Literary visions of multicultural Ireland

The immigrant in contemporary Irish literature

Pilar Villar-Argáiz

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719097324
• eBook ISBN: 9781784992125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Now available in paperback, this pioneering collection of essays deals with the topic of how Irish literature responds to the presence of non-Irish immigrants in Celtic-Tiger and post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland. The book assembles an international group of 18 leading and prestigious academics in the field of Irish studies from both sides of the Atlantic, including Declan Kiberd, Anne Fogarty and Maureen T. Reddy, amongst others. Key areas of discussion are: what does it mean to be 'multicultural' and what are the implications of this condition for contemporary Irish writers? How has literature in Ireland responded to inward migration? Have Irish writers reflected in their work (either explicitly or implicitly) the existence of migrant communities in Ireland? If so, are elements of Irish traditional culture and community maintained or transformed? What is the social and political efficacy of these intercultural artistic visions?

1

Introduction: the immigrant in contemporary Irish literature

Pilar Villar-Argáiz

Celtic Tiger Ireland and inward migration

When Ireland became part of the European Union in 1973, the country entered a new phase of rapid social, political, and economic transformation. This radical change was perceived at all levels of Irish life. Ireland’s gradual transformation from a predominantly agricultural economy to a hi-tech multinational one was simultaneously accompanied by other influential events such as the rise and success of the women’s movement, the shrinking influence of the Catholic Church, and noteworthy political achievements in the North such as the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. New descriptions were needed for identifying this fresh and almost unrecognisable Ireland which was emerging. In 1994, the economist Kevin Gardiner coined the now ubiquitous term ‘Celtic Tiger’, referring to the unprecedented financial boom of the country. During this Celtic Tiger period, which lasted approximately from the early 1990s to the first years of the twenty-first century, Ireland was often depicted as the most globalised country in the world.¹

One of the immediate consequences of the economic success of the country was the reversal of emigration, from outward to inward migration. For the first time in history, Ireland became a destination not only for tourists and students, but also for EU nationals, asylum-seekers, political refugees, and the so-called economic migrants. The growth of these diasporic communities, especially in the years 1997–2001, profoundly altered the ethnic landscape of Irish society. As Titley, Kerr, and King O’Rían (2010: 22) explain, statistics show that nearly 250,000 people migrated to Ireland in the period between 1995–2000. As a result, it was stipulated in 2007 that one person in ten was born outside the Republic (2007 census of the Central Statistics Office). With the arrival of immigrants, mainly from Eastern Europe, China, and Africa,² D.P. Moran’s exclusivist equation of ‘Irish Irish’ with Gaelic and (white) Catholics has been consistently challenged and proved to be untenable. This increasingly multicultural composition of Irish society is perceived in one of the most explicit exhibitions of national pride, St Patrick’s Day Parade. In recent years, this has displayed ‘new [multiethnic] forms of Irish identity’ (Salis, 2010: 33–4). Indeed, in the 2012 St Patrick’s Day Greetings from the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, to Irish people around the world, there is praise for ‘the inclusive and generous spirit of St Patrick’, which inspires this national celebration to ‘accommodate all ages, all communities and all ethnicities’. The ‘global Irish family’ that is addressed in Higgins’ speech not only encompasses the Irish diasporic community abroad, but also a more ethnically diverse community within the borders of the Republic, also composed of people not necessarily ‘Irish’ by birth.³

The profound impact that migration has had on the island has been examined from various perspectives.⁴ Barret, Bergin, and Duffy (2006), for instance, have analysed its effects on the economy of the country; and Crowley, Gilmartin, and Kitchin (2006) its consequences for legislation on Irish citizenship. The increasing cultural and racial diversity of Irish society and the subsequent anxiety over traditional notions of Irish identity led to the publication in 2001 of Multi-Culturalism: The View from the Two Irelands, a brief book featuring essays by two of the island’s most prominent cultural critics, Edna Longley and Declan Kiberd, and a preface by the then President Mary McAleese. Other works which have recognised the impact of the immigrant experience in Ireland are the special issue of the journal Translocations, Irish Immigration, Race and Social Transformation (Fanning and Munck, 2007), and Bryan Fanning’s 2007 collection of essays, both gathering multidisciplinary studies on the migration debate.⁵ Most research, however, has been conducted in the area of racism and xenophobia and the controversial impact of migration at the social and political levels. These have been extensively studied by Bryan Fanning (2002), Ronit Lentin (2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2008), Robbie McVeigh, who co-edited two volumes with Lentin in 2002 and 2006,⁶ and more recently by Gerardine Meaney (2010), whose monograph Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change offers an illuminating analysis of the consequences of the racialisation of Irish national identity in contemporary representations of immigrant women and their children. The edited volume Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender, and Social Justice in Ireland (Faragó and Sullivan, 2008) also constitutes an important contribution, as it examines the contemporary intercultural and interethnic tensions in Ireland from a broad range of perspectives, including the artistic and sociological. Indeed, the present collection is appearing at a time of heightened interest in the cultural and literary contexts of Irish migration, as evidenced by the recent special issues of The Irish Review (King and O’Toole, 2012) and Éire Ireland (Mac Éinrí and O’Toole, 2012).

The cultural effects of migration

Inward migration has had inevitable consequences for the literature which has been produced in Ireland from the beginning of the Celtic Tiger period onwards. Although in contrast to Britain, the literary world in Ireland is still overwhelmingly ‘white’, this is undoubtedly changing as large-scale immigration has altered the ethnic composition of Irish society. One of the earliest examples of literature produced by the so-called ‘new Irish’ is provided by the immigrant writer Cauvery Madhavan, whose first novel Paddy Indian (2001) signalled ‘the arrival of the new minorities to the Irish literary scene’ (Zamorano Llena, 2011: 97). Madhavan’s work was later followed by the intercultural narratives of Iranian-born Marsha Mehran and by the weekly newspaper Metro Éireann, which regularly publishes stories centred on race issues.⁷ The work of the ‘new Irish’ has had a particular impact on the theatrical arena. Ursula Rani Sarma and Bisi Adigun are two of the most representative playwrights belonging to this first literary generation of immigrants in Ireland. In particular, Adigun is well known for his rewriting in 2007 of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, a play co-written with Roddy Doyle which features a Nigerian Christy Mahon. Other theatrical multiethnic projects include the Dublin-based African theatre company, Arambe Productions, and ‘The Tower of Babel’, initiated by the Calypso theatre company. Both are successful attempts by immigrant artists and journalists to foster, in Reddy’s words (2007: 16), ‘an integrationist, celebrate-difference racial discourse’ in Ireland, one which accommodates the culture of the newly arrived communities.⁸

The effects of Ireland’s multiethnic reality are also observed in the multiplicity of literary texts by Irish writers, both male and female, which engage simultaneously with issues of nationhood and ethnicity. Ever since Donal O’Kelly’s production for the Abbey Theatre in 1994, Asylum! Asylum!, there has been a profusion of literary productions by Irish artists exploring the presence of the migrant Other in Irish culture and social life. One of the first Irish-born writers to delve into the changing racial landscape of the country was Hugo Hamilton, whose groundbreaking memoir, The Speckled People (2003), anticipated the now increasing literary concern with ‘outsiders coming from other cultures to blend with the existent culture and change it’ (interview with Allen-Randolph, 2010: 19). Hamilton’s work has been followed by others such as Roddy Doyle, one of the most prolific writers on multicultural Ireland. For Doyle, his recent work has been informed by the attempt ‘to embrace the new changes in Ireland creatively, rather than see them as statistics’ (148). Ireland’s multiethnic reality is also palpable in the work of other prominent writers such as Dermot Bolger, Colum McCann, Kate O’Riordan, Emer Martin, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, among others.

It is important to bear in mind, however, that not all Irish artists have responded so openly and rapidly to Ireland’s new multiethnic landscape. To start with, there are writers who are not interested in recording this social aspect of the country. Others find this experience too new, and like Sebastian Barry in The Pride of Parnell Street (2008), experiment with new themes briefly, only to leave them aside for later. It seems that Ireland’s economic and demographic changes have occurred too quickly for writers to reflect them adeptly. It is precisely this aspect that is alluded to by Kiberd in his 2003 essay ‘The Celtic Tiger: a cultural history’, reprinted in The Irish Writer and the World (2005: 269–88). Kiberd illustrates the inability of artists to capture accurately Ireland’s shifting reality by means of the metaphor of a moving object whose velocity cannot be ably reflected in a photograph: ‘The pace of change may be just too fast for most, for it is never easy to take a clear photograph of a moving object, especially when you are up close to it. Nothing, after all, is more difficult to realise than the present – we are always at its mercy more than we are its masters’ (276). This might explain the gestation, throughout the 1990s, of three successful literary works – Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, John McGahern’s Amongst Women, and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa – which were set in the past, rather than in the context of prosperous Celtic Tiger Ireland. According to Kiberd (281), these works conceal a form of ‘masked modernity’. While the impression is that they are obsessed by history, they are actually using the past to achieve a better understanding of the present. Kiberd articulates this cultural contradiction – which he describes as ‘the strange blend of backwardness and forwardness’ – as follows:

The country has gone through in the past century and a half the sort and scale of changes which took four or five hundred years in other parts of Europe. No wonder that people have looked in the rear-view mirror and felt a kind of motion-sickness, or have sought to conceal the underlying modernity of their lives by giving them the surface appearance of the ancient. (280)

In any case, not all literary works during the Celtic Tiger period nostalgically retreated to the past. Keith Ridgway’s novel The Parts (2003), for instance, accurately reflects Ireland’s rapid changes. Nevertheless, as Kiberd contends, its very title indicates that a ‘complete’ assessment of Ireland’s present condition is impossible, as this will always be inevitably incomplete and partial (277). The implication of Kiberd’s argument on the literary works produced in the last decade of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries is that Irish writers need to acquire the perspective afforded by time, as the reality of multicultural Ireland is too recent to be completely understood. Indeed, the example of other countries (particularly former empires such as Spain, France or England) shows that the impact and effect of immigration on the cultural sphere of a nation is a slow and, at times, troubled process, particularly with respect to the incorporation of ethnic Others in the mainstream literary sphere.

Ten years have now passed since Kiberd’s claim in 2003 that ‘[t]here is no major celebration or corrosive criticism of [Ireland’s profound social change] in good novels, plays or poetry’ (2005: 276), and his assertion is being challenged by the publication of numerous works which have brought centre-stage the existence of migrant communities in Ireland, a presence rarely perceived before in Irish literature. Some iconic examples include in short fiction Roddy Doyle’s The Deportees (2008), in the theatrical arena Dermot Bolger’s The Ballymun Trilogy (2010) and, in the literary field of poetry, Michael O’Loughlin’s In This Life (2011). In this sense, the silence that Kiberd diagnosed over the decade of the 1990s on a whole range of issues seems to be overcome; we now begin to perceive, over the past few years, a gradual moving away from themes of the past to Ireland’s multicultural reality in the twenty-first century. It is precisely this emerging multiethnic character of Irish literature that is addressed by this collection of essays.

In spite of the fact that Ireland is now effectively what could be called a multicultural society, multiculturalism is still an issue which requires analysis at an artistic and literary level in the specific context of Irish studies. As explained above, the last decade has witnessed a proliferation of studies on race and multiculturalism in Ireland. However, there is insufficient research on the literary representations of the so-called ‘ethnic Otherness’ that prevail in a society where everything that distances itself from the white Irish majority is secluded to the margins, particularly immigrants and Travellers.⁹ This collection of essays tries to fill this research lacuna, by assessing the cultural effects of inward migration in relation to contemporary Irish literature.

In particular, the book examines literary representations of the exchanges between the Irish host and its foreign ‘guests’, which have become common aspects of everyday life in twenty-first-century Ireland. Key areas of discussion are: What does it mean to be ‘multicultural’, and what are the implications of this condition for contemporary Irish writers? How has literature in Ireland responded to inward migration? Have Irish writers reflected in their work (either explicitly or implicitly) the new influx of immigration? If so, are elements of Irish traditional culture and community maintained or transformed? In other words, does contemporary Irish literature confirm ethnonational boundaries by drawing upon cultural difference? Or does it dissolve all forms of local specificities by celebrating hybridity and cross-fertilisation within the geographical space of Ireland? What is the social and political efficacy of these intercultural artistic visions?

While these issues have received sustained academic attention in literary contexts with longer traditions of migration, they have yet to be extensively addressed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword: the worlding of Irish writing
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the immigrant in contemporary Irish literature
• PART I Irish multiculturalisms: obstacles and challenges
• PART II ‘Rethinking Ireland’ as a postnationalist community
• PART III ‘The return of the repressed’: ‘performing’ Irishness through intercultural encounters
• PART IV Gender and the city
• Index