felt from childhood. Upon arrival the first time I visited Ireland, I was brought to my knees outside the Cork airport by a surprising and intense sadness. The last time I left Ireland, I was the woman on the plane hiding her tears from the stranger in the next seat. I was bewildered by the overwhelm of loss I felt for leaving a place my family hadn't lived in for a century.
I deeply love my community and home in Montana, but I am not indigenous to this place. There are unspeakable crimes to make reparations for as a settler here. This line so adeptly identifies the un-ease: "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." The phantom limb of diaspora grief is always there and always untouchable.
Ah Erin, thank you so much for sharing this with me. It is a very difficult grief to carry as it's a grief that most other will refuse to actualise, instead they will dismiss it as mere 'sentiment' and 'nostalgia'. But I hear you xx
Thank you, Belinda. I appreciate how generously and empathetically you elucidate this feeling and experience. I agree that such grief is so often either trivialized or fetishized while papering over the realities of colonization and diaspora — a distortion that, in the U.S. at least, is most prominently on display on St. Patrick's Day. (Green beer and plastic shamrocks... oh, please spare me.) The more I consider it, the more I've come to think that the denial of this grief is one deep root underpinning tremendous abuse, injustice, racism, addiction, intergenerational trauma, and on and on and on.
I recognise that diaspora grief, being English born and living in Ireland that last 20+ years. Despite my part-Irish heritage, I felt huge disconnection when I first moved here and it took time for me to feel belonging on Irish soil. I believe that by my efforts to connect to Irish land/nature, as well as culture and people, I have been able to make a home here that I wouldn't want to leave. I wonder whether some of the diaspora grief is grief for the disconnection from the land that bore them or their ancestors, having not connected with the land elsewhere?
Yes I think the not connecting elsewhere is a big factor, or not feeling they can connect elsewhere. Also, I think when people emigrate they can maintain a sort of heightened version of their home culture which maybe influences subsequent generations strongly to the point they don't feel like home is home.
Thanks for using a broader definition of diaspora, I've had a couple native Irish people tell me I don't count or ridicule me for talking about my roots. Yes I get that some of us can be rather loud & annoying but we are often that way because of the pain & deep longing you so beautifully describe. Unfortunately sometimes that gets turned into something rather toxic & distorted, superficiality & consumerism.
I am so grateful to find this powerful piece - it gives voice to what I have often tried to describe. Three of my grandparents are Irish all the way down their respective lineages. My father spent half of his time until adulthood going back and forth to live either in Ireland or Scotland. The music, literature, songs, and stories I was raised on were largely Irish. Raised in the North West of England, about 60% of my schoolmates had Irish surnames, as did the teachers and the nuns who taught me. We carved turnips at Hallowe'en, ate porridge for breakfast, and soda bread, bacon and black puddings featured heavily at our table. I learned history and interpreted media reports (via my politically-minded father) through an Irish lens and, later, read Irish history and politics at University. It was then that I began to learn the language.
After leaving University, I lived in Ireland - a much-longed-for dream, but, sadly, never quite managed to make it permanent. It is where I feel the joy of belonging - of being rooted in the landscape. But I am always the stranger, "the Australian" (a twinge of an accent after living some years in Australia). My ‘pick and mix’ accent dictates that I am a stranger wherever I live.
All five of my daughters have Irish names, my eldest first spoke with an Irish accent. They don’t want to live in Ireland - remembering too well the bemused, subtle condescension of many Irish to the diaspora newly returned. Many moons ago, back in the UK, I co-directed and managed an Irish theatre group. Most of us were from the diaspora. When promoting our latest play, our trustees demanded that "someone with an Irish accent" do the interviews. That one person was a good friend who helped with admin but knew nothing at all about the play, the playwright or any aspect of drama - still, she was duly and disastrously sent to be interviewed. It was a kick in the gut for the rest of us. It seems one’s accent is all-determining.
Hi Clare, thank you so so much for sharing your experiences here (and so sorry for being slow in my reply). It’s a comment so full of lived reality and story and generational experience, I could read it over and over again and keep finding something more to connect to. I find it fascinating how strongly Irish culture seems to be kept alive when it ‘goes abroad’, in all of those seemingly simple things like food and stories and music and politics, but which actually are how culture is kept alive, reproduced, adapted and developed. What you say about accent is so true - we seem to be unable to get past these really superficial labels, and it’s so sad!
A fellow pick and mix here. I’ve lived in Northern England and Australia, but grew up in Scots-Irish diaspora and culture in Australia and belong everywhere and nowhere with my accent. It’s a wrench whenever I live, and if you ask me where “home” is I can’t give you a straight answer. But, it makes me feel sensitive to how it is for many migrant or refugee families where the culture and language between places is more vastly different. I have seen other people less sensitive to what this experience of massive cultural shift must feel like. So that’s how I sort of live with this gnawing pit of constant longing, and just delve into music, literature and family history research as comfort.
Thank you Angela. I think you have answered something here for me that I have been trying to make sense of — that very thing of ‘how do people fill the pit’ and the void of something as ephemeral as geography and culture? Music! xx
This is a beautiful piece, thank you for writing it. I am an Irish American who spent my whole life feeling conflict over my identity. I felt some sense of imposter syndrome on both sides. I was too Irish to just be American, but I was too American to just be Irish. It was only when I learned the Irish language to fluency that I really embraced both sides of my identity. Through learning the language, I was able to understand what my life would have looked like if I had been born and raised in Ireland. In reflecting on that and my outlook towards my own upbringing, I came to understand that I would have taken so much of my Irishness for granted. I never did well with languages in school in the US so I certainly wouldn't have done any differently in Ireland. I am someone who moved away from home and never looked back. Who is to say I wouldn't have been the source of diaspora myself had I not been born and raised in Ireland? There is a pain and a grief that comes from feeling like part of your heart resides in a different world than your body. However, I have found peace in seeing diaspora as the root of my passion.
Thank you so much for sharing this Briana. It’s really lovely to hear (and also very uplifting) to learn how you navigated all the different feeling of Otherness throughout your life and transformed them into something positive. As someone who did grow up learning the language and whose ‘Cúpla focail’ has waned to a shocking extent since I moved away from Ireland, I can definitely afirrm that you would have taken the language for granted!
Hi Belinda - I'm guessing you're probably aware of this, but just in case not, Dr Pauline Boss has done a lot of work around losses which are both present and absent at the same time (diaspora, dementia, missing persons, etc) calling it 'Ambiguous Loss'.
I really appreciate that you wrote this, Belinda. I am 3rd-generation Irish-American- all 8 of my great-grandparents emigrated from Ireland during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War (I got 97% Irish on my DNA test, lol) I grew up in an Irish neighborhood of the Bronx. My parents were raised with the help of their Irish grandparents. Everything about who I am is informed and shaped by my "Irishness"- my politics, my mental health, my childhood, everything. I feel like I have to constantly explain how I am connected to Ireland, and then it makes me look like a try-hard, or that I am trying to bypass my existence as someone who was born in America. I am just desperately trying to find a way to feel at home in a body that yearns to be back (or, at the very least, have the means to go back more often) in Ireland, and part of that work has been to find ways to connect with Ireland without physically being there.
My life is also very much shaped by war time in Ireland- all 8 great-grandparents emigrated between 1919-1925. Some were anti-treaty Irish and had no choice but to leave. Some were younger siblings who couldn't find work or didn't have land to work. Only one set of my great-grandparents met and married in Ireland- the others found themselves in NYC and met through Irish gatherings and friends. They had American wakes thrown for them before they left- they didn't get back for their parents' funerals or siblings' weddings. Only one of my great-grandparents ever actually went back at all. I think it is also time for Ireland to start reckoning with how those wars not only shaped Ireland as a country but also affected the diaspora. An Gorta Mór isn't the only time the children of Ireland were forced out of their homes.
I am someone who lost her only child in labor at 40 weeks, so the loss of children is something I know so acutely and painfully. There's a letter I have from my great-grandmother in Mullinary, Co. Monaghan to my great-grandfather where she describes how things are going back home- she discusses the sale of a pig, how my great-grandfather's brother is being kinder to her, etc- and my heart broke open just thinking about how this mother would literally never see her child again. To know your child is alive but out of your reach forever? It's devastating. How would that immense grief and trauma not carry through the line?
Anyway, thanks again for sharing this beautiful piece. It definitely made me feel seen and I appreciate that greatly.
Hi Meaghan, first my apologies for my very delayed response here, I’ve been absorbed in getting a book finalised and ready for release these last weeks. I so appreciate your sharing your own and your family’s story and experience. I can’t help but think how many times that similar separation from Ireland yet how strongly it can remain carried through a family line has happened in so many families of Ireland across the world. It’s an almost unfathomable level of loss and yearning. My time interviewing women of the diaspora has definitely made me more conscious of my own short-sightedness with regards to this and how I have been guilty, so many times, at brushing off people with similar lived realities as yours in the past. But I now fully recognise that ‘having Irish ancestors’ is not some tenuous, bygone thing — that, in fact, it is quite the opposite, it is a very present, raw, visceral, daily reality. There is an Ireland, or a connection to Ireland, that is so strong in those who have been raised without it but very much with it, that those of us who are ‘born and raised’ Irish will never know, and I think that’s kind of beautiful. It is its own unique thing (and I won’t ever dismiss that when I encounter it ever again) xx
This is a lovely read. I grew up with my both pairs of biological grandparents just as voices on the phone from Ireland and Scotland at Christmas (we had to save up all year for calls from Australia). My grandparents were long gone by the time I made it there in my 20s, from Australia. My parents are both Scottish so I have grown up in an ex-pat community as a child, with traditional folk music and all the adults speaking and singing of their childhoods “back home”. The longing I feel leaving from visiting Scotland and Ireland takes months to settle, and I can’t really explain the power of it. As an example, I was in a uni zoom seminar and the lecturer had a Sligo accent and for inexplicable reasons, an awful sudden sadness just descended upon me, so I was there crying and having to turn my camera off. I am looking forward to exploring this more through your work because it’s a feeling of being almost unhinged and I’d like to understand it more deeply.
Thank you for putting words to your emotional experience (not an easy thing to do). That sense of absence is so strong in diaspora communities and it near breaks my heart. In some ways, it’s a living experience for me as I haven’t lived ‘home home’ in Ireland for over 10 years, so, although I don’t really think of myself in that way, I am now of the Irish diaspora. I can never return to Ireland in the same way as when I left, just as I can never quite settle in other places because they are not Ireland. The strength of longing for something so intangible that you don’t even really know what you are longing for is an incredibly challenging thing to navigate! Some days are definitely harder than others.
You’re right there are those hard days. I can only try and imagine how it was for my Dad who left his family at 19 in Scotland to go to Australia, never saw his parents again and had a younger brother who he met for the first time in his 50s.
Everytime I have a Zoom call with friends, or can send a quick WhatsApp to my parents I think, how lucky we are, for as much as I hate all that technology too, that at least we can stay connected to people in ways that previous generations could only have dreamed of.
Great post Belinda and I look forward to reading your book when it’s out. You crossed my mind recently when I watched the documentary ‘Housewife of the Year’ - have you heard of it / seen it? I highly recommend it.
Margaret! That trailer gave me shivers! SHIVERS! I have a particualar penchant for the 'Housewife of the Year' competition because of the Aga in my mother's kitchen. It was always my mum's dream to have an Aga range, but she didn't know how she would ever afford one. We were talking about this one day and she pipes up "If it wasn't for its last owner winning the Housewife of the Year Competition' we'd never have had one. And I was there like WHAT HOUSEWIFE OF THE YEAR WHAAAAT? Never heard of such a thing in my life. My mum then went on to explain that the previous owner of the Aga had sold it to them for a really good price because she'd just won the housewife of the year competition and Calor gas were coming and re-doing the whole kitchen as the prize and put in a gas cooker etc.
I did not know about this documentary!! So glad you told. The awful thing about living outside Ireland. I'm going to have to try and figure out where I can view it, and soon!! Thank you
I knew you’d be interested but didn’t expect such a direct personal connection with that comp! I went to see it with my daughter, now a mum of two girls herself. Even though she’s v aware through her own study and her area of work (and me!), there was much she wasn’t aware of. We had a v interesting conversation on the journey home. She said it should be available on the curriculum in senior cycle in secondary schools. If you could view it with your mum? Has she seen it yet I wonder?
Goodness that hit hard. I had wondered if we had met but I tend to keep those feelings buried deep. As the first generation born outside of Ireland I still didn’t properly mix either English people until I hit secondary school and even then only superficially. So when I was called a “plastic Paddy” by an elderly Irish lady last week I was shocked at how much the phrase affected me. Even more shocked that I answered her back and asked her to consider that some may find the phrase offensive. Who we are is bigger than the place we are born.
I was born and bred in Glasgow, but very aware that my great grandparents and further back on both sides were mixed Irish and Scottish. My DNA is about half and half, a bit more Irish. I married an Irish man and have now lived in Ireland for more years than I lived in Scotland (28 years). After Brexit I got my Irish citizenship, and took along with me a list of all my Irish ancestors who had moved to Scotland. I sat in the hall and read all of their names (to myself 😁) and told them that I had finally properly come home. I was, however, fiercely disappointed during the ceremony when there was no mention at all of the diaspora who had returned. It was all about new Irish and their contributions. All true and welcome, but I felt ignored and taken for granted. Or not wanted. I describe myself as a Glaswegian Dub, and feel that I am a hybrid. My siblings tell me that they've always thought of me as being more Irish, even though we had no Irish family to visit when growing up.
Thank you Tracey. I love this image of you reading the names of all your ancestors in the hall the day you got your citizenship. I imagine they were all there with you. Also find it really interesting how your siblings all thought you were always more Irish growing up. Another woman I interviewed, who grew up in London, said something similar — her siblings can’t understand her wanting to be in Ireland but say that out of them all, she was always ‘The throwback’.
What a heartfelt project and at such an important time! A somewhat related discussion was had over on another post, about how so many cultures are lost through assimilation. My family was more Czech than Irish but neither culture survived when my grandparents immigrated to the US. The demand to be more like the country you move to requires for so much of who we are, who our ancestor were, to be abandoned and to me, seems too high a cost. I hope more people begin to find and hold onto their roots in the years ahead. Regardless of where we happen to be physically.
Hi Belinda, thank you for your wonderful project and the work you are doing to understand how place affects one’s sense of self even when that self has never been in that place. I’m especially thankful for all the heartfelt comments left by other readers.
My family is made up of Italians, Minorcans and English all somehow meeting up in the bodies of my parents in Florida. My dad was the child of immigrant Italians and my mother from a long line of English (likely having immigrated in the early 18th century) and Minorcans (late 18th century). I’ve visited Spain (but not Minorca) and Italy twice but it was only when I came to England in 2010 that I felt I’d come home. I’ve always felt that my birthplace was the USA but it was not where I was from. In fact now when someone asks me where I’m from I say that I was born and raised in Florida; a place I left as soon as I could when I was 24. It was never home for me nor were any of the places in the States I moved to subsequently. Until I landed at Heathrow Airport in 2010.
I’m lucky. I have a place here living in community that has allowed me to slowly pursue permanency. I have permanent leave to remain and will apply for citizenship when I have funds to do so. I think I haven’t experienced the situation of some of your commenters being snubbed by Ireland Irish because England has always been the coloniser and never had to create an identity from the margins. Most English people are lovely and actually most other UK people are as well when they meet me. This is where I find being an American an advantage, oddly enough, because I’ve not grown up in this nation. Even when I talk of becoming a citizen; that usually is greeted with enthusiasm.
If I have any Irish ancestry it’s likely to be very little but I suspect that you may run across people whose families emigrated (whether by force or out of necessity) from one country to another and now some generations later feeling the lost limb. Thank you again for what you are learning and sharing.
Hi Kerri. Thank you so much for your comment and sharing your family's journey across the oceans. Really interesting to hear your particular experience of coming 'home home' to England and how largely positive that has been -- that has been something I have been curious about, whether people of other diaspora's experience something similar to those of the Irish diaspora in terms of being not wholly accepted by their homeland because they have the 'wrong accent' or some other identifier that marks them out as 'other'. That colonised vs. coloniser piece does seem to speak to that, especially in terms of how protective Irish people can be over 'Irishness'.
I've never had anyone else put this into words before but this is me and my Mothers exact situation. I do not want to live here (england) either. I find it so easy to be happy in Ireland and so hard to not be unhappy here. I really miss it, I haven't been back in two years now. Really appreciate this. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing what it feels like for you and your mother, Alexandra. I think we are taught so much to over-ride or derride our bodily knowings as ‘irrational’, and yet what you and your mother experience is real and is a truth. I am so glad that these words perhaps helped articulate that in some way xx
I'm sitting here, on a Sunday morning in Ottawa, Canada, having just read your piece wanting so say so much; while at the same time feeling a sense overwhelm and unsure of where to start. So, instead, I wish to offer a heartfelt míle buíochas. As an Irish-Canadian woman who has been feeling the 'calling home' from within my bones for sometime now, your piece offers glimmers of validation for what my body and spirit have known (and been feeling) for quite some time now.
I have also saved your piece to circle back to. As an artist and sacred storyteller, the spirit of the next story that swirls around me is called 'De thír mo mháithreacha / Of the Land of My Mothers'; inspired through diasporic grief and cultural belonging, this story tells the tale of one Irish-Canadian woman's search for belonging. Upon returning to the lands of her ancestors, and held within the wild the embrace of Éire [Ireland], she re-members that the magic and wisdom of the Irish matriarchs is alive and well within her (where ever her feet may call home).
I feel blessed that I will be in County Kerry next year for a residency to explore the heart and bones of this piece upon the land herself. For I know connecting with the earth and the language of Ireland is (and will be) particularly poignant for me personally - especially when tending to the threads of diasporic grief that rest within me.
So, from across the sea, on an overcast Sunday morning, go raibh maith agat.
Erica, go raibh míle míle maith agat as do chuid focal. Lovely to connect with you across the ocean and also to learn of the work you are doing. I would dearly love to hear that story you are working on one day.
I am an Irish-descended American three generations removed from our family's diaspora and yet, the bone-deep longing you describe is a haunting and ever-present feature that I've felt from childhood. Upon arrival the first time I visited Ireland, I was brought to my knees outside the Cork airport by a surprising and intense sadness. The last time I left Ireland, I was the woman on the plane hiding her tears from the stranger in the next seat. I was bewildered by the overwhelm of loss I felt for leaving a place my family hadn't lived in for a century.
I deeply love my community and home in Montana, but I am not indigenous to this place. There are unspeakable crimes to make reparations for as a settler here. This line so adeptly identifies the un-ease: "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." The phantom limb of diaspora grief is always there and always untouchable.
Ah Erin, thank you so much for sharing this with me. It is a very difficult grief to carry as it's a grief that most other will refuse to actualise, instead they will dismiss it as mere 'sentiment' and 'nostalgia'. But I hear you xx
Thank you, Belinda. I appreciate how generously and empathetically you elucidate this feeling and experience. I agree that such grief is so often either trivialized or fetishized while papering over the realities of colonization and diaspora — a distortion that, in the U.S. at least, is most prominently on display on St. Patrick's Day. (Green beer and plastic shamrocks... oh, please spare me.) The more I consider it, the more I've come to think that the denial of this grief is one deep root underpinning tremendous abuse, injustice, racism, addiction, intergenerational trauma, and on and on and on.
I recognise that diaspora grief, being English born and living in Ireland that last 20+ years. Despite my part-Irish heritage, I felt huge disconnection when I first moved here and it took time for me to feel belonging on Irish soil. I believe that by my efforts to connect to Irish land/nature, as well as culture and people, I have been able to make a home here that I wouldn't want to leave. I wonder whether some of the diaspora grief is grief for the disconnection from the land that bore them or their ancestors, having not connected with the land elsewhere?
Yes I think the not connecting elsewhere is a big factor, or not feeling they can connect elsewhere. Also, I think when people emigrate they can maintain a sort of heightened version of their home culture which maybe influences subsequent generations strongly to the point they don't feel like home is home.
Thanks for using a broader definition of diaspora, I've had a couple native Irish people tell me I don't count or ridicule me for talking about my roots. Yes I get that some of us can be rather loud & annoying but we are often that way because of the pain & deep longing you so beautifully describe. Unfortunately sometimes that gets turned into something rather toxic & distorted, superficiality & consumerism.
I am so grateful to find this powerful piece - it gives voice to what I have often tried to describe. Three of my grandparents are Irish all the way down their respective lineages. My father spent half of his time until adulthood going back and forth to live either in Ireland or Scotland. The music, literature, songs, and stories I was raised on were largely Irish. Raised in the North West of England, about 60% of my schoolmates had Irish surnames, as did the teachers and the nuns who taught me. We carved turnips at Hallowe'en, ate porridge for breakfast, and soda bread, bacon and black puddings featured heavily at our table. I learned history and interpreted media reports (via my politically-minded father) through an Irish lens and, later, read Irish history and politics at University. It was then that I began to learn the language.
After leaving University, I lived in Ireland - a much-longed-for dream, but, sadly, never quite managed to make it permanent. It is where I feel the joy of belonging - of being rooted in the landscape. But I am always the stranger, "the Australian" (a twinge of an accent after living some years in Australia). My ‘pick and mix’ accent dictates that I am a stranger wherever I live.
All five of my daughters have Irish names, my eldest first spoke with an Irish accent. They don’t want to live in Ireland - remembering too well the bemused, subtle condescension of many Irish to the diaspora newly returned. Many moons ago, back in the UK, I co-directed and managed an Irish theatre group. Most of us were from the diaspora. When promoting our latest play, our trustees demanded that "someone with an Irish accent" do the interviews. That one person was a good friend who helped with admin but knew nothing at all about the play, the playwright or any aspect of drama - still, she was duly and disastrously sent to be interviewed. It was a kick in the gut for the rest of us. It seems one’s accent is all-determining.
Hi Clare, thank you so so much for sharing your experiences here (and so sorry for being slow in my reply). It’s a comment so full of lived reality and story and generational experience, I could read it over and over again and keep finding something more to connect to. I find it fascinating how strongly Irish culture seems to be kept alive when it ‘goes abroad’, in all of those seemingly simple things like food and stories and music and politics, but which actually are how culture is kept alive, reproduced, adapted and developed. What you say about accent is so true - we seem to be unable to get past these really superficial labels, and it’s so sad!
A fellow pick and mix here. I’ve lived in Northern England and Australia, but grew up in Scots-Irish diaspora and culture in Australia and belong everywhere and nowhere with my accent. It’s a wrench whenever I live, and if you ask me where “home” is I can’t give you a straight answer. But, it makes me feel sensitive to how it is for many migrant or refugee families where the culture and language between places is more vastly different. I have seen other people less sensitive to what this experience of massive cultural shift must feel like. So that’s how I sort of live with this gnawing pit of constant longing, and just delve into music, literature and family history research as comfort.
Thank you Angela. I think you have answered something here for me that I have been trying to make sense of — that very thing of ‘how do people fill the pit’ and the void of something as ephemeral as geography and culture? Music! xx
This is a beautiful piece, thank you for writing it. I am an Irish American who spent my whole life feeling conflict over my identity. I felt some sense of imposter syndrome on both sides. I was too Irish to just be American, but I was too American to just be Irish. It was only when I learned the Irish language to fluency that I really embraced both sides of my identity. Through learning the language, I was able to understand what my life would have looked like if I had been born and raised in Ireland. In reflecting on that and my outlook towards my own upbringing, I came to understand that I would have taken so much of my Irishness for granted. I never did well with languages in school in the US so I certainly wouldn't have done any differently in Ireland. I am someone who moved away from home and never looked back. Who is to say I wouldn't have been the source of diaspora myself had I not been born and raised in Ireland? There is a pain and a grief that comes from feeling like part of your heart resides in a different world than your body. However, I have found peace in seeing diaspora as the root of my passion.
Thank you so much for sharing this Briana. It’s really lovely to hear (and also very uplifting) to learn how you navigated all the different feeling of Otherness throughout your life and transformed them into something positive. As someone who did grow up learning the language and whose ‘Cúpla focail’ has waned to a shocking extent since I moved away from Ireland, I can definitely afirrm that you would have taken the language for granted!
Hi Belinda - I'm guessing you're probably aware of this, but just in case not, Dr Pauline Boss has done a lot of work around losses which are both present and absent at the same time (diaspora, dementia, missing persons, etc) calling it 'Ambiguous Loss'.
https://www.ambiguousloss.com/
Oooo no I didn't know of this! Thanks so much, this is great 👍
I really appreciate that you wrote this, Belinda. I am 3rd-generation Irish-American- all 8 of my great-grandparents emigrated from Ireland during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War (I got 97% Irish on my DNA test, lol) I grew up in an Irish neighborhood of the Bronx. My parents were raised with the help of their Irish grandparents. Everything about who I am is informed and shaped by my "Irishness"- my politics, my mental health, my childhood, everything. I feel like I have to constantly explain how I am connected to Ireland, and then it makes me look like a try-hard, or that I am trying to bypass my existence as someone who was born in America. I am just desperately trying to find a way to feel at home in a body that yearns to be back (or, at the very least, have the means to go back more often) in Ireland, and part of that work has been to find ways to connect with Ireland without physically being there.
My life is also very much shaped by war time in Ireland- all 8 great-grandparents emigrated between 1919-1925. Some were anti-treaty Irish and had no choice but to leave. Some were younger siblings who couldn't find work or didn't have land to work. Only one set of my great-grandparents met and married in Ireland- the others found themselves in NYC and met through Irish gatherings and friends. They had American wakes thrown for them before they left- they didn't get back for their parents' funerals or siblings' weddings. Only one of my great-grandparents ever actually went back at all. I think it is also time for Ireland to start reckoning with how those wars not only shaped Ireland as a country but also affected the diaspora. An Gorta Mór isn't the only time the children of Ireland were forced out of their homes.
I am someone who lost her only child in labor at 40 weeks, so the loss of children is something I know so acutely and painfully. There's a letter I have from my great-grandmother in Mullinary, Co. Monaghan to my great-grandfather where she describes how things are going back home- she discusses the sale of a pig, how my great-grandfather's brother is being kinder to her, etc- and my heart broke open just thinking about how this mother would literally never see her child again. To know your child is alive but out of your reach forever? It's devastating. How would that immense grief and trauma not carry through the line?
Anyway, thanks again for sharing this beautiful piece. It definitely made me feel seen and I appreciate that greatly.
Hi Meaghan, first my apologies for my very delayed response here, I’ve been absorbed in getting a book finalised and ready for release these last weeks. I so appreciate your sharing your own and your family’s story and experience. I can’t help but think how many times that similar separation from Ireland yet how strongly it can remain carried through a family line has happened in so many families of Ireland across the world. It’s an almost unfathomable level of loss and yearning. My time interviewing women of the diaspora has definitely made me more conscious of my own short-sightedness with regards to this and how I have been guilty, so many times, at brushing off people with similar lived realities as yours in the past. But I now fully recognise that ‘having Irish ancestors’ is not some tenuous, bygone thing — that, in fact, it is quite the opposite, it is a very present, raw, visceral, daily reality. There is an Ireland, or a connection to Ireland, that is so strong in those who have been raised without it but very much with it, that those of us who are ‘born and raised’ Irish will never know, and I think that’s kind of beautiful. It is its own unique thing (and I won’t ever dismiss that when I encounter it ever again) xx
This is a lovely read. I grew up with my both pairs of biological grandparents just as voices on the phone from Ireland and Scotland at Christmas (we had to save up all year for calls from Australia). My grandparents were long gone by the time I made it there in my 20s, from Australia. My parents are both Scottish so I have grown up in an ex-pat community as a child, with traditional folk music and all the adults speaking and singing of their childhoods “back home”. The longing I feel leaving from visiting Scotland and Ireland takes months to settle, and I can’t really explain the power of it. As an example, I was in a uni zoom seminar and the lecturer had a Sligo accent and for inexplicable reasons, an awful sudden sadness just descended upon me, so I was there crying and having to turn my camera off. I am looking forward to exploring this more through your work because it’s a feeling of being almost unhinged and I’d like to understand it more deeply.
Thank you for putting words to your emotional experience (not an easy thing to do). That sense of absence is so strong in diaspora communities and it near breaks my heart. In some ways, it’s a living experience for me as I haven’t lived ‘home home’ in Ireland for over 10 years, so, although I don’t really think of myself in that way, I am now of the Irish diaspora. I can never return to Ireland in the same way as when I left, just as I can never quite settle in other places because they are not Ireland. The strength of longing for something so intangible that you don’t even really know what you are longing for is an incredibly challenging thing to navigate! Some days are definitely harder than others.
You’re right there are those hard days. I can only try and imagine how it was for my Dad who left his family at 19 in Scotland to go to Australia, never saw his parents again and had a younger brother who he met for the first time in his 50s.
Everytime I have a Zoom call with friends, or can send a quick WhatsApp to my parents I think, how lucky we are, for as much as I hate all that technology too, that at least we can stay connected to people in ways that previous generations could only have dreamed of.
Great post Belinda and I look forward to reading your book when it’s out. You crossed my mind recently when I watched the documentary ‘Housewife of the Year’ - have you heard of it / seen it? I highly recommend it.
Here’s a link to the trailer https://youtu.be/I0OGXGAHaWs?si=ym7orzrzTrYi_WkC
Margaret! That trailer gave me shivers! SHIVERS! I have a particualar penchant for the 'Housewife of the Year' competition because of the Aga in my mother's kitchen. It was always my mum's dream to have an Aga range, but she didn't know how she would ever afford one. We were talking about this one day and she pipes up "If it wasn't for its last owner winning the Housewife of the Year Competition' we'd never have had one. And I was there like WHAT HOUSEWIFE OF THE YEAR WHAAAAT? Never heard of such a thing in my life. My mum then went on to explain that the previous owner of the Aga had sold it to them for a really good price because she'd just won the housewife of the year competition and Calor gas were coming and re-doing the whole kitchen as the prize and put in a gas cooker etc.
I did not know about this documentary!! So glad you told. The awful thing about living outside Ireland. I'm going to have to try and figure out where I can view it, and soon!! Thank you
I knew you’d be interested but didn’t expect such a direct personal connection with that comp! I went to see it with my daughter, now a mum of two girls herself. Even though she’s v aware through her own study and her area of work (and me!), there was much she wasn’t aware of. We had a v interesting conversation on the journey home. She said it should be available on the curriculum in senior cycle in secondary schools. If you could view it with your mum? Has she seen it yet I wonder?
When you mentioned it I was nearly thinking to myself, I’d love a ‘Women of Ireland Project’ day out to go and see it!
That would be a fab outing! I’d love to join you if I could.
Goodness that hit hard. I had wondered if we had met but I tend to keep those feelings buried deep. As the first generation born outside of Ireland I still didn’t properly mix either English people until I hit secondary school and even then only superficially. So when I was called a “plastic Paddy” by an elderly Irish lady last week I was shocked at how much the phrase affected me. Even more shocked that I answered her back and asked her to consider that some may find the phrase offensive. Who we are is bigger than the place we are born.
Ooph, yes that phrase Plastic Paddy is awful. Good for you for responding back!
I was born and bred in Glasgow, but very aware that my great grandparents and further back on both sides were mixed Irish and Scottish. My DNA is about half and half, a bit more Irish. I married an Irish man and have now lived in Ireland for more years than I lived in Scotland (28 years). After Brexit I got my Irish citizenship, and took along with me a list of all my Irish ancestors who had moved to Scotland. I sat in the hall and read all of their names (to myself 😁) and told them that I had finally properly come home. I was, however, fiercely disappointed during the ceremony when there was no mention at all of the diaspora who had returned. It was all about new Irish and their contributions. All true and welcome, but I felt ignored and taken for granted. Or not wanted. I describe myself as a Glaswegian Dub, and feel that I am a hybrid. My siblings tell me that they've always thought of me as being more Irish, even though we had no Irish family to visit when growing up.
Thank you Tracey. I love this image of you reading the names of all your ancestors in the hall the day you got your citizenship. I imagine they were all there with you. Also find it really interesting how your siblings all thought you were always more Irish growing up. Another woman I interviewed, who grew up in London, said something similar — her siblings can’t understand her wanting to be in Ireland but say that out of them all, she was always ‘The throwback’.
What a heartfelt project and at such an important time! A somewhat related discussion was had over on another post, about how so many cultures are lost through assimilation. My family was more Czech than Irish but neither culture survived when my grandparents immigrated to the US. The demand to be more like the country you move to requires for so much of who we are, who our ancestor were, to be abandoned and to me, seems too high a cost. I hope more people begin to find and hold onto their roots in the years ahead. Regardless of where we happen to be physically.
Hi Belinda, thank you for your wonderful project and the work you are doing to understand how place affects one’s sense of self even when that self has never been in that place. I’m especially thankful for all the heartfelt comments left by other readers.
My family is made up of Italians, Minorcans and English all somehow meeting up in the bodies of my parents in Florida. My dad was the child of immigrant Italians and my mother from a long line of English (likely having immigrated in the early 18th century) and Minorcans (late 18th century). I’ve visited Spain (but not Minorca) and Italy twice but it was only when I came to England in 2010 that I felt I’d come home. I’ve always felt that my birthplace was the USA but it was not where I was from. In fact now when someone asks me where I’m from I say that I was born and raised in Florida; a place I left as soon as I could when I was 24. It was never home for me nor were any of the places in the States I moved to subsequently. Until I landed at Heathrow Airport in 2010.
I’m lucky. I have a place here living in community that has allowed me to slowly pursue permanency. I have permanent leave to remain and will apply for citizenship when I have funds to do so. I think I haven’t experienced the situation of some of your commenters being snubbed by Ireland Irish because England has always been the coloniser and never had to create an identity from the margins. Most English people are lovely and actually most other UK people are as well when they meet me. This is where I find being an American an advantage, oddly enough, because I’ve not grown up in this nation. Even when I talk of becoming a citizen; that usually is greeted with enthusiasm.
If I have any Irish ancestry it’s likely to be very little but I suspect that you may run across people whose families emigrated (whether by force or out of necessity) from one country to another and now some generations later feeling the lost limb. Thank you again for what you are learning and sharing.
Hi Kerri. Thank you so much for your comment and sharing your family's journey across the oceans. Really interesting to hear your particular experience of coming 'home home' to England and how largely positive that has been -- that has been something I have been curious about, whether people of other diaspora's experience something similar to those of the Irish diaspora in terms of being not wholly accepted by their homeland because they have the 'wrong accent' or some other identifier that marks them out as 'other'. That colonised vs. coloniser piece does seem to speak to that, especially in terms of how protective Irish people can be over 'Irishness'.
I've never had anyone else put this into words before but this is me and my Mothers exact situation. I do not want to live here (england) either. I find it so easy to be happy in Ireland and so hard to not be unhappy here. I really miss it, I haven't been back in two years now. Really appreciate this. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing what it feels like for you and your mother, Alexandra. I think we are taught so much to over-ride or derride our bodily knowings as ‘irrational’, and yet what you and your mother experience is real and is a truth. I am so glad that these words perhaps helped articulate that in some way xx
Great post, as always. Looking forward to your book.
Thank you Rionach 😊