The French theorists and nomad enthusiasts Deleuze and Guattari declare that the hierarchical model of the tree has dominated too much of Western thought and offer in its place the rhizome, the loosely structured, horizontally spreading root system of plants such as strawberries; Ní Shuinear’s proposal that Travellers are organized socially and imaginatively around contemporary networks rather than historical taproots echoes their metaphor. The intimation of such a radically divergent sense of time, space, and society electrified me, but other information and conversation tempered my romanticism. The enormous contemporary enthusiasm for nomads—the romanticism that has brought into being so many boutiques, tattoo parlors, artists’ projects, pseudoethnic recordings, and books with “nomad” in their names—is premised on the dubious idea that nomads embody on a mass scale the freedom of the solitary traveler, that romantic figure silhouetted against an exotic landscape like the individualist tree. For those of us who are largely sedentary, travel is a way out of the world that surrounds us, but nomads rarely if ever leave their world: it moves with them. The Traveller activist Michael McDonagh explains that “for Travellers, the physical fact of moving is just one aspect of a nomadic mind-set that permeates every aspect of our lives. Nomadism entails a way of looking at the world, a different way of perceiving things, a different attitude to accommodation, to work, and life in general. Just as settled people remain settled people even when they travel, Travellers remain Travellers even when they are not travelling.”
The spatial freedom that might otherwise dissolve their society and identity altogether as it does for us temporarily, as respite, vacation, and escape, is counterbalanced by a greater rigidity of social structure. Architecture and geography hold our lives in place—identities built into the layout of the house, the status of the address, and the routine of the day—but custom alone must hold theirs in lieu of place and therefore must surround them as surely and solidly as a locale. The nomad’s fluidity of time and space and work and property all occur with in a stubbornly conservative culture perpetuated in tightly knit families. Likewise extreme feats of travel have little to do with nomads. It is exhilarating that individuals should walk the length of a continent or carry a sixty-pound pack over the remote mountains, but such feats are for solitary adventurers in their prime, not for groups for whom travel is a permanent condition including all the goods and generations, and certainly not for commercial nomads like the Travellers and Gypsies who earn their living from interactions with the sedentary community. Still, one romantic attribute remains, that of movement itself, of the constantly shifting scene, the unpredictable life lived closer to the bone of those in motion, uninsulated by the buildings and goods and familiarity of settled life: that is a romanticism Travellers and sedentary people seem to share.
Travellers have traditionally been self-employed or temporarily employed, surviving on a plethora of skills and talents, and often shifting roles and images to accord with the work—abjection for begging, an air of responsibility for contract labor. Indeed much of what seems to be considered Traveller and Gypsy dishonesty is the art of saying what works or pleases in wildly varying and often hostile circumstances. Taking permanent jobs conflicts with the fluid autonomy of their identity, argue some of the sociologists of Travelling. They may be the last people in the industrialized world to have collectively escaped wage labor, escaped selling their time and setting their lives to someone else’s schedule, but the price of their social redemption seems to be the surrender of the fluidity of their labor, spatial, and temporal structures via the taking of jobs. By many accounts and oral histories, Travellers who get ahead often take it as an opportunity to take time off or travel, disregarding the longterm security to which the wage earner aspires. Freya Stark, the travel writer who spent years among the pastoralist nomads of the Muslim world, writes, “The life of insecurity is the nomad’s achievement. He does not try, like our building world, to believe in a stability which is non-existent; and in his constant movement with the seasons, in the lightness of his hold, puts something right, about which we are constantly wrong. His is in fact the reality, to which the most solid of our structures are illusion; and the ramshackle tents in their crooked gaiety, with cooking pots propped up before them and animals about, show what a current flows round all the stone erections of the ages.”
In the picture most accounts paint, Travellers throughout the first half of the twentieth century continued their professions of tinsmithing (from which the term tinker comes—the tinkers or tinsmiths made many of the milking cans, buckets, pots, and pans farm families used), horsetraining and trading, begging, fortune-telling, selling balladsheets, handicrafts, and other small items, and working as migrant agricultural and manual labor, encountering hostility and some brutality but at levels that allowed them to continue to be nomadic. They Travelled mostly on backroads and consorted mostly with rural people—one Traveller term for the sedentary is country people—though they found work in English cities and the outskirts of Irish towns from time to time. They were appreciated for their skills, wares, and the news and novelty they brought to isolated communities. They were disliked for begging, for sometimes sneaking their horses into farmers’ fields and crops to graze, for the dishonesty with which nomads often deal with sedentary people, for theft and suspected theft, and maybe for being an unfamiliar intrusion into familiar landscapes. It isn’t clear when they began using barreltop wagons, but they seem to have pitched roadside tents made of hazel branches and some kind of tarp beforehand. Anyone who has encountered the wet Irish land and sky can appreciate how strong the nomadic impulse must be to survive in those circumstances (partially settled Travellers now often say they yearn to roam in the summertime, when the weather is fine).
In the 1950s and 1960s horsedrawn wagons began to be replaced by cars pulling trailers, and horses are now kept more for pleasure than for use (though tourists can rent facsimiles of the wagons, complete with horse, and play Gypsy on the back-roads; I had seen such a rental site in Westport). It may have been cars and the concomitant shrinkage of distance and access to manufactured goods that doomed their symbiosis with the countryside; it is often said that plastic did in their way of life. Handmade tinware was replaced by mass-manufactured goods, and as distances shrank and cars replaced horses Travellers’ functions as pedlars and horsetraders also eroded. Roadsides were relandscaped to make roadside camping difficult or impossible across the country, unregulated space dried up, and they began to stay longer wherever they were, however unwelcome, since finding another halting site would be hard. Ironically, hostility seems to make them stay rather than go. There are regulations that halting sites and housing must be built for them, but many projects have been delayed by opposition and many that do exist are inadequate or inappropriate in their design. In the 1970s a Traveller told an oral historian, “For a woman a house is a grand thing for her to put the children in. But for a man a house is only a payment of rents . . . Lots of travellers have houses in the winter and they leaves them lonely when they take to the roads in the summer. It’s only a bother having the house and it’s not healthy to be shut inside them four walls with no trees in sight and only the windys to keep you half breathing. No, I’d sleep in a stables before I’d sleep in a house . . .” Travellers now appear to be something of a displaced population, in flight from the destruction of rural life as much as any farm people, but they are seen less as refugees than intruders wherever they go. Many have ended up on the periphery of towns and cities, and some have gone to England. The programs of forcing them to settle into fixed houses are over, but the elimination of the necessary sites and circumstances for Travelling continues, as do some voluntary housing programs. Though Travellers are central to the scrap metal and car parts industries in Ireland, and a few Travelling families have become wealthy antique dealers (and, because of their wealth, are seldom counted as Travellers), a high percentage are on the dole. In a country with more than 20 percent unemployment overall and intense exc
lusion of Travellers from all institutions, welfare dependency is not surprising. But in addition to the suspicion nomads and minorities usually attract, the Travellers are now hated with the peculiar fury taxpayers reserve for those they consider freeloaders.
Most recently the authorities have become better at navigating a middle ground, of providing housing adapted to the needs and customs of these increasingly immobilized nomads. In such a housing complex did Cathleen McDonagh and her family live, up against the walls of Wheatfield Prison. I recognized it from the Travellers’ parish worker’s description: a double row of diminutive houses with wide driveways, arranged in two lines flanking a central green, with a high gray prison wall behind looking like the back of a stage set. When I reached the grass a group of little boys ran up to greet me and inspect me. They were tough, scruffy, but polite, and I could tell I wouldn’t get far without their cooperation. So I told the one who seemed to be the leader, a stout, chestnut-haired boy of about ten in an undershirt, who I was looking for. She’s my cousin, he said, and began to lead me to her trailer. The boys asked if I was a social worker, and I told them that I was a writer from America. I knew that would keep them busy for a while and it did; they too had to know who I’d back in the World Cup. A middle-aged man came up to us, another inspector; I introduced myself and we shook hands. It was John McDonagh, Cathleen’s father, a powerful-looking, big-bellied man whose mild face gave him a horse’s air of harmless power. Cathleen, he told me, was in her sister’s house, and so we doubled back the way the boys had led me, and he took me into a kitchen with a plump woman—the sister—washing lettuce, a child in a high chair and another one roaming around the tiny room, and Cathleen sitting and talking. She showed me around the tidy house, which was bigger than it looked from outside, showed me her nieces sitting on the edge of their bed knitting and looking very diligent for girls of twelve or so, and took me into the parlor. I perched among the fat lace pillows of the sofa, facing the corner cabinet of richly colored dishes, the mantlepiece’s two plates depicting a horse fair, and my hostess.
In her cut-off jeans and black t-shirt, she looked much much more at ease than in the long patterned skirt in the Dublin office. I had met her at the Travellers’ Parish, where she was studying to advance her education beyond the primary-school level where she had left off, and to gain the skills to become a Travellers’ rights advocate. She was a bigboned, broadshouldered woman of my own age—early thirties—with high cheekbones and powerful pale blue eyes beneath her thick brown hair. In the parlor, amid the lace and china, she continued to talk of prejudice in the low, flat voice she’d used before, a voice that sounded both cowed and resistant. She spoke in examples rather than abstractions. She spoke of how every Traveller is held accountable for the acts of any one of them. Of how when Travellers misbehave, they tend to do so in public—almost every aspect of their lives is much more visible, outdoors and by the roadside—and thus gain an exaggerated reputation for drinking and brawling. Of how they don’t want special treatment, only the rights of the rest of the citizenry: access to the same education, entry to the same places, housing or at least halting sites. She told me about last Christmas when her brother came over from England. It’s customary, she said, to do a good deal of celebrating around Christmas, and so she spent all she had on a disco outfit. But when they got to the club in Dundalk, they were told they would have to wait because there were too many already inside. But there were people all around them pouring in. Apartheid Irish style. You get very guarded after experiences like that, which is why Travellers might not be easy to get to know. People think they’re rich because of their vans and jewelry, but they buy the vans on credit and need them for their work, just as settled people do their houses, and the jewelry is akin to savings. All her own jewelry, she told me, was gifts—the three gold bangles from her parents, the big gold hoop earrings from her brother in England. She frequently ended her sentences Please God, to indicate that her desire or ambition was tempered by God’s approval, and her religion was an important part of her life.
The ice broken or at least a little thawed, we went into her trailer—her parents, she said, had allowed her to remain unmarried, and she had a trailer of her own—and she began to have real conversation with me in a different, more natural voice. Her brother and other men kept dropping by to say hello and inspect me, and I met her younger brother William and inspected the dagger tattooed on his forearm in return. The trailer, the kind that hitches to the back of a car, was the size of a small room, and everything in it was neatly arranged, the bed folded back into a couch. The clock she had broken that morning, however, was lying on a counter all in pieces. She had beautiful dishes arrayed on narrow shelves above the windows and two books on another counter: Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines and Peter Matthiessen’s Indian Country.
It turned out she was interested in Native Americans and identified with them, with better grounds than most who do. She had acutely picked out their nomadism as one of the reasons why Euro-Americans considered them barbaric and one of the grounds for persecuting them. Civilizing Indians usually entailed transforming them from nomads into agriculturalists, tied to the success or failure of individual labor on a small piece of land. The sedentary toil of agriculture was usually considered inseparable from or foundational for culture itself by the nineteenth-century Americans who made Indian policy; what they would think of the present’s postagricultural societies is hard to imagine. Turning Native American nomads into agriculturalists largely failed, but it did succeed in justifying a drastically reduced land base for them and thereby freeing up much of their land for others. My hostess also pointed out that what the Jews and Gypsies killed in the Nazi holocaust had in common was nomadism, and I was glad I’d introduced myself as a Jew and might thereby be considered an honorary nomad. (I had somewhere around Galway stopped telling people of my mixed ancestry, because it was clear I wasn’t Irish in the way the Irish were, because trying to explain that being mixed didn’t mean being nothing was getting tiresome, and because declaring Jewishness dried up any further questions. I thought I’d probably only really ever feel Irish Catholic if I went to Israel.)
Each door Cathleen led me through seemed to take me into a more personal sphere; we had moved from the formal interview on her sister’s sofa to the conversation in her trailer to the festive visit in her parents’ trailer next door. I seemed to have been accepted, at least as a guest. In her parents’ trailer Cathleen laid out thinly cut fresh bread, cold meats, and tomatoes and began to make cup after cup of strong tea for us all, washing the cups thoroughly between each round. Her parents’ trailer was airy and comfortable, a spotless salon of windows, couches, kitchenette, and a central table. What do you call them, they asked me, and I said, Trailers. They looked satisfied and said that Travellers too called them trailers; only country people called them caravans. And they asked me about American rest stops; they had heard wondrous stories that the US government built them copiously along the highways and anyone was allowed to halt at them unharassed.
My own country took on new enchantment for me as I told them of the western American infrastructure of rest stops and camp grounds and trailer parks and interstate highways. Of the quite respectable middle-class retirees who sold their houses and took to the road in trailers, migrating like birds alone and in flocks, south in the winter and anywhere in the summer. Of how much of the populace was, if not nomadic, at least restless and rootless, moving on an average of once every five and a half years. Of states where the majority of homes seemed to be prefab trailers that could be trucked to the next location. Of how many fine gradations there are between the absolutely fixed and the fluid in the US, rather than Ireland’s stark gap. Of my own adventures in my pickup truck with the shell on the back, traveling around the West, living out of the truck for weeks on end sometimes, traveling sometimes with my younger brother in his pickup when we went to political actions together. As I spoke of days of driving five hundred miles or so alone, of
driving a hundred miles down Nevada’s secondary highways without seeing another soul, I became homesick for my own roadscapes. Any doubt I’d had about disconnectedness, rootlessness, and fossil fuel economies were bowled over by our collective evocation of the lure of the open road.
I swapped my tales with road stories of theirs, mostly of Mrs. McDonagh’s. Mrs. McDonagh, Cathleen’s mother, impressed me as a remarkable woman. Stout and weathered, with her shapeless dress and her graybrown hair pulled back casually, she had made no efforts at beautification but she radiated a calm joy in her expressions and her sweetvoiced stories. Though one might expect a nomad to flicker like a flame, she gave instead the impression of enormous earthy solidity and complete participation in the present. Life seemed to delight her. She told me they could see the mountains from where they were, the Dublin mountains. That her mother was from County Meath, and there was always a town you’d go back to. That home was where your people were buried. And one of the great pleasures of travel was going back to a place in which a significant passage of your life had occurred, revisiting experiences inextricably linked to a distinct locale (unlike, she implied, the sedentary, whose different dramas may all occur on the same thereby unevocative home front). She grew up in the wattle tents—the tents made of tarps and hazel wands—and there would be a big tent with a fire to cook on and sing around. There was a wagon to sleep in (though she didn’t make it clear if it was always there along with the wattle tents). She hadn’t learned to read or write, which was inconvenient, because you had to ask people to help with your letters, so they always knew your business. When a white moth came and fluttered between us on the couch where we sat, she said, A little moth. That means a letter’s coming.
A Book of Migrations Page 24