Sir, - Professor Donald Akenson's reminder of the collusion of many Irish emigrants and their offspring with the imperialist destruction of native cultures and socio-economic structures (The Irish Times, September 26th) is an antidote to the exclusive preoccupation which we Irish have long had with the sufferings, exploitations and cultural traumas inflicted on this island and its people in various forms and with varying degrees of intensity over some 700 years and to our tendency to romanticise or elide that collusion.
One of our greatest writers, James Joyce, anticipated Professor Akenson's analysis by some 90 years. In his short story Counter- parts, he explored the dialectic between being oppressed and becoming an oppressor. Farrington is tyrannised by his Northern Protestant boss, Mr Alleyne. He spends his day mindlessly copying out legal documents, thus helping to ensure the enforcement of the law of the Empire, although he is emphatically told that he does not have the right or the intellectual capacity to think about what he is doing. When he does "score" verbally, he puts his job on the line. Having realised that he has done so, he seeks relief in drink and in boasting of his linguistic victory. When, however, he tries to assert his physical superiority over an Englishman in a symbolic arm-wrestling contest, he is defeated and humiliated.
The terrible, physically violent counterpart which gives the story its title is played out when he returns home seething with suppressed rage. Discovering that his dinner is uncooked, his wife at the chapel and the home fire unlit, he turns in sado-masochistic frenzy on his son, beating him savagely as the child, a "native" whose name is scarcely known to his own father, pleads for mercy in return for saying "a Hail Mary". To understand such cruelty is not to condone it. To recognise its existence and its causes is perhaps a necessary step towards developing that conscience which Joyce, too, sought to forge for his people. We should all take Counterparts to heart. - Yours, etc.,
From (Prof) Mary C. King
Old National School, Ballyduff, Co Wicklow.