Jenny Farrell reviews Colm Tóibín's latest novel

There are many books, including biographies, of Thomas Mann as well as about other members of the Mann family. There are far fewer novels about this writer. Now Irish novelist Colm Tóibín has presented us with just this. His novel about the magician, as Mann was known in his family circle, centres on the man, his times, writer, husband, father, brother, and yes, on the hidden fantasies of Thomas Mann.

Tóibín’s book is as substantial as a Mann novel, however, it is easier to read. The author takes his time, exploring in many scenes Mann’s family background, his childhood, his marriage to Katia von Pringsheim, his first great success with Buddenbrooks, the family saga based on his own family.

Tóibín creates the world of Mann very well and does justice to his times. He does nothing to excuse Mann’s inability to see WWI for what it was, and happily writes of brother Heinrich respectfully. Heinrich Mann, Thomas’s elder and very left-wing brother, becomes an interesting character in his own right in the novel, a recognised moral authority. While “Heinrich’s article began by insisting that there was no such thing as victory in a war. There were only casualties, only the dead and injured”, “Thomas got comfort from being part of a movement that included workers as much as businessmen, and people from all parts of Germany.”

In Munich, during the days following WWI, while Germany lived through its ultimately failed revolution of 1918/ 1919, Heinrich was part of the movement, supported and led by socialist and communist writers such as Kurt Eisner, Ernst Toller, and Erich Mühsam, which resulted in the establishment of the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic. Tóibín devotes time to those days of unrest and shows the anti-revolutionary, bourgeois Thomas Mann family’s attitudes during this time.

The establishment of the Munich Soviet Republic had been preceded by the abdication of the Bavarian King and the setting up of the Bavarian free State. This free State was headed as prime minister by the writer Kurt Eisner, who was assassinated after 100 days in office. Heinrich Mann I gave the oration at the memorial ceremony a few weeks after this murder: “It took Thomas a while to accept that there was a new and functioning government in Munich and that it consisted of poets and dreamers and friends of Heinrich’s. He was comforted by the news that no equivalent revolts had happened successfully in other German cities.”

Thomás is told by an emissary of this government: “You were on the list of those to be detained,” he said. “I was in the room when that list was read out. And two of the leaders insisted that your name be removed. One was Erich Mühsam and the other was Ernst Toller. Toller spoke eloquently about your virtues.”

Mühsam and Toller are given considerable importance in Tóibín’s book, especially the horrendous fate of Mühsam, who was viciously tortured and killed in a concentration camp. Thomas Mann is appealed to for his intervention in trying to save Mühsam.

“There is a reason I wanted to see you alone,” Toller said.

He was even more nervous than before. Thomas wondered if he was going to ask for a large amount of money.

“Erich Mühsam is being held by the Nazis. They arrested him after the Reichstag fire. I know he has been tortured. (….) As he sat alone in his study, it struck him that he could stir up interest in Mühsam’s case in the wider world, maybe even in America, but this might make things worse for him.”

During Mann’s exile in the US, he is entreated time and again to try and help save German writers fleeing Nazism. He also comes under pressure from Heinrich and his children Klaus and Erika to take a clear stand against Nazi Germany and to urge the US to join the war. All three are very active in the antifascist struggle.

The question of citizenship understandably dominates the family after leaving Germany. Erika takes fate into her own hands and enters a marriage of convenience with W.H. Auden. She had previously been married to the later Nazi star actor Gustaf Gründgens between 1926 and 1929. And so, Auden and Isherwood meet the Mann family in Princeton. Tóibín seems dismissive of both English writers and also of Virginia Woolf. With regard to Auden, biographers have noted how grateful the Mann family was to him and it would appear that Tóibín may be taking poetic licence. It is also inconsistent with historical fact to suggest that Virginia Woolf was aloof from the British antifascist movement. She supported the Spanish republic during the civil war and was also supportive of the campaign to award the incarcerated Carl von Ossietzky the Nobel Peace Prize.

True to historical fact on the other hand is Tóibín’s description of the FBI watching and questioning the Mann family: “Erika returned, there was a letter waiting for her from the FBI, which wished to interview her, wanting to know the names of anyone in America who had been involved in the anti-fascist movement in Germany before 1933.”

When they visited Thomas, they “made clear then that they were here to find out about Bertolt Brecht and his associates and Thomas realized that he would be in a difficult position no matter what he said. Brecht had certainly been hard to avoid in the circle of German exiles on the west coast, but his contempt for Thomas and his work was also widely known. Although his visitors promised complete confidentiality, he suspected that news of this encounter would leak out. He thought of contacting Brecht before the end of the day to let him know that this meeting had occurred”.

Brecht and Mann had little to do with one another, and consequently, Brecht does not appear in person in this novel.

U.S. secret services continue to follow Mann and intervene when he visits Germany after the war: “My mission,” Bird said, “is simple. I represent the U.S. government and I am here to tell you that we do not wish you to travel to the Eastern Zone. (…) “We don’t want you to go,” Bird continued. “If you do go, you will find America a cold place on your return.”

Mann defies this threat and goes to Weimar. This spells the end of his acceptance in the U.S:

“When Thomas was named as a Communist by a hotel in Beverly Hills that did not want to host an event at which he might speak, he could not blame Heinrich or Klaus for tarnishing his reputation as an imperturbable man of reason. Nor could he blame Brecht, who was living in East Berlin.”

He and Katia move to Switzerland, where they lived until their respective deaths, never returning to Germany to live.  

30-year-old Irish author Sally Rooney has been in the headlines following her refusal to grant the translation rights of her new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) to the Israeli Modan publishing house. Seventy prominent writers backed her decision in a statement in November. 

In May, Rooney had been among over 1,600 artists who condemned Israel’s “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution” in a ‘Letter Against Apartheid’. Israeli apartheid, they said, is “perpetuated by international complicity; it is our collective responsibility to repair this harm.” The signatories to the new statement reaffirmed their support for the Palestinian people, saying:

Like her, we will continue to respond to the Palestinian call for effective solidarity, just as millions supported the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. We will continue to support the nonviolent Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality.

The authors include Irish Kevin Barry, Ronan Bennett, Seán Hewitt, and Rita Ann Higgins from Ireland; Rachel Kushner, Eileen Myles and Eliot Weinburger from the US; Monica Ali, Caryl Churchill, China Miéville and Kamila Shamsie from the UK.

Two bookstore chains with a presence in both Israel and in the occupied territories responded to Rooney’s decision by removing her novels from their stock. So who is Sally Rooney and what are her books about?

Rooney was born in 1991 in Castlebar in the West of Ireland and describes herself as a Marxist. Her mother ran a cultural centre and her father worked for Telecom until it was privatised. Rooney studied English at Trinity College. In an interview Rooney said: “I don’t know what it means to write a Marxist novel. I don’t know and I would love to know. It is the analytical structure that helps me make sense of the world around me.”

Alienated relationships prevail

Her first novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), focuses on two young women, Frances and Bobbi, who, having met at school, are now studying in Dublin and also performing artists. The novel is primarily about sexual relationships among young people, about the question of true love and genuine friendship in an environment where none of this seems to be possible. Most unusually for a contemporary novel, both protagonists see themselves as politically left-wing, even communist:

Bobbi and my mother got along famously. Bobbi studied History and Politics, subjects my mother considered serious. Real subjects, she would say, with an eyebrow lifted at me. My mother was a kind of social democrat, and at this time I believe Bobbi identified herself as a communitarian anarchist. When my mother visited Dublin, they took mutual enjoyment in having minor arguments about the Spanish Civil War. Sometimes Bobbi would turn to me and say: Frances, you’re a communist, back me up.

Bobbi is the most obviously interested of the two in social and international issues, she likes to sing anti-war songs, is well-informed and ready to discuss Syria, Algeria, Palestine. Frances, the narrator, comes from a single-parent working-class household. She is the only character in the novel’s plot who is not wealthy, the only one who has no money. While she is very aware of this, money is not something her friends think about.

Despite recurring references to left-wing views, however, they do not directly inform the novel’s plot, which revolves mainly around sexual relationships. But in a way, this is the crux of the matter. What we encounter in this first novel will characterise the next two: there is a lack of love in most relationships. The young people at the centre of the plot are unable to say that they love each other, find it hard to acknowledge a partner as a ‘girlfriend’/ ‘boyfriend’; there is a lack of genuine commitment. Unconditional love seems impossible. Alienated relationships prevail. Many of the young people are very lonely, have no real self-esteem, are damaged in their humanity. No help is given to them.

In Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (2018), the focus is again on young people, their relationships in their final year at school and follows the two main characters, Marianne and Connell to Trinity College Dublin, which the author knows from her own experience. Again, one of the two is a working-class child with a single mother, the other comes from a dysfunctional wealthy family. In both novels, the working-class child’s mother is the one older character that readers get to know a little better, although drawing people over thirty is not Rooney’s forte.

As in Conversations with Friends, the central theme is sexual relationships and how people treat one another. The plot is a little more complex, goes a little deeper than in the first novel. Once more, it is striking how left-wing the main characters think – and that they stand by their convictions, never deviating from them. That they recommend reading the Communist Manifesto seems perfectly normal. Connell’s mother is also left-wing.

Culture as class performance

Class distinctions are even more clearly highlighted in Normal People, and it’s emphasised that Trinity continues to be the elite university of the bourgeoisie. The larger social themes of class struggle and political protest are echoed by the conflictual relationships between the characters, and sometimes explicitly linked, as when the two main characters actually take part in a protest demonstration:

They went to a protest against the war in Gaza the other week with Connell and Niall. There were thousands of people there, carrying signs and megaphones and banners.

Rooney is also keen to highlight the class nature of the culture industry. Connell goes to a literature reading at the university:

It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.

This quest for alternatives to the capitalist culture industry takes up even more space in Rooney’s latest novel, named after a Schiller poem Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). Questions of interest to the author are discussed primarily in an email correspondence running through the book between Alice, the young, successful author, and her friend Eileen. The discussion covers a whole spectrum of political and philosophical-historical issues from a left-wing perspective. On the contemporary novel, Alice writes:

The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful.

And although political views occupy an increasingly large space in the novels, they still stand apart from the action, which again revolves around sexual relationships and friendships, around young people, some of whom hate themselves, and who are somehow damaged.

While the endings of the first two novels give only vague hope, this third one offers an alternative. It speaks for Rooney’s growing skill that this alternative is woven into the action of the novel and arises organically from it. This way out of alienation comes as at a certain cost for the woman concerned, who will now put motherhood first. However, it is unlikely that Rooney means this in absolute terms; it is what happens to this character and is not generalised as an exclusive alternative. One need only to look at this character’s partner to understand this.

Marxist readers will also be interested in Rooney’s underlying interest in religion for solace. She has stated:

How do people console themselves through periods of immense suffering? Capitalism doesn’t really have an answer (…) it doesn’t always help to read Karl Marx.

It is curious that the artist Rooney sees no role for art as a solace for the psyche, the thought at the heart of Keats’s To Psyche. Rooney’s position may well spring from her dim view of the arts under capitalism.

All art is political. Sometimes, it is the politics of turning a blind eye, or opening casements on faery lands forlorn, as Keats put it. Rooney does not write escapist literature, but a kind that confronts alienation. Her novels depict alienated relationships, alongside explicit political statements by her characters – who would no doubt stand with Rooney in her solidarity with the Palestinians. She understands that literature written from a Marxist perspective needs to go deeper than having characters make progressive political statements. Its political meanings must also be skilfully expressed in the plots and the actions of her characters, as in novels like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

Rooney’s novels have struck a chord with many people worldwide because her readers recognise their own sense of isolation. It is likely that Rooney will increasingly forge her characters’ views with what they do in her novels, and the alternatives they explore.

Thomas Kinsella has died, aged 93. He must be counted among the great Irish poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. He was very involved in uncovering the power of Irish language verse, translating into English the epic The Táin (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), and the verse collection 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed. But what puts Kinsella in a league of his own, is his poem A Butcher's Dozen written in response to the slaughter of 13 civil rights marchers in Derry on what became known as Bloody Sunday, on 30 January 1972, 50 years ago next month.

In honour of Thomas Kinsella, below we republish the article from 2019 about this poem.

Jenny Farrell protests the decision only to charge one paratrooper, and introduces extracts from Thomas Kinsella's poem, A Butcher's Dozen

Shock and disbelief is the reaction of most people in Ireland to the decision of the N. Ireland Prosecution Service (NIPP) only to charge one British paratrooper, “Soldier F” in connection with the murder of 14 innocent civil rights marchers on Derry’s “Bloody Sunday”, 30th January 1972. 

This morning relatives and friends of the Bloody Sunday victims had marched to Derry’s Guildhall in anticipation of the NIPP’s announcement.

The NIPP’s decision reflects the arrogant stance of the British establishment to these crimes committed in Ireland. Indeed, it echoes the Northern Secretary Karen Bradley’s statement last week that all killings by the British army and police during the Troubles were “not crimes”.

Her statement and today’s legal decision only to prosecute one soldier stand in direct contradiction to the findings of the Saville Inquiry and to the apology made by former British PM David Cameron in parliament, stating that the killings were “unjustified and unjustifiable”. 

Lord Saville’s public inquiry into Bloody Sunday ran for over 10 years.  Lord Saville found those killed and injured were innocent, and that the killings were unjustified and those killed posed no threat. It overturned the first, discredited report into the killings, by Lord Widgery, in 1972, which said British soldiers were fired on first and some of those killed had been armed.

Its report, in June 2010, identified 22 former British soldiers who could be charged with murder, attempted murder, causing grievous bodily injury with intent, or perjury. It has now taken almost 9 years for the NIPP to whittle that number down to one anonymous scapegoat, “Soldier F”. Saville linked him to the killing of 4 people on Bloody Sunday. According to the brother of victim Michael Kelly, what stood out about the evidence “Soldier F” gave to the Inquiry “he showed absolutely no remorse for what he did”.

Today, one of the solicitors for the Bloody Sunday families praised their tenacious 47-year campaign for justice that had resulted in the historic public inquiry and the prospect of actual prosecutions.

Alas, their campaign for justice is not yet over. The families will study this decision very carefully and look for legal possibilities to challenge today's decision before the High Court. They will seek to have the number of soldiers prosecuted increased as well as ensure the accused are named rather than they remain anonymous, as was the case at the Saville Inquiry. 

“Bloody Sunday” was a watershed in the North of Ireland conflict. It was to result in the decline of the powerful civil rights movement and the rise of the Provisional IRA. The peaceful demonstrations demanding equal rights for Catholics in the late 1960s exposed internationally the sectarian, repressive and gerrymandered regime operating in Britain’s backyard, “Northern Ireland”. 

In August 1969, the British Labour government brought British troops onto the streets to stop the pogroms against the Catholic community by the armed, sectarian pro-British N. Ireland police force, the RUC.

The British Labour government disarmed the RUC and began to introduce democratic reforms. However, in June 1970 the role of the British state changed, when Edward Heath was elected Prime Minister. The Tories – or to give thei official title the “Conservative and Unionist Party” – were in power, and they sympathised with their fraternal party in the North of Ireland, the Unionist Party, that had controlled the sectarian state for almost 50 years.

Repression of the Catholic community rather than democratic reforms became the order of the day, culminating in internment without trial in August 1971.

The demonstration in Derry on 30th January 1972 had been aimed against internment. The killings on “Bloody Sunday” were seen as a deliberate act by the British Tories and their Unionist allies to force the unmanageable peaceful protests for civil rights off the streets. Both at home and abroad it was more acceptable to fight “terrorism” than to deal with peaceful demonstrators demanding their civil rights. Besides, in N. Ireland the British army could perfect its anti-insurgency techniques.

So, while only one of the soldiers who fired the shots is to be prosecuted, the politicians, civil servants and army officers who pulled the strings are not. Of late, particular attention has been drawn to retired General Sir Mike Jackson. He was second-in-command of the army in Derry on Bloody Sunday.  During his evidence at the Saville Inquiry he suffered from severe memory loss.

This contrasts with his disputed account of another mass killing in Northern Ireland months before Bloody Sunday. In August 1971 during internment the Parachute Regiment shot dead 11 innocent people, including a mother and a priest, in what is now known as the “Ballymurphy Massacre”. Jackson was press officer for the Parachute Regiment, stationed in Belfast, and he briefed the media that those killed in the shootings were Republican gunmen. This view was contradicted on Monday last at the on-going inquest into the “Ballymurphy Massacre”, when the then commanding officer of the Parachute Regiment, Gen Sir Geoffrey Howlett, 89, admitted that of those killed “most if not all were not IRA”.

Jackson’s role in Northern Ireland did not hamper his career, which saw him involved in the wars in Yugoslavia and Kosovo. On 1st February 2003 he became chief of staff of the British Army, a month before the illegal invasion of Iraq – another war where those who pulled the strings go completely unpunished.   

Irish poet Thomas Kinsella’s poem A Butcher’s Dozen was written in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday, following the Widgery report which whitewashed the atrocities, and published on 26 April 1972.

Kinsella later said:

The Widgery report was a great insult. [My] response was instant; the poem itself was written and issued in seven days. … I debated with myself at the time whether to keep it anonymous, but that would have been wrong. Commitment is important when faced with wickedness and injustice. … The poem was some at some personal cost, however. There was a considerable loss of readership – a permanent chill in the atmosphere from readers of my work, and from friends. I received a letter from one friend who simply put an end to our friendship. They signed off, “No British person would behave in such a way.” This continued even after total vindication [in] the Saville report; and the apology [from prime minister David Cameron] in the British parliament. I stand over my decision to write [it].”

The poem opens in tone and rhythm reminiscent of Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, written after the Peterloo Massacre in 1819:

I went with Anger at my heel
Through Bogside of the bitter zeal
- Jesus pity! - on a day
Of cold and drizzle and decay.
A month had passed. Yet there remained
A murder smell that stung and stained.
On flats and alleys - over all
It hung; on battered roof and wall,
On wreck and rubbish scattered thick,
On sullen steps and pitted brick.
And when I came where thirteen died
It shrivelled up my heart. I sighed
And looked about that brutal place
Of rage and terror and disgrace.
Then my moistened lips grew dry.
I had heard an answering sigh!
There in a ghostly pool of blood
A crumpled phantom hugged the mud:
"Once there lived a hooligan.
A pig came up, and away he ran.
Here lies one in blood and bones,
Who lost his life for throwing stones."

It continues, commenting on British justice:

"The shame is theirs, in word and deed,
Who prate of justice, practise greed,
And act in ignorant fury - then,
Officers and gentlemen,
Send to their Courts for the Most High
To tell us did we really die!
Does it need recourse to law
To tell ten thousand what they saw?
Law that lets them, caught red-handed,
Halt the game and leave it stranded,
Summon up a sworn inquiry
And dump their conscience in the diary.
During which hiatus, should
Their legal basis vanish, good,
The thing is rapidly arranged:
Where's the law that can't be changed?
The news is out. The troops were kind.
Impartial justice has to find
We'd be alive and well today
If we had let them have their way.
Yet England, even as you lie,
You give the facts that you deny.
Spread the lie with all your power
- All that's left; it's turning sour.

As various ghosts of the dead speak, one refers to the witches’ broth in Macbeth – only this pot is worse!

A joking spectre followed him:
"Take a bunch of stunted shoots,
A tangle of transplanted roots,
Ropes and rifles, feathered nests,
Some dried colonial interests,
A hard unnatural union grown
In a bed of blood and bone,
Tongue of serpent, gut of hog
Spiced with spleen of underdog.
Stir in, with oaths of loyalty,
Sectarian supremacy,
And heat, to make a proper botch,
In a bouillon of bitter Scotch.
Last, the choice ingredient: you.
Now, to crown your Irish stew,
Boil it over, make a mess.
A most imperial success!"

Kinsella’s concluding lines will stand for the way many in Ireland feel today:

I stood like a ghost. My fingers strayed
Along the fatal barricade.
The gentle rainfall drifting down
Over Colmcille's town
Could not refresh, only distil
In silent grief from hill to hill.

For the full text, please click here.

On 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, Abdulrazak Gurnah will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature on behalf of black Africa.

Wole Soyinka was the first black African writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Other Nobel Prize winners from the African continent are Nagib Mahfuz (Egypt), Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee (both South Africa). The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, who died in 2013, and who is considered one of the fathers of modern African literature, never received the prize.

In all likelihood, neither will the Marxist Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who has been strongly favoured in recent years. Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie and Nuruddin Farah from Somalia are repeatedly mentioned as other African authors worthy of the prize. But no black African author has been considered for the Swedish Academy’s award since Soyinka – until this year, when Zanzibar-born Abdulrazak Gurnah was unexpectedly declared the Nobel Laureate for Literature.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Born in 1948, Gurnah’s youth was marked by the last years of British colonial rule and the troubled early years of independence. Much social tension on the small island in the Indian Ocean off the Tanzanian coast sprang from the conflict between the Arab and African populations. The British, who maintained good relations with the Sultans of the Persian Gulf, and fearing rebellion in Africa, launched Zanzibar’s independence in 1963, at the same time affirming Arab rule.

An eyewitness at the time, the legendary Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuściński wrote in The Shadow of the Sun:

Abeid Karume was the leader of Zanzibar’s Afro-Shirazi Party. Although this party, representing the island’s black African population, won a majority in the last elections, the government was formed by an Arab minority party supported by London—the Zanzibar Nationalist Party. The Africans, outraged by this fact, organized a revolt and abolished Arab rule. That is what had just transpired two days ago.

 Three hours after Prince Philip, in the name of Queen Elizabeth, transfers Zanzibar into Arab hands, Field Marshal John Okello makes his move, and in the course of a single night seizes power on Zanzibar.

This led to persecution and massacres of the Arab and Indian populations, and many fled. Gurnah and his brother, of Arab descent on their father’s side, also emigrated to England to study in late 1967. Gurnah only returned to Zanzibar on a visit in 1984.

Gurnah’s memory of this period is largely painful. But in some of his works, especially in By the Sea (2001), he addresses the solidarity of the GDR with Zanzibar, which was important for both countries, especially in the 1960s. Zanzibar was the first non-socialist country to recognise the GDR diplomatically and to defy the Hallstein Doctrine, West Germany’s claim to sole diplomatic representation. After the unification of Zanzibar with Tanganyika to form Tanzania, President Nyerere also insisted on maintaining recognition of the GDR and entertained diplomatic relations with both German states, despite the Hallstein Doctrine. In addition to projects such as a housing construction programme, many young Zanzibaris went to the GDR for training courses and studies.

Zanzibar appears as a setting in most of Gurnah’s novels, usually dealing with the fortunes of individuals and families in the turmoil of the times. Migration and being caught in between cultures are important themes in Gurnah’s work, for which he was ultimately awarded the Nobel Prize: "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents."

By the Sea

 In this novel Saleh Omar, a 65-year-old Zanzibari refugee and former businessman, seeks asylum in England following 11 years of imprisonment on Zanzibar. Here he meets his compatriot Latif Mahmud, whose shared past consists in two evictions linked to Omar’s business dealings with the Persian trader Hussein, who exploited and defrauded all parties involved. This conflict is embedded in the history of Zanzibar. It begins in the last years of British colonial power and ends with Omar’s departure. Brought together by fate, both men now try to remember the exact course of events and the circumstances surrounding this period of their lives. These memories form the core of the novel.

Right at the start, Omar reflects on the colonial history of East Africa:

Then the Portuguese, rounding the continent, burst so unexpect­edly and so disastrously from that unknown and impenetrable sea, and put paid to medieval geography with their sea-borne cannons. They wreaked their religion-crazed havoc on islands, harbours and cities, exulting over their cruelty to the inhabitants they plundered. Then the Omanis came to remove them and take charge in the name of the true God, and brought with them Indian money, with the British close behind, and close behind them the Germans and the French and whoever else had the wherewithal.

The action here, as in other novels by Gurnah, is set in the petty bourgeoisie and middle class – the class of often impoverished shopkeepers, small businessmen, mostly of Arab, Indian or mixed descent, not the dispossessed African population of labourers and fishermen.

The school-educated Omar says of the British colonial masters:

In their books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering, they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read about the diseases that tormen­ted us, about the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways that we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well-fitting was the story they told about us.

Mahmud, a generation younger, goes to study abroad in East Germany in the 1960s, shortly after gaining independence, through his mother’s connections with a minister. Here, Gurnah paints a picture from the perspective of the young African who does not find paradise. Even before starting his studies in dentistry, he is persuaded by friends to defect, which takes him to England. The author based his picture of Mahmud on reports from school friends. It is important, however, that the GDR’s aid projects for Zanzibar occupy such considerable space in this novel.

Omar also reflects critically on the role of the USA after the end of colonial rule:

Then the President became disenchanted with the Americans. Partly this was because of the swelling chorus of discontent with the United States across Africa at the time. They had shown their hand too openly in the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo – boastful CIA officers could not resist making unattri­butable claims. They were murdering black Americans at home, when they only wanted the vote and equal rights as citizens, aspirations familiar to all of us at the time, aspirations which chimed with our discontent over arrogant oppression of non­-European people all over the world.

History overtakes Gurnah’s characters and makes them its pawns; the author remains committed to individual fates. From his perspective, he rejects simplistic notions of liberation, migration, Muslims and East Africa, and so By the Sea is more concerned with the complicated relationship between the two narrators than with Omar’s precariousness as an asylum seeker. Although the frame story is about Omar’s situation as an asylum seeker in England, most of the text follows the two men’s conflicting narratives of their lives in Zanzibar and their eventual negotiation of a new acquaintance based on their shared history.

Desertion

This novel, published in 2005, also examines the history of Tanganyika through the lens of a petty bourgeois Indian-African family. The story spans almost 90 years, from 1899 to about 1984, beginning with the fateful rescue of a Mzungu – a European – whose love affair with Rahena, sister of his rescuer, continued for years, and its aftermath through the generations. The deserters from societal rules become tragic figures.

The story is set first in the colonial era, later in the early 1960s, the years around independence and afterwards. Rashid, who emigrated from Zanzibar to study in England and narrates some of the novel, shares aspects of his biography with Gurnah: he too studies English, obtains a doctorate, gets a lectureship, marries in England. He only returns to Zanzibar for a visit in the mid-1980s, when his parents have already died. Until then, his family advises against visiting because of expected reprisals. Gurnah paints a bleak, desolate picture through the accounts of Amin’s brother:

We are all becoming increasingly addicted to the mosque. The government delivers its socialist lies and we all rush for the mosques. The days are getting darker in every way. Food is becoming more scarce. There are power cuts and water shortages. So it’s inevitable that mosques will get fuller and prayers last longer. I find an unexpected pleasure in this communion.

Still revered today across Africa for his socialist Ujamaa policies in the post-colonial early years, Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere, is also portrayed less than sympathetically:

Poor minister, they captured him and humiliated him as they did all the other ministers. They’re all in jail on the mainland now, guests of President Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika, who glows with pleasure at what has befallen us.

Gurnah and Ngugi's views on colonialism

Gurnah’s perspective differs from that of Ngugi, whose view of colonialism is more uncompromising, who writes about resistance, and who also comments scathingly about Africa’s neo-colonial present. While Gurnah is strongly indebted to English literature, and to the tales of 1001 Nights, Ngugi has consciously and pioneeringly discarded the language of the colonists and writes only in Gikuyu. His novel Matigari, published in 1987, rapidly entered popular culture, to the dismay of the authorities. When the then President Daniel Arap Moi heard that a certain Matigari was abroad in Kenya, asking difficult questions, he ordered his immediate arrest. All copies of the book distributed in Kenya were confiscated and destroyed.

Gurnah’s character Rashid reflects on the writer Sundeep as he remembers former fellow students:

 Sundeep … has become a writer of some fame. He spent a year living in Malawi and wrote … an irreverent comedy about post-imperial absurdities … President Banda did not like it and had the sale of the book banned in Malawi. Sundeep was well out of harm’s way by then, and having his book banned by a President-for-Life who was just reaching the peak of his authoritarian career did not do his reputation any harm. … I’ve read most of his books but I no longer look forward to them. I think that despite their zest and fluency, they have grown increasingly certain of their judgements, and to be too certain of anything is the beginning of bigotry.

 This portrait contains certain similarities to Ngugi, which are supported by Gurnah’s views on him in academic publications.

Paradise

This ironically titled novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. The action takes place between 1900 and 1914 in colonial East Africa:

 Everywhere they went now they found the Europeans had got there before them, and had installed soldiers and officials … The traders spoke of the Europeans with amazement, awed by their ferocity and ruthlessness. They take the best land without paying a bead, force the people to work for them by one trick or another.… Taxes for this, taxes for that, otherwise prison for the offender, or the lash, or even hanging.

The plot centres on Yusuf, who is sold into bondage at the age of 12 by his father, who runs a hotel for a certain Aziz and cannot repay a debt. The boy works for Aziz without pay and never goes to school. He is not the only child who comes to Aziz in this way. Khalil is a few years older and becomes his best friend and advisor. Yusuf thus comes from the impoverished petty bourgeoisie but slips into servitude through bondage. Nevertheless, he is under Aziz’s protection. Despite the relationship of dependence, there is a certain sense of security.

Over the years, Aziz takes Yusuf with him on his trading caravans, and so Yusuf gets to know an Africa marked by tribal wars, superstition and disease. Germans are also heard of again and again, slowly spreading. Years later, Yusuf learns that his parents are dead. Like Khalil, he does not know how to free himself financially from Aziz. With Aziz, a life as a trader awaits him. So, at the end of the novel, he runs after a German Schutztruppe of African askaris to join them. He does this despite just witnessing their willingness to use violence against their own people. Although various gardens of paradise appear in the text, there is none for Yusuf or Khalil. Other characters are also excluded from this possibility.

After Lives

Published in 2020, this novel picks up historically where Paradise left off. Now, however, the German colonialists and their Schutztruppen move to the centre of the action. A lot of German and references to German culture and colonial history appear. Gurnah clearly enjoys languages and integrates mainly Swahili but also Arabic into all his texts.

Once again, interest in the fate of the characters is central, through which Gurnah creates an empathy for these people who are guilty of crimes against their own people. He shows what draws them to the Schutztruppen, how they are treated as sub-humans and how they still act against their own interests. The focus is on their human motivations, their pride, not their misdeeds. They learn German; Hamza, a main character, learns it particularly well. But he is badly injured by an officer in a rage and eventually deserts.

Another character, Ilyas, ends up in Germany through the turmoil of the First World War, stays, and another stroke of fate awaits him there. The lives of these characters, why they join the Schutztruppen, what else life has in store for them – everything makes up a whole in which, characteristically for Gurnah, there are no heroes, only people who somehow survive.

Although the time span of this novel includes the years of the Maji-Maji rebellion, this is only mentioned in passing. The 2-year rebellion was brutally crushed. The Germans also used famine as a weapon, wantonly destroying the crops of suspected Maji-Maji supporters. The Maji-Maji rebellion in Tanganyika was the most significant African resistance against German colonial rule.

The jury members of the Swedish Academy, who are not above bourgeois prejudices, would do well not to wait another 35 years before picking another book from Africa.

Jenny Farrell reviews Provenance, by Kate Thompson

As Elliot Fielding struggles in an Australian hospital to piece together his fragmented memory following serious head injury, the reader embarks with him on the road to make sense of his life before. The narrative delves into the realities of Aboriginal life, through the fictional Warlpiri community in the central Australian Tanami desert, and indigenous art.

Elliot, through whose lens this world unfolds, is an English doctor, come to work in the remote community, inspired by a previous visit to the red sands of the desert. With little knowledge of this society, he takes up a post in a medical centre for Aboriginal people, and complications unfold the more involved he becomes in the lives of his patients.

The Western reader expects to encounter alcoholism, mental illness and other manifestations of indigenous cultures being robbed of their land, culture, and livelihood by colonial ‘civilisation’. Kate Thompson, however, focuses primarily on Aboriginal art as the language of the native Australians. It is apparent from this fascinating novel that she has personal knowledge of her subject.

Sensitive to the realities of the indigenous people, the author never wholly departs from the Western outsider point of view of Elliot, never attempts to speak as an Aboriginal. Choosing a character who slowly learns something of the native Australians’ lives, and later their art, allows her to express a growing understanding of their culture. And over time, his patients learn to trust Elliot, as a Westerner, while never admitting him fully into their lives.

‘I thought you didn’t mind people seeing your culture. I thought you liked sharing it with the whitefellas.’ ‘Some parts we don’t mind,’ Doris said. ‘But that little dance we do for people, over there in the town sometimes, special times, that one not our culture, not proper one, Same with those paintings. They are just one little bit, one story. That’s like you read one page out of the Bible and think that is your whole law.’

Elliot’s central assignment in the novel is to sell some paintings by an elderly artist, Doris Banks, who asks him for a Toyota in return. In this request, the clash between capitalist and pre-capitalist society is highlighted; money in native Australian communities is something shared across the community, and cars are also common property. The Toyota is needed to manage distances: ‘We don’t need much. (…) Little bit of fence around the back and that side. Make it safe, for women dancing, you know? And one Toyota.’.

The art market for Aboriginal paintings is shown to be diverse, ranging from centres that facilitate artists, to ‘carpetbaggers’ who go into the desert to acquire artwork directly at a fraction of the price they then sell them for. And while Doris Banks’ request that Elliot sells her paintings for her feels natural to her, this is totally unacceptable to the white art dealers.

The continuing exploitation of the indigenous artists is an important theme in the novel, reflected in its title Provenance “what makes the same painting worth three figures in your bit of plastic pipe, and five figures in someone else’s bit of plastic pipe.” Provenance, the record of ownership, also refers to something’s origin, a close semantic connection with indigene. The fact that these art dealers supply the provenance, reinforces the theme of resistance in the novel to the notion, that “white people were the ones who knew what was best for Aboriginal people.”

Thompson does not idealise the realities of Aboriginal society. This is no pastoral, the native Australians we encounter are not ‘noble savages’. More clearly, we are shown Western incomprehension of worlds beyond their immediate experience. Having travelled into the desert with the native Australians under the guidance of Luke on a visit to a significant site to fulfil obligations, Elliot exclaims, “What were you thinking of, bringing us out here into the middle of nowhere?” Luke gives him the answer he deserves “this place is not nowhere to me.” and Eliot understands in one of his many dreams “that old tree is deeper than it is high and that its roots stretch far down into a time that is governed by a set of elementals he will never comprehend.”

How much of the language of the landscape, its beauty, and native culture is expressed in indigenous painting, is a growing realisation for Elliot and the reader.

 Kate Thompson is an award-winning writer. The daughter of the social historians and peace activists Dorothy and E. P. Thompson, her books always display an awareness of social injustice and the manipulations of the powerful. This novel and her other books also reveal and side with people’s resistance against inequality.

One of Ireland’s foremost Irish language poets and scholars, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, died aged 99, on 16 October. Her fellow poet Louis de Paor said of her work that it reflected “the intimate experience of women at a time when women’s voices were largely inaudible”.

Born in Dublin on 4 April 1922, her Belfast-born father Seán McEntee had fought in the GPO in 1916 and was elected for Sinn Féin in the 1918 election. Her mother, Margaret Browne, also active in the republican movement, acted as a courier during the Rising. Recalling “a really big row” at home in 1937 over the new Constitution “because of the article stating that women should not be compelled by financial necessity to work outside the home”, Mhac an tSaoi gives some idea of where her emancipatory aspirations for the women of Ireland were born: “My mother, who had carried the finances of the family all the way since 1922, while my father earned hardly anything, was furious. She couldn’t bring herself to talk to him.”

From a privileged background, she embarked on a formidable academic career. Because of Irish legislation banning married women from the public service, which only changed in 1973, Mhac an tSaoi had to resign from the diplomatic corps in 1962 to marry Conor Cruise O’Brien, a relationship that affected her political views. However, she opposed the Vietnam war and resigned from Aosdána, the Irish association of artists, when Francis Stuart was nominated to be a 'Saoi', the highest artistic honour in Ireland, because of his perceived Nazi sympathies. In the early 1970s, she also helped in the campaign against closing down a national school in Dún Chaoin, in the heart of Irish-speaking Kerry by bringing out an LP of her poems, “Ómós do Scoil Dhún Chaoin” (Homage to the School in Dunquin).

Mhac an tSaoi engaged deeply with the Irish language, stating it was “the prime catalyst in the creation of a truly European culture” and thereby vital to Ireland. She began writing in Irish. The theme of female sexuality featured prominently in Mhac an tSaoi’s first poetry collection, Margadh na Saoire (“The Hiring-Fair”, 1956), especially in Ceathrúintí Mháire Ní Ógáin  (“Mary Hogan’s Quatrains”). Mhac an tSaoi herself compared the sequence to an Irish language version of Yeats’s Crazy Jane. Writing in Irish helped evade the Censorship of Publications Act, which may well have stopped this volume from appearing had it been written in English.

To get some idea of Mhac an tSaoi’s writing, I will look at a short poem from this early collection, “Margaret in the hairdresser’s” (“Máiréad sa tsiopa cóirithe gruaige”). This is a translation into English of the Irish original.

Five years old! My amber flower!
It was foolish of me to fix your hair
So lightly you stepped to the hairdresser
To be soaped and scissored, pinned and dried
With such good grace, willing and obliging
As a lamb to its raddle for shearing and marking
Until you landed on earth like Shirley Temple,
Though not so pale, a charming girl,
Before the mirror revealed the new you... and then
Oh such lamentation may I never hear again!
With your head in my lap you wept your fill -
I won't pretend I don't know what horrified you
Love, marriage, the monthly blood, all
Staring back, childbearing, the common lot.
Bless your little head and your crowning glory
As you bawl your eyes out at your mother’s waist
With hatred for the female and no escape from it!
My soul’s treasure, if only I could help you I would.

 The title suggests an ordinary, everyday event. The opening exclamation “Five years old!” drives home a young age, a child leaving early childhood and entering primary school age. The world is getting bigger, there is still great closeness between mother and child: “My amber flower!” In the next line, the mother already blames herself for not preparing her daughter for this step outside the home, feels she has over-protected her, that Mairéad is unprepared for what awaits her. Mairéad is unsuspecting and expects only good from the world, “So lightly you stepped to the hairdresser”.

The verbs in the very next line, “soaped and scissored, pinned and dried” suggest an assault, cutting and pinching, emphasised by the hissing sibilance, a caesura and then another attack in the punch-like sounding verbs that follow. This attack is endured with “such good grace, willing and obliging” – a line that offers brief hope that all might be well. Then Mhac an tSaoi turns the emotions around again dramatically, as she compares the child’s innocence to “a lamb to its raddle for shearing and marking”. Here we get a first sense of sexualisation in a very rural image: raddle is a coloured pigment used to mark sheep for various reasons, including to mark the backs of ewes a ram mates. These are the thoughts that go through the mother’s head before the girl sees herself in the mirror.

Mairéad’s mother realises the transformation, that puts her child into a league with Hollywood's child film star from 1934 to 1938, Shirley Temple, dating the experience related in the poem to the late thirties or forties. Again, there is a struggle between attraction and repulsion, as the mother on the one hand sees how her daughter is transformed modelled on the fashionable child beauty of the day, at the same time realising how this appearance sexualises her.

However, when the girl sees herself in the mirror, some possibly unformed realisation hits her, and her reaction is unequivocal: “such lamentation may I never hear again!” She understands at some level that an irreversible transformation has taken place that allows for no return to innocence. She seeks comfort in her mother’s lap – at the same time a very young child’s need for a mother’s protection, as well as a symbolic desire to return to the womb.

The mother/speaker intuits the reason for her daughter’s shock at what she sees as she looks at her ‘new self’ in the mirror: “Love, marriage, the monthly blood, all/ Staring back, childbearing, the common lot.” She empathises completely with her child. Once more, the girl’s small stature is emphasised, “at your mother’s waist”. Her mother is more resigned to what seems like her daughter’s inevitable future lot, tries to comfort her and refers to the ‘beautifying’ hairstyle. The speaker understands her daughter’s “hatred for the female” – meaning the female lot – and the realisation that there is “no escape from it!”

The poem ends with the speaker’s deep regret at her powerlessness to truly protect her daughter against the condition of women in Ireland at that time: “My soul’s treasure, if only I could help you I would.” 

It wasn’t until 1979 that some form of contraceptive became available in Ireland, with some further easing in 1985. But it was only in 2018 that Ireland decided overwhelmingly by referendum to finally end the constitutional ban on abortion, which had led to the Magdalen Laundries, the unhappiness, distress and the deaths of untold numbers of women. As trailblazer for female poets in 20^th century Ireland, Máire Mhac an tSaoi recoded this experience in her poetry, and helped pave the way for others.

The Irish poet Brendan Kennelly died on 17 October, aged eighty-five. At an event for his eightieth birthday, Kennelly had said, he wanted to be remembered by his poems. His poem “Oliver to his Brother” is one that stays with me.

The name Oliver still suggests Oliver Cromwell in Ireland, so deep are the scars left in the national consciousness by Cromwell’s holocaust in Ireland: massacres of thousands of soldiers and civilians by the New Model Army at both Drogheda and Wexford in 1649, the execution of large numbers of Catholic clergy, the transportation of thousands of women and children to Barbados, to work on sugar plantations.

So, poem’s title, “Oliver to his Brother”, is loaded. In addition, the title announces that the poem’s speaker is Cromwell himself, and to expect a private address.

Loving brother, I am glad to hear of your welfare
And that our children have so much leisure
They can travel far to eat cherries.
This is most excusable in my daughter
Who loves this fruit and whom I bless.
Tell her I expect she writes often to me
And that she be kept in some exercise.
Cherries and exercise go well together.
I have delivered my son up to you.
I hope you counsel him; he will need it;
I choose to believe he believes what you say.
I send my affection to all your family.
Let sons and Daughters be serious; the age requires it.
I have things to do, all in my own way.
For example, I take not kindly to rebels.

The text is a letter. Its first word, ‘Loving’, is deeply ironic. The irony continues in ‘glad’ and ‘your welfare’. The second line reveals that this letter is a response to one telling him of his children, at least two of whom seem to be living with their uncle. It is also suggested that they enjoy freedom: ‘cherries’ evoke summertime, also ‘travel far’ suggests the outdoors and independence. This clashes implicitly with the harsh discipline of an army in the context of the military man Cromwell.

The first sentence, spanning three lines, ends in ‘cherries’. The reference to cherries introduces smell, taste and colour – sensations that have been absent so far, and immediately intensify the sensual appeal of the image and make it more memorable. Until this word, the poem has been reflective, cerebral, with slight hints at outdoor pleasure.

A loving father, Cromwell finds such delight ‘excusable’ in his daughter – implying he is less happy about his son enjoying the innocent pleasures of life. He adds, referring to his daughter, ‘whom I bless’, requests and looks forward to correspondence from her. He is concerned for her wellbeing and suggests to his brother that he ought keep an eye on the child exercising: ‘Cherries and exercise go well together’.

Next, his thoughts turn to his son, also in his brother’s care. For him, Cromwell asks for a more serious upbringing: his brother should council him, ‘he will need it’. A much more serious life is expected for his son. Cromwell as a leader in the English revolution, a signatory to Charles’ I arrest and subsequent beheading, in the first bourgeois revolution in history, expects his son to be prepared to enter a life of politics and militarism. Kennelly then reinforces the irony in the line sending ‘affection’ to brother’s family, highlighting the sense of  Cromwell the family man.

This is followed by a transitional line ‘Let sons and Daughters be serious; the age requires it.’ And now the age comes more clearly into focus. It is a brutal age, showing at this early stage of capitalist history, now that the bourgeoisie has seized power, it will exercise great force to supress any challenge to its power. Be this in Britain or in Ireland.  

This thought links the poem’s first half with its latter half: ‘I have things to do, all in my own way’. And then Cromwell, who was a supreme rebel in English history (decapitating king and establishing a parliamentary republic) states: ‘I take not kindly to rebels.’

Cromwell continues the English tradition of colonialism – does not bring to Ireland the emancipation of England, and is responsible for genocide.

This ominous, threatening statement comes at line 14 of 28, in the exact middle of the poem.

Now the attention turns away from the family to ‘I’, Oliver Cromwell, military man. As the poem’s speaker, Cromwell relates an actual historical event in which he was instrumentally involved:

Today, in Burford Churchyard, Cornet Thompson
Was led to the place of execution.
He asked for prayers, got them, died well.
After him, a Corporal, brought to the same place
Set his back against the wall and died.
A third choose to look death in the face,
Stood straight, showed no fear, chilled into his pride.

‘Today’ dates and places the letter: The Banbury mutiny was a mutiny in England by soldiers in the New Model Army. The mutineers sympathised with the radical Levellers and early communist Diggers in England, who wanted an equal society for all and set up communes. This execution demonstrated that Cromwell suppressed aspirations to take further the ideas of the revolution, apply them to all. The three leaders shot were Cornet James Thompson (commanding Captain William Thompson’s brother), Corporal Perkins and John Church on 17 May 1649. This destroyed the Levellers’ power base in the New Model Army. Cromwell reports coldly how they died. This is before Cromwell goes to Ireland in August.

Men die their different ways
And girls eat cherries
In the Christblessed fields of England.
Some weep. Some have cause. Let weep who will.
Whole floods of brine are at their beck and call.
I have work to do in Ireland.

‘Men die’, and ‘girls eat cherries’ brings the reader back for a moment to the poem’s opening lines. Cherries now are brought into clear association with blood – cherries are blood-red. Cherry eating is no longer as innocent as it seemed in the beginning. The cherries placed at the start prove to hint at an underlying blood trail.

As a Puritan, Cromwell saw things in religious terms and justifies his actions accordingly: ‘Christblessed fields of England’. Yet, he shows no compassion: ‘Some weep. Some have cause. Let weep who will.’ The weeping drenches the next two lines, by its repetition and the alliteration with ‘will’,  the EEEE sound echoes the weeping. The three short sentences in one line enact strictest control, but also hint at short breath and sobbing. This contrasts with the free flow of the next line, where floods of tears are suggested in the salty ‘brine’, reinforced at sound level with the alliteration ‘beck’. Cromwell’s cynicism is implied in ‘Let weep who will’ and his comment about the weeping having tears “at their beck and call”.

The final line announces Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland. It comes as a profound shock to the reader. We know him now. We know what will happen. This is has only been a prelude of what he will do in Ireland.

With this poem Brendan Kennelly creates a powerful image of Cromwell. Its relevance for today lies in the stark reminder of early capitalist suppression of aspirations for emancipation, with murder and genocide. Cromwell’s methods continue to this day.

The power of Kennelly’s verse makes the poem very memorable. At his 80^th birthday event Kennelly also said he hoped that his poems would be read out aloud. “Oliver to his Brother” would be most suitable.

As Ireland observes the centenary of its incomplete independence – the setting up of the ‘Free State’ with dominion status and the partition of the country – care must be taken not to distort history. One of the authors who lived through the years of upheaval and the years of the Free State, Liam O’Flaherty, wrote about those times honestly and unflinchingly.

Liam O’Flaherty is one of the foremost Irish fiction writers of the 20^th century. Like none other, he commented on the times as they were unfolding in his novels written in the 1920s and early 30s. He achieved his international breakthrough with the novel The Informer in 1925 – a novel set during the War of Independence.

In addition, O’Flaherty’s interest in Irish history resulted in the first Irish anti-war novel, Return of the Brute, a Civil War novel, The Martyr, as well Famine (1937), Ireland’s first serious artistic grappling with this Irish holocaust.

O’Flaherty was born in 1896 on the largest of the Irish speaking Aran Islands, Inis Mór, and he left the island for secondary education aged only 12 in 1908.

During WW1, in 1916, O’Flaherty joined the British Army. Back in Ireland, the Easter Rising took place in late April 1916. The Rising was defeated and its leaders were executed. In the Easter Proclamation, the leaders had set out important aspirations for an independent Ireland:

• the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland
• the Irish Republic to be a sovereign independent state
• religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities for all its citizens

Awareness of these demands help to understand O’Flaherty’s supreme disappointment with the state that evolved after 1922.

Class-based divisions in the struggle for liberation

British atrocities after the 1916 Rising fuelled the War of Independence, which took place from 1919 to 1921. In May 1921, Ireland was partitioned by the British Government, which set up Northern Ireland. A ceasefire and talks between the British and the leaders of the Irish rebellion resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921, ending direct British rule in 26 of the 32 counties. A year later, the Irish Free State was established, which was not a republic, but a Dominion of Britain. This Treaty, was the cause of the Civil War between the forces of the pro-Treaty provisional government – later  the Free State government – and the anti-Treaty volunteer army (IRA), which had its own executive. 

This class-based division of a united front for liberation into the monied forces with the Catholic Church behind them on the one hand, and on the other hand the dispossessed who aspire to a new society, became very evident during the Civil War and the subsequent Free State government. Its post-Civil War reality is apparent in O’Flaherty’s book The House of Gold.

Two parties that still figure largely in Irish politics, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, emerged from Sinn Féin, the national liberation movement, after the Civil War. The pro-Treaty party Cumann na nGaedheal, later Fine Gael, aligned itself with big business, and then with the European fascists. It was supported by the Catholic hierarchy. Fianna Fáil, the anti-Treaty party, had its base among the working class and small farmers. However, the difference between these two Civil War enemies has dwindled to practically nothing today, and they have governed Ireland on separate occasions in similar ways for the past 100 years.

O’Flaherty’s experience of WWI left him strongly anti-war and a committed socialist. He travelled widely after the war, but returned to Ireland in late 1921, and became a founder member of the first Communist Party of Ireland in November 1921. On 18 January 1922, two days after the establishment of the Irish Free State, O’Flaherty, as Chairperson of the Council of the Unemployed and other unemployed Dublin workers, occupied the Rotunda concert hall for four days, flying a red flag. The Civil War began in May 1922 and O’Flaherty joined the Anti-Treaty Republican side. After their defeat, he fled to London in July 1922.

There he began writing. He became a close friend of the German socialist, Carl Lahr and his wife Esther Archer, who managed the Progressive Bookshop. The left-wing circle around this bookshop became O’Flaherty’s political home. In London, he encountered first-hand the Expressionist movement, and almost all of Liam O’Flaherty’s 1920s novels are expressionist in character.

We return to the Civil War and its aftermath for a moment, as this is significant for understanding O’Flaherty’s work in the 1920s, all of which comments on the new Free State.

Liam Mellows, imprisoned and executed by the Pro-Treaty forces during the Civil War, notes in a prison letter on 25 August 1922:

In our efforts now to win back public support to the Republic we are forced to recognise whether we like it or not – that the commercial interest, so-called, money and the gombeen men are on the side of the Treaty, because that Treaty means Imperialism and England. We are back to Tone – (…) - relying on that great body, ‘the men of no property’. The ‘stake in the country’ people were never with the Republic.

The forces that seized power in the new Irish state confirmed this to the letter. Their betrayal of the ideals of 1916, the betrayal of the ideals of the War of Independence, becomes a paramount theme in Liam O’Flaherty’s 1920s novels. The aspirations of the Easter Proclamation were sacrificed to money and power. The right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities for all its citizens – all were abolished in one fell swoop.

How religious and literary culture conforms to ruling-class hegemony

The Catholic Church, a central institution in Irish religious culture, actively supported this betrayal and soon the Free State became a Catholic State for a Catholic people. All aspects of society in the Irish Free State were controlled by the Catholic Church. This included the notorious Church-run ‘Mother and Baby Homes’ for unmarried mothers, where children given away by the nuns for adoption, and there was an unspeakably high mortality rate for children. Recently the remains of 796 babies and young children were discovered in the sewage system of just one of these institutions, in Tuam, Co. Galway.

In 1929, the Censorship of Publications Board, a central institution in Irish literary culture, was established to prohibit any publications they found to be obscene. This made it illegal to buy, sell or distribute any such censored publications in Ireland. The first book banned by this Board was The House of Gold, O’Flaherty’s Galway novel that took to task the men who seized power in the Irish Free State following independence. Four more works by O’Flaherty were banned. The index of censored works consisted of hundreds of books by Irish and international writers.

These are the two overarching themes Liam O’Flaherty takes on in his novels and some short stories: the betrayal by the Irish bourgeoisie of the ideals of Independence, and the crippling of Irish people by the Catholic Church.

Two examples of Liam O’Flaherty’s work to illustrate this undertaking, the 1929 novel The House of Gold, and his 1925 short story “The Outcast”.

The House of Gold

This novel is set in the fictional town of Barra, easily recognised as Galway, the city closest to O’Flaherty’s homestead on the Aran islands.

The novel’s significance lies in the way it exemplifies and typifies for Ireland, and by extension for other post-colonial countries, how the newly empowered, corrupt native bourgeoisie has replaced the British ruling class, headed by the power-hungry Ramon Mor Costello and his clerical allies. 

Ramon Mor is a Cumann na nGaedheal politician, who extracts his wealth from a largely rural proletariat and deprives the town of Barra and its environs of its wealth and hopes for the future. He is what in Hiberno-English is known as a gombeen man. The word comes from the Irish word “gaimbín”, meaning exorbitant financial interest, a term that became notorious for those shopkeepers and merchants who exploited the starving during the Famine by selling food and goods at high prices and charging enormous interest rates.

The House of Gold is O’Flaherty’s only novel in which a gombeen man figures in a leading role. Although this character was inspired by a particular Galway businessman, O’Flaherty states unambiguously in the novel: “in every little town in Ireland you will find a man like Ramon Mor”.

The action of the novel takes place over the course of 24 hours. It follows a number of main characters: Ramon Mor Costello, his unhappy, beautiful wife Nora, her lover Francis O’Neill, who shares some features with Liam O’Flaherty, the town’s doctor Jim Fitzgerald, as well as quite a number of people associated with them, including the police. The action begins at midnight with a rendezvous between Francis O’Neill and Nora. What arises in the plot is Nora’s probable rape by a priest, her attempts to break free of Ramon and his family, Ramon’s business dealings, a public meeting, a robbery, and two, if not three, deaths.

This sounds like a thriller; yet the novel, in its 21 chapters, focuses less on the background action, than on individuals, their motivations, their relationship with Ramon Mor. The various encounters take place in a number of locations – Ramon’s house, his office, outdoors on the hillside, at the fish market, in the church, the doctor’s house, the pub and at a public meeting in the town’s main square. The scenes, depicting people of all social strata, are filled with talk and energy, they are individualised, visual, and dramatic.

The social panorama of the town unfolds, as all are shown each in their dependence on the tyrant Ramon Mor. This dependency causes distress and indeed something close to madness in some of the characters, for example Father Considine. Other characters suffer due to their weakness, their inability to stand up to Ramon Mor. These include the doctor, Ramon’s sister, Fr. Considine, and Nora herself.

Rather than follow a strictly chronological, linear, traditional plot curve, the events take a back seat to the relationships that are revealed in the novel. It is noticeable that here, as in other O’Flaherty novels, there are no heroes, no characters the reader is invited to identify with. Instead, in Brechtian style, readers are kept at an emotional distance, which encourages them to view the scenes with a detachment that allows for critical thought and reflection. The reader sees the characters and their relationships for what they are, undeterred by emotional identification. O’Flaherty proves himself here, as in other novels written in the 1920s, to be part of the European modernist avant garde, and must be classified along with Brecht and other left-wing modern writers of this time.

The essential truth about the Irish Free State after independence was, as Liam O’Flaherty saw it, that the new, Irish bourgeoisie has simply stepped into the shoes of the English and Anglo-Irish landlords. They have literally moved into their big houses and continue to exploit the working population in the same way as before. As the character Francis O’Neill says:

That house you are living in now once belonged to Sir Michael de Burgo. He was the landowner around here. …. He was a tyrant and an enemy of the people. … but he was seven times better than the man that’s there now, because, after all, it was not his own class or his own flesh he was eating, same as Ramon Mor is doing. … in the last rising of the people, I and the like of me put the finishing touches to the landlord class, fighting with the whole country against us, while Ramon Mor lay low, waiting to see how the cat would jump, by God, at the same time, making money out of our blood by selling rations to the soldiers we were fighting. And when it was all over and we won, it was he stole into that empty house and grabbed the land we fought for.

Ramon Mor Costello, along with many of the characters around him, are damaged by the times of their own making, deprived of their humanity in diverse ways, out of touch with themselves and their own people. O’Flaherty shows that independence has not brought about a freer society. Yes, Ramon Mor has money and power in the new state, but even his wealth is shabby and rundown. His political power serves only to increase his power over his people, to make them miserable. Their lives are no different to before, very little has changed or improved.

In addition to this, readers see the influence of the Catholic Church, which is never far away from Ramon Mor. The doctor comments,

The Church is more sacred than the law, and the citizen has very few rights where the clergy are concerned.

Many of the impoverished ordinary folk, the people living in the mountains, emigrate. They are Francis O’Neill’s people. He encounters them on their way into town. Among them is a big man who understands:

Who’d stay on these rocks but a lunatic, working for Ramon Mor Costello? (...) sure there’s nowhere else for them to go but to America. Aren’t they flying every day, as if there were a plague in the country? Soon there’ll be nobody left. And that miser down there, that grabber Ramon Mor is the cause of it. He has ruined the country. My curse on him.

The villagers see small boats from the Aran islands approaching Galway Bay harbour. These are Ramon Mor’s people. And we have another encounter, this time between Ramon and his own villagers. A parallel character to the big man in the previous scene, is Tommy Derrane:

a well-known fellow in the district, because of his strange conversation and his demented wit. He was terrifying in appearance because of his wild, restless eyes, his pale face, his sudden grin, his hunched shoulders, his bobbing chin and the twitching of his limbs. He was dressed in island costume. He was tall, large-boned, lean, terribly vital, a typical islander.

Derrane says:

God listens to the prayers of the rich. All the power of the world is in service to the rich man.

 The rich man turns everything into gold, for he is wise and he has no pity for the hunger of an empty stomach. He has no conscience. He doesn’t see the misery of the poor, for he has a magic veil over his eyes. He is deaf and blind like God, who made Hell as well as Heaven.

It is the ordinary working people who see through Ramon Mor completely, understand his nature and know they can neither trust him, nor expect to be treated any better than they were under de Burgo. Derrane and the big man in the earlier scene represent the potential of the people to see through Ramon. Both have energy and insight, and are unafraid, yet isolated. Both are seen as outsiders and the majority of the people around them are subservient to Ramon.

There seems little comparable insight in the town’s population. The town is destitute, semi-derelict, the inhabitants overcome with a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. There is no sense of the kind of energy and anger we see in the individuals from the rural outposts. The middle-class characters in the novel are ineffectual, often too afraid of Ramon and his power to act decisively. This fear impacts on a latent resentment that fails to spark into rebellion.

At a public meeting, we come across the proposals for change and reactions of different people of the middle class – the solicitor, the doctor, the proprietor of the Railway Hotel, Finnigan, the businessman Fogarty. Solicitor Mr Fitzpatrick addresses the meeting. He says that the people of Barra “must root out the cancer that is eating into the heart of their social life.” While Fitzpatrick has insight, the reader has no indication that this will go anywhere.

Bob Finnerty, the labour union organiser, speaks against him and says “It’s not people like you who are going to free the people from oppression. It’s up to the working class...”

While all this is going on, the doctor arrives at the conclusion that he was “really equipped for leading an analytical life, for accepting reality and for influencing his fellow-creatures towards the pursuit of beauty by moving inwards on his own soul”. Little hope for real change comes from any of these people. The police too, it is suggested, are in the hand of Ramon Mor.

Too great is the combined power of Church and State. When the doctor suggests setting up a library, the townsfolk comment:

How are ye going to have a library, when Fr. Considine’d come and burn the books? Not that I want a library. That man Ramon Mor has this town sucked dry. Along with taking the people’s money, he has taken their hearts as well.

The hearts that struggled for independence have been taken away by this unholy alliance. And because there is no visible change to colonial times, the people give up hope. The ideals of 1916, the ideals of 1921 have been sold out. Instead, the Free State has become a neo-colonial backwater ruled by the gombeen, and created a system where even access to literature and thought is censored.

In this way we find in The House of Gold a complex social panorama of Irish society in the early years of Irish Free State with many echoes that ring true to the present day. To quote from Tomás Mac Síomón’s perceptive introduction to his republication of The House of Gold 80 years after its first and only publication:

This re-issue of The House of Gold by Nuascéalta, the first since 1929, should find particular resonance in a contemporary Ireland where the threatening figure of the local gombeen merchant has been replaced by that of the Troika. An anxious, submissive and debt-ridden citizenry, unjustly beholden to foreign bond-holders, now takes the place of the debt-ridden citizens of 1920’s Barra, cowering under the baleful glare of Ramon Mor Costello.

Since such contagion has now infected the entire world of contemporary capitalism, the basic theme of this extraordinary novel is truly universal. If only for its masterly depiction of the vicissitudes of a population deprived of real power, alternative leaders and a sense of direction, Liam Ó Flaherty’s The House of Gold deserves an honoured place in the world canon of socially committed literature.

It is typical of O’Flaherty novels of his time that there is no hero, no one person who truly grasps the situation and attempts to change it. The central character is a villain. All other important characters belong to the middle class and are weak, highly improbable leaders. These must be sought among the people – Francis O’Neill’s own people, whom he meets coming from the mountains and Tommy Derrane from Aran who directly challenges Ramon Mor. However, they are very marginal indeed. The majority of the people we encounter appear traumatised by the loss of the ideals for a society that would treat “all the children of the nation equally”, as the Easter Proclamation had determined. Demonstrating the absence of a united force capable of bringing about change shows the realism of O’Flaherty’s work. A sense of stagnation prevails.

The Outcast

O’Flaherty’s short story “The Outcast”, published February 1925, is a text in which the world of a well-fed and well-rested priest, attended by an intimidated housekeeper, clashes with the reality of a young girl who has recently given birth and who appeals to him for help. His response is true to the time and reflects a power and inhumanity on the part of the Church, and the political establishment that facilitated it, which continued for a very long time.

The young girl says,:

I have no place to go to. No shelter for me child. They’re afraid to take me in in the village for fear ye might ... Oh! Father, I don’t mind about mesel’, but me child.

She states here quite clearly that no one in the village will dare oppose the iron grip and diktat of the Church. It is left to this young girl to go to the priest and appeal for humanity. But of course, she is too isolated and weak on her own, and so she is insulted and sent away. Not only does O’Flaherty highlight the Church’s power and control, he also underlines the deep-seated clerical prejudice against and hatred of women. Indeed, in this short text, the housekeeper covertly tries to hand the distressed girl something in an act of solidarity, an attempt to help:

The housekeeper opened the hall door. She was thrusting something into the girl’s hand, but the girl did not see her.

I mentioned the Church-run homes earlier, where unmarried mothers and their children were kept in gulag-like conditions, the children frequently not surviving. Any birth control was banned until 1979, with further easing on the sale of contraceptives in 1985. However, abortion was completely illegal and impossible to obtain in Ireland until very recently, when the law was changed by referendum in 2018. This means that for almost 100 years, women who did not wish to or could not go ahead with a pregnancy, had to travel abroad to terminate it. Many, many women died as a result, as even in the event of fatal foetal abnormality, or indeed life-threatening conditions of the mother, no abortions were performed. As we speak, there are still people who picket abortion clinics in Ireland to harass the women who have the need to avail of this service. And the present Irish government continues to permit this form of intimidation.

O’Flaherty’s writing in Irish

O’Flaherty was a native speaker of Irish and a gifted storyteller. He wrote poetry and short stories in Irish as well as his play Dorchadas. Dorchadas is possibly the only expressionist play ever written in Irish. O’Flaherty tells of the fate of an amazing project in a 1927 letter to the Irish Statesman:

I wrote a few short stories for the Gaelic League organ. They printed them … I consulted Pádraic Ó Conaire and we decided that drama was the best means of starting a new literature in Irish … the two of us went to Dublin …[and] put our scheme before them [the Gaeltacht Commission] for a travelling theatre and so on. I guaranteed to write ten plays. They thought we were mad and, indeed, took very little interest in us. In fact, I could see by their looks and their conversation that they considered us immoral persons.

And so, what might have been a truly vibrant project to move literature in Irish into the 20^th century, and even embrace modernist writing, was extinguished by the Free State. Reverberations of its actions and inaction are felt to this day. O’Flaherty recorded the minutiae of these inglorious years like no other Irish writer.

Jenny Farrell discusses the work of Caravaggio, who revolutionised European art. Image above: Judith Beheading Holofernes

Born 450 years ago, on 29 September 1571, Caravaggio lived and worked in Rome. 

The development of the new middle class of traders, merchants, artisans – the bourgeoisie – brought with it the dawn of the modern capitalist, era. The artistic expression of this new era of middle-class confidence, was the Renaissance. The Reformation, which began in Germany in 1517,  was its religious expression. This new class needed to legitimise its claim to political power at all levels. Protestantism replaced the strongly hierarchical older, feudal Church with one that did away with the middle-men structures. This reflected the new thinking that challenged the established political hierarchy, and aspired, theoretically at least, to political power for all.

The Reformation had forced Catholicism to retreat in many parts of Europe. However, outside of Britain, no successful bourgeois revolution consolidated the growing economic power of the middle class that would have eliminated feudalism. Instead, feudal absolutism emerged. The nobility remained the ruling class, although increasingly capitalist forms began to shape economic life.

The Counter-Reformation and the Baroque

The Counter-Reformation refers to the mainly political and military actions of Catholicism between 1555 and 1648, aiming to reverse the conditions created by the Reformation in central Europe. Its leading force were the Jesuits. The Counter-Reformation led to the resurgence of Catholicism, to significant shifts in political power in Europe and to the reclamation of Austria, Bohemia and Poland for Catholicism. The Counter-Reformation and the Baroque went hand in hand. If the Renaissance had been a violent time, the Counter-Reformation was even more so.

The arts reflected the character of this age, and the purpose of the Baroque was to glorify the power and external splendour of the absolute state. The ruling class deluded itself into a fullness of power that it had long since ceased to possess. With this came an unprecedented class differentiation in art. In addition to the ruling culture of the nobility, bourgeois-democratic and upper middle class forms of culture evolved. While the interests of the upper middle class associated with the nobility are reflected in the Baroque, democratic tendencies were expressed in realist works of art.

In St. Nicolas Church, Prague, statues of clergy stabbing rebellious peasants

Caravaggio

In 1591, a young painter from northern Italy came to Rome. His name was Michelangelo Merisi, who took the name Caravaggio after his birthplace. He revolutionised art in Europe. Caravaggio’s sense of reality, his this-worldly sensuality, re-established and further developed the realism of the early Renaissance.

Sick Bacchus (1593), an early self-portrait of Caravaggio, then aged 22, already confidently departs from convention:

It is a disconcerting picture. Bacchus, pagan god of revelry, intoxication, and sexual promiscuity, is depicted as a victim – he looks weary, even exploited. The vine leaves and grapes, promising intoxication and gratification, are offered as though to a customer. The white himation resembles a sheet. The smile seems fake, and there is a suggestion of an unhappy male sex worker.

Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1593–1594)

Painted around the same time, Boy Bitten by a Lizard depicts another ordinary person, without signs of rank or status, reacting to a sudden shock. Again, there is a hint of a sexually exploited young male, in a state of partial undress and with a rose behind his ear. While the rose indicates romantic love, jasmine, also included, was a traditional symbol of desire. While the youth reaches for cherries, he is bitten by a lizard (real lizards don’t have teeth). Both pictures should be interpreted in the context of Caravaggio’s target audience – the Roman clergy.

The Genre Picture

Caravaggio was one of the first to develop genre painting, showing the lives of ordinary people. Two early examples of this are The Gypsy Fortune-Teller (1594), and The Cardsharps (1594). They focus on the lower social orders, which became an important model for him and heightened the realism of all his work.

Both pictures were startlingly original in late 16^th century Europe, foregrounding on canvas the class that had never been considered a worthy aesthetic subject – tricksters.

In The Gypsy Fortune-Teller the young woman is seen removing the naïve nobleman’s ring as he gazes into her eyes. Already, Caravaggio’s insistence on realism in both subject matter and depiction is clear: the young woman has quite dirty fingernails! Such attention to realist detail shocked his audience.

The Cardsharps also laughs at how a young gentleman is tricked. The opulently dressed young gentleman has come to the notice of card tricksters in a gambling den. Their yellow-and-black costumes hint at wasps closing in on him. The backgammon board at the edge of the table suggests he has already lost money to them. The narrative of the picture implies that the gentleman has been successfully persuaded to try and regain his losses. Yet it is hopeless. The viewer sees more that he does: spare cards behind the back of his opponent, with an accomplice signalling in code how to ensure a winning hand. Once again, there is little doubt as to who is streetwise, and who is the fool.

Another famous example of Caravaggio’s realism, of his bond with the ordinary people, is Judith Beheading Holofernes. In his depiction of Judith, Caravaggio used Fillide Melandroni, a well-known courtesan, as a model. She was instantly recognisable to the people of Rome.

Religiously motivated killing takes centre stage in this painting. Renaissance artists had focused on the beauty of the human form and nature, not so much on human suffering. During the Counter-Reformation, torment and violence had a considerable impact on art, as they had in everyday life. Caravaggio painted the moment when Holofernes is beheaded, his head only half-severed from his body. His eyes are opened wide with horror, his mouth is screaming. Severed heads nailed to the Ponte S. Angelo over the Tiber were a common sight in Rome.

Judith is painted in the best clothes of a woman of the people. Caravaggio also departs from biblical tradition in showing the maid alongside her mistress. This is an intensely realistic representation of a working woman. He painted directly from life, showing the wrinkles on the face and working hands of this woman. In fact, she is shown to hold up her apron in readiness to receive and dispose of the head. Caravaggio’s contemporaries deemed such portrayal “too natural”. The maid really stands out in the picture contrasting strongly with the more idealised beauty of Judith, and even of Holofernes. She is chosen and painted as a third focal point, not to be missed.

For the first time in this painting, Caravaggio uses the light/dark contrast (chiaroscuro) that was to become characteristic of his work: figures, accentuated by artificial light, standing out against a dark background. In this technique, Caravaggio prefigures Rembrandt.

St. Matthew and the Angel, Caravaggio’s 1602 painting, is a picture that famously exists in two versions. In this first painting, Saint Matthew sits on a scissors chair, dressed in short workman’s clothes, leaving his arms and legs bare. His legs are crossed and his left foot almost breaks through the painting, at the point, where a priest would hold up the host at Mass. To make matters worse, Matthew is flat footed, with dirt under his toenails. He seems to have difficulty writing, his hands unused to holding the quill, as he peers on to the pages – even his writing appears too big. The angel helps him write the Gospel.

The viewer looks on the scene from above. It seems that Caravaggio gave Matthew the likeness of Socrates, often depicted as a humble man, who said that the only true wisdom lies in knowing that you know nothing. The clergy rejected Caravaggio’s interpretation of the saint as an illiterate peasant, and objected to the intimate relationship between the apostle and the angel holding his hand. He had to paint a second picture.

Caravaggio’s second painting is less realistic. Matthew is no longer wearing working clothes. Instead, he is biblically dressed and towers above the viewer. The angel hovers over him, there is no physical contact, and Matthew writes by himself.

Caravaggio refused, wherever possible, to bow to Counter-Reformation diktat. Many of his works were rejected because of his intense realism and his depiction of ordinary, working people in his paintings. He used real-life models for his religious figures, famously Roman prostitutes as models for his Madonnas. One of the well-known courtesans, Anna Bianchini, drowned, possibly murdered, in the Tiber in 1604. Caravaggio had been commissioned to paint Death of the Virgin and, according to legend, he used Anna’s bloated body as the model for the dead Mary.

The painting caused an outcry, because the identity of Mary was so clear. Her bare feet, her red dress, and the realism of death, all make for an unholy appearance, unfit for a devotional picture of the mother of Christ. An early biographer suggests that Caravaggio painted the murderer into the picture: the dark, bearded young man, looking away from the scene.

The lives of ordinary people

Caravaggio’s sense of realism stood in the way of painting idealised forms. Even in his religious paintings, he used real-life models from among ordinary people. These were the people that mattered, that life was all about, as far as Caravaggio was concerned.

Caravaggio worked mainly for Roman clergy and so most of his works have religious themes: yet they are profoundly humanist. This painter rejected the highly ornamental, empty and often triumphalist Baroque manner. He painted everyday reality, the ordinary people he encountered on the streets of Rome, including the most deprived – beggars, prostitutes, criminals. Even his religious paintings are linked to the violence and deprivation Caravaggio saw all around him. He was unwilling to look the other way.

When Caravaggio killed a man in a quarrel on 28 May 1606, he was forced to flee Rome, and spent the rest of his life on the run, spending time in Naples, Malta, Messina, and Palermo. He died in exile in 1610, aged only 38, and was buried in an unmarked grave, leaving behind masterpieces that have influenced European art from the 17^th century onwards.

Jenny Farrell reviews The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices, edited by Paul McVeigh 

Working-class writing is coming to the fore in Ireland. “The 32” follows the publications of two anthologies of working people’s writing, “The Children of the Nation” and “From the Plough to the Stars” (Culture Matters, 2019, 2020).

All three anthologies stand out in the literary landscape for being just that: anthologies. Much as the publications of individual working-class writers must be admired for breaking through the class barriers in the publishing industry, these anthologies together give a strong sense of the voice of a class speaking; the strength that arises from standing together, a fact to which The Irish Times and the Independent, in their reviews, are oblivious.

One of the statements this book makes, and some of its contributors attempt to answer, is how to define the working class. The texts printed within its covers agree on some of the basic aspects: above all, it means to be poor. It certainly means to be scorned by those who represent the establishment and dominate education, culture, politics, the media. They reinforce their preconceived, ill-informed notions of the working class by all means at their disposal. Erin Lindsay observes: “Whether it’s in film, music, or conversations overheard on the street, the idea of being working-class is contorted and presented back to us without our presence in its creation.” This motivates taking charge of one’s own narrative, a theme that recurs throughout the collection.

This is an issue of key relevance to publications such as The 32 and the Culture Matters anthologies. These anthologies undertake the epic task of removing class barriers and creating a more democratic and grassroots publishing culture, indeed focusing on the class that is generally excluded.

Censorship by RTE

By way of example, Alan O’Brien, working-class writer and contributor to the  Culture Matters anthologies, submitted his radio play “Snow Falls and So Do We” to RTE, based on the true event of a woman dying of hypothermia in a Ballymun flat. O’Brien won the P.J. O’Connor Award for Best New Radio Drama but encountered significant opposition from RTE when they were to broadcast his play. O’Brien was told his lines were crude and that the portrayal of the Gardaí was unacceptable. A significant and inappropriate change in the narrative was suggested whereby Joanne, rather than disliking the Garda known as "miniature hero", actually fancies him, and wants him to take her out of this hellhole.

This smacked more of make-believe Hollywood that the reality of Ballymun. O’Brien’s statement that the people of Ballymun have a very different experience of the Irish Constabulary was sneered at. He rejected the changes to his script, explaining his reasons. But RTE made them anyway and many more, without further consultation. Most significantly,  they changed the ending of a working-class woman dying as a result of social depravation, metaphorically (and actually) freezing to death. Working-class tragedies are not allowed. The establishment will only accept its own interpretation, and rewrite history accordingly.

So, not only are working-class people excluded from mainstream cultural consumption, they are also prevented by the media – including the publishing industry –  from expressing artistically their experience of the world. By recognising this class barrier and attempting to tackle it, these anthologies of working-class writing are blazing a new trail. However, unless other cultural workers, institutions, trade unions and universities acknowledge this deficit with a view to redressing it, they will remain a drop in the ocean.

Kevin Barry writing in “The Gaatch” points to where establishment prejudice invariably leads:

On Thursday mornings I attended the sittings of Limerick District Court. I did the courts for a couple of years, and I can’t remember ever hearing a working-class defendant’s word taken over the word of a guard. You could predict with high accuracy the forthcoming judgements from the look of the defendant taking to the witness stand. If he or she had a working-class kind of gaatch to them – as we’d say in Limerick, meaning that they carried themselves in a certain way, dressed in a certain way, spoke in a certain way – they would very likely be found guilty. 

Being presumed guilty because of belonging to the dispossessed, is reiterated in Rosaleen McDonagh’s experience as one of the Travelling community:

Five o’ clock in the morning the sound of police sirens. Bursting into the caravan, looking for stolen goods, tax and insurance, drugs, firearms. They pull my brothers and my father out of bed. Trousers and boots, no shirt. Made to stand in the middle of the site alongside thirty or forty other men and boys of various ages. … Nothing was found; all tax and insurance related to our vehicles were in date.

And so, the importance of speech, dress, address, and school, appear time and again in these texts. The greatest part of these are memoirs, or ‘faction’. Poverty looms large, and a sense of deliberate exclusion from mainstream lifestyle pervades. Class barriers are seen and cited all the way, and education is viewed as a way out. Many of the authors describe the difficulty of pursuing a writing career. 

Therefore, it is unsurprising that an overall impression forms that in order to live a better life, you need to get out of the working-class trap. The disadvantages seem to outweigh any positives. And yet, Erin Lindsay states in complete contradiction to the received mainstream view:

Growing up, my house was full of conversations and debates about history, philosophy, politics, life, ethics, love – they taught me everything I know.

And Dermot Bolger says – with Gorky – that working life is a university:

It was a last valuable lesson I learned in the only university I ever attended before commencing my journey as a writer.

Class consciousness, pride and solidarity

Working-class writing is as old as the working class itself, arising with the Industrial Revolution, landless peasants before that, much of this in the oral tradition. Within class society, the working class is to a large extent indeed cheated out of fair pay, cheated out of education and opportunities. The introduction to “From the Plough to the Stars” presents a Marxist definition: 

Our understanding of ‘working class’ are those people who sell their labour power and share only marginally in the fruits of their labour. They create the basis of national wealth, yet their living conditions are frequently precarious. This includes the urban and rural proletariat, small farmers as a peripheral group, as well as the rising number of people in precarious employment, the homeless and the unemployed.

In some of the texts in “The 32”, you find a sense of solidarity and pride in class, the sense that surely poverty and lack of education is not the ultimate and eternal definition of working class – that there is a potential that will allow this class to challenge the society that keeps it on the poverty line. This strength, this process of liberation, is a hallmark of Maxim Gorky’s working-class writing. It envisages a society where there is little difference in income and living standard between the skilled industrial workers, farmers and professionals. In this (socialist) society being working-class does not spell poverty, poor education and neglect by society. It is entirely possible to be a working-class intellectual, and it was in the USSR and other socialist countries that working-class history and art first became the subject of academic research. It is thus ignorant and damaging to be told that having achieved a university education, or working in the arts, means one is no longer working-class.

The texts in this book focus on the here and now in Ireland, the lived experience of the authors, ranging from the 1950s through to 2020. Paul McVeigh, has achieved a good balance of contributions from the Republic of Ireland as well as the North. Here, the sectarian prejudice against the Catholic population adds significantly to social inequality, as several contributors attest. And when we refer to bigotry and discrimination it is to welcomed that a member of the travelling community, Rosaleen McDonagh, as well as a representative of the queer community, Marc Gregg, are given the opportunity to add their voices.

Regrettably, no Irish language texts are included. This would have paid necessary tribute to the long tradition of working-class writing as Gaeilge in Ireland. The exclusion of this tradition by the publishing industry is shameful and needs to be challenged by those who have taken up the pen to put an end to social injustice. This can only be achieved by the whole of the working class standing together.

Along with “The Children of the Nation” and “From the Plough to the Stars”, “The 32” presents a differentiated image of what it means to be working-class in Ireland today. These three anthologies will be followed by a fourth publication, “Land of the Ever Young”, a beautifully illustrated book of working people’s writing for children, in November of this year.