Speaking as a Canadian of mixed heritage, it's always a bit annoying when our official policy of Multiculturalism forces us to answer the question, "What's your nationality?" Many times over their school years, my kids were told to bring in a dish from or write a report on their nation of origin, and as my husband is also of mixed heritage, there's something rather pointless, to me, about them self-identifying as any single one of the many cultures that went into their makeup. After I don't even know how many generations here, we're Canadians. Nothing hyphenated, just Canadians. But…if I were forced to self-identify, I would have to say that with hair as coppery as Mary/Moira's and my mother's side being of pure Irish extraction, I'm more Irish than anything else. Having had Irish-Canadian friends, and also having visited the Emerald Isle as a teenager, I do have an emotional pull in that direction as well. I've read some Irish fiction over the years, some James Joyce and Maeve Binchy et al, but this was the first Ireland to Canada immigrant story I can remember reading and it had an effect on me that very likely has everything to do with this notion of self-identification.
In Away, Jane Urquhart starts her story in Ireland (poetically evoking its landscape, culture and mythology), introduces the Potato Famine (and its attendant death and devastation as well as emigration aboard the "coffin ships" for the lucky few), leading to pioneering in the harsh Canadian wilderness, and ends with a glimpse into the nascent politics of the young Dominion. Interspersed are scenes from the modern day life of an aged descendant of the O'Malley line as she tells the story of her family, giving voice to it even though she's alone, carrying on the tradition of oral history as related to her by her own elderly grandmother. In many ways this felt like a substitute for the immigration story of my own family that I'll never know, and as such, I made a connection with this book that might make me rate it higher than others who don't feel this connection.
Urquhart, in addition to being a novelist, has also published books of poetry and this lyrical sensibility is displayed throughout the book.
In describing a forest: Leaf and leaf and shadow, shadow and sunlight scattered there, and over here, by the wind.
In describing love: This is what love is like, one is asleep and the other is awake but you never know which one is dreaming.
This is also a political book, making commentary on the British Landlords in Ireland (even though the Sedgewick brothers are treated as oblivious and benign), the treatment of the Irish immigrants in Canada (from the fever sheds in Grosse Ile to the impoverished Griffintown neighbourhood of Montreal), the Fenian Rising, and the Fathers of Confederation (in particular D'Arcy McGee).
As a nation of (predominantly) immigrants, Mary's epiphany on being forced to leave Ireland is a shared part of our Canadian heritage:
She saw the world's great leave-takings, invasions and migrations, landscapes torn from beneath the feet of tribes, the Danae pushed out by the Celts, the Celts eventually smothered by the English, warriors in the night depopulating villages, boatloads of groaning African slaves. Lost forests. The children of the mountain on the plain, the children of the plain adrift on the sea. And all the mourning for abandoned geographies.
And this exchange between the mysterious Algonquin named Exodus and Mary's husband notes an equivalence between the experience of the Irish and the Native Canadians:
Exodus leaned across the table and looked steadily at the Irishman. "And so I told her," he said, "that some white men had seized my people's land and killed many animals for sport and abused our women."
The hands of the two men lay flat upon the table but their eyes never left the other's face. "What did she say then?" asked Brian.
When Exodus replied there was a break in his voice. "She embraced me and said that the same troubles stayed in the hearts of both our peoples."
This exchange has further personal relevance for me since the only other heritage I know of is Mi'kmaq on my father's side. It may also explain why I am open to stories that involve the unseen behind the seen; whether faerie-folk or manitou.
After having read the nonfiction Roughing it in the Bush earlier this year, Away reads like a realistic and well-researched account of the early pioneers to Canada. These two books also highlight the differences in experience that was awaiting the poor Irish (even those privileged enough to have had land awaiting them as in Away, which I can't imagine was a common situation) and the moneyed English who were better able to negotiate and navigate the British culture of Upper Canada. Here's another personal story: As a Canadian of mixed heritage, I honestly don't have either superficial or bone-bred prejudices against other people, no matter where they or their ancestors came from. Over the years, I've heard many of the immigration stories from my husband's family, and as a result, have been amused to watch each of my red-haired girls go off to school with a proudly researched paper on their Italian roots. But it floored me when my mother-in-law once informed me that although she always knew her grandfather came from Tipperary, she had just learned that he wasn't Irish-- he was a Brit who had bought land in Ireland in the mid-1800's, sold it at a profit, and then made his way to Canada. I couldn't help but at that point feel a kind of sleeping with the enemy internal conflict: Was he one of these notorious landlords? Did he somehow profit off the Irish during the Potato Famine? I have no clue, but reading Away brought this time alive for me.
I enjoyed everything about Away, from the fates of the drowned sailor and the Latin-teaching Brian to the beautiful and frenetic step-dancing Aidan. But this was really a story about the women:In this family all young girls are the same young girl and all old ladies are the same old lady. This book connected with me in a way that made me feel like this same young girl, this same old lady, if only because no one has ever taken the time to tell me what my own story is. As much as I proclaim myself Canadian first, maintain my impatience with the official need for hyphenated identities, I will concede that I likely have a need to know what path led me to where I find myself now; perhaps I can even be indulged in mourning for abandoned geographies I never knew.
And so in addition to the above Goodreads review I have just a bit more to add. One might wonder why I don't know the immigration stories of my ancestors, or even what the cultural makeup is on my father's side beyond him being 1/4 Mi'kmaq, and the answer was posted here before in my review of Little Bird of Heaven (my father snorting derisively at me when, as a child, I asked him if I was really mostly Irish, and also his oft-repeated refrain of "If it was any of your goddamn business someone would have told you by now".) So yeah, questions were not encouraged in my immediate family and I rarely ever saw my grandparents as they lived far away. When we did visit my grandparents, the conversations were pretty superficial -- I never knew these people who are now all gone.
Here's my only exception: In July of 2010, Dave, Mallory and I went over to visit my maternal grandmother in PEI (Kennedy stayed behind in Nova Scotia with my brother Ken, and although he was supposed to bring her and his kids over to visit our grandmother a week later, he decided against it. This would turn out to be the last chance any of us from away had to see her). We knew that "Mom" (as we called her because my mother's father had been determined to be "Pop" to his grandkids) was in questionable health, and so a long visit was discouraged, but we were cleared to take her out to Tim Horton's for a bowl of soup and a coffee. It was a bit shocking to see my vibrant grandmother looking so pale and frail, but worse, her sharp mind was now wandering and as we sat together, she would get into these ruts and a few short stories were repeated over and over, as though they were just occurring to her for the first time in years. One of these stories was perhaps the most interesting glimpse into my heritage that I will ever have.
I wanted to refer to the absent Kennedy, so I told Mom that just like her, her eldest great-grandchild is a great reader. Mom sighed and said, "When I was a girl living out in the country, my own grandmother who lived with us was always busy, always cleaning something, always dusting away at the corners. If she happened to see me with a book in my hand, she would crack me over the head with her goose wing and say, 'Get your nose out of that novel. Don't you have something useful to do?' And it didn't matter what kind of a book it was, she always called it a novel. And the boys? Well, the boys, my brothers, could do no wrong, you see. And I could do no right." And here her eyes squinted, and her voice became deep and blustery in that wonderful and vaguely Irish, PEIslander lilt. "But on the night she died, was it one of the boys that sat up with her all night long? It was me." She told this story three times as we sat there, word for word, a familiar lament that she was hanging onto until the end, and it gives me the only clues I have: I knew that my grandparents were all born in Canada, and I knew that this grandmother's parents were farmers (I had met my great-grandmother, known as "Country Mother", several times before she died in her nineties), but this was the first I heard about this great-great-grandmother, and was intrigued to learn that she lived in Canada as well. That's it-- I still have no idea when the original Irish folks left Ireland, I have no idea if it was related to the Famine or not. I remember learning in college that in most societies oral traditions are passed down matrilineally, and that's probably why I am most attracted to the notion of my maternal grandmother's grandmother, and why I regret that I don't know her story in the way that Mary's story is passed down to Esther by Eileen in Away. I don't feel the same responsibility to my father's ancestry, I suppose, because he has a sister who has a daughter-- and there's a chance she has become the repository for that line of the family.
More thoughts on the Irish: When I was a girl, my best friend was Cora Ryan. Her parents were Irish immigrants to Canada, coming in the 1950's or 60's. Her mother was a bit uptight, a bit cool, but she worked hard to maintain a very comfortable home for her family, and when she told a rare joke, it was in a severe tone that made you pause for a beat before realising it was time to laugh. Cora's Dad, on the other hand, was a jovial and loving red-faced man, prone to breaking out into song at gatherings, and despite my general shyness and awkwardness, he gave me a real feeling of belonging when I was visiting their house. As Christmas of 1981 approached, Cora's Dad beckoned me upstairs one evening, and as he went room to room in their century farmhouse to plug in the electric candles that sat in each window at the holidays, he explained that they were an Irish tradition, an invitation to absent friends. As he plugged in the last one, he asked, "Do you think you can remember where all the candles are in this house?" I nodded and he said, "Good, then this will be your job from now on. This year and every year after, any time you're visiting, you will be the candle lighter." I was horrified and had to choke back tears as I asked, "Didn't Cora tell you? That we're moving to Alberta at the end of the summer?" He did not stop his tears, and throwing his arms around me said, "I didn't know, but from now on I want you to know that every Christmas there will be candles in these windows, candles for you." That was the kind of person he was, loving and kind in a way that I didn't know in my own family, and not unlike my father-in-law (with his Scottish-Italian heritage, I'm certainly not saying that the Irish have a monopoly on warmth).
Somewhere out of this came the idea that I should go with the Ryans on their biannual trip to visit friends and family back in Ireland in the last few weeks before my family moved, and to my eternal surprise, my parents agreed (I've never said they don't love me). That was an astonishing culture shock for a 14 year old, but also felt like a homecoming. We stayed with Cora's aunt and uncle in Killaloe, more or less right here:
There were parties most nights at which there was singing and dancing and, having been prepared for the eventuality beforehand, Cora and I would pull out our flutes and play a couple of heart-wrenching duets her brother Sean had written for us. Her Dad gave us a walking tour of the village and pointed across this small river to where there was still a town with English settlers, complete with an Anglican church that had once been Catholic before the troubles. This was the first I had heard of Ireland having been a British holding, and getting the story from the mouth of a patriot, it was duly impressed on my mind as a horrifying and illegal occupation. This was such a painful part of Mr. Ryan's psyche that so far as I know, for the rest of his life, he never applied for Canadian citizenship as it entails an oath of allegiance to the Queen. There were children, dressed in rags, begging for coins in Limerick and this was my first glimpse into this kind of poverty. But there was also the incredible scenery, the green fields and mountains that give Ireland its nickname. We saw castles and cow-filled pastures and ate periwinkles on the beach at Kilkee, and everywhere we went, people, strangers, told me that I was home. And it's worth restating that I knew that when my three week Irish vacation was up, I was to get on a plane to Alberta, leaving the home and friends I knew, to start over in a place where I had no roots, no references, no candles in the window.
My last thoughts on Ireland: In the summer of 1988, my mother had the opportunity to take her parents on a trip of a lifetime to Ireland. They had a rental car and drove through the big cities and the small villages, went to Northern Ireland (where they were warned against leaving any packages on the seat of their parked car-- it would be assumed it was a bomb and panic would ensue) and they breathed a sigh of relief when they crossed the border back into the Catholic, more familiar Ireland. In one village, they stopped at Dowling's Pub on a lark, where upon seeing my grandfather, the waitress exclaimed, "Well if you aren't just the very likeness of William Dowling!" To which Pop replied, "But I am William Dowling." The waitress explained that the owner of the pub was also William Dowling and that he was away for a couple of days-- if they could stay around they were in for a surprise. Unfortunately their schedule didn't allow them to stay still that long, but as my mother said, they felt at home wherever they went.
And to tie this up with a reference back to the book that started these thoughts: I am most definitely made up of many different cultures and think of myself as Canadian first. Yet, there is something about the Irish part of me that wants to be in the forefront, whether it's a matrilineal bias, or my brushes with its culture, or that I just have more Irish blood than any other. I can identify with the notion in Away that a person doesn't need to be born in Ireland to be enchanted by its ghosts. Something is also impelling me to pass on an Irishness to my kids that I'm barely familiar with. We named our firstborn Kennedy in order to honour my brother Ken, but also because I wanted her to have a strong Irish name. I thought it unfortunate that it translates as "ugly head", but didn't think she would really need to know that part until she was old enough to know that it doesn't matter. When we were expecting again and I was looking through the baby name book, I was drawn to finding one that not only mirrors Kennedy in form (it is not a coincidence that Mallory is also consonant, vowel, double consonant, vowel, consonant, y), but I was also hoping to find a name with a similarly unfortunate meaning, and of course Mallory means "unlucky one". Thus armed, the first time they were old enough to flip through that same baby name book and ask me why I would have chosen names with such bad meanings, I was able to explain that it's an Irish tradition to say horrible things about babies in order to fool the Banshee. Of course no witch was going to steal one of my babies if I referred to her as ugly or unlucky. I do believe they find this story satisfactory, but the bigger truth is that I do, too. As my mother has been wont to say, "I'm not superstitious but I don't take any chances."
I wonder if that is an Irishism?
A further note added 19/01.14: I played around with mundia, an online ancestry site, and found that my grandmother's grandmother's name was Margaret Daughtery, born in 1846, but unfortunately, that's all the information I have on her. I had told my mother, just before Christmas, that I was looking into our family tree and she and my father sounded excited that I even cared. She called me the next day to say that she had looked and found some documents and information that might be of interest to me and she was going to put it right in the mail -- and that was a month ago and, of course, I haven't received anything.
