The nuances of identity dull and blur with every step you take from home. While a suggestion from a stranger that you could be from a town 10 miles west of the one you were born in will prompt scorn or derision in Ireland, the further you travel, the more the subtlety is lost.
Go far enough away and nobody recognises the difference between Irish and Scottish, or Irish and American, let alone North and South, or Kerry and Cork. Despite the deep and enduring Irish love of and link to Australia, most Australians I encountered during my almost three years in the country didn’t know very much about Ireland at all. For them, we’re just another little place on the far side of the earth, like Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan or Belgium; more of a “not here” in the Australian consciousness than a distinctive “there”.
In Australia, people would routinely observe that my accent is “foreign” without being quite able to place it. Some presumed it was American, which I suppose makes sense if you’re trying to identify an English speaker who doesn’t sound British and your knowledge of nondomestic accents ends about there. One outlier with a particularly odd ear accused me of being French.
There’s nothing at all wrong with being French, of course. Many have been doing it without any issue for a long time. It’s just that Limerick and Lyon have a rather large gorge between them in auditory terms, even if the language being spoken is English. Nobody with an Irish accent is being accidentally elected mayor of a small French town because they pass so seamlessly among the locals.
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Due to Ireland and Irish people having traditionally enjoyed an outsize cultural influence in the US in particular, we often tend to presume this extends across the anglosphere – that wherever people speak English, our reputation and its tired stereotypes will naturally follow. That goes for the flattering as well as the unflattering ones. The friendliness, the drunkenness, the tendency to wear jeans on a roasting hot beach, and to consider tomatoes alone to be somehow an acceptable sandwich filling at a funeral; the whole shtick.
Last week, during a trip to San Francisco, I was confronted by more affable Americans than I could count presuming vocally, and with great warmth, that I am British.
“Well, as a British person, you can share another perspective,” someone said with a voice full of kindness.
“I’m interested whether this is the same for you, being from the UK?”
Or the hardest one to politely dodge: “So what was growing up in the UK like? I love your accent!”
At home in Limerick, if someone suggested I might be from Cork, I would consider that person to have embarrassed themselves in a manner no self-respecting Irish person could ever recover from.
‘Behave in contravention of your culture’s expectations at home, and you can expect a sharp tug at the back of your collar pulling you back into line’
“What’s wrong with you?” I would think. “You besmirch both counties with your humiliatingly tone-deaf ear. You should be deported to Skellig Michael to live in sombre among the ruins with the puffin colony among the ruins.”
It takes a lot of energy to get annoyed about this sort of thing, though. It might require the sort of vitriolic, self-obsessed momentum that only someone energised by the youthful idea that they are less a person than the living hand of justice, a receptacle for truth, a counterbalance to power. Because really, it’s fine that people from another culture don’t know the nuances of mine. It’s understandable that their ears, honed on the flatter honks and rounder syllables of American English, don’t quite recognise what they’re hearing. Why would they? Ireland is the focus of Ireland, not the centre of the universe.
American English leaves out all but the essential letters in word and names. Things according to their utility rather than the feeling they elicit, their Latin root, or the name of the mistress of the person who invented them. “Sidewalk” – okay.
These friendly Americans and these industrious Australians don’t owe me nuance. I’m on their turf and in their culture, so if they think I’m British, I suppose that’s fair enough. I’m not, of course, and will say as much if asked, but if they mischaracterise my national identity, I’ll survive. I’ll be grand.
The British did that in relation to all of us for a number of years, if my Irish secondary school history education is to be relied upon, and we can still tell the difference between Kerry and Cork.
We are not injured by the loss of nuance when we leave home – it’s just slightly annoying, and something experienced to varying degrees by anyone who leaves their place of origin to spend significant time in a culture that isn’t their own.
The presence of this nuance at home is what makes the place what it is – somewhere a shared collective identity can feel frictionless; where you can answer a question about whether you’ll do something with “I will, yeah”, and it is instantly understood that you are not, under any circumstances, going to do that thing. A joint lexicon, culture and way of being remove some of the challenges of feeling understood, or that you belong. This doesn’t exist everywhere – it characterises home, and of course that belonging brings its own challenges.
Behave in contravention of your culture’s expectations at home, and you can expect a sharp tug at the back of your collar pulling you back into line. There are worse things you can be mistaken for than British.
