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Emerald Memories

Ireland, A Great-Uncle, and a Journal

By KATHRYN HARRIS

The buildings in Ireland are pulsing with color. It is as though a rainbow has exploded over the entire country, leaving it awash in vivid green and blue and yellow and pink, as though it is some kind of legacy, a holdover from its tumultuous past when its cobblestone streets were red with rebellion. It is as though the people are trying to compensate for a stark, suffering history.

It was in a yellow house in the southwest part of a southwest country where my grandfather was born, in the same year a group of grimly determined men and women seized German arms and took control of a post office in Dublin. It was from this house he left, he and one of his brothers, for America in the middle of the past century, and it was from this house he carried his stories and his music and his words and handed them to me.

That house is where my great-uncle still lives.

“Why would you want to learn Irish?” Uncle Willie peers quizzically at me, blue eyes large and watery behind thick glasses. He is a combination of his two brothers I had known growing up, and it’s still unnerving to hear my Uncle Joe’s voice from my grandfather’s face; it’s disorienting to see two dead men so very much alive in their brother’s every word and deed.

I shrug in slight embarrassment. I confess my Classics major’s desire to speak a language so very old. I confide my longing to reclaim a part of my culture that had been starved, beaten, and stolen from my ancestors. I admit that I don’t worry about practical applications, that I just learn things because I want to and not because they have any bearing on what I want to do with my life.

He asks me what that is, and I tell him sheepishly that I want to be a writer. I am prepared for a number of reactions, the usual ones I get when I reluctantly reveal this to people, but my great-uncle’s throws me off balance.

“Do you have anything here I could read?”

“I have a notebook with some poems in the car,” he surprises out of me.

He asks if he could read some, so I retrieve it from the red van we’re renting. I turn to a poem I think is decent, hand the notebook to him, and wait nervously while he reads it.

“You didn’t copy this from somewhere?” he inquires suddenly. “Someone else didn’t write this?”

I confirm that I had indeed written it, that it is in fact something I had made up myself.

“This is very good.” He sounds impressed, as though he hadn’t expected that. “Very good.”

I tense as he flips through the rest of the notebook and hastily explain that most of it contains nothing more than notes, character outlines for stories I’m working on, unintelligible and meaningless scribblings to anyone but me.

In my room above my desk is a poster I bought in Ireland this summer that features nine famous Irish writers. It’s there so that generations of Irish writers look down on me when I write, so I’m constantly reminded of the tradition I’ve been born into and committed myself to trying to uphold. Ireland’s literature is modern Ireland itself, both steeped in a history that until recently had to fight to be expressed. Every page of Joyce, each poem of Yeats gives voice to the Celts who died protecting their lands from the Romans, to the women and children Cromwell murdered simply because of their faith, to the patriots who gave their lives so their country could rule itself.

And as I stood in that house in that country with that man—the same style house the Irish have been building for centuries—I had never felt as connected to my past as I had then, while at the same time feeling on the verge of something different and unexplored. For the first time, I saw my writing in terms of more than just myself, but as a part of something greater. For the first time, I realized that if every writer writes for her country—if, as George Bernard Shaw once observed, an Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination—then it was true of me, as well.

Kathryn Harris '06 is a Copy Editor for The Watch