Writing a letter to a friend yesterday I found my hand scribbling down words I didn’t choose to write. They were words that blurted out through the conduit of my arm, through my pencil onto the page. I shared with the page my reflections. Being a writer, for me I wrote, is a type of hunger. It is to be restless in the face of living. Writing, is a way of returning, a meditation, a way of seeking peace in an otherwise overwhelming existence. Writing is a ritual, a container, a mirror. It is a boat, which has aided my navigation in the realm of the unseen.
This last month I have avoided writing. In doing so I’ve chosen to avoid seeing. Seeing is sometimes painful. Sometimes, the things I see I do not want to accept.
On the 3rd April I returned from Ireland. Over the last two years I have visited once every 3 to 4 months. My quest between the two islands began with a desperate need to understand. It began with an unsatiable desire to see, to feel, to touch & to be with the land my family had worked until they migrated. In this time I have visited my ancestors graves. I have visited the places they were born. I have lit candles in solemn churches where their names are written on ancient stone. I have sung keening songs in lonesome, ravaged woods. I have sunk my long fingers into Irish soil and held it as delicately as water. I have thrashed like a giant bird in the waves of the Atlantic. Inhaled the mountains, the cow shit, the rich fertile earth.
Over the last two years I have begun the task of sowing myself back into an ancestral story. A story that is largely submerged beneath the few existing records I have; names written in cursive, with coal black ink. Yes, this journey has brought some healing, has re-fused the connections between me & those lands. It has also summoned grief. Wild tides of grief.
Increasingly, my return has become more of a challenge. My return to England has become an extended moment of turbulence; a rupturing of the foundations I have been slowly laying since I entered into recovery. The past is erupting, disrupting like an invasive species between the bramble & the dandelion of my native soil. This is not what I expected. When I ask myself what I did expect, I can only describe to you a sense of satiation. A gasping thirst that would be quenched.
Naively, I believed the more I visited Ireland the less alienated I would feel from my history. The more connected I would feel to the parts of my being which had, until visiting being untended & neglected. In part, this is/was truthful. Being able to be with the soil my family touched with their own hands & feet does something to a body. Swimming in the timeless tides of Irish shores re-membered psyche into the threads of forgotten stories. The complexities however, of visiting a place both internally & externally, a place that has been a site of such familial hardship was something I had not prepared for. I was not prepared to digest the gnarled skeleton of the Irish Diaspora. I was not prepared to take those knowing’s into myself.
I have felt torn whether or not to write this piece. Whether this experience itself is worthy of the hours it will take to write this essay. Fortunately, my desire to write is largely uncontrollable despite my best efforts to shackle my creativity. Despite not wanting too, I have typed this far. Seeing these words on the stark luminescence of this screen, has illuminated glimmers I could not see in the thicket of my thoughts. The process of me not writing, feeling unable to write is, I see now, wholly related to the social ecology which surrounds being a woman of Irish Diaspora within the framework of a colonial nation. There are intersections of oppression here, like barbed wires slicing through the hawthorn hedge. There are fibres of frayed thread unravelling beneath the weight of expectations. Cultural codes. The Habitus.
I have been raised in a culture that silenced and continues to silence migratory histories. Not just Irish migration, but Jamaican, Syrian, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Palestinian. The list is long. So too are the histories of bloodshed which dye the cloth British culture brandishes itself in. Indeed, my own blood seldom spoke of their Irishness. Not explicitly. Instead, Irish songs would be sung. Luke Kelly’s voice would fill the car. Raglan road would be sang so gutturally & passionately tears would often roll down my fathers face. Our lady would sit on my nan’s mantle-piece, glaring down from sky blue realms, white porcelain hands held the holy water, in the same way I hold the soil.
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