Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The problem with being Irish... is having 'Riverdance' on your back. It's a burden at times.
I had studied Irish history. I had read speeches from the dock. I had tried to fuse the vivid past of my nation with the lost spaces of my childhood. I had learned the battles, the ballads, the defeats. It never occurred to me that eventually the power and insistence of a national tradition would offer me only a new way of not belonging.
Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.
Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.
Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.
Being Irish is very much a part of who I am. I take it everywhere with me.
I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction.
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Being Irish, I always had this love of words.
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