John McGahern, many years ago, in an essay on “The Local and the Universal” claimed that “everything interesting begins with one person in one place”. The poet, teacher and scholar Eamonn Wall would add an important caveat: only if you set that person in motion.
Conocimiento: Writing Irish Borderlands is an exploration of the consequences of mobility, displacement and migration for writers born both on and off the island of Ireland.
Wall draws on the writings of the Chicana author and critic Gloria Anzaldúa to chart the dangers and the possibilities for bodies, languages and cultures on the move across different spaces. The range is broad as he moves from EM Reapy on the Irish in Australia to Terence Winch on the Irish in the Bronx, and from Úna Minh Kavanagh embracing a new Irish identity in Ireland to the Native American writer Louis Owens teasing out his mixed Choctaw, Cherokee and Irish inheritance.
Further essays on Philip Casey, John McGahern and Anna Burns trace out the tensions in the standoff between attachment and detachment as writers negotiate a truce between respect for place and desire for change. Wall’s writing reflects his own desire to cross literature’s border spaces, mixing personal memory with critical analysis.
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He writes with great feeling and wry clarity of the Wexford of his youth. Speaking of the local library in Enniscorthy which had many westerns available to rent, he observes: “In the decades of censorship that followed Irish independence, westerns, favouring violence over sex, were seen as inhabiting the high moral ground.”
[ Childhood culture: Colm Keena on the Wild WestOpens in new window ]
Wall is careful not to sentimentalise borderlands. He picks up on the harrowing sense of exclusion as expressed by migrant writers living in direct provision in Ireland and details the imaginative claustrophobia of community border surveillance in Anna Burns’s Belfast. If he argues, in an essay on Louis Owens, that “[i]t is often motion rather than settlement that defines the histories of families”, then the land may not be the only thing that matters.
Equally important, as borne out by this engaged and engaging set of essays, is what happens to the land when we leave it behind or bring it to the liminal spaces of elsewhere.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
