Bringing home the language

First he rejected Irish as the language of the Flintstones-bogmen, then heembraced it as his cultural heartland. Poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh explains how he found his voice in his native tongue

In the past it was customary for Irish language writers to be grumpy. They felt marginalised, left out of things. Some disorder or other in the make-up of their metabolism, perhaps, or some collapse in the set-up of their imagination made them become losers. The health-food of recognition, when occasionally it came their way, only made them unhealthier. Everything around them seemed to droop and decay. If they had an artificial flower it would surely lose its lustre and die.

Roger McGough, in a succinct little poem titled 'Missed', seems to allude to them in all their groggy hopelessness. 'Out of work/divorced/usually pissed/they aimed low in life/and missed'. I'm glad to be of a much more upbeat, optimistic generation of Irish language writers. As a result of our extravagant positiveness we have moved from the margins to the centre page of popularity. We are no longer the footnotes. We have become the centre-fold of notoriety.

We are all gods in exile. We have, I believe, the potential to empower ourselves, to be creators of our own cosmos. In the early 1990s I had a rare experience of that kind of heart-swelling ebullience at an Altan concert in Milwaukee. It was an open-air extravaganza with many great groups performing, but Altan, with their predominantly Gaelic repertoire, stole the show. Introducing their songs and their tunes in Gaelic they showed an unflinching belief that the Irish language was dashingly cool and daringly hip. As I cast an eye around that vast assortment of people I could see Shamrock-clad grandmothers from Boston stomping to the thrill and throb of a strathspey and ageing Finn McCool hipsters from San Francisco, with very little hair to hold the proverbial Scott McKenzie flower, all lilting that funky highway reel The Glen Road to Carrick. Under the pull and power of Altan, that huge crowd became one and I could hear a reeling chorus of heartbeats proclaiming joyously that they were Gaelic to the innermost boglands of their soul.

That swinging two-hour-Gaeltacht created by Altan on the shores of Lake Michigan was, for me, a positive experience. It reinforced my belief that Gaelic, despite talk of its terminal decline, its low-status, marginalised existence, was still a language of awesome power. Hadn't Altan proved by their supercharged performance that they were sustained and nourished by its strength and vigour; that for them it was not an inert endowment from the past but a real source of vitality in the here and now.

As a child growing up in the Gort a' Choirce area of north-west Donegal in the 1950s and 1960s the Irish language was the local community lingo, but even then it was in crisis. I remember as a monolingual child of five being brought to the fair day in Falcarragh by my grandfather. Falcarragh, the commercial centre of the parish, is about six miles from my ancestral hill-farm in Mín a Leá. We went there by bus. What a wondrous journey it was. My grandfather doting on me; the two of us chattering away in Irish. Strolling around in the bazaared dazzle of those fair-day streets, I was baffled by my grandfather's speech. He spoke hesitantly and with great difficulty, I thought, in a strange cumbersome language. When I asked him what it was, he squatted down beside me, took my small hands in his big knobbly hands and spoke softly to me in Irish: "Here we will have to speak English because they will think we're from the bogs".

"But aren't we from the bogs, granda", I piped up with childish innocence.

"You'll have to learn English a chroí so that the bog can be sifted out of you."

I began to learn that day that with the colonic irrigation of English we could cleanse ourselves of the build-up of Irish in our gut. I also began to think that all Gaelic speakers were another branch of the Flintstones; a rather stone-age family; a goofy page right out of history. Mín a Leá (where I lived), meaning the plain of flat stones, was, it seemed to me then, the most backward part of Bedrock. I certainly didn't want to be yabba-dabba-doohing in Gaelic. I didn't want to have any part in the future of our barmy Gaelic past.

I was getting the message clear and sharp that Irish was a spent force; a backward, anti-modern, parochial language, belonging to another time, another place and to encourage in any way a widespread use of it would be a stupid isolationist act that would limit our possibilities, narrow our horizons.

The revivalists, many of them redneck fanatics, added to my belief that the language was crass and dull. These smug, self-appointed defenders of the language put a lot of people off Gaelic. The intimidating presence of these purists: linguistic McCarthyites who inspected your grammar, your syntax, your blas, made learners, especially, very self-conscious about speaking the language. Even I, who was a native speaker, suffered from an acute tension in my tenses and sometimes a severe diarrhoea in my declensions when these puritanical grammarians were present. When they scrutinised my vowel movements I become sexually awkward with my genitive case.

In my early teens I had a change of heart about Irish. The Muse of poetry beckoned and led me back to Gaelic. She convinced me I could be a tuned-in cosmopolitan and still have roots in my "dúchas". She opened a Gaelic doorway for me onto the world; a liberating doorway to life. She showed me a groovy, Gaelic Ireland that flourished, defiant and free, on the margins of English.

This change of heart happened in London. I became acutely aware of the word "home" while cruising around Piccadilly Circus, in the mid- 1970s, "a hustle here, a hustle there, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side". In the amped-up lingo of Lou Reed, I was a thrill-seeking teenager, doing my best to be self-indulgently hip. But I was just a foppishly dressed yok from the back-country.

A poem became for me an act of defiance thrown in the face of that silence. I wrote in English, poems of adolescent angst, mostly. A poetry of pimples. I wrote bad poems because I didn't have the humility to read great ones. Until one evening in the autumn of 1975 a man who worked in the storeroom of Oxford University Press walked into the pub where I worked and handed me a copy of Derek Mahon's latest collection The Snow Party. That book had a profound effect on me, especially the first poem, called 'Afterlives'. Derek Mahon, a Belfast man, had gone to London at the beginning of the Northern troubles and I think he felt it on his conscience that he hadn't accounted for these terrible times in his poetry. So 'Afterlives' is a homecoming poem, in that Mahon came back to Belfast. The last verse was a real shock of recognition:

But the hills are still the same

Grey-blue above Belfast.

Perhaps if I'd stayed behind

and lived It bomb by bomb

I might have grown up at last

And learnt what is meant by home.

Home! The word just winged its way off the page. I felt the word as an intense desire to be reunited with something from which I felt I was cut off from. The word was a smell from another world, the last domain of my Dúchas. Dúchas is a difficult word to explain in English, but briefly it means a sense of connection, a feeling of attachment to a place, a tongue and a tradition, a belief that one belongs to a sustaining cultural and communal energy; that one has a place and a name. Suddenly I realised that I was in exile in an alien city where I neither had a face nor a name or a place. To be an exile meant to be on my own. It meant to be without the community's sense of warmth and settledness. I had to return home to reclaim my heritage, my Dúchas. And for me the Dúchas is not a flight into the past, rather a rejoining of the past, the present and the future. It is a quest, perhaps for an expanded present which flows backwards and forwards with the one and same movement.

Home! This word was a discovery, but what is discovery only what we remove the cover from. It has always been there - only hidden. I also realised that Irish was my emotional language and not English. Intuitively, I knew more about the texture and the tone, the aura of words in Irish. The language inhabited my consciousness, perhaps, in a way that English didn't. From then on I would write poetry in Irish. "She" would connect me to the vital creative energies of my Dúchas. She would bring me back home.

The language linked me to a wellspring of tribal memories; an archive of ancestral experiences; a library of folk wisdom that was distinctly Gaelic. I felt that I belonged to something peculiarly enriching, something with its own irreplaceable value system. I was able to assert myself and withstand being absorbed and assimilated into whatever standard was being foisted on me from abroad. Oscar Wilde stated somewhere that "most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation". The Irish language enables me, I believe, to be uniquely myself. The language allows me to have a distinctively native viewpoint, my own radiant window of wonder onto the world.

The notion that Gaelic culture stands motionless in time; perfectly transfixed in the past is a common belief in our country. I am not interested in this myopic view of culture. I'm interested in the creative and transformative possibilities of culture; its abilities to renew itself, to develop and evolve. To be fluid and dynamic, futuristic and forward- looking. Too often we become mesmerised by the past instead of paying attention to the present. It's like driving a car and looking out the rear view mirror instead of the front mirror. A deadly practice.

At present, we are experiencing convulsions of change in our society; a shifting of boundaries and a reshaping of identities. With increased migration to our shores we are living in a state of cultural multiplicity, of linguistic diversity; of inevitable hybridity. A time of wandering borders and an overlapping of cultures where it's no longer credible to believe in a single unified identity. Making claims for a pure identity, can, as we know too well, create an aggressive polarity between people and lead to a vicious politics of intolerance.

It is healthy to open up to the uniqueness and the strangeness of other cultures; other ethnic perspectives. We are enriched by their differences, by their diversity As Gaelic speakers we have to channel the potential and harness the energies of the great rainbow river of culture that is sweeping through our lives. Our great challenge is how to avail of the power of the mainstream to maintain our own small stream.

© Cathal Ó Searcaigh

• The above is an edited version of Cathal Ó Searcaigh's essay at the Ag Trasnú Teorainneacha symposium on the Irish language and the arts in a multicultural society, which runs on December 6th and 7th at An Chuirt Hotel, Gweedore, Co Donegal. He and artist Maria Simonds Gooding have collaborated in an exhibition entitled Trasnú as part of the event. Other speakers include Fintan O'Toole and Colm Tóibín. The symposium is open to the public, €20 registration. Further information from Ceardlann na gCroisbhealach at 074-9165594, e-mail ceardlann@eircom.net