For centuries, America has occupied a dominant place in the Irish imagination. However, our fantasy of the United States often collides with the reality. Eamonn Wall, a Wexford native and current Nebraska resident, is no stranger to the immigrant's dilemma of finding a place in a new land even when old identities and allegiances remain strong. This book is a personal journey told unconventionally through memoir, essay, fiction and literary criticism, for one form alone cannot suffice to explore the complexity of exile.
Wall's humility and generosity are apparent from the outset; he does not attempt to tackle his task alone but ropes in the works and observations of a myriad of Irish and Irish American writers. Michael Stephans, Mary Gordon, Eavan Boland, John Montague, Brian Moore and Helena Mulkerns are but a small sample of the artists whose work he draws on to probe his topic. Wall poignantly refers to second generation Irish Americans as "Shadow Americans". They are trapped by the unresolved anger of immigrant parents, and their only hope is to disappear through assimilation into the vacuous mainstream of suburban America.
Though Irish Americans can undergo this process by virtue of their white skin, as Michael Stephans's fictional family, the Cooles, illustrate in his phenomenal book, The Brooklyn Book of The Dead, they do not go gently into that melting pot.
The Sin-e Cafe of the title was a New York East Village hangout that attracted a different kind of immigrant. Eamonn Wall himself is part of a new wave of Irish immigrants in the last two decades, who, as he puts it, skipped the traditional Irish ghettos and parishes and went "straight to the Lower East Side". The New Irish are educated and, given the communications revolution, completely hip to what's going on in downtown New York.
Cobblestones apart, there's currently very little psychic distance between Temple Bar and the East Village. Sine was inevitably a victim of its own success: in a world where space is cyber, real space can seem irrelevant. Nascent culture is hardly given time to breathe and develop before it becomes a commodity and is swamped by celebrities.
Talking about the demise of Sine, Helena Mulkerns states: "When Sinead O'Connor and U2 and the Black Crowes, etc, started dropping by, that was all written up, and instead of a local, unofficial arts center, you had a nightspot where people were practically lining up outside to get in."
The interviews with writers Roger Boylan and Helena Mulkerns make a splendid contrast between two world-views, one mourning the loss of the old and the other embracing the new. Roger Boylan morosely complains that most modern literature is "dross" while confessing to not reading any, and goes on to whinge about the Internet and vilify rock music. Refreshingly, Helena Mulkerns has created her own website, and cites punk music as an invigorating influence on New Irish writing.
The most personal and moving part of this book is the last episode, where Wall talks not only about immigration, but migration. He is wrenched away from his beloved adopted city of New York to teach in Nebraska and is forced once again to come to terms with an alien landscape. Here, he finds transcendence in the disputed territory of the Black Hills, where the Indians were conned out of their sacred lands. The Native American history of dispossession bears some similarity to Irish history but Wall is reluctant to indulge in parallels. After all, the Irish were an active part of the European invasion which sought to exterminate the indigenous people of this land.
Wall is profoundly moved when he witnesses his own second-generation children put down roots and form a relationship with the land of their birth - a relationship he himself can never have. But by bringing them to this troubled, magical wilderness he can give them their own heritage, their own sense of belonging. At last, this brings the stranger in a strange land the comfort he needs to continue his journey.
In this book, personal anecdotes merge fluidly and thematically with literary criticism and non-fiction to probe the mysteries of belonging and alienation, of being an Irish immigrant and father of American children in the United States. Wall's style is at once casual, humorous, moving and profound. The fact that this book is so easy to read is deceptive and a testament to Wall's calling, not only as a poet, but also an educator. He seeks, not to dazzle us with obtuse references and arcane academic language, but to reveal the deep heartbreaks and occasional joys of exile with unerring simplicity and touching honesty.
Emer Martin's novel More Bread Or I'll Appear has just been published by Allison and Busby