Keeping nothing under his hat

Poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh has kept a low public profile since a controversial documentary in 2007 about his relationships with young men in Nepal. Now he is back with a memoir, and keen to speak out about the ‘tabloid frenzy’ that followed the film

IN CASE YOU were wondering what Irish-language poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh has to say in his newly published memoir about Neasa Ní Chianáin's controversial documentary, Fairytale of Kathmandu, that aired 18 months ago, the short answer is nothing. Light on Distant Hillsfocuses on the poet's life from childhood to the end of his adolescence, a journey that follows him from the Co Donegal Gaeltacht in the 1950s to London in the 1970s.

We're indoors, having coffee in the lobby of a Dublin hotel, but Ó Searcaigh is still wearing his trademark Nepalese pillbox hat. Indoors or outdoors, the hat stays on. He's worn a version of this hat for years, so it makes him quite a recognisable figure. For most of the last 18 months, however, Ó Searcaigh has kept a low public profile. Not any longer. Now that his memoir is out, he's actively seeking media attention, and although there is no mention of Fairytalein the book, he's extremely anxious to speak about what he describes as "the tabloid frenzy".

First, the memoir. It’s Ó Searcaigh’s first book in English, and it focuses on his rural upbringing in an Irish-speaking community near Gortahork in Co Donegal, his discovery of the possibilities of language, and the exploration of his sexuality. “I was lucky that I was there at a time where there was a significant shift in the place where I was brought up, when an archaic pastoral culture was changing into a more technological, modernistic culture. I saw and experienced that,” he explains.

Why write the book now, and why in English, when he has made his reputation writing in Irish? “Well, why not?” he laughs, in his distinctive sing-song voice. “I’d been thinking for a long time about writing something sustained in English. And it was easier to write a memoir than a novel – although I am working on a novel right now.” Then he says: “There’s this obstacle sometimes if you write in Irish: people in the revival movement seem to think that you have sold your inheritance if you dabble in English.”

Who does he think will read the book? He considers. “Well, I hope some of the people who read my work in Irish. I think that the book is really a chronicle of becoming a poet. Then I hope there is a larger public out there who are interested in memoir. We live in an age of memoir, to some extent. It’s a sort of a plague of memoirs.”

He captures well a child’s growing awareness of the differences between the Irish spoken in his home and community, and the English spoken in the towns. “When Granda spoke in English his voice sounded creaky, like a rusty gate squeaking in the wind. He wasn’t at ease in it. I knew this from the way he scraped out the words as if he found it hard to get hold of them.”

There was very little money while he was growing up, but there was a priceless private library, in the form of books his father, who worked in Scotland most summers, brought home, and which they both devoured. An only child, Ó Searcaigh was indulged with both love and freedom, and records a happy childhood, despite the bouts of manic depression his mother suffered from, during which times she believed she had been taken by the fairies.

If there is a surprise in the memoir, it is the impression it gives that – for Ó Searcaigh, at any rate – growing up gay in a close-knit community in rural Co Donegal in the 1960s seems to have been relatively easy.

“I didn’t feel it was difficult,” he agrees, praising the community where he still lives. “The thing that safeguarded me was an absence of guilt in my life. So many people are anguished because of a guilt about themselves.”

Then he says that although he didn’t write about it in the memoir, he was very sporty, which he considers helped him to be accepted. “So many gays are effeminate in some way and, you know, this and that, and they feel that they don’t belong. I always knew that I belonged to a community.”

NÍ CHIANÁIN'S DOCUMENTARYprovoked widespread questions about the many relationships Ó Searcaigh had with young men in Nepal. The uncomfortable fact is that anyone who saw that documentary now knows probably more than they ever wanted to about Ó Searcaigh's sex life. Well, they get to find out quite a lot more in the memoir. There are many pages that detail sex scenes from the early parts of his life. "He tongued me with an unsparing all-absorbing attentiveness, his soft velvety tongue vigorous as a calf's" is a mildly representative line.

Why did he put all this detail in the memoir? “I have nothing to hide,” Ó Searcaigh declares flatly. Nothing to hide, but did he ever consider that in any genre of writing, readers don’t necessarily want to see everything? What about the first principle of every writing class, “less is more”?

Ó Searcaigh himself brings up the subject of Fairytale of Kathmandu. He audibly draws breath before he starts, his voice steadily increasing in volume from this point onwards.

“That documentary!” he spits. “It’s a very bad documentary . . . I was so demoralised by the whole thing up to now that I was silenced . . . It’s a horrific documentary . . . No wonder I’m upset and rather furious . . . I’m dismayed, disillusioned . . . There was betrayal of trust.”

He has a lot of other things to say about the documentary. On this subject, at least, Ó Searcaigh has only one consistent view: anger.

However, what becomes ever more clear during the interview is that in almost everything else he talks about, Ó Searcaigh is full of contradictions, of which he doesn’t seem to have any awareness himself.

First he says: "If I wasn't a member of Aosdána, it would be very difficult to survive. Otherwise I'd be on the dole and the State would have to support me anyway." Then he says that he gave all his money away "to people who needed it much more than I did", and that the reason he hasn't been back to Nepal since the documentary aired is because he has "no money". He berates himself for not reading the contract he signed with the makers of Fairytale. Then he confides that he's hoping to make money from the memoir, but that he has no idea what the print run is , because "I didn't read the contract".

He says also that “his close friends and associates in Nepal”, despite not having English as their first language and the fact that he himself has not been back to Kathmandu since the documentary aired, are talking about taking legal action against Vinegar Hill, the production company. The average daily wage in Nepal is less than $5 (€3.50). Who would pay for such a theoretical action? He doesn’t miss a beat. “We’re going to raise money and they’re going to raise money,” he states grandly.

When asked if he accepts that some people consider there was an imbalance of power in the relationships he had with young Nepalese men, Ó Searcaigh snaps out his reply. In short, he does not. “The imbalance of power!” he says “I am fed up answering that question! An imbalance! This is such a western question.”

At one point, he says: “I’m talking to them every day, to all my friends in Nepal.”

AS IT HAPPENS, during the interview, his mobile rings. He leans over to check the number, smiles, and then answers. This is what he says:

“Hello, my Prakash. Namaste. Is daddy okay? Is your father okay? Did you get the money? Oh, good, good. I’ll talk to you later.” He puts the phone down. “That was Prakash from Nepal,” he relates happily. “His daddy is suffering from testicular cancer, so yesterday I had to send him some money.”

I find myself wondering why he took the call at all. Given how he considers that he was misrepresented by the documentary-makers, I would have thought he would have wanted to keep his calls to and from Nepal private while in the presence of a journalist.

Prakash Nepali, as Ó Searcaigh refers to him, appears briefly in the documentary, where he is recorded saying of Ó Searcaigh: “He is as god for me, real god for me.” When Ní Chianáin asks whether he loves Ó Searcaigh, he replies: “Yes, why not? With my heart and then my body, I love to him.”

Ó Searcaigh, who says now he never had a sexual relationship with Prakash Nepali, is a fan of the sweeping statement. “You know how, when people are learning English, the register of English used by people in the orient can be so exaggerated?” he declares. “When people say, ‘He is my god’, you know, it sounds pompous and terrible to us, but within the register of what they’re speaking, it’s acceptable.”

If he writes another volume of his memoirs, as he hopes to do, Ó Searcaigh intends writing about what he terms “this episode” of his life. Meanwhile, the whole sorry controversy is being discussed again by default of its absence from this memoir.

Light on Distant Hills

, by Cathal Ó Searcaigh, is published by Simon & Schuster, £12.99