Silent Irish Voices - Irish Poets and Writers Know This
I wrote chapter one of Coming Home some time ago and then returned last week to claim my rights- my heritage and history as an Irish writer- needing to add Bailieborough or Bailieboro /ˈbeɪlibərə/; Irish: to the opening of the chapter:
‘A Mother
Sixteen is a young age for anyone to leave home, but that is what she did. Packed up in the dead of night from her father’s home when she left Ireland and ran away to England.
I don’t remember what the reason was, or if indeed she ever told me, but London would have held more than a pig farm could for her in County Cavan.’
Listening to Mother
Hers is a story all its own. One that my mother told me and God in her mutterings I couldn’t quite make out. In fits and starts, both metaphorically, under the Veil of Grief: A nylon black scarf she wore ceremoniously in church near the coffins of each child.’
It was here that I stopped. It wasn’t just an inclusion of Bailieborough or Bailieboro /ˈbeɪlibərə. It would be the start of a conversation I would have with many dead relatives. In the following days, it is the word I feel most tearful about, remembering my mother and the chances I had to ask more. It was never followed up on. Maybe once, when I heard my brother say he wanted to visit Ireland and see where mam had come from. I was bold enough to interject, “It’s actually Bailieborough.” Like I had some intention to write about, visit or claim her status as an Irish mother returned.
I begin in Bailieborough, Bailieboro /ˈbeɪlibərə Co. Cavan, at the foot of Rebel Hill.
Remembering my mam. I’m writing, learning, being egged on from below the grave. She is just as loud and wants me “not to show her up!” She’d call me “Paddy, Podrick, Pádraig, Patricia,” couldn’t recall, in the seven of us. I’d shut me mouth, but not for long. – I begin in Bailieborough, Bailieboro /ˈbeɪlibərə Co. Cavan, at the foot of Rebel Hill.
In my ‘can’t-she’s-dead’ head, which never entirely stops me, I begin outside in an Irish Facebook group tentatively, like I’m six years old. Waiting to be asked to take a seat and offered “hare naow, whisssht, littl cop o’ tay.”
Irish and Can't Speak
I’m still there on Facebook, but move like a hummingbird from post to post, love-hearting Irishness that I belong to, or those that I recall. I claim, observe, and absorb tears into desktop tissues piled high. Her cigarette ash is now my own. And the knowing that embarks upon me, of an Irish writer’s history inextricably woven in threads of Trinidad and London, second-generation, mixed-race Black Irish, and can’t speak. I’m all about the poetry.
Irish History - Poetry Excerpts
Excerpt from two poems, the first on my mother:
Let’s Ride to Trinidad, Ireland and Beyond
Quantum leap to Ireland
County Cavan and more green
Bailieborough born and Dublin calls her too
under her nylon scarf in churches of loss
I have wired DNA from the Castle
in boots of those of Rebel Hill
Let’s be in her shadows in London brood
children are seven the Black Irish sins
of those oppressed coming together
be Irish Trinidadians
on buses or boats that land
from shore to shore
of England’s.
Excerpt: This second poem, on my Irish grandmother:
I Knew Her …Not
She lived in a place above clouds
sat on the dark silent watcher’s bench
darning imaginary socks for men on farms
silent shame in her butcher’s ask
ah go on just a little bit more.
imagined in Irish cobbled lanes
smoking quietly under bridges
near political streams for girls
forbidden Gaelic swearwords
falling on her toes
when my mother left her home
was likely saddened and much more
maybe fought and cried go find her
or merely glad one girl was gone.
The can't-speak-ness of Being Irish
Something fundamental is understood in the can’t-speak-ness of being Irish. Of The Irish in England. I learned it in tightened hands as we walked into our Catholic church or down any London street. I am here to speak her silent voice back into existence: “Now shho’t op, you said your piece!”
