On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
The following excerpt is from a 2001 lecture Seamus Heaney gave at the University of Aberdeen. In it, he discusses the often-triangulated position of Irish poets who live in Great Britain, or Northern Ireland … and he also loops in the Scottish and the Welsh to his discussion. All part of the same nation. All different dialects and cultures. One dominant, though. One so dominant that it rendered the others voiceless, at least in terms of publishing opportunities and inclusion in the all-important canon. Heaney is interested in questions of language, first and foremost: how certain phrases he grew up with, in Ulster, made perfect sense to him, and yet were completely invisible/non-existent in the poetry he was taught in schools. He has written before about the moments of revelation when he discovered Patrick Kavanagh, or Robert Burns – who wrote in a vernacular that he recognized. It blew young Master Heaney’s mind. It opened up space for him, even before h knew he wanted to be a poet.
Now art has many purposes, and only one of its purposes is to see yourself reflected in it. What, I can’t enjoy a WWII movie because there are no women in it? I can’t “relate” to a male character? I am only going to really respond to books/movies that have middle-aged freckled film critic/culture writer Elvis fans as the lead? Is that it? (I’m exaggerating to make a point.)
However: when you are completely not represented at ALL … well, that’s a problem. My friend Mitchell and I have talked often about that offensive gay character in St. Elmo’s Fire, swishing around holding a drink with a paper umbrella in it. It’s not that there aren’t gay swish-y men out there. Of course there are. But at that particular period of time, the dark homophobic 1980s, there was almost NO representation of adult gay men in cinema at all. And so that ridiculous guy was IT. To those who get annoyed at “representation” and spout shit like “We’re all people, we’re all human beings, we all can relate to stories” … yes, but please imagine that you never once see yourself onscreen. Or, maybe once or twice a year, a big movie will have a “you” in it. And when a “you” shows up in a movie, the “you” is there to be made fun of. Just try to imagine it, and shut your cake-hole in the meantime about “we’re all human beings, we’re all people, stories are for all of us, kumbaya …” And so Mitchell watched that movie, enjoyed it, because, duh, everyone enjoyed it at that time, but he was no dummy. He knew he was being made fun of. That guy isn’t even a PERSON. He is there to poke fun at because of his sexuality. That’s his purpose. This situation ends up taking on the feeling of political propaganda. And indeed it IS political propaganda. That’s what people who get all misty-eyed about the Production Code in old Hollywood forget. Yes, the Code wanted to cut down on sex and violence. But the Code also wanted to keep the Negro in his place. Eliminate fraternization between the races. Certainly no romance, but also friendship. (The friendship Barbara Stanwyck had in Baby Face with a black woman, a partner-in-crime, an egalitarian relationship, was not possible after the Code came down. And Baby Face was one of the movies that made The Powers That Be realize that they needed to create a code in the first place.) My point with all of this is: when a culture engages in complete erasure of another, or turning entire peoples into “Other,” or boiling an entire sexual preference down into a silly idiot holding a froo-froo drink … and there are no other options out there … then you’ve got some serious problems with diversity.
Heaney is careful to avoid overstatement. He had said he thought the term “diversity” was “pious” (that is not a compliment), and I tend to agree with him. At least when it is expanded out into the ONLY arbiter of whether or not a movie is good or worthwhile. It turns art into a checklist. I will never be for that.
However, speaking from his own experience: he grew up as part of a hated minority in an extremely strong dominant culture. That dominance was reflected in the language, in the terminology, the vernacular. And so how, as a poet, do you negotiate those things? Especially if you move between those worlds (as everyone did). The term Heaney latched onto for that experience was “through-other.” Boundaries are not hard and fast: they can be crossed, you go “through” borders and boundaries, you have one voice you use at work, one voice you use at home, and everyone understands this. Why is it so difficult to understand politically? The Irish poet will always be a political figure as long as the political situation stands. Heaney has written extensively about that. He started making a name for himself in the mid-60s, as all kinds of ground was breaking up, and it was all very exciting. Then, of course, came the late-60s, and early-70s, and dreams died, en masse.
It’s a wonderful lecture, and should be read in its entirety but here’s an excerpt.
Excerpt from Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
‘Through-other’ is a compound in common use in Ulster, meaning physically untidy or mentally confused, and, appropriately enough, it echoes the Irish-language expression tré na céile, meaning things mixed up among themselves, like the cultural and historical mix-up that the poet [W.R. Rodgers] acknowledges, a bit too winsomely perhaps, in the last two stanzas of ‘Armagh’:
Through-other is its history, of Celt and Dane,
Norman and Saxon,
Who ruled the place and sounded the gamut of fame
From cow-horn to klaxon.There is through-otherness about Armagh
Delightful to me,
Up on the hill are the graves of the garrulous kings
Who at last can agree.
The Irish for ‘Armagh’ is ‘Ard Mhacha’, meaning the heights of Macha, and the garrulous kings are presumably those who once upon a time occupied the legendary royal seat of Emain Macha, home of King Conor and the Red Branch Knights, although they must include as well all those warring lords of the great Gaelic families of Ulster, those O’Neills and O’Donnells and Maguires whose descendants continued to hold sway until the Flight of the Earls in 1607. But obviously, more recent and more rancorous battles between the house of Orange and the house of Stuart are being alluded to in that concluding cadence: “Up on the hill are the graves of the garrulous kings / Who at last can agree.” The problem is that the dying fall has the effect of settling the argument a bit too quickly and too amicably, it dodges very nimbly past the dangers, so I don’t find that it provides the momentary stay against confusion which Robert Frost said a poem should provide and be; the conclusion is more like an evasion, more like saying ‘There are faults on both sides’ – the old palliative catch-phrase that has got Northern Ireland people through embarrassing situations for years and at the same time got them nowhere.
All the same, a certain amount of evasion is understandable in such a through-other situation. I remember, for example, a moment in Belfast early on in the Troubles, sometimes in 1970, when I myself hesitated to face the full force of the sectarian circumstances. I was living then on the wrong side of Lisburn Road, socially speaking, since Lisburn Road was a thoroughfare that divided a wedge of middle-class and university-related housing from a largely working-class barrio that grew more and more boisterous as it ran down, in more senses than one, to its loyalist limit, a distract known locally as The Village. The Village in those days was no place for somebody called Seamus, and I wasn’t often to be seen there, but I did frequent a lock-up fish-and-chip shop just round the corner from us, on the outer edge of what was still strongly loyalist territory. Anyhow, one night there was a new assistant behind the counter, a young English girl who happened to recognize my face because she’d seen me the night before on some television arts show. “Oh,” she cried as she lashed on the salt and vinegar, “I saw you on the box last night, didn’t I? Aren’t you the Irish poet?” And before I could answer, the owner of the shop turned from her tasks at the boiling oil and corrected her, “Not at all, dear. He’s like the rest of us, a British subject living in Ulster! God,” she went on, addressing me and rolling an eye behind the innocent mainlander’s back, “wouldn’t it sicken you! Having to listen to that. Irish poet!” And Irish and all as I was, I’m afraid I hesitated to contradict her.
