A Book of Migrations

by Rebecca Solnit

  The Famine changed the face of Ireland forever. In affecting the poorest of the south and west most drastically and causing them to emigrate or die in greatest numbers, it accelerated the loss of the native language and culture which had been begun by the education act of 1831, legislating universal education—in English, as English citizens. So it was also a catastrophe of forgetting, and in a recent spoken-word song, the rock star Sinéad O’Connor conflated the education act and the Famine into one traumatic silence:

  And so we lost our history,

  And this I think is what’s still hurting.

  And she steals back a little something from England, the refrain to the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.” The Famine rapidly shifted a great deal of land from very small farmers to much larger ones and began the elimination of the rural community that seems to be reaching its final stages now; it is sometimes said to have marked the end of the Stone Age in Ireland by ending some of the primordial way of life and agriculture that came out of rural poverty; and it pushed a nation of people who were exceptionally attached to their homes into ships on one-way tickets.

  The historian Kerby Miller concludes that before the Famine the Catholic and Gaelic-speaking Irish were, unlike the Scots Irish who had already mobilized for America in disproportionate numbers, exceptionally reluctant to emigrate. Among the reasons he enumerates are: their profound attachment to place; a language in which the word for going abroad translates as exile, a literature in which all departures from one’s country of origin were regarded as tragic exile; and a syntax that encouraged and reflected passivity and fatalism. A culture that deemphasized individualism, initiative, and innovation and discouraged breaks with tradition and community was one in which departure would inevitably be a forced exile rather than an embraced opportunity. Only such a catastrophe as the Famine could loose the ties of place and tradition and propel the population outward. The rapid drop in the population owes more to this than to death itself. About a million are thought to have died of hunger, exposure, and disease resulting from the Famine—and during the Famine years, a quarter of the population, more than two million people, emigrated, mostly to North America.

  Emigration seems to Ireland what the western frontier was to North America, an outlet for the unemployed, the restless, the insurrectionary, and for a swelling population. Ireland is almost unique among the nations of the world in having a population that declined during the past century and a half; the North and the Republic together have not much more than half the population of 1846. One interpretation suggests the real trauma, the subject of the central silence, was emigration itself. The historian Joseph Lee writes, “The second major distinctive experience of modern Irish history, next to colonization, was emigration. Emigration was not unique to Ireland. But the type of emigration and the impact of emigration was. In no other European country did emigration become a prerequisite for the preservation of the social structure and the status system . . . After the Great Famine, the emigration of ‘surplus’ children became a necessity for the farm family if the parents were to transmit the inheritance intact, and for the labourer’s children if they were to survive. But emigration came to be perceived as a blot on the communal landscape, a shaming indictment of the incapacity of the nation to provide for its own people, just as the time when a national consciousness was beginning to spread through the populace . . . No other society found itself obliged so remorselessly to rationalize the subversion of the family ideal inherent in the emigration ‘solution.’ . . . The psychic impact of emigration, the price paid both by those who stayed and those who went, for the subterfuges and the evasions to which the society had to resort to preserve its self-respect while scattering its children, has scarcely begun to be explored.”

  During the brief period of prosperity created by industrialization and the expansive world economy of the 1960s and 1970s, it seemed that emigration as a recurrent feature of Irish life was over. But in the 1980s the new urbanized, postagricultural economy began to crumble, and while family farming continued its long decline, the city jobs that had absorbed rural refugees dried up. The high Irish birthrate has long demanded either industrialization or emigration as an outlet for the young pouring into the job market, and industrialization has not been a great success despite all the tax and pollution breaks offered foreign and multinational corporations. A new wave of emigration began and continues. In the 1980s one person out of twelve in the Irish Republic emigrated, the majority to England and the States; in 1994 alone more than seventeen thousand people from the Republic were allowed to legally emigrate to the US (and despite the disproportionate number of visas granted since the 1990 Morrison Act, the US also has a vast, but uncounted, population of undocumented Irish immigrants).

  Counseling and aid with emigration are now standard offerings of church and community youth centers, but the conservatism of the country is a factor in the flight of the young, who often give the impression of running away to join the twentieth century and embrace the rootless and urban with satisfaction, if not without backward glances. At one point on my journey, I met a woman in her early twenties who had gone back to her village for a festival and found that everyone she had gone to school with, everyone her age, had emigrated outright. She was the only one of her peers still in the country, she told me, let alone the village. Versions of her story are common, and it seems sometimes that Swift’s Modest Proposal, in which he proposed that the impoverished adults of Ireland eat their young or sell them for consumption, has come true by other means. The century and a half of emigration has consumed the population, particularly the young, as even the Famine didn’t; and unlike those who died disastrously at home, those who went abroad to work became a commodity—they are still cheap labor in their new countries and were formerly a resource in the form of money sent back to the old one. When he visited Ireland, John F. Kennedy said, in words that must have been meant to be charming but are instead chilling, “Most countries send out oil, iron, steel or gold, some others crops, but Ireland has only one export and that is people.”

  The beggar in the story wasn’t an emigrant but a migrant, and the image of him rotating around southern Ireland as regularly as the hands of a clock conveyed something of how established begging was when charity was still considered a Christian duty. Foreign writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries routinely complain about the quantity of beggars, but their continuing presence suggests that begging must have had some kind of niche in the society. For centuries Ireland had a huge population of wandering beggars, both the permanently homeless and the wives and children of improverished peasants who would take to the road during the mild months while the potato crop was growing and bring back money to help pay the rent. The Famine displaced vast numbers of families who had once been tied to the land, because famine relief was unavailable to those who owned any land at all and the failure of the crops forced others to sell their land or lose their leases. The population of beggars took a temporary leap upward, and millions took to the roads; so that in addition to the outright emigrants a new swarm of migrants arose. Nowadays begging is a last resort, and beggars are considered to have dropped out of the world with its schedules and routines, but begging was once a living or at least a way of life.

  Lee’s and Paddy’s beggar was himself a conundrum, this man who had been crippled by love and saved by strangers, who had been resurrected in the midst of terrible death, an outcast who had become a fixture on the rounds of his route, homeless and local, a lame man whose principal activity was walking this circuit over the seasons and years, in one year and out the other as liberation movements and dreams rose and fell, millions emigrated, the world lurched forward into a century of wild growth, destruction and unimaginable transformation.

  Lee and Paddy insisted I stay with them for a few days after the dinner in Cork. They lived in an old farmhouse outside the hamlet of Ballydehob, whose name has become the eponym for rustic and remote living, the Dogpatch or Hicksville of Irish
jokes. I never met their old neighbor, now ninety-seven, who recalled the beggar—I don’t think he was ready for anything new at his stage of life—but I did hear him. Having finally come to terms with the possibility he wouldn’t be around to tell them forever, he had committed some of his stories to tape, and they played the tapes for me. It was clear he was steeped in the past that preceded his own birth, for he spoke familiarly of the Great Snow of ’55—1855—as the standard by which all other cold spells were judged, and spoke, the way one might of the recently deceased, of a local poet who had gone to the American Civil War as a reporter and died two days before Gettysburg. He told a slightly different version of the story of the beggar with the peculiar gait, though it only included a few more details than my hosts had recalled seven years before. The beggar’s name was Tom Guerin and he was, like so many in this island, a poet. In one of his poems he portrayed himself as a man with one leg pointed east and one pointed west.

  Lee and Paddy were great hosts whose conversation was a gift, who stuffed me several times a day with gallons of tea and local delicacies, and who couldn’t travel across their home territory without a stop to show me a carved cross or a ring of standing stones tucked away inconspicuously in a cowfield. Probably tired out by their own generosity, they packed me off on the last day of my visit with a snack and some vague directions to go see some petroglyphs a mile down the road and a ring fort a mile or so up the mountain in the other direction. I put my inch-to-two-mile map of the region in my pocket and set out for the fort on the side of Mount Kid on another May day whose clouds were sodden and distended, though they seldom brought forth much rain. The eighth-century stone cross they had shown me in a cowfield near Bantry had a vertical boat carved on it, sailing straight up to heaven, and the highest thing in Cork was the golden salmon atop the church; sea and sky seemed easy to confuse here, with the earth nothing but a slice of stone and melting mud between wet clouds and hungry sea.

  It was easy enough to find the dirt track I was to turn off on. Not much further down the road, a flock of belligerent sheep raced up to the fence as though they would trample me if they could and bleated with the sound of a traffic jam in Arcady, and dogs lurched out at me the rest of the way, so I walked with handsful of rocks. The ring fort was nothing more than a circle of low stone walls whose cow pies demonstrated its most recent use, but it was a vestige of the petty warfare of early Christian times, another one of the obdurate witnesses to all the generations who had crisscrossed the landscape before. There were ghosts, quiet ones.

  My next instruction was to admire the view from the top of Mount Kid, a hill about a thousand feet high on the spinelike ridge stretching up from the Mizen Peninsula. One of the peculiar features of this terrain is that the highlands are often the boggiest; the deep soil has become impermeable, water no longer drains downward, and the peat above acts as a sponge to hold it in place. Mount Kid’s west face became increasingly squishy until I was hopping laboriously from tuft to tuft of the moss and sedge that grow like tiny islands on the wet ground. Along the flat back of the mountaintop was a square pit where someone had been cutting peat. An accumulation of plantlife whose wetness has kept it from fully decaying into soil, pear or turf is dried to become one of the principal fuels of Ireland—even some of its power plants are peat-fueled—and one of its characteristic sights and smells: the stacks of turfs piled near rural houses, the sweet smell like molasses and grass of a turf fire. (When Friedrich Engels attempted a history of Ireland, he started with the bogs and the lack of better fuel. “It is obvious that Ireland’s misfortune is of ancient origin,” he wrote. “It begins directly after the carboniferous strata were deposited. A country whose coal deposits are eroded, placed near a larger country rich in coal, is condemned by nature to remain for a long time the farming country for the latter when the latter is industrialized. That sentence, pronounced millions of years ago, was carried out in this century. We shall see later, moreover, how the English assisted nature by crushing almost every seed of Irish industry as soon as it appeared.”) The bogs themselves are considered threatened in many places, by reforestation, burning, and peatcutting; and no intact large bog remains, only the small bogs such as the soggy patch of mountain I was skipping across.

  As I ascended, the peninsula became visible, crowned by Mount Gabriel, where the last wolf was said to have been killed. The islands scattered in Roaringwater Bay to the south were a pure deep blue, and the change from the green underfoot to the blue of distance was perceptible in all its phases. The land between the mountain and the islands was agricultural, a collection of fields marked off by the wavering lines of roads, and to the north were the higher ridges of the mountains between Cork and Kerry, also that exquisite wistful blue that painters relied upon to indicate distance in the days before vanishing-point perspective expressed the transformation from here to there. Such a blue is deeply satisfying by itself, but it is also pleasant to contemplate as visible evidence of the materiality of the atmosphere.

  Tired of the slow process of locating dry patches in the bog, I descended on the rocky eastern face and found, where the slope began to flatten, a ruined farmhouse with a warren of outbuildings around it, set amid fields so stony their outcroppings often towered over the stone walls. A pair of pheasants burst out of one such clump with a booming cry, alarming amid the quiet. We had explored a ruined house on the side of the mountain several years ago, whose downstairs was dominated by what had once been a blue-painted room with a cheap iron fireplace. Green mold had grown over the pale blue plaster and given it a sad and elegant iridescence; the two rooms upstairs had been painted pink. But this house was far more ruined; its floor an impassable heap of sharp shards of wood, its walls crumbled back almost to the stone, and its staircase nearly gone. Only the stones of the house would remain in a few years more, though the squat stone outbuildings that must have been for peat and chickens and the like were still standing. Suddenly I saw a square window a few feet from the rough ground in one outbuilding and remembered it, not from my visit but from the photograph my lover, Lee’s cousin, had taken of my head framed in the wall. I was back at the same place after all, though we had both changed, the house and I. I had a strange compulsion to kneel and replace my head where it had hovered seven years before, but I knew that to do so would be a terrible mistake.

  By that time it was not the ghosts of former inhabitants and ages past haunting me, nor that of my lover, with whom I had separated a year later when it became undeniable that our lives were taking different directions, but the ghost of the woman I was then. Between Lee’s recollections of his family and mine of the photographs we had taken, the past had come swarming back and brought with it a sense of terrible loss. I had to recite to myself all the fine things that had happened since to ward off that blue melancholy, but at the window, I suddenly felt my own former self dead here, with her dreams and all her plans for futures that never came to pass. Every cell in the human body is renewed every seven years and so nothing material remained of the younger, more timorous woman who had come here before me, and nothing but a bridge of memory connected us, memory so frail it hung on a vacation photograph.

  6

  Anchor in the Road

  From the edge of Roaringwater Bay in Ballydehob, I set off walking around noon one day for the town of Bantry, finally alone and afoot as I had planned, or almost as I had. Before I’d left, I had sat down with a map of Ireland and made an itinerary for walking from one small town to the next along the west coast, and the list of names themselves were an incantation, Bantry and Kenmare and Killarney and Tralee and Listowel and Glin and on and on from south to north. Anticipation itself is a great pleasure, and planning is a fine way to bask in it; I have enjoyed making lists for travels since I plotted to run away from home with my middle brother when I was eight or nine, a plan that never got beyond the list of survival gear I thought we should take with us to the hills. My Irish itinerary fell by the wayside too.

  In Dublin I
had found a mountaineering store and bought a clutch of detailed topographical maps from a shaggy, lithe boy with long sideburns, who talked with me in a gentle murmur in which the accolade grand shone like a minnow again and again, silvery with pleasure. Grand were my plans to walk up the west, was the surfing in Clare where he was going to catch some waves during the bank holiday coming in a few weeks, were my stories about the marvelously inventive language of surfers in my own part of the world and the Cliffs of Moher I should go see in Clare, his home country. The maps he sold me, pretty squarish red-covered things with sea level in green and altitude shading into the soft orange of 2000 feet, with a name on every square mile at least of land, made it clear that the route I’d daydreamed over was impossible. They showed that the roads were laid out less as the crow flies than as the butterfly does, often doubling the distances shown by the less-detailed maps.

  On my previous trip my sense of scale had veered wildly, shaped as it was by continental and interstate scale: I would look at a place on the map and say, We can’t go there, it’s all the way across the country, then realize the country was hardly a hundred and fifty miles across, only a few hours on a straight highway, and finally find that the slow winding roads of the countryside keep the island large after all, in a way that has nothing to do with notions of objective scale. The roads had been built not for long-distance travel but to connect the dots of adjoining towns, and they do so in serpentine lines that writhe even more to accommodate the steep terrain of the west. Still I planned to walk, but it was already becoming clear that to do so continuously along an extended contiguous-stretch of land was not nearly as alluring as it looked on a map.