A Book of Migrations

by Rebecca Solnit

  It had had occupants, Bill said, for the first seven of the last twelve thousand years. Then the region dried up, leaving the cave too far from any source of water to be habitable. The floor was soft dirt, the sifted result of excavations, and there were plastic tarps under it, their edges sticking out, so that if the excavations ever resumed, the archeologists could pick up where they left off. Nothing aboveground suggested the people who had lived here, no visible structures, no tombs, walls, carvings, no paintings in the cave, but it had been inhabited thousands of years before human beings are thought to have come to Ireland. This part of the world is old in ways that Europe is not, governed by a different sense of time altogether. But the traces of age are far subtler in most parts of North America, and newcomers easily imagine that it is new itself. Bill spoke of how the Shoshone traditionally destroyed the property of those who died, so that there were almost no heirlooms, no objects passed down the generations, no accumulations of property. I knew a woman in Death Valley, at the other end of Shoshone territory, who remembered such a funeral pyre herself, in the 1940s, when even the horse was killed. It was a circumstance that suited well the nomadism of the Shoshone in their arid homeland. Whatever its religious purposes, the custom kept people from piling up wealth over the generations, forestalling inheritance and the inequities that result. Nomads travel light on many levels.

  The innumerable objects of the past are milestones telling us how far we have come on the one-way road of history. This destruction of property when it became the property of the past must have kept its practitioners living in a perpetual present, where all that existed of the past was what could be remembered and told. In such a scheme, culture itself was what could be carried in the head, and material culture was always being created anew from the surrounding landscape. In the oral history at the center of such a scheme of perpetual re-creation, the time between the dreamtime of creation and the present is immeasurable, elastic. The present is a mesa surrounded by creation rather than a slope rising up incrementally from the historic past. Forgetting, like remembering, has its uses, and the two are balanced differently in different places.

  Bill had got into trouble, he said, for his conclusions in his book about the prehistory of the region. He had found that the region’s art—the petroglyphs and stone tools—changed from a relatively refined state to the simpler work identified with the present-day Shoshone, and it seemed to him that they were relatively recent arrivals in the area. His conclusions were at odds with their sense that they had been here forever, since creation. For a lot of Native Americans, the Bering Land Bridge theory, which postulates that their ancestors came over from Asia and, over the millennia, migrated all the way to Tierra del Fuego, is as problematic as evolution is for fundamentalist Christians. Their religions often dictate that they were created where they are, with an indissoluble, irreplaceable symbiosis with their landscape. Once, when I was working as a Western Shoshone land rights activist, I stopped in at a gathering, not far from where we were wandering around the lava cave. There, a Shoshone guy objected to both the Bering Land Bridge theory and evolution, saying with fine disregard for the official details, that Europeans might well be descended from Neanderthals—certainly it would explain why they were so hairy—but it had nothing to do with him and his people, who had never been in the old world, never been anywhere at all but the perfect dry bowl of the Great Basin, where they had been placed by the creator to take care of it and no place else.

  Politically and spiritually, such an approach declares that the relationship is untransferable, that they did not adapt but originated as they are, and therefore that there can be no replacement, no new home. There is a sense in which both versions can be true: the evidence of ancient migrations means one thing, a material history; and the relation of the people to their land means another, a cultural history. As long as their identity is so profoundly situated in their landscape, it is impossible to say that they were that people before they were in that landscape. If it is the genesis and face of their identity, it is literally where they are from, where they were created—which makes the rest of us rootless by comparison.

  Even recognizing the existence of indigenous people in the Americas raises a lot of difficult questions about belonging for those Americans who descend from historical emigrations: questions about what it means to be and whether it’s possible to become native; about what kind of a relationship to a landscape and what kind of rootedness it might entail; and about what we can lay claim to at all as the ground of our identity if we are only visitors, travelers, invaders in someone else’s homeland. Some of the most literal-minded Euro-Americans have decided simply to become Native Americans, as though identity and heritage could be picked up in a process as simple as shopping, and the very shallowness of such methods of impersonation undermines the sense that there is something deep at stake.

  A lot of Native Americans respond that Euro-Americans have their own cultural traditions, which they should recover rather than appropriating someone else’s, and this too seems to simplify the matter. Many of us are children of refugees from countries that no longer exist, from atrocities no one spoke of, from traditions that had been trampled over earlier by the same forces; and in living on a new continent, most of us have begun to be something else, transplanted and hybridized. This evolving something else has never been resolved adequately, and perhaps it is irresolvable—unless resolution itself returns to its linguistic roots, which meant to unloose or dissolve, to clarify by liquefying, not solidifying. If being local is a matter of forgetting what came before, then the journey is completed by severing previous ties. Naturalization, the term for becoming a native, suggests this process of adaptation—and perhaps suggests that forgetting rather than remembering is central to an identity resolved like rain from a passing storm sinking into the soil.

  I am in fact legally a European, naturalized, if not naturally. I have an Irish passport, thanks to some fancy detective work by my Uncle Dave, my mother’s brother, who dug up the whole chain of birth and marriage certificates linking us to Ireland. That so thin a mythological fluid as blood entitled me to so solid a legal status as citizenship still amazes me. I am, I suppose, a third-generation Irish-American, and that old country is just beyond memory, with our paucity of family stories. I’m not much of an Irishwoman, let alone a Catholic, since my father’s parents were immigrant Russian Jews, and I’ve been in hybrid California, world capital of amnesia, nearly all my life. My Irish passport seemed less like a legacy than a windfall, a key not to my own house but to an unfamiliar building, a return ticket not for my own journey but for that of my four Irish immigrant great-grandparents about whom I know almost nothing. According to the way people tend to talk about blood and roots and other charged images now, this unknown country is what’s mine.

  It isn’t, but I thought that Ireland was a good place to think about it all. Ireland, which once formed the western edge of the known world and the wild west of Europe, which for all the tea-drinking whiteness of its populace was colonized by England in much the same way as North America, which was the first of so many conquered countries from Algeria to Zimbabwe to liberate itself in the twentieth century, which is still described as the third world of northern Europe with its underdevelopment and huge unemployment, with its conflicts subsuming so many versions of cultural strife into a smaller compass of space and race, Ireland where Europe came closest to other parts of the world. Rather as the sweet-voiced Mormon was going to tour England with Logan, Utah, hovering somewhere in her imagination, I was going to wander Ireland and see how far away Ireland was, or how near. This other land in the guise of a motherland presented an opportunity for me to go both back and away, be lost and found, but mainly to think.

  I wanted to think in a different landscape about questions that had arisen for me in my own: about the concentric circles of identity formed by memory, the body, the family; by the community, tribe or ethnic group; by locale, nationality, language and lite
rature—and about the wild tides that have washed and wash over those neat circles, tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, exile, nomadism, and tourism. Ireland has been particularly shaped by these tides, and for me it seemed an ideal place to look at these things and their consequences. I wasn’t sure what I would find—certainly I didn’t expect to find a strong, if embattled, contemporary nomadic culture as I did at the end of my Irish expedition—but travel provides not confirmations, but surprises.

  In a sense, it was travel itself that I was after. There’s a convenient fiction preserved in travel literature, if nowhere else, that a person is wholly in one place at one time. The idea of nativeness is similarly a myth of singularity or perhaps an ideal of it, but even most contemporary more-or-less indigenous people have mixed ancestry, have undergone sudden and violent relocations, have lost something of their past in the process and picked up a lot from the dominant culture of the US, which is itself a hybrid with many sources, not all of them European. We are often in two places at once. In fact, we are usually in at least two places, and occasionally the contrast is evident. I always seem to be trailing through three or four at once: talking about Utah and thinking about Idaho caves while watching a movie about British prisons in an airplane over what was probably Newfoundland on the way to Ireland was nothing exceptional.

  Once on a long trip down a wild river, I dreamed about my city and my home every night, and upon my return, I began to dream about the river over and over again. Here, most often, is nothing more than the best perspective from which to contemplate there: one climbs the mountain to see the valley. Traveling, I had found in the course of a year of farreaching excursions, shifted one’s memory and imagination as well as one’s body. The new and unknown places called forth strange, oft-forgotten correspondences and desires in the mind, so that the motion of travel takes place as much in the psyche as anywhere else. Travel offers the opportunity to find out who else one is, in that collapse of identity into geography I want to trace.

  2

  The Book of Invasions

  The first thing I did in Ireland was miss the cousin who had come to meet me at the airport, one of the dozens of third, fourth, and umpteenth cousins my uncle had located on his genealogical spree a few years ago. This one was about to emigrate to New York to join the huge underground economy of undocumented Irish workers, and I was curious to talk to someone who was going to carry on the adventure of exile so long after my branch of the family had. So there he was, probably holding up a sign outside the baggage claim for me, and there I was, without anything more than a knapsack I’d carried with me, rushing onward toward Dublin and toward an odyssey in which I’d never track down any of the cousins I had scattered over the island, people with whom I shared nothing more than a sixteenth or thirty-second of a gene pool and a common past beyond our recollection. I got off near the Customs House in downtown Dublin, at a place where dozens of buses were belching their diesel breath into the dirty air, a stranger among strangers under a thin gray sky, with a tourist map to get my bearings.

  Being in Dublin isn’t quite the same as being in Ireland, though if it’s an anomaly, it’s one that includes at least a quarter of the three and a half million people in the Irish Republic. The city and the country are profoundly different everywhere, but in Ireland, the city is truly singular: a city, Dublin. Ireland overall seems to be a place where the industrial revolution has yet to happen, where the serene fatalism of rural time seems to govern the pace of life, where the wet green landscape is hardly ever out of sight and the tourist’s picturesqueness is the native’s isolation. My Irish history book from college said that the Celts’ “way of life did not include the concept of towns”; the other population centers in the Republic—Limerick, Galway, Cork—feel like sprawling towns at best even now; and more than 40 percent of the population is still considered rural. But Dublin is a city, crowded and bustling.

  It has been a city of invaders from its founding to its present, another reason it seems anomalous. Invasion has been the principal motif in Irish history, and Dublin the principal port of entry and site of occupation. It’s a history that repeats interminable variations on invasion, its extended and usually brutal consequences, resistance, revolt, and flight—and contemporary Ireland has a curious blankness, as though it has outlived the only kind of political history it knows, while the conflict in the north reiterates the past on a reduced scale. The pattern seems set even before the historical invaders came, for the mythological history of the Irish Celts is the Book of Invasions, which recounts six legendary waves of incursions. This imagined Ireland is a place not of indigenous but of settled and assimilated immigrants and of older tribes whose faint traces underlie the present: the giant Fomorians, the small, cunning Fir Bolg identified with the precursors of the Celts, the beautiful Tuatha Dé Danann, children of the goddess Danu who dwindled over time to the stature of fairies, and the last to come, the Milesians. Of the Fir Bolg, says the Book of Invasions, “As everyone does, they partitioned Ireland,” and of the Tuatha Dé Danann, “On Monday in the beginning of the month of May, to be exact, they took Ireland.”

  According to the archeological evidence, Ireland was first inhabited about eight thousand years ago, by the people who eventually built the magnificent stone circles and cairns that punctuate the countryside; the Celts who did not have the concept of towns invaded about twenty-four centuries ago. The Celts were, for the most part, left alone for their first Irish millennium. Although a Roman fort was very recently discovered twenty miles north of Dublin, the Roman invasion that must have produced it left no obvious traces in Irish history or culture. The imperial Roman vision of order that would shape and subjugate much of the rest of Europe didn’t stick until the English brought it long after England’s Roman phase. Christianity had come benignly, with St. Patrick and various others in the fifth century, and when the rest of Europe was in its dark age of invasion and decay, Ireland was in its great Golden Age of wealthy monasteries and erudite monks who kept alive the European learning that was dying out elsewhere (much modern Irish decoration on objects ranging from paper currency to manhole covers draws from the Celtic interlace of illuminated manuscripts and other art of this period, a sobering reminder of how long ago Ireland’s last era of happy independence was). The significant invasions in that era were those the Irish carried out in Britain, most notably those carried out by the Scots, an Irish tribe that colonized the Pictish place now known as Scotland (and perhaps the raid on England in which the future St. Patrick was captured and brought back as a slave). Ireland was a tribal society with a fine literature, art and scholarly tradition, and without a central authority, when the invasions began.

  They began in the ninth century, when the Norse Vikings founded Dublin in a marshy region where the Pobble meets the Liffey. These Vikings kept the Celtic name of the place, Linn Dubh, or Black Pool, after the place where the two rivers met, and Dublin provided them with a base from which to loot and terrorize the rest of the island. The name outlasted them, for they were driven out at the beginning of the tenth century, only to be succeeded a few decades later by Danish Vikings, who stayed to develop a more extensive city. That city briefly reappeared when foundations were dug on Wood Quay for a new city hall in 1978, and was buried again under the international-style steel-and-glass offices, after wrangling over the fate of the site and hurried excavations. This lost city on the south bank of the Liffey had massive walls, but the houses themselves, woven out of wattles and plastered with mud, were hardly more substantial than basketwork. Viking Dublin, like dozens of later versions, lies dead and buried under its descendant, the modern city, whose physiognomy bears traces of its ancestors—a certain ancient building jutting out here, a street name and the angle of the street itself there. The Vikings had become craftspeople and traders and were assimilating into the local culture by the time of the next invasion, the one that determined Irish history until the twentieth century.

  There’s a poem of Jonat
han Swift’s, meditating on the drying up of St. Patrick’s Well in Dublin in 1729, a poem in which he implies that his native land was an Eden and pins its fall on England’s invasion:

  Britain, by thee we fell, ungrateful Isle!

  Not by thy Valour, but by superior Guile:

  Britain, with shame confess, this Land of mine

  First taught thee human Knowledge and divine . . .

  It is true that Irish missionaries had first converted England to their mild form of Christianity, and equally true that Ireland’s peace and prosperity came to a conclusive end with the Norman invasion in 1170, only slightly more than a century after they had conquered England. And like the original fall from grace, Ireland’s has often been blamed on a woman. In 1152, Devorgilla left her princely husband for—or was abducted by—Diarmait, the man who had usurped the kingship of Leinster, Ireland’s eastern quadrant around Dublin. Not much is said about her, generally, except that she was forty-four at the time, her husband sixty, and her lover forty-two. So, in a middle-aged operetta that became a seven-century-long national tragedy, her husband eventually succeeded in driving her lover out of Ireland, and the despotic lover, Diarmait, sought help from the English king.