Madam, - This year marks the centenary of Lafcadio Hearn's death and John Moran's welcome article (The Irish Times, April 24th) reminds us that, before devoting himself to the study of Japan, Hearn spent six years writing in Cincinnati, 10 in New Orleans, and two in Martinique.
Each of these sojourns represents a stage in Hearn's growing fascination with creolised cultures, an affinity that culminated in Two Years in the French West Indies. Not only do contemporary Caribbean writers value this masterpiece, but some of them view Hearn as an honorary Creole, largely because of his "multiple identities".
We should not forget, then, the strikingly mixed background of this "wandering Irishman", as John Moran rather reductively terms him. His father was an Anglo-Irish Protestant and a surgeon in the British army; his Eastern Orthodox mother was Greek; and the paternal grand-aunt who reared him in Dublin and sent him to Catholic schools in France and England had converted to Roman Catholicism. Indeed, not only Hearn's Creole odyssey - involving a deep fascination with racial and cultural mixture - but also his eventual Japanese naturalisation, were no doubt partly inspired by his own origins, marked as they were by (colonial) displacements, relations, and combinations. This, indeed, is one of the reasons why this writer is of international interest in our neo-global age. - Yours, etc.,
MARY GALLAGHER, Department of French, UCD, Dublin 4.