Irish writers living abroad give their perspectives

Philip McDonagh

MOSCOW

"Frost and sunshine, day of miracles" begins Pushkin's poem Winter Morning. Winter has its own beauty in Russia: frozen rivers on which to skate, architecture coming into its own in the stillness, the intimacy of indoors as the temperature drops.

Christmas falls on January 7th here, in accordance with the old Julian calendar. Under the communists New Year became the major celebration. The Bolsheviks did not like Santa Claus, St Nicholas in disguise. They promoted instead Father Frost and his granddaughter the Snow Maiden.

Then times changed again. Joseph Brodsky, who referred to himself as “a Christian by correspondence”, would write a nativity poem each year, beginning in 1962. The other day I had dinner with a family who were observing the Nativity Fast. Fish was served, not meat. Icons hung in a corner. The three children came to the father of the family to receive a light sign of the cross on the forehead before saying goodnight to the guests. There was a lively discussion around the table about President Medvedev’s plans to hand back to the churches the properties confiscated in the Bolshevik era. This was not a notably pious group. One of the guests had been employed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Another was a theatre director. I sensed not religiosity but a willingness to tread softly in the face of the life experiences of others.

Moscow’s churches are the physical counterpart to this atmosphere of charity. The domes resemble in shape and colour the candles that burn inside. In the church of St Philip near the Irish Embassy, commuters and shoppers queue all day long to light candles and pray. If you approach the church through the perechod, the pedestrian underpass, you will see another side of real life, old women selling shawls, a trade in second-hand books, repairers of shoes and watches.

Russia endures, but it also expects. Kutya, the traditional Christmas dish, contains grains for hope and honey and poppy seed for happiness and peace. Russian believers pray for Russia herself. The mantle of Our Lady, her pokrov, is pictured as thrown protectively over the whole land. There is a prophetic aspect to Russian expectation. Mandelstam dies in a gulag, but his widow’s account of Stalin’s Russia is accepted even in Soviet times as true history. Pasternak sits to his desk each morning for 10 years in the hope of writing something that might help the faith – the name “Zhivago” being taken from the word used in the liturgy for “the living God”. Russia’s great books are like artesian wells accessing the groundwater of European civilisation.

In Ireland today economic turbulence may cause us to believe that our bread is dipped in chopped garlic, to use a Russian image. But the honey of life does not thereby disappear. The legacy of St Patrick is latent in our culture. Perhaps in time we will recognise the Belfast Agreement as the most important achievement of our times and as reflective of our Christian traditions.

Elements of shared European identity hold a mirror to Russia, to Ireland, to the nations and institutions of this continent. Seeing ourselves in that mirror, we can form expectations of the future. We can do what Yeats wanted Synge to do: “Go deep down, seeking foundations for an Ireland that can only come into existence in a Europe that is still but a dream.”

Philip McDonagh is Ambassador to the Russian Federation. His latest collection of poems, The Song the Oriole Sang, was published by Dedalus earlier this year

Eamon Grennan

POUGHKEEPSIE, NEW YORK

Born and brought up in Dublin, I’ve lived in the US since 1965. Being a teacher has allowed me a yearly summer return to Ireland: neither exile nor emigrant but more a migrant – like the swallows. In the US I’m a “resident alien”, possessor of a green card. It’s not a bad description, entailing a sort of perpetual doubleness of being: a life with two very distinct parts: over there and over here, the meaning of “here” and “there” constantly shifting, creating a certain detachment from both places. Still, I consider each place while I’m living there home. But the word has a hovering quality for me, the nuance it carries when I use it here in the US different from its vibration when I use it “at home” in Ireland.

What remains clear is that my feeling for what's happening in Ireland has always been more primary in its nature than the feeling I have about whatever's actually happening in the country where I have by now spent most of my life. I mean happenings of public moment: I feel more distressed about the disembowelling of the fat cat that was the Celtic Tiger, more immediate anger at the shameful array of private and public faults that have brought the country to the state it's in, sadder at the sight of half-built houses near where I live (part time) in Connemara, or at hearing of people I know losing their jobs, than I feel about the gigantic horror show that is the Republican Party bringing down these huge and complex United States in order to hurt Obama. Yet, whatever my feelings, I find that living at a distance as I do – no matter my daily reading of The Irish Timesor listening every breakfast time to RTÉ's News at One– makes it impossible for me to be moralistic or judgmental.

So to see the bailout-announcing line-up of Taoiseach and Ministers facing a barrage of flashbulbs, like a small herd of deer caught in headlights, inclined me not to say, “Serves them right,” but to think, “Poor country”. Aside from futile rage, then, I guess bruised sadness is what I feel now about my home country and its ills.

On the private side, home is where the hearth and heart are, where I live with my partner of many years. My family is here: children, and now grandchildren – all living within 250km of our home in Poughkeepsie. And still this feeling of home must coexist with my sense of a windy, wet corner of north Connemara where the heart, if not the all-year-round hearth, also abides, feeling it too to be home, the chosen place.

Exile. Emigration. Think exile and you hear Yeats's Lake Isle of Innisfree, plus rounds of sentimental or tragic or politically rousing songs. Think emigration and it's Famine statistics, or pictures of the unemployed in the 1950s or 1980s, massed protestors on the streets. The words seem lodged at "the deep heart's core" of the Irish psyche, as if what they name were part of our nature. Maybe it is. Very often the hurt they contain is blamed on some outside, non-Irish force or other, though the truth and the causes lie – as they do now – nearer home.

I miss Christmas in Ireland: the feel of the air, the stopping into friends’ houses, the buzz in the shops, on the lit streets, in the pubs, the churches at midnight – the sense of the community, big or small, sharing something, some still-ingrained habit of ritual.

“Next year,” we’ve often said, “we’ll be back for it.” This time I think we really mean it. Next year. But on this Christmas Day, like every other, I’ll ring my brother and his family in Dublin, my sister in London, my brother in Edinburgh, my friends in Connemara. And I’ll be doing what so many other migrants, exiles, emigrants will be doing. In spite of whatever the big misguided world is at, how it’s hurting us, we’re, like so many of those gone before us, staying in touch.

Eamon Grennan teaches in the graduate writing programs of Columbia and New York University. His most recent collections in Ireland are The Quick of It and Out of Breath. A New and Selected Poems came out recently in the US

Philip Ó Ceallaigh

BUCHAREST

Ceausescu had a dream and poured it out in concrete. He demolished much of old Bucharest and rebuilt it on a monstrous scale, in the style of the boulevards of Pyongyang. And we walk through his nutty fantasy still. Bucharest is a vibrant city in the long summer, but in winter the same streets are desolate. The heavy communist architecture becomes the dominant mood, grey concrete against a grey sky, and it’s like sliding back 20 years into the past. It’s not the season when I’m most fond of Bucharest.

I came here a decade ago. The country had been in recession for about 60 years. I lived in an unfashionable neighbourhood on the edge of the city, and if forced to account for myself I might have said something about wanting to become a writer. But I didn’t like to talk about that. When you live among poor people they hold it against you if you aren’t making the best of yourself.

I went back to Ireland from time to time. It had gone from a place of emigration to a place where the low-paid work was done by foreigners. We were supposed to feel good about this, but somehow it was unconvincing. The pace of life had accelerated, along with the price of homes. Nobody could slow down enough to feel they had arrived somewhere. It had happened too fast.

The frenzy of self-congratulation was peculiar, too. Apparently, we were a nation of geniuses, and we deserved to have lots of money now that the chains of history had been shrugged off, and it was only natural that eastern Europeans should serve us and clean up after us, and they should be grateful for the chance.

It was a sense of victimhood and self-pity turned on its head. Now, instead of finding equilibrium, it has flipped back the other way again. The whole country is hung over, with a vague sense of having done something shameful, of having indulged in a collective fantasy. Validating yourself through money is a form of fantasy.

The Celtic Tiger wasn’t such a great fantasy, or such a terrible one. It was just a fantasy. And it wasn’t the fault of bankers, or politicians, or the elite. The people of Romania were victims of one man’s fantasy, and suffered for it. The people of Ireland voted for their fantasy, spent for it, lived for it. It wasn’t a dictatorship: it was lots of cash.

From where I sit, in what was Bucharest’s old Jewish quarter, demolished two decades ago by Ceausescu to construct 10-storey apartment blocks, Ireland’s drama doesn’t look so dramatic.

Ireland’s bailout doesn’t get more than a shrug from Romanians. The average wage here is less than €400 a month. Nobody is scandalised that the minimum wage in Ireland has dropped below €8 an hour.

Ireland is still one of the richest countries in the world. Romania was bailed out by the IMF last year. Among the austerity measures, all public-service workers received a 25 per cent pay cut. That probably didn’t make headlines back in Ireland.

Stash the apocalyptic language. I like Ireland more now that it’s sane, and resembles home again.

Philip Ó Ceallaigh is the author of the short-story collections Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day (both Penguin) and most recently edited an anthology of Irish and international fiction entitled Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press)

Vona Groarke

MANCHESTER

During the freeze-up Network Rail, which is responsible for Britain’s railway lines, announced that it would run ghost trains through the night to keep tracks from freezing over. Imagine: empty trains, all lights blazing, with no chat in them, no limbs, no histories, pushing on through landscape and weather to keep ice at bay.

I think I am a stowaway on a ghost train of the mind. I think maybe we all are. Maybe it’s how we keep ourselves going or make sure what’s important doesn’t just seize up. And if we live abroad the ghost train will take us, more often than not, towards home.

It scuds through fields and streets we think we knew the run of once, past houses with one window lit, and a Christmas tree in it. We imagine the waiting faces, cars left ticking over for warmth, news dusted down, our old beds aired and a fire on the go in the grate. In our hands are suitcases full of gifts from real lives not quite real enough. And for all we know that the train will likely stop at a station with a name we’ve never seen before, that no one will be there to meet us and that we may find ourselves alone in darkness, we climb aboard to take our seats anyway, and we shuffle the pack of memories we brought to kill the time.

Maybe it’s sentiment, nothing more, at a time of year when sentiment wears a paper crown and laughs at us, every one. And maybe it’s how small rituals work, each one a thin inch of track to keep us somewhere we know how to be, where we’re not alone. I hang two Christmas ornaments from my childhood tree, a pink angel with a yellow harp, and a blue angel with her two wings reduced by years to stubs. I put out the card my mother sent me the last Christmas she was alive. I put a few bob in envelopes on the tree for Tommy and Eve, the way my father did for us, always with a cheerful word scrawled in dark-blue ink. I make a cake every year to a recipe given by a friend’s mother 25 years ago. (It won me a bake-off in North Carolina with Eddie from Ringsend, probably using a recipe fresh off a ghost train of his own.) My pudding recipe comes from Prague; my trifle recipe from Galway; my soundtrack from New York.

This year may be different or no different at all. Could be ghost trains will run day and night, back to lighter times; to the impulse buy, the too-generous gift, the daft indulgences of winter that helped us through slow nights. Could be the ghost train will be the only way out for those who stand behind closed doors and adjust their faces and tone of voice before meeting the day. Could be that our ghost trains will slip us back to Christmases with more heart in them, or hope, or company. But we will make surely the best of things, because that’s what we do.

There have been carols in Manchester Cathedral, mugs of Gluhwein at the Christmas market, and a tree that came down on a lorry from Scotland that had to be thawed out. There will also be the Voice Squad’s Coventry Carol, the Christmas poem in The Irish Times, and Philip King in his eyrie in Ballydavid on St Stephen’s Day. Cards opened coming in from school. Phone calls and Skype. Wishes from home. My Irish friends will be round for hot whiskies at 1pm on the day, and we will have our families with us, howsoever we may.

Vona Groarke’s latest collection of poetry, Spindrift, was published by the Gallery Press last year

Barry McCrea

ROME

I have lived outside Ireland since 1997. Thanks to my job my emigrant existence has been punctuated with regular lengthy spells in Dublin, but my main day-to-day experience of Ireland has been a virtual one, through the screen and speakers of my laptop and through the texts and phone calls of my friends and family.

The crisis jolted me into a sudden awareness of the depth and inescapability of my connection to Ireland. My worries and anxieties about my personal plans, my writing and living, the streets of Rome – where my partner lives and where I am based this year – were suddenly dislodged by an overwhelming feeling of connection to this collective disaster. I sit up in my Roman bed at night watching Prime Time on my laptop. In previous years keeping up with the news from home was a kind of a hobby, an observation of a somewhat virtual reality; now Ireland feels immediate, vivid and substantial, rocks and water, flesh and blood.

On the radio, in newspaper columns, on Facebook pages it strikes me how often Irish people use the pronoun “we”: our state, our government, our future, our finances. This, it seems to me, is the real meaning of the idea that what is happening in Ireland is a battle for sovereignty. People at home seem like me, the emigrant, to be struggling to find the ground beneath their feet again, to figure out what, after all of the foam and glitter has washed away, is real and solid, reaching out for a “we”.

The virtual, imaginary Ireland of the late boom, built on the selfish fantasies of individuals and individualism, has evaporated; by repeating “we” and “us” and “our”, people are looking not only for sovereignty but also for company and solidarity.

As an emigrant with only a virtual eye and ear on Ireland I know what it is to long to be included in the national family. Christmas is the only time of the year when I really feel that I am, for a moment, really part of the national “us”. Like Joyce’s snow in The Dead, Christmas slowly but inexorably effaces the ins and outs of individual striving, rubs out the differences between emigrants and residents, brings us closer to Christmases past than to my normal life.

So this year I am relieved that I will be spending Christmas in Dublin. No one knows what the future holds for Ireland after the betrayals and folly of “our” government and ruling elites. But, unlike Easter, Christmas is not about the future; Christmas is not a festival about time or change. It does not promise that out of the darkness something new will grow but rather that, hidden already inside the darkness, are still some things that are fresh and green, that we can still find light and warmth.

The anthem of this annual, timeless world is Adeste Fideles, an exhortation to the faithful to all gather together in a miraculous place. The true faith is in the endurance of this one recurring moment outside the ordinary progress of our individual days. For this the faithful find themselves called back to Dublin every year, bust or boom or bust again: for the festival of light in the blackest depths of the year, to step outside the march of time and keep each other company, for a moment, against the darkness beyond.

Barry McCrea is associate professor of comparative literature at Yale University and the author of the novel The First Verse. His next book, In the Company of Strangers, a study of family in the modern novel, is published by Columbia University Press in June

Justin Quinn

PRAGUE

Every time my father has rung me from Ireland over the past few weeks he has begun by saying, “You’re well out of it.” I haven’t known how to respond. To agree would be heartless; to disagree would be to pretend the Czech Republic is doing as badly as Ireland, which it patently is not. My adopted country has more or less improved on all fronts since it dumped the communists in 1989. Democracy has become stronger, the standard of living has risen, health care has improved and the streets have remained relatively safe.

I arrived in Prague in the early 1990s, and I had to try not to take it personally when Ireland improved after my departure. The boom severed my last residual feelings of belonging to the country: it was now so irreversibly different from the murky Irish 1980s I grew up in that I could no longer feel at home there.

I settled down in Prague fairly quickly and rarely felt homesick. There was too much to do, what with learning the language, finding my feet at work, raising a family. Perhaps only during the summer, when the temperature here ramped up to the mid 30s, did I fantasise about taking a trip back for a swim in the Forty Foot or the Vico, and making it back home the same day to a good beer with the tang of Irish Sea salt still on my skin in the midst of the hot central European night.

Because I’m married to a Czech and we have two boys, the whole family has to navigate between two languages and cultures every day. Compromises have to be made and treaties negotiated about everything, from the smallest everyday details to the gala occasions, such as Christmas dinner. I have never become accustomed to the Czech tradition of carp instead of turkey, with a starter of soup made from the fish’s innards.

As I watch some members of family argue about who is going to get the carp’s head for breakfast I, at least, have the consolation of serving a well-aged Christmas pudding.

My wife views the pudding much as she might a lump of earth shovelled on to a plate and put on the table. Of course my feelings about the carp’s head are no warmer. There remain things about each other we will never understand. But some international compromises are less fraught. For instance, I flame the pudding not with whiskey but with slivovitz, the local plum liqueur. I reckon there can’t be much wrong with a plum liqueur for a plum pudding. In my view the Christmas dessert has been edging towards this perfection for centuries.

The recipe for the pudding is my grandmother’s, which she wrote down some time during the 1940s. You can see the effect of the Emergency in some of the skimping on ingredients, but these, as in most recipes, can be adjusted to suit the times, as well as different countries. Now that there is another emergency in Ireland, no doubt some of the older recipes are being searched out, less rich and less exotic. They will hardly be a consolation if one has lost one’s job or one’s house – there is no consolation for such things, and it is fatuous and insulting to suggest otherwise. At a distance of several thousand kilometres I see the country as a whole, and not just individuals, losing so much. There is a feeling in my chest that tells me not all my ties have been severed. I’m not fully out of it yet.

Justin Quinn’s next book of poems, Close Quarters, is due from the Gallery Press in the spring

Sara Berkeley

SAN GERONIMO, CALIFORNIA

Christmas in my adoptive home, a rural valley just north of San Francisco, has often been an eclectic affair. My husband is Jewish. Bizarre though it was to me at first, raised in a place where everyone’s Christmas came out of the same cracker, he never celebrated it and had no childhood rituals to uphold. His first wife used to get together with her family and make ravioli to celebrate the birth of Jesus. All very strange. Once our daughter was born I realised that if Christmas was going to be meaningful to her I’d have to make it so. We politely eschew organised religion, but I’m all for a bit of ritual: kids need something concrete to reject when they are teens. So in our house it was out with midnight Mass, in with an early-morning treasure hunt. Out with turkey dinner, in with a picnic by a local lake. Our tree lights blink side by side with the Hanukkah candles. Santa has a tan.

Luckily, I have a brother in the Bay Area who has kept some semblance of an Irish Christmas alive. He and his English wife happily cook a turkey and ham. He even steams a few Christmas puddings, something Americans completely fail to appreciate. (My first husband affectionately referred to it as roadkill.) We lavish brandy butter on it while everyone else looks on, polite but disbelieving.

I left Ireland in 1989, right on the threshold of the economic upswing. My three brothers had emigrated before me and I followed, less from financial necessity than from the desire to step off the small rock and see the world. So I watched the Celtic Tiger bare its teeth from afar, a shadow play. The friends I left behind largely made out well. As I landed in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the median house value was over $900,000 in 2007, it wasn’t so hard for me to wrap my head around Dublin property prices. But experiencing the New Ireland first-hand on my trips back was another matter. In 2001 I drove a rental car from Kerry back up to Dublin along motorway that was completely unfamiliar to me until it dumped me a kilometre or so from my parents’ house. From the air the country still looks reassuringly small and comprehensible. Driving through Dublin, I have felt like the ultimate stranger: an alien in her own city.

If I experienced Ireland’s bubble inflation from a remove, its bursting seems even more remote. Yes, the world is a small place, and technology brings the finest details of far corners on to my laptop screen. I read accounts of the Irish bailout in the New York Times just hours after it was announced. But I have found as I have moved around the world that life is largely made up of your village. I felt first-hand the collapse of the US economy, the slap across the face of taxpayer-funded bank bailouts. That the Irish are now in for similar pain, and worse, seems sort of like Waugh’s blow upon the bruise: “expected, repeated, falling . . . with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull sickening sensation and the doubt whether another like it could be borne”. I have very few Irish friends here. Those non-Irish I have asked seem only vaguely aware of the distant island’s woes. Something like Haiti’s tragedy seems more immediate, easier to do something about. Ireland’s just another European domino.

So as I fill my daughter’s stocking this Christmas Eve (she confessed recently she no longer believes, but could we still “have Santa” this Christmas?) it’s with a new spin on an old feeling: no matter how hard I have it, somebody somewhere has it much, much worse. And, this Christmas, that somewhere is Ireland.

Sara Berkeley’s fifth collection of poetry, The View from Here, has just been published by the Gallery Press. She is also the author of a novel and collection of short stories

Colum McCann

NEW YORK CITY

My father tells this story. When he was a boy, back in the 1930s, he lived in the cottages in Foxrock, at the edge of the Leopardstown racecourse. It was, like most then, a tough childhood. A litany of images immediately surrounds him. He knew to walk behind the coal truck to pick up the scraps that fell through the grating. He had his hands in the dark of many empty pockets. He grew familiar with the sound of the emigrant mailboat from Dún Laoghaire.

One Christmas morning, eight years old, my father was given a donkey. The most extraordinary present he could get. He wanted a racehorse, of course. Every boy who lived near Leopardstown had a dream of the gallop. But a donkey was a good enough start. It was tethered with a rope outside the cottage. “The white breath of it in the air,” he recalls. “I rode it up and down the village.” He washed it, groomed it, fed it with good hay he collected from the back of the stables.

Three days later his own father sat him down and told him it was time to sell the donkey. It was too expensive. They couldn’t feed it. And, besides, his family needed the money back. He didn’t stand too hard on ceremony. The donkey tugged down the road and was gone. A three-day gift, it wasn’t coming back. My father was given a penny to spend in Findlater’s shop. He bought a cube of Oxo.

It is either the saddest story I know or one of the most necessary. There is a temptation also to say that it is both, wrapped together, the essence of contradiction.

A few weeks ago I was home with my father, who is now more than 80 years old. I arrived in the driveway, fresh from New York, and he stood up on his walking frame to greet me. I could see him from outside the house. The hand raised, the body shifted, I could see him grasping for a hold. From outside the house I, helpless, watched him slowly fall. The meaning of it didn’t escape me even then. I had no keys to the house.

The following day, after an evening at St Vincent’s, where they treated him for a shattered humerus – “not so humourous,” he told the wonderful nurse – we were due to do a radio interview together. I encouraged him not to do it, that he was too tired, that it would drain him too much, that he didn’t need the strain. But he wanted to talk.

“But I look a bit rough,” he said from his wheelchair. “Do I look a bit rough, Sally?” he asked my mother, who smiled, winked in my direction.

So I had a chance that all sons should get. I got a hot towel; I lathered his cheeks. It is strange to be so close to one’s father, to be able to look him in the eyes, to run a smooth blade down the side of his cheek, to touch his face without complication.

I shaved him and he was ready. For all the shattering of his body he still wanted to go to the held-together past. And he did so. When the radio folk arrived to talk to him about his life he lit up from the inside and told his stories as they were meant to be told. The news around us was the IMF and the bailout and the protests and the interest rates and the bankers. Fair enough. But our stories don’t have to be national to be necessary. He talked, of course, about the white donkey. I could close my eyes and see my father, younger than I could ever know him, clopping along towards whom he would become. Me, I sat there thinking of lather and blade.

Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin won last year’s National Book Award in Fiction