Theatre and film have taken up the challenge of portraying the lives of immigrants in Ireland but where are the novelists, asks Ruadhán Mac Cormaicin his continuing series Migration and the reinvention of Ireland
'By day I walk among the countless faces. Nobody turns to take a second look, not even a glance." With those words, written to her sister back home, the viewer is reminded that Taiwo - the protagonist played by Ruth Negga in CiaráO'Connor's forthcoming film Capital Letters- has not spoken a single sentence in a film she dominates. She is unheard as well as unheeded.
It is tempting to believe that Taiwo speaks for all migrants in Ireland, offering a reminder of how cross-cultural contact is largely absent from so many areas of public life but also how the arts could provide the space for such encounters. Theatre and film have been most receptive to the experiences of immigrants and it is there that the themes broached from the early 1990s by writers such as Donal O'Kelly and Roddy Doyle recur. As the patterns of migration have shifted, so have the creative responses to it.
Early treatments on screen and stage - O'Kelly's Asylum! Asylum!,performed at the Abbey in 1994 was an opening gambit of sorts - concerned themselves with the arrival of asylum seekers, often using the form of a conventional domestic drama to depict the experience of the migrant and society's responses to new arrivals.
While the genre evolves and maps new terrain, it does so in many cases by drawing on Irish historical memories of migration, asking us to see parallels between Irish emigrés of yesterday and today's newcomers.
Thus we have the arrival of an African St Patrick (played by Nigerian asylum seeker, Solomon Ijigade) in pre-Christian Ireland after he is kidnapped by Celtic raiders in Maeve Ingoldsby's Mixing it on the Mountain(2003), or the setting of the social club in London, where a group of Irish emigrant labourers is impersonated by a cast of African actors in a re-enactment of Jimmy Murphy's The Kings of the Kilburn High Road.
Some see here the equivalent in art of the "historical duty" theme that is so commonly deployed in public rhetoric, by President McAleese and others, by which a shared experience of suffering offers a powerful basis for cross-cultural sympathy.
Prof Luke Gibbons of Notre Dame University in Indiana finds it in Gerry Stembridge's 2001 television drama Black Day at Black Rock(2001), which charts a day in the life of a sleepy Irish town as it responds to a decision by the Department of Justice to house 30 asylum seekers in a hostel in the town.
The most powerful sequence in the drama occurs when, at a public meeting, the local school's vice-principal (and history teacher) Brian Cross tries to defuse tensions by reading a letter written by a young Irish emigrant who has just arrived in New York after escaping the Great Famine.
Bisi Adigun, the founder of Arambe Productions, regrets that so many artistic renderings of these questions have tended to cast the immigrant in the role of victim - he is tired of seeing black characters who are prostitutes, slaves, servants or mentally unstable. Don't most plays and films with an asylum seeker end with him being deported before things return to "normal"?
"I am looking forward to a production that will highlight the fact that black people have been coming to Ireland since the 18th century. Or a production that imagines an asylum seeker from Nigeria who joins Ireland's national football team and helps Ireland to qualify and win the World Cup. If it happened in France, via Zinedine Zidane, it can happen in Ireland - and why not use the art of drama to foretell it?"
Some more recent output sketches more variety of experience, as would be expected after more than a decade of steady immigration. John Carney's recent film Once, starring Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, is a milestone, according to Prof Gibbons.
Set in a Dublin of cash-strapped buskers and artisans at a remove from the dominant self-image of the swaggering city, the film uses music to develop the otherwise inexpressive relationship between an Irish busker and a central European pianist who sells the Big Issues. Geoffrey Gilmore, the Sundance festival director, thinks the film has a lot to say about immigration and cross-cultural migration and according to Gibbons, its repudiation of Hollywood endings makes an important point.
"It makes a case that integration need not involve assimilation or resolution, and the fact that there isn't a happy ending is crucial to it. It's not required that everybody sing from the same hymn sheet and the movie shows that that's not required for the story to work."
While film and theatre have been at the forefront of Ireland's redefinition of itself since the early 1990s, however, novelists - with a few exceptions - have been strangely silent.
Zeljka Doljanin, a Croatian who is writing a PhD thesis at UCD on the stranger in current Irish fiction, finds a conspicuous absence of immigrants in recently published work, where the few foreigners to be found tend to be pieces of descriptive furniture rather than fully realised characters. She sees much more curiosity about foreigners in the monocultural world of John McGahern, where "there was something like a longing for multiculturalism, I find, while now there's more a longing for the way things were before".
One possible explanation, she suggests, is that there are profound home-grown questions that remain unanswered by Irish novelists and, until they are resolved, the immigrant won't get a look in.
"Ever since I got into Patrick McCabe I realised that it maybe shouldn't surprise me that much, because he, for example, is dealing with the outsider, he's dealing with the Other, the Irish Other - the abusers, the transvestites, whatever. I think there's so much there in Ireland, because so much has changed that hasn't been dealt with, and maybe foreigners will come later."
Could it just be a matter of time? This is the view of novelist Colum McCann, who reckons it is inevitable the theme will eventually be confronted. "I have no doubt that the immigrant will become a vital theme in, and feature of, Irish literature in the next few years. I have a feeling that many Irish writers have been away for a while, looking at other worlds, in order to come back home and tell the story properly."
This absence of the outsider is all the more intriguing given the long tradition of texts filled with strangers and strangeness that Irish writers inherit. From Swift through Joyce, Synge, Beckett and McGahern, notes Prof Declan Kiberd, "the whole Irish literary canon is almost like a crash course to prepare us for this moment".
If so, why are we less open to the stranger now that he has come to us? One explanation, Kiberd says, lies in the "horizontal bonding" of contemporary Irish life - the fragmented ways in which we mix and move, where people know their own circle and seldom venture beyond it.
Those who graduated from Trinity College in the late 1990s socialise with each other and know that world. People from Blanchardstown can hang out together, go to watch films there and know only their circle.
So too with the Chinese and the Poles. "There's less a sense of circulation and people crossing other territories than there would have been in Joyce's time, and what allowed Joyce renew his styles in each chapter of Ulysseswas the random meetings in the freely-circulated streets."
The one genre that has tried to engage with the fast-track shifts of the Celtic Tiger years is chick-lit, but its authors are concerned broadly with one clique and its narrow-gauge preoccupations. Migrants are invisible. Kiberd suggests it would take an ambitious author to try a grand social panoramic sweep in the mode of Dickens or Tom Wolfe. Joe O'Connor has just written such a novel, but it's set not in Dublin but in the 1860s after the civil war in America.
As Bisi Adigun points out, most attempts to depict in art the experience of migration are at least mediated, if not entirely conceived, through Irish eyes. There is a need for greater input from migrants themselves, not only through existing institutions and pre-determined roles but in new forms, new practices, and the effect would surely be liberating.
Perhaps the next great Irish novel will be written by an immigrant, Colum McCann suggests. But in the meantime, perhaps the work of migrants would at least help resolve one of the preoccupations that binds a great amount of creative output on migration: Irishness.
In the deftly crafted title story of Claire Keegan's new collection, Walk the Blue Fields, a Chinese man who becomes the local healer in a rural Co Wexford parish is a presence rather than a participant: we are concerned not so much with him but with the feeling that he has become a spiritual rival to the local priest. The outsider is a lens through which to look at ourselves, in other words.
Similarly, Yu Ming is Ainm Dom(2003), Daniel O'Hara's short film about a Chinese student who masters the Irish language only to be thrown into confusion when he arrives in Ireland and tries to speak it on the streets, is as much about Ireland's ambivalence towards the language as it is about the disorientation of the newcomer.
This autumn a revised version of Synge's Playboy of the Western World, co-written by Roddy Doyle and Bisi Adigun, and featuring a Nigerian actor as that great outsider Christy Mahon, will be staged at the Abbey Theatre. It's a fitting choice, says Kiberd.
"I think at the basis of this is a simple enough thing. In order to be ready to meet the stranger without, you must first confront the stranger within yourself and be at peace with your own strangeness."