Michael Brendan Dougherty\u2019s My Father Left Me Ireland<\/em> is a book as concise, and almost<\/em> as elegant and sharp, as its title. Those five words tell you almost the whole story: how his Irish father met his Irish-American mother, how she became pregnant, how they broke up and he returned to Ireland while she ended up in the fatherless oubliettes of American suburbia; how she took her son to Irish-language weekend retreats, sang the old rebel songs to him, handed on an Americanized, kitschified Irishness that was the closest she could give him to his patrimony. How his ambivalence toward and then wholehearted embrace of being Irish mirrored his relationship with his father. How he went further in Irishness than his father would\u2013because his father is actually<\/em> Irish and so there\u2019s a wedge jammed between him and Ireland which isn\u2019t present in Americans\u2019 relationship to Eire, a wedge which I think Dougherty fils would call shame though some might call it irony<\/a>. (Porqu\u00e9 <\/span>no los dos?, as the Americans say.) How in nationhood, Irishness, the son discovered that love demands sacrifice, a lesson he remembers when his own firstborn arrives.<\/p>\n This comes near the beginning of the book and suggests the strength of Dougherty\u2019s prose\u2013it\u2019s a scene with his parents in a pub, on a childhood visit to his father in the County Clare:<\/p>\n I had this dim sense of the two of you enjoying each other, and enjoying me. I moved about this world in which every object was charged with meaning. I remember Mom\u2019s blue eye shadow and the gold-plated bangles and your thick Irish wool jumper. I remember that my mother\u2019s Virginia Slims suddenly had this new Irish name, \u201cfags,\u201d which I was not allowed to repeat. I remember the smoke drifting up from her glass, held at the height of my head, and seeming to curl around your arm like a lasso. And I was praying it would pull you two closer to each other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There\u2019s beautiful writing in Ireland<\/em> about what it means to be a people, especially a people whom others would define by their defeats and humiliations. There are some slack passages of what felt to me like generic generational complaint about how adults never taught us to sacrifice\u2013I admit that I may be unable to enter into this mentality as I\u2019m both older than Dougherty, and (more relevantly) raised by Communists and educated early by Afrocentrists, two groups who will make sure you know the sacrifices love-in-history requires. Any time Dougherty talks about \u201cthe culture\u201d his prose weakens and his criticism loses focus; you get the same essential idea, with much more specificity and persuasive power, when he talks about suburbia\u2019s \u201carchitecture of fatherlessness\u201d or contemporary Ireland\u2019s conveniently-capitalist reactions against the national mythos.<\/p>\n Dougherty depicts the inescapable tie of physical relatedness: the blood that makes noise, even when we don\u2019t want it to. When his father came unannounced to visit him at school, Dougherty\u2019s classmate spotted him and said, \u201cMichael, your father\u2019s here.\u201d \u201cHe had never seen you before. He just looked at you and knew.\u201d<\/p>\n Dougherty captures\u2013in fact his whole book is about\u2013the way parental breakup affects the narrative of our lives. (Maybe the most elegant chapter is about the misinterpretation of Irish history, closing with a note about Dougherty\u2019s misinterpretation of his father\u2019s letters: the longing he couldn\u2019t hear over his own bitterness.) The unhappy present shadows and perhaps distorts all memories of past happiness. Everyone has his own understanding, his own \u201cside,\u201d and whether they blame one another or protect one another, the secrecies which are the flesh of any family often become swollen and inflamed. Against these only-human stories Dougherty sets the story written, against everybody\u2019s will, in his face and his gestures, which are his father\u2019s.<\/p>\n If, by the end of this book, I was more attentive to what it elides than what it highlights, that reflects my own privileges as someone who grew up with her biological, married parents. Those who grew up in other circumstances may find Dougherty\u2019s book even more powerful and illuminating than I did. But it also reflects the fact that I\u2019m a convert, from secular\/Reform Judaism. I\u2019ve sung \u201cFaith of Our Fathers\u201d in church and it never gets less weird, let me tell you. If I were to tell a story about the intersection of patrimony, oppressed and resistant nationhood, and religious faith, it would not be the story of my discovery of Catholicism. It would be, for example, the day not too long ago when I attended a family bar mitzvah, and watched as grandparents handed the Torah scrolls to parents and then the parents handed the scrolls on to the bar mitzvah boy. And then in the car on the way home we heard the news that a man had opened fire at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing eleven of the worshipers.<\/p>\n And so I noticed all the places where Dougherty wants to conflate faith and patriotism, truth and inheritance. It\u2019s a desire he sometimes resists, but it\u2019s woven throughout the book. It\u2019s why he sometimes gets saccharine: Would James Joyce\u2013or Shane MacGowan!\u2013want<\/em> to be \u201can inheritance to be treasured and passed on\u201d? I think it helps explain the whiff of strength-worship, the praise of sacrifice for its own sake, sacrifice valued because<\/em> it\u2019s proof of masculinity. Dougherty excoriates the modern Irish for worshiping the strength brought by money and international acceptance. But he\u2019s also clearly drawn to rhetoric of \u201cbecoming hard, proud, and valiant\u201d\u2013terms he borrows from Patrick Pearse, for whom the nation should be \u201call holy, a thing inviolate and inviolable, a thing that a man dare not sell or dishonour on pain of eternal perdition.\u201d It should be unsettling to read that as a Christian; it\u2019s definitely unsettling to read it as someone who did literally the only thing that can get the Jews to stop claiming you as their own.<\/p>\n This conflation of faith and patriotism may help explain the occasional brusqueness with which Dougherty addresses the actual crimes of Irish institutions. When I saw The Devil\u2019s Doorway<\/em><\/a>, a new Irish horror film set in a Magdalene Laundry in 1960, the director mentioned that former Magdalene inmates would drive across the country to see screenings, and would come up to her afterward, moved and shaken by the fact that someone was telling their stories. Those women are as much (holy Catholic) Ireland as anybody if not moreso, you know?<\/p>\n The Pogues\u2019 very best lines, I think, are from \u201cThousands Are Sailing<\/a>,\u201d their American immigration song:<\/p>\n Where\u2019er we go, we celebrate Ireland<\/em> captures the poignancy of that celebration from overseas, the inherent ambiguity of it and the strenuous love which tries to overcome the ocean. But it over-defends, and so it can\u2019t acknowledge all the reasons people can become refugees even if they never leave.<\/p>\n The other great elision is Dougherty\u2019s unreadiness to talk about who he is as an American, in America. Because the thing is, he lives here. I don\u2019t say this to be all, \u201cYou say everybody should sacrifice for the nation but you won\u2019t even live there!\u201d because people have lots of reasons for what they do and I don\u2019t know his life. (Although like, can he really take for himself the last words written by a man killed in the Rising, the farewell he wrote his family after he\u2019d already been shot, if he won\u2019t live there.) And this absence in the book may be the result of Dougherty\u2019s decision to frame it as letters to his father, for whom the duties of American life and history aren\u2019t relevant. But listen to this description of what it means to belong to a people:<\/p>\n I see in the Rising that a nation cannot live its life as a mere administrative district or as a shopping mall; nations have souls. \u2026I see that nationality is something you do, even with your body, even with your death. I see that a history of plunder does not oblige those plundered to despair; it obliges them to hope, and to act on that hope.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That\u2019s stirring stuff. And the Americans it most closely describes are black people. The American Wolfe Tones aren\u2019t Bruce Springsteen or Dolly Parton or even Johnny Cash; they\u2019re Public Enemy and Nina Simone. Or\u2013there are parallels with American Indians\u2019 history, and many Latinos\u2019 also. But this is not, here\u2019s the thing, a great description of what it means to be a white American. By the end of Ireland<\/em> I was pretty frustrated by the conspicuous absence of any exploration of what Dougherty might owe as an American, to America and especially to the peoples oppressed here now. People laugh at Oirish-Americans, \u201cwe were indentured servants too, NINA<\/a> NEVER FORGET!!!!\u201d etc etc, but being \u201cIrish-American\u201d doesn\u2019t have to<\/em> be an escape from the responsibilities of being a white American. It doesn\u2019t have to be; maybe don\u2019t let it be.<\/p>\n
\nThe land that makes us refugees\u2026.<\/p>\n