It was the most awesome T-shirt I had ever seen. A funky deep purple dye and a cartoon of a drunken cat on the front. Thirteen years old, I stared at in gobsmacked delight. Gimme! The cat was all starry-eyed with a wasted grin on his face and he was lying inside a whiskey bottle. “Awe, Mom, why can’t I have that T-shirt?” I said over the phone. For some reason my mother had laughed when she saw the T-shirt in a shop and said she would discuss the matter with her friends at work before buying.
“I just don’t think it is such a good idea,” my mother said with a big smile in her voice and I could hear one of her friends laughing in the background.
I was bewildered. It was civvies day at our school soon and we could all wear casual clothing instead of school uniforms and my heart was set on wearing that T-shirt. It was just a picture of a drunk cat, for heaven’s sake, I thought. About a decade later, I was reminiscing about my school days and suddenly there was that memory of that T-shirt of the inebriated cat inside a bottle. What I also remembered, with renewed impact, was the slogan on the T-shirt: “Happiness is a tight pussy”. Ahem. Memory shifted meaning. For the first time it occurred to me why my mother laughed and refused to buy the garment.
We just seem to be chock-a-block with memories and undreamt-of associations that we only make some sense of much later in life. Some are even built into our genes or our souls if we still choose to believe that.
The most powerful, for me, was visiting Ireland. I am of Irish descent and proud of it. Singing in pubs is a pastime of theirs, and of mine, even before I became aware of that trait among fellow Paddies.
My first experience of the Irish proper (as in those who live in Ireland) was the ferry from Holyhead in Wales to Dun Laoghaire just outside Dublin about fifteen years ago. The ferry was just a huge, floating pub. I sang as best and lustily as I could with the lads at the bar counter, many of whom had baggage trolleys loaded with boxes of Forster’s beer which they were taking back to Dublin for their shebeens, I gathered. I recall sitting back with my head raised and arms folded (just like them, it came naturally, that posture), extolling the virtues of Van Morrison’s “Brown-eyed girl”, but could not keep up with all the real Irish ditties they all knew so well. I was jealous. Their music was deeply tattooed into their identity.
But still, South African born and bred, I was absolutely at home with the Irish, and it was definitely an ancestral resonance, a sense of belonging that lay deep below the surfaces of verbal memory.
That sense of belonging was temporarily removed when we got to the passport check-in at Dun Laoghaire (Dun Leary in English). The tubby, blue-eyed official grinned and waved the lads through with their crates of Forster’s beer and without checking their passports, no less. And they were reeling drunk, singing at the top of their voices. He looked at me and my girlfriend at the time (this was long before the advent of the Chook) more cautiously, but friendlily enough. He checked my passport, which was Irish and which I produced with a proud flourish.
The passport official then started asking me questions about the duration and nature of my stay in Ireland. What I was going to be doing and so forth. The cheeky bugger, I thought. I am an Irish citizen, as evinced by my passport and did not need to answer such questions. “Long as I like, mate,” I said in my best, cringeworthy, fake UK accent. “This is an Irish passport and I have as much right to be here as you have … and here is my Irish birth certificate,” which I produced from inside a flap of the wallet into which my precious passport was inserted. The document was a cherished “particulars of a foreign birth”. The official had a sort of blank grin on his face while the momentous nature of our brotherhood sank in. “Catch you later, mate,” I primly announced and stalked into Ireland.
Ireland! Many times on my trip there I could not shake off the feeling that I had been there before. You have been here before, echoed something through me, not so much the words, but an electric surge that contained the deeper meaning underlying those words, buckets drawn up from some unfathomably deep well. It was eerie; it was déjà vu. I could feel and smell the history of me — an ancestral me — on solitary walks down those beautiful stonewalled roads all over the Irish countryside.
I tried to put into the following lines my experiences of Ireland
Pick two of her stones, bright and bare —
Your words will soften them, creating her eyes.
She is this country: her unbridled lips
Gentle you into verses, wetting the mist and the noon
On this road which is narrowed in the glow
From coal-damp stone walls. Stones are everywhere
And grant this scene the burden of the ages.
Listen: The pulse of boots, gunfire, hooves.
This was in the mid-nineties, South Africa was a barely-born democracy which I was tremendously proud of and very hopeful about. I found myself associating my identity as a second-generation South African with my ancestral identity as an Irishman. Of course, I was also aware of the sad, cruel history of Ireland, or rather, both Irelands:
Today, rain-tender as mourning often is
In the ancestral home of County Antrim,
You are a journal untouched, a language unfingered
In two South African generations of saddening
Into the senseless. That’s why she’s called you –
To put these stones and their stories into
A hearth of words, to take them back
To another home, a dwelling of a kind.
County Antrim! Before writing the poem I actually had no idea where my grandparents came from in Ireland. The sense of belonging, of deep, wordless, tugging memories, you have been here before, been here, been there was strongest in County Antrim. At times my eyes were watering with the power of the déjà vu. And “it was getting weird, like!” as the Irish might say. When I got home to Joburg I phoned my mother in Cape Town to find out where my grandparents came from. Yes, you guessed it: County Antrim. We are, I realised, our histories, in ways much deeper than we can cerebrally know. The scary or sobering thing is we are not tuned into our histories, our deeper identities. For some reason, and only to some extent, I was tuned in when in Ireland. My experience of my ancestral home was one that I will hold high and cradle close as something sacred, venerable. There is something poetic and musical about us Irish. And the sad thing is I will probably never live there.
So what is your identity? What have your memories made of you? In the rest of the poem which follows I often compare Ireland to a sacred but violated woman, a Mary figure, a Guinevere. Dropping the stones partly means letting go. The rest? A wordless significance, brimming with ancestry, identity and a wish to belong somewhere, somewhere, still resonates nearly fifteen years later:
Two homes, two histories,
As blunt as the stones in your hands.
The one where you now hike, stop and crouch
Holds an ancient, terrible loveliness.
She tugs
At you until your bones ache.
Your body sags, feeling its ghost-light
Brimming through the skin at the sight
Of her body and its old, stupid hurt.
Her eyes — like stones they’re everywhere,
Watching you find the history of her.
If words
Could calm her face, give it the sheen
Of a loving stare. At times on these cliffs
Her cheeks are granite hills tumbling
Into roadside walls soothed by a tartan
Of heather and moss, and a louch below.
You drop
The stones and for years you know you will hear
A long slow clattering echoing over cliffs
Whenever you leave or return.
Sadly, my only memories, sense of belonging and déjà vu are on the Southern tip of Africa where my forbearers made their home when the first soldier bearing my surname came to the Overberg from Switzerland. Sadly, because I’m still seen as an outsider or a ‘settler of a special kind’. My ancestral identity is Afrikaans, based in Africa and this is the continent that will always be my home, it doesn’t matter where I’m living.
Hey Rod, great read, and something that really resonates with me. I was given away at birth for adoption and am still trying to find info on biological parents. There is a theory that in the ’60s you were “given” to couples that mirrored your biological ancestary. So I have always had the sense that I could have some Irish in me.
About 4 years ago I went to Ireland and what you have written has left me with goose bumps and teary. Dublin was home even as going through passposrt control with my green RSA passport. Then the city, the people and that tug. It’s in our genes and in our souls. No accident the people the landscape, the history, the poetry, lit and music have always resonated. Still working on the bio-parents info, there’s Irish in there somewhere to be sure!
I walked past a neighbour’s house as a wee 3 year old and one of his pet geese rushed out and bit me really hard on my backside as I was trying to run away. Considering our relative sizes at the time, it was like being rushed and bitten by an insane ostrich. To this day, I have very great respect for any feisty-looking poultry.
Memories of apartheid have made who we are AND
how we perceive and treat people of other
nationalities.Epigenes have formed generations
of black and white racists in south africa that
still indoctrinate their children in various ways
such as christianity,legally,socially,educationally
and politically.
On reading this it’s easy to see why many ‘African Americans’ still think of themselves as African. There is definitely an unvisible cord that binds us to our roots and I too felt it when I went to Ireland some years back: a deep sense of belonging and understanding. On returning to SA I was equally overwhelmed by a sense of home and familiarity and I felt quite blessed (to use an old-fashioned word) to have experienced both.
Blip, I also had a bad goose experience at a young age. I’ve since discovered that barking like a mad dog is a good way to scare the suckers off.
I was born in the UK of an SA father (in the RAF) and an English mother. We came to SA when our dad retired, but moved around the UK every few years as he was reposted between bases. I have memories of staying at a place called Silversands (Scotland), where we rented the top floor of the vicarage, a large stone building, until married quarters at Petrievie Castle were available. The steps up to that top floor were so long and hard to climb. I used to sit on a step to rest halfway, while my mother nagged me to hurry up. The cliff at the beach also had stairs carved right up it and I remember my brother standing on the step above me. I would get my foot at about shoulder height, on the stair above and he would pull me up. And so we would proceed. He was eight years older than I.
I was two at the time and my mother was utterly amazed when I once told her of these memories!
The most interesting thing about the married quarters, is that every home was identical apart from being mirror-imaged and semi-detached. We moved from Scotland to Ickenham later and the house was the same; the carpets and curtains copies; the furniture could have been moved there for us, but all was the property of HMS.
Good to note you are sounding more cheerful. Keep it up!
Rod, Rod…
That was some of the best read I have had in a long time now. Thank you!
You said: “The scary or sobering thing is we are not tuned into our histories, our deeper identities.”
We could probably better be quite happy with that. This makes us able to make the road as we walk it.
Think about the monumental songs you will sing sometime in the far future, while echoing your travels and experiences in THIS lifetime!
Though, I mused a bit on why you did not say: “It echoes whenever you leave AND return…”
But it makes the best sense of it as it is, Rod. Our future is made as we create it now.
Again – thank you for this cherished moment of longing for home…!
JoeR
Thanks JoeR. With regard to the poem. Thanks for picking up on the nuance of “leave and/or return”.
I respect poetry enough to mull and mouth over and over each line in final draft and inspect every word. Or try to. I went with “or” finally instead of “and” as to my mind every leaving is a returning to somewhere else… in the CONTEXT of the poem, that is. The word or seemed to contain more tension, suggesting yearning. I am not saying I am correct; that is just how my ear/heart felt the word “or”…in context.
Dear Rod
I’m glad that you seem more cheerful now, and thankful that you have several irons in the fire. I agree with MLH’s previous post.
Your post struck a chord with me too. I also took the ferry to Dun Laoghaire. I’d left my (British) passport back in Berkshire. When we disembarked the passport control officer asked all the passengers if they were British, and if they said “No” he asked to see their passports. I said that I was British, for the first and probably last time in my life.
I met a cousin of my dad’s in Dublin and she told me of a graveyard in County Clare where I could look for the remains of my Murphy ancestors. In a pub on the route of the backpackers’ tour that I was on, a band dedicated a song called “It’s a long way from Clare to here” to me. Pity they didn’t take debit cards, I would have bought one of their tapes out of unashamed sentimentality.
When I visited the Scottish Highlands under the influence of Braveheart, I remember thinking that the Scots, like South Africans of a century or two ago, must have been tough to live in that wild and beautiful place.
An Afrikaans acquaintance asked me recently “Is jy Engels of Afrikaans?” I replied “Ek is Skots.” My Scottish-born mother writes “Celtic” when asked to give her ethnicity and not compelled to choose “White”, as do I.
Hi Rod is your Mom’s name Sheila or Shelagh McKay by any chance? Was she born in Port Braddan? If so an old family friend from Port Braddan would like to get in touch with her. Regards Elise
Hi Elise – no that was not my mom, good luck with finding your old friend.