TOOL for Learning: Back on the road again in C.2.2.

Tasks for January 18th


1. In her 30-day challenge Cati chose the poem "An Irishman Foresees His Death" by W.B. Yeats

Listen to Irish actor, director and singer Adrian Dunbar recite the poem (you may recognize him from "The Crying Game")



How does the poem make you feel?
What ideas is the poet expressing in the poem?
Is it a war poem or a poem about what it means to be Irish?
What literary devices does Yeats use and to what effect?

Now read the poem together with Oliver Tearle's analysis of it.

https://interestingliterature.com/2018/04/a-short-analysis-of-w-b-yeatss-an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death/

Does he point out anything you had not seen? Listen to it again. Has the information provided about Yeats and the historical context helped you better understand the poem?

2. Now read Colm Tóibín's short story Journey to Galway.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/colm-toibin-short-story-the-journey-to-galway-1.2315961#.VoZA4Sr5uNQ.twitter

Write one question about the story to discuss with your classmates.

Choose one passage from the story and explain its significance.

Identify one simile or metaphor in the story and explain its meaning.

What is the historical setting of the story?

Are there any common themes between this story and Yeats' poem?

Between this story and Joyce's "The Dead"?

A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’

https://interestingliterature.com/2018/04/a-short-analysis-of-w-b-yeatss-an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death/

‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ is one of W. B. Yeats’s best-known poems: it is simultaneously both a war poem and a poem about Irishness, and yet, at the same time, neither of these. To unpick these paradoxes, a bit of analysis of the poem is required.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

A traditional, and rather breezy and superficial, analysis of ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ might go something like this: an Irish pilot fighting for Britain in the First World War predicts that he will die in that war, but he feels no sense of patriotic duty towards Britain, the country he fights for. He is fighting for Britain because, although he is Irish, Ireland was under British rule at the time (independence, leading to the formation of the Republic of Ireland, would not be achieved until 1922, four years after the end of the war). Instead, he identifies as an Irish patriot, rather than a British one.

What’s wrong with such an analysis? Nothing drastic, perhaps, and the essential details of Yeats’s poem are captured. But it all goes awry when we reach that final sentence, which is too glib for its own good. For it is not true that this ‘Irish airman’ feels patriotic towards Ireland rather than Britain: ‘My country is Kiltartan Cross, / My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.’

Despite Yeats’s title, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, there is little sense of patriotism at the national level displayed by the speaker. Instead, his allegiance is to his Kiltartan Cross, a small parish in the county of Galway in Ireland, a remote part of the British ‘empire’ which is unlikely to be greatly troubled by the war: this Irish airman’s sacrifice (or heroic victories) matter little to the ‘poor’ of Kiltartan, who are likely to remain poor whatever happens in the mighty clash of empires that was the First World War.

The idea that soldiers in the First World War fought ‘for King and Country’ made for good propaganda, and was undoubtedly true in the case of many English poets (Edward Thomas, for instance); but it wasn’t true of everyone, and many were motivated by more regional or local pressures (fighting to protect their loved ones, or to avoid the scorn of their neighbours incurred by not fighting).

And this was even truer, Yeats seems to suggest, of Irish fighters, who had less invested in England or Britain than, say, a young man from Shropshire or the Home Counties. His Irish airman fights out of a sense of duty, rather than national pride, whether British or Irish.

Why an airman? Air travel was still relatively new in the First World War (the Wright Brothers’ famous flight at Kitty Hawk was in 1903, eleven years before the outbreak of the war), and H. G. Wells’s vision of aerial warfare in The War in the Air (1908) was realised in WWI, the first major war in which aeroplanes were deployed. There was an excitement and exhilaration to flight, and the sense of boundlessness and freedom it suggested. Man, for the first time since Icarus’ failed attempts in Greek mythology, could finally soar among the clouds like a bird. The airman seems unperturbed by the fact that he will give his life in the war – something which the word ‘foresees’ presents as inevitable – because, much as with John Gillespie Magee’s sonnet from the next war, the ecstasy and liberty of aerial flight is worth it.

A few notes towards an analysis of the poem’s form: ‘An Irish Airman’ is written in iambic tetrameter, rhymed abab, with a fair bit of syntactical balance and poise (perhaps suggesting the poise of the plane in mid-air, but also arguably echoing the airman’s joint-status as ‘British’ and ‘Irish’): note the antithesis of ‘Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love’ and the chiasmus of ‘The years to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind’.

About W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. His first collection, Crossways, appeared in 1889 when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry bore the clear influence of Romanticism. As his career developed and literary innovations came with modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, Yeats’s work retained its focus on traditional verse forms and rhyme schemes, but he became more political, more allusive, and more elliptical.

His late work, such as his 1927 poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, about growing old, show a thoughtful and contemplative poet whose imagery and references defy easy exegesis (what exactly does the ancient city of Byzantium represent in this poem?). And yet, at the same time, there is a directness to his work which makes readers feel personally addressed, and situates his work always at one remove from more famous modernist poets (such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound).

Yeats died in 1939. Throughout much of his life, a woman named Maud Gonne was his muse. Yeats asked her to marry him several times, but she always refused. She knew she could be of more use to him as a muse than as a wife or lover. Yeats was in favour of Irish independence but, in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’ which respond to the Easter Rising, he reveals himself to be uneasy with the violent and drastic political and military methods adopted by many of his compatriots. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/colm-toibin-short-story-the-journey-to-galway-1.2315961#.VoZA4Sr5uNQ.twitter

She remembered an unusual silence that morning – a stillness in the trees and in the farmyard, and a deadness in the house itself, no sounds from the kitchen, and no one moving up and down the stairs. But she wondered later if the silence had been real or, instead, if it had been something she had merely imagined afterwards. She was unsure if the news had not actually changed her memory of the hours that came before. At times she thought that it hardly mattered, but at other times, especially when she woke to dawn light and dawn birdsong, the details of how word of Robert’s death came, and precisely what the period before was like, belonged to her life as much as her breath did, or her heartbeat.

It came to her as a story that had been told and re-told rather than a brutal single fact, as though placing it in time and remembering how the news had spread would come to soften what had happened, ease it, edge it away. The details of her journey to Galway to tell Margaret, for example, and what went through her mind on that slow train. Or where she was sitting when the word came, and what went through her mind in the seconds before she saw the telegram.

She lay in bed some mornings living it all from moment to moment, knowing that she would go on doing this until she died and that nothing she could do would make it change. For her, there was a line between the time before she heard of her son’s death and the time after. In the time before, she had wondered, if news were to come, where she would be, what room she would be in, at what time of the day it would come. She had even pictured herself receiving the news, her own face in shock, her voice gasping. And every evening, as she walked upstairs to bed, she had marked the day just ended as another one that had come and gone without news and thus a day to be savoured, to be thankful for. These thoughts seemed as different from the thoughts of later as land was from ocean, as air from water, as a death in a play in a theatre from a real dead body lying in a pool of blood in the real street outside.

When Robert had written letters, they had been devoured. She knew that there was much he could not say, which meant that a stray phrase carried weight, perhaps even hidden meanings. But how much was often unclear because his letters seemed to be written in haste; perhaps he had intended phrases to mean nothing more than what they said. When he wrote: “I sometimes awake feeling as if some part of me was crying in another place”, it hardly mattered whether he had meant to alarm her or not, whether he had meant or not to let her know how afraid he was despite his efforts to be brave, and, as an airman in a war, how much daily fear he lived with and how much he masked. The other place where he was crying, she thought, was here, where she was now, the house which he owned, which his father and grandfather had owned. If the crying was hidden, then it was hidden here and in the woods and fields around here, and the thought almost satisfied her as she read the letter again and again.

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It occurred to her afterwards that what he did in those few years when he was a fighter pilot was merely an exaggerated version of what we all do as we live: we swagger, we are full of pretence that there is no real danger coming towards us, we talk as though the enemy is in flight, or under control. As time moves, however, it drags us with it until the time for pretending ends and the body lies spent. When she saw him in London, and later when he came home to Coole, she noticed the swagger. She made sure that she gave no sign that she was watching all the time for a break in it, gave no sign that much of it seemed to her who knew him closer to bravado than bravery. She hoped he believed his own pose some of the time, at least, but she wondered when night fell for him and he was alone, how much he knew, how much he could foresee, and how little peace he got when the prospect of being alone and helpless in a burning plane thousands of feet above the earth insinuated itself into his waking time as much as into his dreams.

When she wrote letters to him, she thought too about chance. This letter, she imagined as she wrote to him, might be the last word he will read from me, or it might be the letter from me he will never read; it will arrive too late and it will be returned. It will be the special letter, written in hope, maybe even confidence, written to be read by someone who was alive, who would recognise the writing, and know that when she referred to Margaret and the children, she meant his wife and Richard and Catherine and Anne. These things would not need to be spelled out for him, since they were written in the quickened spirit of being alive, but they might never be read like that, they might become, unknowingly, last words, or they might be words that came too late, or they might be ordinary words glossed over, taken for granted.

The days before she heard the news seemed to have passed in slow time and lodged in her memory with sharpness and perseverance. She had gone to Dublin, stopping off on the way at her sister’s house where Margaret and the children were. She spoke at a meeting in the Mansion House calling for the paintings which had belonged to her nephew Hugh Lane to be returned to Ireland, as he had wanted, or at least wanted at the end of his life, a life also cut short by the war. The meeting was crowded and there was enthusiasm about the pictures and their importance for Dublin. The pictures were things that might matter.

From Dublin she wrote to Robert, saying that if the pictures came back she should feel “Now lettest Thou they servant depart in peace.” She was not sure she meant it, but he might see the humour of it mixed in with the sense of this struggle as the last one she would have energy for. And she gave news to him about the trees she was planting, the formal rows of larch with inlets of elm and sycamore, and then some silver birch and broom. And she added what she thought might please him about the children without making him too sad, writing of Richard with a catapult looking quite the schoolboy, and then concluding with the thought of what a happy world it might be “with you back and the war at an end!” She concluded with: “God bless you, my child.” She did not know that he was already four days dead.

When she came back from Dublin she went to the wood where she had been planting and was vexed that some timber had been given away and annoyed too the men were cutting the young ash which had come into sight after they had cut the spruce. She had imagined Robert coming home and seeing the ash trees and the blue hills between them and seeing also the broom and the flowering trees.

She decided that she would spend the whole next day at the wood making up for her absence, making sure that everything was done according to her plan. In the morning she asked for a sandwich to be made for her and the donkey carriage made ready and, while waiting, she decided to go into the drawing-room and write a letter, some letter that was urgent, or that seemed urgent then that morning. Her day ahead was fully planned, and it was easy to imagine how it might have been. She would have been well wrapped from the cold; she would have been decisive, thinking ahead to what things in the wood might look like in a year, and then in 20 years, and then in 50 years when other people, those not yet born, would walk here. That day could so easily have happened, and, as she made her wishes known and watched the work happen, it would have left her satisfied.

She was at her writing table when Marian the servant came in very slowly. When she looked up she saw that Marian was crying. She had a telegram. But there had been telegrams before. Twice on her last visit to London she had received telegrams and they were from friends about the breaking of some engagement. Marian could so easily have presumed that a telegram meant bad news. But when she was handed it and looked down and saw that it was not addressed to her but to Mrs Gregory, to Margaret, Robert’s wife, she knew that it was telling of Robert’s death, it was as simple as that, it was to Margaret they would send it. The first words she saw were “killed in action” and then at the top “Deeply regret”.

She turned to Marian. “How will I tell Margaret? Who will tell her? Who can go to Galway and tell her?” She tried to stand up but she could not. It occurred to her that she must not cry now or think about herself. She must fix her mind on one thing – on that scene she had witnessed a few days earlier, Margaret and the three children lodged with her sister, the ease and the peace in the house despite the worry. It was to be broken now. Who would break it? She wondered if she could send Marian and if Marian could hand Margaret the telegram as she had handed it to her. She told Marian to order some vehicle that could meet the train in Gort.

She went upstairs and got some things for the journey, even changing her dress as though it might matter what she was wearing. But it slowed time down as she selected it. It slowed time down as she took the other dress off and put this one on and then checked herself in the mirror and made sure that she had forgotten nothing. The carriage would be waiting. She wondered if there was one more thing she needed to do in the bedroom, but there was not. She had the telegram in her hand now, and that was really all she needed. She would have to show it to Margaret. Maybe that is what she would do, say nothing, just hand her the piece of paper.

As she walked towards the train she saw that Frank, her brother, was at the window of a carriage and was motioning her to come and join him. She looked at him and looked away and walked further down, away from him. She did not want his company. She could not speak. She went to some other carriage where there was a woman, a stranger. As she sat down, she tried to picture the scene in Galway, her arrival, she tried to imagine what words she would use if she were asked why she had come. She bowed her head.

At one of the station stops when Frank came to her window she tried to tell him, but found that she could not speak and instead held out the telegram which she had in her hand. For a second it struck her that if she could only have something else in her hand, then this might all be nothing, that it was the telegram itself which was bearing down on her. Frank spoke softly. “I know all about it,” he said. He had guessed from her face that some dreadful thing had happened; when he sent someone to ask the driver of the carriage, the worst was confirmed for him.

As the train went on, she cried, but not much, aware of the other woman, the stranger, opposite her. She forced herself to sit up straight and steel herself. So this was what Robert’s life had led to then, this death! It was like an arrow hitting its target. It would hardly matter now, or in the future, how cruel and thoughtless Robert had been in the year or two before he signed up. There was no need to judge him anymore. She would remember him instead when he was a boy, or a young man she was proud of. Someone brave and talented, filled with daring. His dying meant that she would no longer have to judge him. Death would simplify him and that at least was something. Margaret could mourn him, or some idea of him, and forget what he had done, forget how, in the time before he joined up, he had seemed to want her to know that he was in love with her best friend. In that time he appeared to enjoy the idea that Margaret knew that he and her friend had become lovers.

Perhaps it was easy, or too tempting, to be cruel to Margaret; she would, she thought as the train moved towards Galway, find out herself soon since Margaret would inherit everything, the house, the land. There would be a struggle. Robert was already in a place where such struggles no longer mattered. She gasped for a moment when Robert’s face appeared before her and the thought came that his body had been burned and that he might have suffered badly as his plane went down.

Yes, she thought, going to war had solved so much, it had left things in abeyance, it had meant that all discussion had been postponed, it had made compromise impossible, but in solving what it did, it had solved too much. It had solved everything so there was nothing left. All their daily thoughts, all the differences between them, all their knowledge of one another, were nothing now and would always be nothing.

Despite what had happened, Margaret had wanted him back. But he would not be back; he would not grow old, or live to regret anything at all, or be forgiven. Action had given him simplicity, as it must have done for others, an avoidance of having to deal with his own complexity. Death, however, would give him nothing at all. From now on, it would be all absence. For her too, everything she did or said in the future would be a way of distracting herself from the stark simple fact that her son had died in the war, in the last year of the war. There was hardly anything else to be said; the texture of what happened was reduced to a telegram, the telegram she still held in her hand.

And he had died in a British uniform, a uniform that had seemed more and more the uniform of another country. In joining the British army, he had been his father’s son; he had followed his cousins. He had not followed her, nor had she asked him to. She wondered now if he and those like him, the others who had died for this dream of empire, this large and abstract conflict between nations, would belong to the past, if they would not be shadows fading into further and deeper shadows. Their class would not hold sway in an Ireland of the future, she was sure of that. She began to imagine what it would be like instead if she were going on a train to Dublin to be with him on the night before his execution, if he had taken part in the Rebellion in Dublin.

She thought of how proud she would be on the train, how there would be some people travelling with her who would feel exalted by her presence. But it would end in the same way. It would end in death, it would end in three fatherless children, it would end in a future in which Robert would only be a name and a memory. He would never come into a room again. It hardly mattered what cause he had fought for, or what his impulse to join had been. It was over; he had been killed.

She was relieved that Frank kept away from her as she changed for the Galway train, relieved that Frank was not also going on to Galway. She looked around for Daly, the porter whom she knew. Someone would have given him the news. But there was no sign of him. She was glad that none of the strangers near her guessed. This was an ordinary day for them; perhaps there was comfort in that, but it was not a comfort that lasted long. When the train came she sat alone and willed only that it would go slowly, or that it might stop somewhere for a while.

In Margaret’s mind, she thought, Robert was still alive. Maybe that meant something; it gave Robert some strange extra time. Although she knew that that idea was foolish, it helped her but it also increased her dread. She was moving westward like cruel death itself, she thought. She was the one who had the news. Until she appeared in the doorway of that house, there would not be death. But once she appeared, death would live in that house. There would be nothing else except death. She carried death with her, she thought, as she had once carried life.

Later, every single thought she had on that train stayed with her as though she had written the thoughts down one by one there and then. But she did not remember the next part clearly. She moved from the light of day into dream as she left the train that day. It was already dark. She took a car across the city, or at least she must have, and they went to the house. She remembered the instant when she gave the man his fare.

When a maid opened the door, she remembered thinking that if only she could be back somewhere else now, in the woods, even in the train, even in the car on the way here. But she had arrived now. As she went into the hallway, she simply asked for Margaret. The maid said that Margaret was in the study with the mistress and followed her as she walked into the room on the right, a room that was seldom used. She told the maid to ask Margaret to come to her, just Margaret. She stood there with the door open. When her daughter-in-law appeared, Margaret looked at her and asked “Is he dead?” She handed Margaret the telegram and then turned away towards the window while Margaret read it. She had brought the news. It was done. It was over. The journey to Galway was over.

This is an edited version of a story that appeared in All Over Ireland, a Faber & Faber anthology of Irish short stories edited by Deirdre Madden

Draft for the Joyce - Huston exercise...

Regardless of its success, it may certainly take a book years to become a movie.

This time distance proves to be a serious hurdle to face for a filmaker because of the reader's high expectations usually based on fond memories. I can barely remember fine adaptations such as Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange or Russell’s Women In Love. On the contrary, hell is packed with frustrated efforts such as 1984.

In rare occasions have I had the opportunity of reading a tale or book and watching immediately the movie based on that story, as it happened during this holiday season. I was first delighted with The Dead from James Joyce's Dubliners as I found not only the story but also the characters very moving and emotional. Hard not to feel strongly engaged or identified with any of them, thanks to the outstading performances of the entire cast.

While the whole movie is a faithful adaptation of Joyce's masterpiece, I noticed some slight but significant differences between both.

In general terms the film seemed to me much more explicit about politics, and reflects much more clearly the existing tension between different parties at that time. Mrs. Ivers’ definition of a West Briton as “someone who looks to England for our salvation instead of depending on ourselves alone” is key to report this conflict and was missing in the book.

As regards the flow of the story I could notice a faster tempo in the movie with exception of the ending part, but this could be easily explained by the fact that the ryhthm of a movie is set by its director, while readers decide their own pace, take every break they need to recreate the story on their minds, as if shooting their own private film. As said before, there is a deep contrast in tempo between the first part of the movie – the lively party hosted by “the Three Graces of Dublin” – and the ending - Gabriel’s monologue, after a feeling of dispair invaded him as he discovered there had been someone very special to Gretta long before he married her.

An absolute must -read novel, a film to watch!

Tasks for January 25th

Do the activities on Colm Toíbín, the author whose story "Journey to Galway" you read last week.

Read Colm Toíbín´s Summer of 38

Summer of '38
by Colm Tóibín

Montse held the door of the lift open for her daughter and put her hand in her coat pocket to make sure that she had her keys. She would walk Ana to her car, which was parked nearby, then, once Ana had driven away, continue on the short distance to the town center to get some groceries. It was easier like this, easier than having Ana say goodbye to her in the apartment, easier than hearing the lift door close, knowing that there was nothing except the night ahead, no other sound but the traffic outside and the birdsong, which would die out when darkness fell.

“Oh, I meant to say that the man—you know, the man from the electric company—” Ana looked at her as though the man were someone she should know. “The one I told you about—he knew I was your daughter and he’s writing a book about the war in his spare time and he asked me where you lived.”

“I don’t know that man at all,” Montse said as she closed the front door of the building. “I’ve never had anyone from FECSA in the apartment. He is mixing me up with someone else.”

She liked to sound firm and in control. It saved her daughters from having to worry about her living on her own.

“Well, anyway, he said he knows you, and I gave him the address. So if he calls on you, that will be why.”

“The war?”

“He’s collecting information on the war.”

“Does he think I was in the war?”

“I don’t know what he’s doing exactly. He’s writing a book.”

“Well, I am sure he can write it without my help.”

“He’s nice. I mean, if there’s ever a problem with the electricity, he comes.”

“Don’t be giving my address out to people.”

They had reached Ana’s car. Montse saw that Ana was not even listening to her. Her youngest daughter, the one who lived closest by, took things lightly. She was, Montse thought, probably relieved that her weekly visit to her mother was over and she was on her way home.

Montse went out three times a day, even in winter. There was always something to buy, if only a loaf of bread or a newspaper. It meant that she took some exercise and saw people.

The week after Ana had mentioned the man from the electric company, Montse saw him waiting at the front door of her building when she came home with a bag of fruit. She did know him, she realized; he was someone she often saw on the street. She must have been aware, too, that he worked for FECSA, although she couldn’t think how she knew this. She didn’t think she knew his name or anything else about him.

Once he had introduced himself, she realized that he wanted to come up to the apartment with her. She was unsure about this. Since Paco died, she had become protective of her own space and she disliked surprises. She even asked her daughters to phone at appointed times. But there was something both eager and easygoing in this man’s manner and she knew that it would sound rude if she asked him to say whatever he had to say in the hallway of the building. Also, she thought, if something ever went wrong with her electricity, it would be useful to know a man who could fix it.

“Ana may have told you what I am doing,” he said, once he was sitting in the armchair opposite hers with a glass of water in his hand.

She nodded but said nothing.

“I am trying to chart every event of the war, just in this valley and the mountains,” he said.

“I wasn’t involved in the war,” she replied. “My father wasn’t even involved. And I had no brothers.”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t to ask you anything, but to say that a retired general in Madrid—actually, he’s from Badajoz—who was here during the war is coming back to show me where the dugouts were and exactly where the guns were positioned. He hasn’t been here since then.”

“One of Franco’s generals?”

“Yes, though he wasn’t a general during the war. I found his name and address and wrote to him. I didn’t expect a reply, but he is coming. I spoke to him on the phone and the only person he remembered here, besides the other soldiers, was you. He remembered your name and said that he would like to see you. I asked around, because I didn’t recognize your maiden name. I asked around without telling anyone why.”

“And what is his name?”

“Ramirez. Rudolfo Ramirez. He was high up in the Army when he retired. I didn’t ask him how old he was, but he sounded in good shape. Still drives a car.”

Montse nodded calmly and then looked toward the window, as though distracted by something.

“There were a few of them,” she said. “I’m not sure I would remember him. We didn’t have much to do with them, as you can imagine.”

“Anyway, he’s coming here on Saturday of next week. There will be no big fuss—I’ve assured him of that. I’ve told no one that he is coming, except you. He’ll show me what he needs to show me and then I’ll take him to Lleida to catch the train back to Madrid. But he said that he would come for lunch at Mirella’s, and when I told him that you were still living here he asked if you might join us.”

“I’m here all right,” she said, “but I don’t go out much.”

“I understand. But no one will know who he is. I could collect you and drop you back if that would suit you.”

“The war was a long time ago.” She was going to say something else and then hesitated. “It was fifty years ago. More.”

“I know. It was hard for all of you who lived through it. The more I find out about it, the clearer it is how much it divided people. I’m trying to get the facts right while there is still time. It’s history now—at least, for the younger generation it is.”

She smiled.

“Anyway, yours was the name he gave me, and he seemed delighted to hear that you were well.”

“I’m not sure I would know him. In fact, I’m sure I wouldn’t.”

“Shall I drop by next week and see what you think?”

“If you want, but I don’t go out much. I’ve never been to Mirella’s.”

“Well, it’s Saturday week at two o’clock, and, as I said, it would be just the three of us and no one any the wiser. He won’t be in uniform, or anything like that.”

“I’m sure he hasn’t been in uniform for a long time if he was one of Franco’s generals,” she said, and then instantly regretted having sounded so sure, so up to date, since she wished to give the impression that she was old and living in her own world.

“It is good of him to come,” the man said. “I was surprised.”

Montse looked back toward the window and did not reply. She hoped that it was clear to her visitor that he should go.

Rudolfo would be over eighty now, she calculated. But he would still have something of what he had then, even if it lurked beneath sagging flesh and stiff hesitant movements. She pictured an old man getting slowly out of an old-fashioned car, his hair white, his frame frail. Maybe he would still have something of the effortless charm that had come to him that summer as naturally as light did to the morning.

It was the summer of ’38, when the prisoners had all been taken to Lleida or Tremp. Those who had avoided capture had fled to the mountains or crossed the border into France or fled south to Barcelona. The town was quiet for a week or more—no one was sure who would come back or what would happen. The dam was being protected by Franco’s soldiers, that was all. Then more of his soldiers began to pile in, and they took over the town hall, and they put up tents on the grounds of the school. Orders were given that shops and bars were to resume their normal hours.

At first, she remembered, people were afraid and stayed indoors. There were rumors that they were all going to be taken away, every house cleared, even the houses that had nothing to do with the war. Under cover of darkness, some people made their way into the mountains or toward the border. Everyone was waiting for something to happen. But nothing happened except that ordinary life came back, or something like it. Once the shops had reopened and there was Mass again on Sundays, the talk was about the dam and how carefully it was being guarded, and about a clearing that the soldiers had made by the edge of the water and the makeshift bar they had built and the fire they lit every night to keep the mosquitoes away. The talk was of the supplies of food they had, and the guitar playing and singing and dancing.

She did not go there at first, but girls she knew did and even some of the older people who wanted to forget about the war.

Later, Rudolfo told her that he had seen her on the street, noticed her as she went shopping with her mother and her sisters, but she did not think that that was true. However, she was sure that she had noticed him the night she first went down to the makeshift bar. It was the way he seemed to be amused by things that drew her attention, the way he smiled. His hair was cut short; he was not as tall as some of the others. He was in uniform, his shirt unbuttoned. As he sat there watching, the soldiers began to play music you could dance to, slow songs. Some of them danced with girls from the town.

There was, she remembered, a swagger about the soldiers, which faded slowly as the night wore on, and there was something uneasy, too, which meant that when the music became sad they all seemed more comfortable, even the ones who were not dancing. When the soldiers were joined by others, who had just come off duty, there were sudden bursts of gaiety—shouting and clapping and drinking. Only Rudolfo sat quietly, observing the scene.

She realized that he had noticed her. Once, he nodded to her. It could have been a casual gesture, except that it was not. She knew that it was not.

After a while, when one of her friends left, she left, too. She did not go there the following night. The next time she went, he was there as before, apart from the others, watching, amused by it all. He did not stir, merely made it clear that he knew she was there; once again, he took no part in the dancing or the showing off around the fire.

He let her know by looking at her that he wanted her and that the rest—the drinking, the dancing, the boyish antics—did not interest him. He was shy, almost retiring, but seemed also entirely sure of himself. She didn’t believe that anything would happen between them. She didn’t think that he would move toward her or do anything to damage his self-contained observation of the scene around him.

Yet he kept his eye on her, and she returned his glances, careful that none of her friends were looking.

One night, there was a full moon and a clear sky. When the crowd moved to the edge of the water and let the fire die down, neither he nor she moved with them. When he spoke to her, she could not hear him, so he moved closer. She realized that no one had noticed that she had not joined the others by the water. Some of the soldiers there had stripped down and were swimming and splashing. Away from them, close to the dying embers, he touched the back of her hand and then turned it and traced his fingers on the palm.

There was an old ruined building nearby. They walked slowly toward it and when they leaned against the wall she was relieved that all he wanted to do was kiss her and smile at her in between the kisses. In all the years since, she had never forgotten the sweet smell of his breath, his eagerness and good humor.

The next night, he found them a place where they could lie together undisturbed, and that was what they did every night until September came.

Every day that summer she waited for the evening. Her friends knew that she was with Rudolfo, but most of the girls who went to the makeshift bar had found boyfriends among the soldiers. No one ever talked about it. When her mother asked her if she had been to the soldiers’ parties, she shrugged and said that she had passed by once or twice, but had walked on with her friends. When her mother asked her a second time, a few nights later, she was careful to come home early for once, so that no one at home would have an idea what she was doing.

She wondered now if she remembered correctly that the weather had changed as soon as the bombardment of the villages on the other side of the river began. Perhaps the man from the electric company would know. The bombardment began, in any case, toward the end of summer. The sound came in the night but often in the day, too, the sound of heavy artillery from up the valley. The villages that had remained with the Loyalists were being attacked.

She remembered her father saying that the soldiers had spent the summer preparing for this assault, that they had been building dugouts and finding the best positions and carrying the heavy guns there. They had left nothing to chance, once they secured the dam. He added that there was no hospital on the other side and no medicine, and the soldiers were letting no one cross the footbridge at Llavorsí or the bridge in Sort. People were trapped, he said, and the injured were dying of their wounds.

It struck her that the parties by the water were where the troops who’d been working all day preparing the guns came to relax. But she did not feel guilty. Instead, she hoped that those who had noticed her presence at the soldiers’ bonfires would have their own reasons to keep silent about it. In the years afterward, everyone—even those who had been there every night—pretended that none of it had happened.

It was the change in the weather that changed everything—she was almost sure of that. It was a gray day, with the mist that came over the valley in September, when she realized that she knew only Rudolfo’s name and that he came from Badajoz. By that time he was gone, and it struck her that he would, in all likelihood, not be returning. The realization broke the spell that had been cast on her, by the war itself as much as by Rudolfo.

It was not until then that she began to worry that she was pregnant. It was not only that she had missed her period; something in her body had changed. She waited and hoped that she was wrong. She woke in terror some nights, but in the day she tried to behave normally. In the meantime, the war went on up the valley, and jeeps and trucks full of soldiers and supplies drove through the town, and the town was often desolate, the main square empty, even though the bars and most of the shops remained open.

When she was sure that she was pregnant she decided that she would marry Paco Vendrell. For years at the town festivals he had followed her around, offering to buy her drinks, asking her to dance and, when she refused, standing on his own and observing her with a single-mindedness that made her shiver. He was ten years her senior, but had seemed middle-aged even when he was younger. Since he had begun working in the control room of the dam, when he was fourteen or fifteen, he had spoken of little else: the levels of water in the two rivers, or in the lake itself, or the flow of water that could be expected soon, or the difference between this year and last year. Montse’s father laughed at him, and for her mother and her sisters the idea that he had been pursuing her since she was sixteen or seventeen was a source of regular jokes. She did her best to avoid him, and if she could not avoid him then she openly rebuffed his efforts to speak to her.

Now she urgently wanted to meet him. For a few days, she watched to see if she could run into him on his way to work. Since she did not see him walking to the dam, she supposed that he was taken there by military jeep now, and brought home in the same way in the evening. No one, she knew, was allowed to approach the road that led to the control tower overlooking the dam. The only time she could be sure that she would encounter Paco, she thought, was at Sunday Mass. She would have to be brave and move fast and not worry about other people watching and commenting. The opportunity to meet him might not come every Sunday.

Fortunately, there was only one Mass on Sunday these days, and the church was more crowded than it had ever been, as the people of the town, even those who had no interest in religion, or who were known to have been with the Loyalists, set out to show the troops whose side they were on now. By the beginning of that winter, it had become clear to all of them who was going to win the war, and it was clear, too, that as soon as the war ended there would be many more accusations and arrests. She understood that there would be little pity for someone in her situation, no matter who the father of the child was.

That Sunday, she went to the church early, walking quietly and demurely in the street with a mantilla on her head and a prayer book in her hand. She was sure that Paco would go to Mass if he wasn’t working; he was not the sort of man who stayed away. But she could not remember actually seeing him in the church and did not know if he stood at the back, as many of the men did, or if he walked right up and found a place close to the altar. She would need to find a good vantage point from which she could see everyone, but she could not, she thought, sit at the back of the church, as she had never done so before and might be spotted by neighbors or by her family, who would wonder what she was doing there.

She sat in one of the side pews and was early enough to witness the two priests arriving, the older one, whom she knew, and the younger one, whom she had never met. What she noticed, as they walked up the aisle to go to the vestry, was their bearing, how proud they seemed and severe. They could easily, she imagined, have approached the vestry from outside, but approaching it like this gave them more dignity and more importance.

Soon, they were followed by a group of soldiers in full uniform. For a second, she was startled by the idea that Rudolfo could be among them. She looked at them carefully, however, and did not see him. Even if he did appear, she thought, whatever had happened in the atmosphere between the summer and now would mean that he would not come near her or acknowledge her. She was sure that, even were she to approach him and try to talk, he would avoid her.

She shivered for a moment and then watched warily as the pews began to fill up with people who kept their eyes averted. She wondered when the war would be over and wondered also, as the panic that often came to her in the night returned, what would happen to her if she could not persuade Paco to marry her. It occurred to her that she would be sent away, that her father and mother would not be able to protect her, even if they wanted to.

But how would she marry Paco? How could it be done? She had been so rude to him in the past, so dismissive. How could she make it clear to him that she had changed her mind? What reason would she give? In this uncertain atmosphere, with the chance that many more people were going to be killed or locked up, no one was thinking of romance or marriage, least of all someone like Paco, who was cautious and whose daily work at the dam was likely more and more difficult. But there was no one else she could think of who might marry her.

In the reaches of the night, one other option had come to her, and it appeared to her again now. There was a secluded place above the river, about a kilometre up the valley, where the current was strong and the water deep. Over the years, two or three people had used this place to kill themselves and their bodies had not been found for days. She thought that maybe soon she should go and look at that spot, check if it was guarded by the troops. She closed her eyes at the thought of it and bowed her head.

When Communion was almost over, she saw Paco walking up the aisle. She knew then that he must have been standing at the back. She studied him carefully as he returned. His lips were moving in prayer; his hands were joined. He seemed even odder and more isolated than usual. She almost smiled at the courage, or the self-delusion, it must have taken for him to pursue her the way he had; she wondered what thoughts he must have had before going out on those evenings and how disappointed he must have been to go home alone, knowing that he had no chance with her. It struck her, too, that, since he worked at the dam with the soldiers, he would have known about the parties at the water’s edge and might have heard that she was among the girls who had gone there. He might even have heard about her and Rudolfo. It occurred to her as she waited for Mass to end that he might want to have nothing to do with her now. And if he, who had been so enthusiastic, did not want her, then she was sure, absolutely sure, that no one else would want her, either.

She moved quickly as the ceremony came to an end. Paco was not the sort of man who stood at the church gates after Mass with a group of friends. In any case, no one would want to be seen standing around now. When she walked out of the church grounds she saw that he was already a block away. She followed him as quickly as she could, hoping that no one would see her. She had prepared what she would say to him. It was important to make it seem plausible, natural.

When he turned, he gave her a look that was anxious and withdrawn, and then almost hostile, as if to say that he had enough problems without her chasing him down to let him know yet again that she had no interest in him. He turned his back to her before she had a chance to smile. As he walked faster, she grew more determined. If he had wanted her before, she figured, he would still want her now. All she had to do was be careful and hide all signs of panic as she spoke to him.

Eventually, when he looked back again and saw her, he stopped.

“I have to go home to change my clothes,” he said, “and then they’ll collect me. They are very busy at the dam. Everything has to be noted and written down.”

She smiled. “Well, I’ll walk along with you so I won’t delay you,” she said. “We are all worried at home. You know, I have no brothers. And my father says that we cannot go out alone now, not even just to the shops. So I am locked in the house or that’s what it seems like.”

They continued walking. She feared that if she stopped talking for one second he would tell her something about the dam and everything she had already said would be forgotten.

“If you were free some time, it would be great if you could call at the house and maybe we could go for a walk, if only through the town and then home again. But maybe you are too busy.”

“There’s a new captain from Madrid and he’s a stickler for notes, and they all watch me in case I decide to pull one of the levers when they are not looking. You know, I’m the only one who fully understands the switching system, though the new fellow from Madrid is beginning to get the hang of it.”

She wondered whether, if she concentrated hard enough, she might get through to him. But she said nothing as they came to the town center and then it was too late.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’d better get going. I can’t use this suit in the control room. It’s the only good suit I have.”

When Paco called two days later, one of her sisters answered the door and did not disguise her amusement or keep her voice down. Montse found her coat and left with him. During the weeks that followed he called every few days. Her sisters and her mother made jokes about him, at first, then expressed puzzlement, and finally grew silent. Not one of them asked her what she was doing walking around the town with Paco Vendrell and having hot chocolate with him in one of the granjas.

He talked to her about the dam, explaining its strategic importance and how old some of the systems were, which meant that only someone experienced could deal with the levers, someone who knew that a few of them would not respond if pulled too fast, and also that if one of them was pulled halfway it would have the same effect as pulling it the whole way.

She already knew that he lived with his mother but found out now that his father had died when he was young. She discovered that he liked routines, liked going to work at the same time every day, and disliked the soldiers’ efforts to vary his timetable. Within a week, she, too, was part of his routine. Chatting to her, he seemed comfortable. She realized that he would be content to meet this way for months, maybe even years. He was not someone who would make a quick decision or want a sudden change in his life. And, like everyone, he knew that things would be very different when the war was over. He had a way of addressing the matters that interested him slowly and deliberately. Her efforts to speed things up, to ask him, for example, if he was happy living with his mother, failed completely. He did not register anything that interfered with the current of his own conversation.

When Christmas came, there were more and more rumors. Whole families disappeared, and houses became vacant. Her father said that anyone who had the slightest reason to leave should go now. She continued seeing Paco, although he was more cautious as they walked around the town, hoping not to be noticed by the troops.

One evening as she stood up from the table she saw her mother’s eyes resting on her belly. She waited until they were alone in the kitchen.

“How soon?” her mother asked.

“Five months, maybe a bit less.”

“Is Paco the father?’

“No.”

“Does he know?’

“No.”

“Is that why you are seeing him—so that he will marry you?”

“Yes, but he’s in no hurry.”

“Was it one of the soldiers?”

“Yes.”

“And he has disappeared?”

“Yes.”

Her mother looked at her.

“Let me deal with Paco,” she said.

For the next two weeks Paco did not come around. The weather grew cold and there was snow. Sometimes they could hear rifle fire in the distance, even during the day. Feigning sickness, Montse stayed in bed, joining the others only for meals. She waited for her mother to come into the bedroom and tell her that it could not be done, that Paco would not marry her. She imagined then how she would have to brave the cold and avoid the soldiers, find a quiet time and move as though invisible. She tried to imagine what it would be like to jump into a deep and fast-moving river, wondered how quickly she would sink, how long it would take her to drown. As she lay in bed, another scenario came to her: she would be sent to a convent or an orphanage somewhere and the baby would be taken from her as soon as it was born. She would not be allowed to come home. Maybe that would be preferable.

Eventually, when the house was silent one day, her mother came to tell her that the wedding was arranged. It would happen in a few days in a side chapel and Paco would take full responsibility for the child.

“His mother seemed surprised and almost proud,” her mother said. “She thinks the baby is his. Paco said that he has always wanted to marry you, that you are the girl for him, so at least someone is happy. There is a small flat at the top of the building where his mother lives. He is moving furniture in there right now. It would be lovely, Montse, if we didn’t have to see too much of him. He has a way of wearing me down with his talk.”

When her mother had finished speaking, Montse turned away from her and did not move again until she was sure that her mother had left the room.

As soon as Rosa was born, Paco wanted to hold her. In the days that followed, Montse watched him to see if he was holding the baby merely for her sake. She saw no sign of that, however. When Paco came home from work he wanted to know what the baby had been doing. Even being told that she had been sleeping was enough for him.

As they walked through the town with the baby, Montse was aware that other men were laughing at Paco because of his devotion to the baby. She knew that her family laughed at him, too. But Paco remained impervious to the laughter. When he was at home, he tried to amuse the baby; he soothed her if she cried. And, once Rosa learned to walk, Paco loved taking her out, moving as slowly as she wanted and holding her hand with pride.

Being married to him was strange. He never once asked about the father of the child. He seemed grateful and content with everything. Montse was grateful to him in return, but that did not keep her from feeling relieved when he left for work each day or when he fell asleep beside her in the bed. She was careful to disguise this, though. And slowly, as they had two more daughters and moved to a bigger apartment, she found that being polite to him took on a force of its own. She tolerated him, and then grew fond of him. Slowly, too, as she realized that her parents and her sisters were still laughing at him, she saw less of them. She began to feel a loyalty toward Paco, a loyalty that lasted for all the years of their marriage.

Rosa did not look like Montse or Paco, or her two sisters. Nor, Montse thought, did she resemble Rudolfo. All she had of her natural father was her way of staying apart. She had little interest in the company of other girls and yet everyone liked her. Although Paco was proud of his two other daughters, it was always clear that he loved Rosa best.

While the others settled locally, Ana in Sort and Nuria in La Seu, Rosa went to Barcelona and studied medicine. She married a fellow-doctor and opened a private clinic with him, using money that his family had given them. When Paco was dying, when his heart was giving out, Rosa insisted on looking after him herself. She sat with him in a private room at the clinic day and night. When he opened his eyes, all he looked for was Rosa.

By that time Rosa had three sons of her own, and it was in the sons, especially the eldest, Montse noticed, that Rudolfo appeared again. It was in their eyes, their coloring, but also in the slow way they smiled, in their shyness. Each year, when Rosa and her family holidayed close to Santa Cristina, on the Costa Brava, Montse spent two weeks with them. Once the oldest boy could drive, he would come to collect her. That journey, alone in the car with him, gave her pleasure.

When the man from the electric company came by again, she told him that she did not want to have lunch with him and the general, and that he should not press her as she was not feeling well.

“He will be very disappointed,” the man said.

“Yes, I’m sure,” she replied, realizing that the edge of bitterness in her voice had given away more than she’d meant to.

“We are all old now,” she added in a softer tone, “and we can only do what we can.”

“If you change your mind, perhaps you will let me know,” the man said. He left her a phone number.

As soon as he had gone she phoned the clinic and left an urgent message for Rosa.

“I wonder if you could come here on the Saturday of next week,” she asked, when Rosa called her back. “And if you could come on your own. If you can, I promise I won’t ask you for anything for a long time.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Is it something else?”

“Don’t ask, Rosa. Just come that day. Come for lunch. You needn’t stay the night or anything.”

She held her breath now and waited.

“I’ve looked at my diary,” Rosa said. “I have a dinner that night.”

“Great. So if you leave my house at four or five you’ll be there in plenty of time.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“You’re a doctor, Rosa. I’ll be seeing you.”

“I’ll bring my stethoscope.” Rosa laughed.

“Just bring yourself.”

She came not only with a stethoscope but with a device for measuring blood pressure and a set of needles to take blood samples and a cooler to keep the samples cold until she got back to Barcelona. She made her mother remove her blouse so that she could listen to her heart and her lungs. She drew blood slowly without speaking.

“I’m old,” Montse said. “There is no point in checking me.”

“You didn’t sound well on the phone.”

“No one my age ever sounds well on the phone.”

“Why did you want me to come today?”

“Because I thought if I gave you an exact day you might be more likely to come than if I said just come any day. I hardly ever see you.”

“I wish my husband knew me as well as you do,” Rosa said. She seemed to be in good humor.

The table in the dining alcove was already set. Now Montse put a tray of canelones into the oven and brought a bowl of salad and two plates to the table and some bread. She asked Rosa about her husband and her sons.

“They are all wonderful. The only worry we have is that Oriol failed chemistry and has to repeat it.”

“Does he still have that nice girlfriend he had in the summer?”

“He does, which is why he failed chemistry.”

When they had eaten, she brought Rosa her coffee at the table near the window.

“I found a box of photographs,” she said. “Some of them were taken before the war. They must have come from the old house when my mother died. I found them a year ago but I put them away because they made me too sad.”

She went into her bedroom, where she had the box waiting on the chair where she normally put her clothes for the next day.

“I wondered,” she said when she came back, “if we could pick out the best photos, the clearest, and if one of your boys, when they have time, could make copies for you and your sisters.”

She began to put bundles of photographs on the table.

“This was my grandmother,” she said, holding one up. “She lived with us until there was a falling out of some sort and then she lived with my aunt. She came from Andorra and my father always thought she had money, but, of course, she had none.”

“Who is the baby on her lap?’

“That’s me. There was a man who would come once a year with a camera and a booth and people would queue up.”

They began to flip through other photographs. Most of them were of Montse and her sisters, taken on summer outings.

“I have some here with no people in them—one of the river when it was flooded, which my father must have taken, and one of the dam being built. I can’t remember what year that was.”

Rosa moved these aside and began to examine another bundle of photographs of Montse and her sisters and their friends.

“Those were taken well before the war,” Montse said. “After the war I don’t think people took photographs as much.”

Rosa was studying a large-format photograph of a group on an outing with mountains in the background.

“Where is my father in this? Why isn’t he in any of the pictures?” she asked.

“Your father always took the photographs,” Montse replied.

She reached for another bundle.

“He might be in one of these, but he was the only one who had a camera in the years before the war and he liked taking photographs.”

She glanced at Rosa, who was nodding.

“Anyway, if you want to take the whole box and select the best ones—and if the boys had time they could make copies. It all must seem like ancient history to them, but maybe it will mean more when they have their own families.”

“I’ll be very careful with them,” Rosa said, picking up a photograph of herself as a teen-age girl with Paco, smiling, beside her.

“I think I took that one,” Montse said.

“I might get it blown up a bit bigger and frame it,” Rosa said.

When it was time to go, Montse carried the box of photographs to the lift and Rosa carried the medical equipment. Montse insisted on going down with her to her car.

“If that’s too heavy, just tell me,” Rosa said.

The car was parked close by. They put the box and the equipment on the back seat, and then Rosa embraced her, before opening the door and getting into the driver’s seat.

Montse waved as the car pulled away. She knew that she could easily be seen by anyone approaching. She looked up the street toward the town center to check if there was a car coming. The lunch would be over around now, she thought, and Rudolfo and the man from the electric company would pass by as they drove toward Lleida. She waited a few minutes, but when she saw no car she decided to go back inside and clear away the dishes. Later, she thought, she would walk to the town center and do a bit of shopping.

Soon, she knew, there would be an old man standing at the station in Lleida as the train to Madrid arrived. He would get on the train slowly and then walk along the aisle to find his seat. He would, she imagined, be polite to those around him as he settled in for the journey. Rosa would be on the motorway that led in the other direction, her driving steady and competent as it always was. Montse sighed with quiet satisfaction as she thought of the two of them, moving so easily away from each other; they would both be home before night fell.

This article appears in the print edition of the March 4, 2013, issue of The New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/04/summer-of-38

Think about the following questions. You will be discussing them in groups during our next class. You might want to note down some of your answers.

Part One: Discussion Questions

1. How is Montse presented at the beginning of the story? What do the following lines tell us about her?

It was easier like this

She liked to sound firm and in control

2. When I read the line "I didn't recognize your maiden name" it threw me off. Why do you think I had this reaction?

3. Why does Montse say "We didn’t have much to do with them, as you can imagine"? And why does the man from FECSA say "there will be no big fuss" and "no one any the wiser"?

4. How did the town people's reaction to the soldiers change over time?

5. What does the line "There was a swagger about the soldiers, which faded slowly as the night wore on" imply?

6. How is Rudolfo presented to us? How is he different from the other soldiers? Explain the use of the following simile "as naturally as light did to the morning".

7. The change in the weather is used a metaphor for another change. What does Montse come to realize? How is the spell broken?

8. Why does she decide to marry Paco? How do her feelings for Paco change over time?

9. What is Montse implying about the priests when she says that they could easily have approached the vestry from the outside?

10. What does Paco's devotion for Rosa say about him?  

11. Why does Montse refuse to meet with Rudolfo?

12. Why does Montse insist that Rosa come and have lunch with her precisely on Saturday?

13. Explain the significance of the last line: "Montse sighed with quiet satisfaction as she thought of the two of them, moving so easily away from each other; they would both be home before night fell."

14. Think of one additional question you would like to discuss with your classmates.


Part Two: Focus on Language

1. Explain the meaning of the following structures:

There was always something to buy, if only a loaf of bread or a newspaper.

She did know him, she realized.

Yet he kept his eye on her.

In all the years since.

It was the change in the weather that changed everything.

It was not until then that she began to worry

In the meantime, the war went on up the valley

she had never done so before

What she noticed was their bearing, how proud they seemed and severe.

Even were she to approach him and try to talk, he would avoid her.


2. Note down 5 words you have learned reading the story.

They can be some of the expressions I have marked in blue or some other expressions that you find it useful to know.

Part Three: Interview

Read the Interview Colm Toibin - Deborah Treisman about Summer of '38

1. What attracted Colm Tóibín to Catalonia?

2. According to Colm Tóibín, what things do Catalonia and Ireland have in common? What things set them apart?

3. Tóibín says "Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can." How is this depicted in the story?


Part Four: Colm Tóibín: Experiences of being gay in Barcelona in 1975

Play Video


What similarities do you see between the police Tóibín mentions in the video and the soldiers in the story?

What does Tóibín say about

- the public and private realm?

- the king?

- the legalization of the communist party?

- the change in people's attitude towards politics and activism?

Draft for answers previous task:

Think about the following questions. You will be discussing them in groups during our next class. You might want to note down some of your answers.

Part One: Discussion Questions

1. How is Montse presented at the beginning of the story? What do the following lines tell us about her?

It was easier like this

She liked to sound firm and in control

2. When I read the line "I didn't recognize your maiden name" it threw me off. Why do you think I had this reaction?

3. Why does Montse say "We didn’t have much to do with them, as you can imagine"? And why does the man from FECSA say "there will be no big fuss" and "no one any the wiser"?

4. How did the town people's reaction to the soldiers change over time?

5. What does the line "There was a swagger about the soldiers, which faded slowly as the night wore on" imply?

6. How is Rudolfo presented to us? How is he different from the other soldiers? Explain the use of the following simile "as naturally as light did to the morning".

7. The change in the weather is used a metaphor for another change. What does Montse come to realize? How is the spell broken?

8. Why does she decide to marry Paco? How do her feelings for Paco change over time?

9. What is Montse implying about the priests when she says that they could easily have approached the vestry from the outside?

10. What does Paco's devotion for Rosa say about him?  

11. Why does Montse refuse to meet with Rudolfo?

12. Why does Montse insist that Rosa come and have lunch with her precisely on Saturday?

13. Explain the significance of the last line: "Montse sighed with quiet satisfaction as she thought of the two of them, moving so easily away from each other; they would both be home before night fell."

14. Think of one additional question you would like to discuss with your classmates.


Part Two: Focus on Language

1. Explain the meaning of the following structures:

There was always something to buy, if only a loaf of bread or a newspaper.

She did know him, she realized.

Yet he kept his eye on her.

In all the years since.

It was the change in the weather that changed everything.

It was not until then that she began to worry

In the meantime, the war went on up the valley

she had never done so before

What she noticed was their bearing, how proud they seemed and severe.

Even were she to approach him and try to talk, he would avoid her.


2. Note down 5 words you have learned reading the story.

They can be some of the expressions I have marked in blue or some other expressions that you find it useful to know.

Part Three: Interview

Read the Interview Colm Toibin - Deborah Treisman about Summer of '38

1. What attracted Colm Tóibín to Catalonia?

2. According to Colm Tóibín, what things do Catalonia and Ireland have in common? What things set them apart?

3. Tóibín says "Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can." How is this depicted in the story?


Part Four: Colm Tóibín: Experiences of being gay in Barcelona in 1975


What similarities do you see between the police Tóibín mentions in the video and the soldiers in the story?

What does Tóibín say about

- the public and private realm?

- the king?

- the legalization of the communist party?

- the change in people's attitude towards politics and activism?

Tasks for February 1st


1. In the video we watched in class,

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13nwN8viJ2yz-WrbzIkGYMFOsj0LsGnvU/view

you heard about Belfast muralists Danny Devenny and Mark Ervine. Their project, Paint for Peace,

https://peaceprocess.northernvisions.org/portfolio/paint-for-peace/

is one of the community peace initiatives chronicled on the Northern Visions Peace Process website.

https://peaceprocess.northernvisions.org/

Choose one of the peace initiatives mentioned on the website (or if you prefer you can search for others online) and send a message to the Belfast forum

https://agora-eoi.xtec.cat/eoi-hospitalet/moodle/mod/forum/view.php?id=125319&forceview=1

with the name of the initiative as the subject, explaining who is behind it, who it is aimed at, what it involves and why you chose it. Add a link so your classmates can access further information about any projects they may be interested in. We are going to use these initiatives to practice creating proposals.

2. Do a Google search for Belfast Murals. Choose a mural. It can be political (Unionist or Nationalist) or deal with some other social issue but it should have a message. Go to the Belfast Murals page in the Songs and Murals Wiki.

https://agora-eoi.xtec.cat/eoi-hospitalet/moodle/mod/wiki/view.php?pageid=19476

Either choose one of the murals in the list or add another one that you find specially impactful or interesting and create a page for it. Embed an image of the mural. Include information about where it can be found. If it depicts a person, explain who the person is/was. If it depicts an event explain when the event took place and what it involved. If it refers to a social issue mention what that issue is and how it affects Belfast. We are going to use these murals in two further activities.

Draft for answers previous post

Tasks for February 8th


1. On February 15th you will be explaining the stories behind some of the Belfast murals to A2 students who will be visiting our class. Each pair/group of C2 students will be in charge of answering students' questions about two murals. This week you should do research into the murals you have signed up to explain. If you were not in class last week, please sign up for one pair of murals (3 student max per mural) on the Belfast Murals Page. During our next class you will share the results of your research.

2. Do the activities on Lyra McKee.

https://agora-eoi.xtec.cat/eoi-hospitalet/moodle/mod/page/view.php?id=126339&forceview=1

Emmalene Blake, a renowned Dublin street artist, putting the finishing touches  to her tribute to murdered journalist Lyra McKee. The wall mural features quotes from Lyra's 'Letter to her fourteen year-old self' and is on Kent Street (at the corner with Union Street) opposite the mural against which Lyra was famously photographed in Belfast city centre beside the Sunflower Bar. Emmalene was invited along with street artists from around the world to Belfast for the annual 'Hit the North' art event as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival.

Questions about Lyra's Ted Talk, How uncomfortable conversations can save lives, which we watched in class. (transcript available)



What was the purpose of Lyra’s trip to the US?

What did she learn about values?

Why does Lyra mention carrots?

What does she say about bridges?

What does she say about meeting Trump?

Why did Lyra find the idea of visiting a mosque off-putting?

What role did religion play in her life when she was growing up?

What lesson did Lyra learn in the Orlando mosque?

How does religion affect the LGBT community?

Why does Lyra mention Megan Phelps-Roper?

What does she say about the name of Londonderry?

With what call-to-action does Lyra end her talk?



Part One

In order to find out more about Lyra McKee choose ONE of the following texts:

A. Read her article on Intergenerational transmission of trauma and why ceasefire babies are committing suicide
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/conflict-mental-health-northern-ireland-suicide/424683/

B. Read Susan McKay's tribute The Incredible Life and Tragic Death of Lyra McKee
https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/the-incredible-life-and-tragic-death-of-lyra-mckee

You should be able to summarize the main points in the text you read/watched for others.

Part Two
Read Lyra's Letter to my 14-year-old self
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/19/lyra-mckee-letter-gay-journalism-northern-ireland

Part Three

Using Lyra's letter as a model, write a letter to your 14-year-old self.



A documentary on Lyra came out recently, but to the best of my knowledge it is not available to watch online.

Here's the trailer



If we find out where it is screening, it would be great to go and see it.

And a reminder that I am posting a multiple choice reading/exam practice exercise every week in the Language Corner

Draft for answers previous post

Tasks for February 15th

1. Continue researching the two murals on the Belfast Murals Page you signed up to talk to our visitors about.

https://agora-eoi.xtec.cat/eoi-hospitalet/moodle/mod/wiki/view.php?pageid=19476&group=0

Think of the possible questions our visitors may ask you about the murals and what they depict. Add any relevant information to the wiki page in a format that is easily accessible (no excessively long paragraphs, important words in bold etc.) so you can look the information up quickly if need be. Please note that you are sharing the wiki pages with another team of students from the other C2 group so feel free to add and edit but do not remove information from the page.

2. Listen once again to the story of the Red Hand of Ulster to make sure you understood the details in the story correctly.

https://agora-eoi.xtec.cat/eoi-hospitalet/moodle/mod/wiki/view.php?pageid=20039



Then read about the current controversy about the hand. The article is also available here.

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ancient-red-hand-symbol-of-ulster-still-has-power-to-divide-northern-ireland/28535172.html

As Northern Ireland's marching season begins in earnest, photographer Declan O'Neill calls for an end to sectarian fighting over the Red Hand of Ulster and a reassessment of the ancient symbol
They say that you are never more than 100ft from a Red Hand of Ulster in Northern Ireland.

Over the course of one afternoon, I photographed more than 100 examples of this ancient Irish symbol – partly in an attempt at divination, and partly as an attempt to show how the red hand is suffering an image problem.

With the summer marching season imminent, flaunting the red hand will be de rigueur on the banners, uniforms and flags of loyalist flute bands and their supporters, who have misappropriated the symbol as an endorsement of their particular brand of ethnic identity and staked a claim to what you might call its cultural copyright.

But while many might associate the red hand with loyalist iconography, there is a cultural tug of war over its ownership. It still adorns the provincial and political flags of Ulster and Northern Ireland, and is deployed frequently by the Ulster Volunteer Force and other loyalist paramilitaries (including the Red Hand Commandos). Yet the Gaelic Athletic Association uses it on County Tyrone's team kit; a red hand marks burial plots maintained by the National Graves Association; adorns stained-glass windows in Belfast's City Hall; and even advertises the services of Indian palmists. For decades, it was the logo for the Northern Ireland tourist board (it has been replaced by the symbol of a heart).

And as you can see from the images on these pages, the majority of the red hands I photographed are vernacular in style – captured in house paint, bathroom mosaic tile and jig-sawed from plywood.
Not surprisingly, there are countless versions of the red-hand tale in the oral traditions of Ireland. The best-known yarn has a Viking longboat war party closing on the shores of Ulster. Their leader promises the first man to touch land full possession of the territory. On board is an Irish mercenary, a turncoat of a man called O'Neill who, with a sword blow, severs his hand and throws it ashore. Ulster is now his property and the mutilated hand becomes the family symbol and icon for a regional creation myth immersed in violence and territorial rights.

And so the image of the hand, constantly revised and eroded, litters the architectural and social topography of Northern Ireland – and, at best, is tolerated for the sake of tourist spectacle. But the policy-makers regard it as irrevocably tainted by a history of violence and are keen to see it removed.

The blood sacrifice in its name has indeed contaminated the hand's image, but as an O'Neill myself, I believe it should be regenerated rather than erased. In the shadow of Belfast's Harland and Wolff dry dock where the Titanic was built, a site for a new public art project is being discussed, and I have submitted my own proposal for a new red-hand sculpture. I don't yet know the outcome – but I believe it's high time we cleaned up the red hand.



3. You should start preparing your proposal, choosing one of the two tasks I handed out in class and filling out the outline with key words only. Be sure to look at the sample structure for the presentation of proposals. Bring the outline to class with you.

4. If you have not done so, please send your letter to your 14-year-old self to bferran

Draft for answers previous post

Tasks for February 22nd

1. Watch David Ireland's play Cyprus Avenue.



https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UVqrBUdgqhiD88g4PNMU4yd2jnu6C7Cd/view

You may recognize the main actor, Stephen Rea, who was also in The Crying Game and Michael Collins. In this filmed version of the play he is truly extraordinary. It is not a happy play, but it does have parts that are very funny, and I promise that after this, the material we cover will get lighter.

After you have watched the play, listen to the two excerpts from a podcast interview with the Northern Irish-born playwright David Ireland. (I have selected the parts of the interview which are the most relevant for our discussion of the play, but if you have lots of time you can listen to the entire interview on the Royal Court Theatre website).

https://royalcourttheatre.com/podcast/s4-ep4-david-ireland-talks-to-simon-stephens/

School Days
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hUk2igjpV8RLWhwpJcHQB8z9tH5sM3eT/view

On Cyprus Avenue
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zBnWvAXAmLigoC1laftC2YQ2EKL_zlSt/view

Questions about Cypress Avenue

1) What is the play about? What does David Ireland say inspired him to write the play?
2) How did growing up during the Troubles in Belfast’s Sandy Row impact David Ireland’s writing?
3) One critic wrote that "Eric’s state of mind makes it too easy to dismiss the play as a tragedy about a man going insane when its true aim is to raise questions about prejudice and identity." What do you think?
4) Another critic said that the subject of Cyprus Avenue is chiefly of local interest and therefore never rises to the level of universal. Do you agree?
5) David Ireland once said “I find it really hard to end plays without violence. I watch other people’s plays, which don’t end in violence, and I think, ‘How do they do that?’” Does the shock created by the final scene make us more or less receptive to the message of the play? Would the play have been more or less impactful if the violence had been implicit rather than physically depicted?
6) Does David Ireland's use of humor make the play more disturbing or less so
7) Why do you think David Ireland includes the character of Slim in the play? What does Slim represent?
8) How are our self-categorizations tied to our hatred of others? How often do we focus on who we are not rather than focusing on who we are? And how can our conflict-based identities lead us to commit destruction?

2. Record your proposal, name the file mental_health_your_name or lyra_tribute_your_name and upload it to this folder in Google Drive.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hhlSIV2yTaAPNG92FPTvyBJeUoYDdcvv

3. Please take a moment to complete this questionnaire about the mural activity we did with the A2 students. The questions refer not only to the classroom activity with the A2 students but also to the activities we did leading up to it.

4. If you would like to read the article we did the reading/vocabulary exercise on in class, you can find it here.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/10/26/rape-allegations-and-ira-paramilitary-justice

Draft for answers previous post

Tasks for March 1st

1. Cyprus Avenue was a joint Royal Court Theatre and Abbey Theatre production. This week we are going to read/watch a short play by one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory (1852-1932), namely The Rising of the Moon.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41653/41653-h/41653-h.htm#Page_75

Some of you may remember that one of the songs I included in the list of rebel songs had that same title. After reading the play you should watch it.



If you have FilmIn you can watch John Ford's film of the same name which tells three stories

Frank O'Connor's The Majesty of the Law
Martin J. McHugh's A Minute’s Wait (starting at 25:30)
"1921" inspired by Lady Gregory's The Rising of the Moon (starting at 49:00)

a) What is symbolic about the title of the play?

b) What conflict is present in the Sergeant? What does the following line suggest: "if we get him itself, nothing but abuse on our heads for it from the people, and maybe from our own relations"? (p 78)

c) What does the Sergeant mean when he says, "It’s those that are down would be up and those that are up would be down, if it wasn’t for us"? (p. 79) How does the Ragged Man echo these lines at the end of the play?  

d) Why did the Sergeant change his mind about sending the Ragged Man away? (p. 82)

e) One of the songs mentions Granuaile – who is this a reference to? Why is it significant that the sergeant knows the ballad of Granuaile? (“But to think of a man like you knowing a song like that.”) (p. 86)

f) How does the Sergeant’s sense of identity and of his role in the world change? What does he realize when the Ragged Man says: "It’s a queer world, sergeant, and it’s little any mother knows when she sees her child creeping on the floor what might happen to it before it has gone through its life, or who will be who in the end"? (p. 87)

g) What does the Ragged Man mean when he says: "I am a friend of Granuaile"?  (p. 89) and "You won’t betray me ... the friend of Granuaile"? (p.90) What does Granuaile represent?

h) What does the Ragged Man mean when he says “I thought to do it with my tongue”? (p. 89)

i) What do the two main characters in the play represent? What is significant about the fact that at one point the two men are sitting back-to-back (p. 84) but at the end they look each other in the face?

j) What is the message the play is trying to get across?


2. if you have not done so yet, record your proposal, name the file mental_health_your_name or lyra_tribute_your_name and upload it to this folder in Google Drive together with your outline (your_name_outline).

3. If you have not done so yet, complete the questionnaire about the mural activity we did with the A2 students. The questions refer not only to the classroom activity with the A2 students but also to the activities we did leading up to it.

Draft for answers previous post

Tasks for March 8th

As March 8th is International Women's Day, this week you are going to prepare a Pecha Kucha on an inspiring or trailblazing Irish woman. What is a Pecha Kucha? Have a look at this video to find out what it is and some get tips on creating an engaging one.



Go to the list of inspiring Irish women and choose one that you would like to learn more about. Click on "edit" and write your name next to hers. Only one student per entry. When you are done click "save".

Clicking on that woman's name will take you to an empty Google Slides presentation. I have decided to use Google Slides to make it easier to keep track of all the presentations, but there is one problems with Google Slides, they can be set to advance at 15 or 30 second intervals but not 20 second intervals, so we will do a Pecha Kucha with 10 slides and 15 seconds per slide. This means that you will have to select the most interesting and relevant information only.

Once you have chosen 10 important ideas and selected an image to go with each of them, you will need to practice. How to do this? Click on Slide Show in the upper right-hand corner and select "start from beginning". Then go to the three dots in the bottom left-hand corner and click on auto-play / every 15 seconds / play.

If you need some inspiration you can go to pechakucha.com and watch some of the pecha kuchas people have uploaded there.

https://www.pechakucha.com/

List of inspiring Irish women:


1. Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)

Mary McLeod Bethune was an African-American educator who was born to parents of Irish and African descent. She founded the National Council of Negro Women and served as a special advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on issues of minority affairs. She also founded Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, which is still in operation today.

2. Maeve Binchy (1939-2012)
Maeve Binchy was an Irish novelist and playwright who wrote about women's lives and relationships. She wrote numerous best-selling novels which were translated into more than 30 languages, including "Circle of Friends" and "Tara Road," which were both adapted into successful films. She was a true champion of women's voices in literature.

3. Eavan Boland (1944-2020)

Eavan Boland was an Irish poet and author who won numerous awards for her work, including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the PEN Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Griffin Poetry Prize.

4. Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973)

Elizabeth Bowen was an Irish novelist and short story writer who was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times during her career. She also won numerous other awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the CBE.


5. Brigid of Kildare (c 451-523)

A powerful Abbess who offered an alternative to the confines of domestic life to up to 14,000 women, a peaceweaver, a fearless negotiator who secured women’s property rights, and freed trafficked women. Ireland's only female patron saint.

6. Margaret Ann Buckley, aka Dr. James Barry (1789-1865)

The female-born surgeon who lived life as a man, eventually holding the second highest medical office in the British Army, bringing about improvements to public health and performing one of the first C-sections survived by both mother and child.

7. Sinéad Burke (b 1990)

Sinéad Burke is an Irish writer, broadcaster, and activist who advocates for disability rights and inclusion. She has worked with organizations such as the United Nations and has spoken on stages around the world, using her platform to raise awareness and promote positive change.

8. Dorothy Cross (b 1956)
Dorothy Cross is an Irish artist known for her innovative and thought-provoking installations and sculptures. Her work often explores themes of nature, the body, and identity, and has been exhibited at prestigious venues around the world.

9. Vivienne Dick (b 1950)
Vivienne Dick is an Irish filmmaker and visual artist who is known for her experimental and avant-garde films. Her work has been exhibited at prestigious venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London.

10. Dervilla M.X. Donnelly (1947-2014)

Dervilla Donnelly is an Irish chemist who made significant contributions to the development of new drugs and treatments for diseases such as cancer and HIV. She has received numerous awards for her work and is widely regarded as one of the most talented chemists of her generation.

11. Mary Elmes (1908-2002)

Mary Elmes was an Irish aid worker who saved the lives of countless Jewish children during World War II. She worked in various internment camps in France and helped smuggle children out to safety, often at great personal risk. Her bravery and selflessness have made her a hero to many.

12. Anne Enright (b. 1962)

Anne Enright is an Irish novelist and short-story writer who has won numerous awards for her work, including the Man Booker Prize for her novel "The Gathering." She is known for her insightful portrayals of Irish life and her exploration of themes such as family, identity, and sexuality.

13. Rosalind Elsie Franklin (1920-1958)

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British biophysicist of Irish-Jewish descent who contributed significantly to the discovery of the structure of DNA. Although her contributions were initially overlooked, her work paved the way for the development of modern genetics and molecular biology.


14. Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926)

Eva Gore-Booth was an Irish poet, suffragette, LGBT and labor activist who campaigned for women's suffrage and social justice, and was one of the first women in Ireland to publicly declare herself a lesbian. Eva challenged the status quo and used her inherited authority to give voice to workers, women and the LGBT community. More on the HERSTORY podcast

15. Eileen Gray (1878-1976)

Eileen Gray was a Modernist architect and furniture designer, considered one of the most important figures in 20th-century design and the finest Western exponent of the Japanese lacquer technique. She created innovative furniture designs and was one of the few women architects of her time, breaking down barriers and inspiring future generations of designers. More on the HERSTORY podcast

16. Rosie Hackett (1893-1976)

She was an Irish trade unionist and political activist who played a key role in the 1913 Dublin Lockout and was one of the founding members of the Irish Women Workers' Union.

17. Lady Mary Heath (1896-1939)

Record-breaking aviator and athlete. Campaigner for women's rights. The first person to fly solo across Africa from South Africa to London. The first female commercial pilot in the U.K.

18. Geraldine Hughes (b. 1970)

Geraldine Hughes is an actress and writer from Belfast. She has appeared in a number of films and television shows, including "Gran Torino" and "The Black Donnellys." Hughes also wrote a play called "Belfast Blues," which is based on her experiences growing up in Northern Ireland.

19. Rosamond Jacob (1888-1960)
Rosamond Jacob was an Irish feminist and suffragette who fought for women's rights and social justice in the early 20th century. She was a founding member of the Irish Women's Franchise League and played a key role in the campaign for women's right to vote.

20. Mainie Jellett (1897-1944)

One of the most important pioneers of the modern art movement in Ireland, eventually developing a hybrid style combining cubism, religious art and Celtic design.

21. Mary Harris Jones, aka Mother Jones (1837-1930)

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was an Irish-born American schoolteacher and dressmaker who played a key role in the American labor movement in the early 20th century. A prominent union organizer, community organizer, and activist, co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World, she was at one time called the most dangerous woman in America.

22. Oonah Keogh (1903-1989)

The first woman stockbroker in the world. More on the EPIC website

23. Eliza Lynch (1833-1886)

Eliza Lynch, aka the queen of Paraguay, was an Irish woman who became the mistress and partner of Paraguayan president Francisco Solano López in the mid-19th century. She played a key role in politics and diplomacy during her time in Paraguay and was a trailblazer for women in positions of power. More on the HERSTORY podcast

24. Dr Kathleen Lynn (1874-1955)

Kathleen Lynn was an Irish physician, suffragette, and political activist who was a volunteer in the soup kitchens during the 1913 Lockout and a medical officer to the Irish Citizen Army, playing a significant role in the 1916 Easter Rising, for which she was imprisoned.

25. Mairead Corrigan Maguire (b 1944)

Mairead Maguire is a peace activist from Belfast who co-founded the Community of Peace People. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for her work in promoting peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

26. Constance Markievicz, aka Countess Markievicz (1868-1927)

Constance Markievicz was an Irish revolutionary who played a vital role in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish War of Independence. She was imprisoned multiple times for her activism. A suffragette and a socialist, she was the first woman to be elected to the British Parliament, although she did not take her seat, and later became the first female cabinet member in Europe.

27. Annie Russell Maunder (1868-1947)

An Irish astronomer. She worked as a “lady computer” at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, but when she married, she was required to resign due to restrictions on married women working in public service. However, she continued to publish her work, often under her husband's name.

28. Kay McNulty (1921-2006)

Kay McNulty was one of the world's first computer programmers and one of the original programmers of the ENIAC, one of the world's first electronic computers. She played a key role in developing the software that allowed the ENIAC to perform complex calculations, paving the way for the modern computing industry. More on the EPIC website

29. Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh (b. 1959)

Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh is a musician and singer from Gweedore, County Donegal. She is the lead singer of the band Altan, which has been a major force in promoting traditional Irish music. Ní Mhaonaigh has also worked to preserve the Irish language.

30. Edna O'Brien (b. 1930)

Edna O'Brien is a celebrated Irish novelist, playwright, and poet who is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. She has published numerous novels, plays, and collections of poetry, many of which explore themes of Irish identity, gender, and sexuality.

31. Maureen O'Hara (1920-2015)

Maureen O'Hara was an Irish-American actress who became a Hollywood icon in the 1940s and 1950s. She was known for her beauty, talent, and fierce independence, and she broke many barriers in the film industry, paving the way for future generations of actresses.

32. Grainne Mhaol, aka Grace O’Malley (c. 1577-1597)

Grainne Mhaol, also known as Grace O'Malley, was a legendary Irish pirate queen who lived in the 16th century. She was a ruthless plunderer, a rebel, a shrewd negotiator, the protective matriarch and a fierce and fearless leader who fought against English colonization and defended the rights of the Irish people, becoming a symbol of resistance and independence.

33. Mary Robinson (b. 1944)

Mary Robinson was the first female President of Ireland, serving from 1990 to 1997. She was United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and played a key role in advancing women's rights and LGBT rights in Ireland and around the world.

34. Saoirse Ronan (b. 1994)

Saoirse Ronan is an Irish actress who has starred in a number of critically acclaimed films, including "Atonement," "Brooklyn," and "Lady Bird." She has received numerous awards for her work and is widely regarded as one of the most talented actors of her generation.

35. Katie Taylor (b. 1986)

Katie Taylor is a world champion boxer and Olympic gold medalist. She has been named as one of the greatest female boxers of all time and has inspired a new generation of young women to take up the sport.


36. Dame Ninette de Valois (1898 - 2001)

Royal Ballet founder/ Dancer / Teacher / Choreographer

Tasks for March 15th


This week we are going to look at an inspiring Irish woman none of you chose to do your Pecha Kucha on, namely, the Irish poet Eavan Boland, who passed away in April of 2020.



1. To learn a bit about her, start by reading this article in the Stanford Magazine.
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/she-was-radical-and-she-was-right

2. Read ONE of the following interviews with Eavan Boland

Shadows in the Story Georgia Review 2019
https://thegeorgiareview.com/posts/shadows-in-the-story-an-interview-with-eavan-boland/

A Vocabulary of Belonging The Believer 2014


The Stoicisms of Love The New Yorker 2001
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/10/29/the-stoicisms-of-love

Make a note of what she says about being a female poet, about being an Irish poet, about the role of women in Irish history, about her battles to transform the language of Irish poetry and any other things she mentions that catch your attention and you want to share with your classmates.

3. Read some of Eavan Boland's Poems:

Quarantine
https://poets.org/poem/quarantine



And Soul
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50005/and-soul



A poem of your choice, bring it with you to class and be prepared to explain to others why you chose it and give your interpretation of it.

Here are some things you might want to consider

What it's about
The main ideas it presents
The mood
How it makes you feel
The imagery
The choice of language
The choice of title
Why you chose it

Post for answers previous post

Tasks for March 22nd

Just a reminder that on March 22nd we will be having the Reading Comprehension part of the mock exam and on March 29th the Listening comprehension.

This week we will start looking at the topic of Irish migration to the United States.

Choose at least one of the following:

1. Read the article When America Despised the Irish: The 19th Century’s Refugee Crisis
https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis

2. Read the short review of How the Irish Became White and watch the discussion
https://sites.pitt.edu/~hirtle/uujec/white.html



3. Read the article Why historians are fighting about “No Irish Need Apply” signs — and why it matters
https://www.vox.com/2015/3/17/8227175/st-patricks-irish-immigrant-history

Things to think about:

What similarities & differences are there between the treatment of Irish immigrants to the US in the 19th century and the treatment of African immigrants to Europe and the United States in the 21st century (e.g. in terms of the forces that drive people to emigrate, the problems they come up against and the way they are received in the country they emigrate to)?

Race, religion, ethnicity and social class... how do these elements factor into our perceptions of "otherness"?

In which ways is the hyphenated identity of Irish-Americans different from that of African-Americans or Asian-Americans? What does this say about the ways in which Americans visualise diversity?

What similarities are there between the Nativist movement, or "Know-Nothings", in the 19th century and the MAGA movement today?

To what extent is the characterisation of Irish-Americans as "Self-aggrandising drama queens" similar the criticism currently levelled against other ethnic minorities? In which ways does the "culture of victimhood" serve and/or limit ethnic minorities?

What role did and do conspiracy theories play in anti-immigrant sentiments? (Consider the Sharia Law Conspiracy Theory and White Replacement Theory currently touted by some conservative pundits.)

https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis

When America Despised the Irish: The 19th Century’s Refugee Crisis

Forced from their homeland because of famine and political upheaval, the Irish endured vehement discrimination before making their way into the American mainstream.

The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of being rapists.

These undesirables were Irish.

A Famine Forces an Unprecedented Migration.

Fleeing a shipwreck of an island, nearly 2 million refugees from Ireland crossed the Atlantic to the United States in the dismal wake of the Great Hunger. Beginning in 1845, the fortunes of the Irish began to sag along with the withering leaves of the country’s potato plants. Beneath the auld sod, festering potatoes bled a putrid red-brown mucus as a virulent pathogen scorched Ireland’s staple crop and rendered it inedible.

While the potato blight struck across Europe, no corner of the continent was as dependent on tubers for survival as Ireland, which was mired in extreme poverty as a result of centuries of British rule. Packed with nutrition and easy to grow, potatoes were the only practical crop that could flourish on the minuscule plots doled out by wealthy British Protestant landowners. The Irish consumed 7 million tons of potatoes each year. They ate potatoes for dinner. They ate them for lunch. They even ate them for breakfast. According to Irish Famine Facts by John Keating, the average adult working male in Ireland consumed a staggering 14 pounds of potatoes per day, while the average adult Irish woman ate 11.2 pounds.

Through seven terrible years of famine, Ireland’s poetic landscape authored tales of the macabre. Barefoot mothers with clothes dripping from their bodies clutched dead infants in their arms as they begged for food. Wild dogs searching for food fed on human corpses. The country’s legendary 40 shades of green stained the lips of the starving who fed on tufts of grass in a futile attempt for survival. Desperate farmers sprinkled their crops with holy water, and hollow figures with eyes as empty as their stomach scraped Ireland’s stubbled fields with calloused hands searching for one, just one, healthy potato. Typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis and cholera tore through the countryside as horses maintained a constant march carting spent bodies to mass graves.

British Neglect Exacerbates the Irish Plight

More than just the pestilence was responsible for the Great Hunger. A political system ruled by London and an economic system dominated by British absentee landlords were co-conspirators. For centuries British laws had deprived Ireland’s Catholics of their rights to worship, vote, speak their language and own land, horses and guns. Now, with a famine raging, the Irish were denied food. Under armed guard, food convoys continued to export wheat, oats and barley to England while Ireland starved.

British lawmakers were such adherents to laissez-faire capitalism that they were reluctant to provide government aid, lest it interfere with the natural course of free markets to solve the humanitarian crisis. “Great Britain cannot continue to throw her hard-won millions into the bottomless pit of Celtic pauperism,” sneered the Illustrated London News in March 1849. Charles E. Trevelyan, the British civil servant in charge of the apathetic relief efforts, even viewed the famine as a divine solution to Hibernian overpopulation as he declared, “The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated.”

Ireland’s population was nearly halved by the time the potato blight abated in 1852. While approximately 1 million perished, another 2 million abandoned the land that had abandoned them in the largest-single population movement of the 19th century. Most of the exiles—nearly a quarter of the Irish nation—washed up on the shores of the United States. They knew little about America except one thing: It had to be better than the hell that was searing Ireland.

A Mass Exodus Begins

A flotilla of 5,000 boats transported the pitiable castaways from the wasteland. Most of the refugees boarded minimally converted cargo ships—some had been used in the past to transport slaves from Africa—and the hungry, sick passengers, many of whom spent their last pennies for transit, were treated little better than freight on a 3,000-mile journey that lasted at least four weeks.

Herded like livestock in dark, cramped quarters, the Irish passengers lacked sufficient food and clean water. They choked on fetid air. They were showered by excrement and vomit. Each adult was apportioned just 18 inches of bed space—children half that. Disease and death clung to the rancid vessels like barnacles, and nearly a quarter of the 85,000 passengers who sailed to North America aboard the aptly nicknamed “coffin ships” in 1847 never reached their destinations. Their bodies were wrapped in cloths, weighed down with stones and tossed overboard to sleep forever on the bed of the ocean floor.

Although most certainly tired and poor, the Irish did not arrive in America yearning to breathe free; they merely hungered to eat. Largely destitute, many exiles could progress no farther than within walking distance of the city docks where they disembarked. While some had spent all of their meager savings to pay for passage across the Atlantic, others had their voyages funded by British landlords who found it a cheaper solution to dispatch their tenants to another continent, rather than pay for their charity at home.

And in the opinion of many Americans, those British landlords were not sending their best people. These people were not like the industrious, Protestant Scotch-Irish immigrants who came to America in large numbers during the colonial era, fought in the Continental Army and tamed the frontier. These people were not only poor, unskilled refugees huddled in rickety tenements. Even worse, they were Catholic.


The influx heightens religious tensions.

Conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the United States had already broken out in violence before the first potato plant wilted in Ireland. Anti-Catholic, anti-Irish mobs in Philadelphia destroyed houses and torched churches in the deadly Bible Riots of 1844. New York Archbishop John Hughes responded by building a wall of his own around Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in order to protect it from the native-born population, and he stationed musket-wielding members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians to guard the city’s churches. Wild conspiracy theories took root that women were held against their will in Catholic convents and that priests systematically raped nuns and then strangled any children born as a result of their union.

The maltreatment of newcomers to the United States was, of course, hardly a cross for the Irish to bear on their own. However, while the number of German immigrants entering the United States nearly matched that of the Irish during the 1850s, the Irish were particularly vilified by the country’s Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose ancestors had explicitly made their exodus across the ocean to find a refuge from papism and ensure their worship was cleansed of any remaining Catholic vestiges. Feelings toward the Vatican had softened little in the two centuries following the sailing of the Mayflower. The country’s oldest citizens could still personally remember when America was an English colony and papal effigies were burned in city streets during annual Guy Fawkes Day celebrations.

Certainly, many Protestants reacted with Christian charity to the refugees. It was a Boston Brahman—Captain Robert Bennet Forbes—who spearheaded America’s first major foreign disaster relief effort by delivering food and supplies to Ireland aboard a government warship during “Black ’47.” In the new Irish exiles, however, many Protestants saw a papal plot at work. According to “Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia,” some Protestants feared the pope and his army would land in the United States, overthrow the government and establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati. They believed the Irish would impose the Catholic canon as the law of the land.

With immigration controls left primarily to the states and cities, the Irish poured through a porous border. In Boston, a city of a little more than 100,000 people saw 37,000 Irish arrive in the matter of a few years. Naturally, it was difficult to integrate the newcomers in such sheer numbers. The Irish in Boston were for a long time “fated to remain a massive lump in the community, undigested, undigestible,” according to historian Oscar Handlin, author of “Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation.”

The Irish filled the most menial and dangerous jobs, often at low pay. They cut canals. They dug trenches for water and sewer pipes. They laid rail lines. They cleaned houses. They slaved in textile mills. They worked as stevedores, stable workers and blacksmiths. Not only did working-class Americans see the cheaper laborers taking their jobs, some of the Irish refugees even took up arms against their new homeland during the Mexican-American War. Drawn in part by higher wages and a common faith with the Mexicans, some members of the St. Patrick’s Battalion had deserted the U.S. Army after encountering ill-treatment by their bigoted commanders and fought with the enemy. After their capture, 50 members of the “San Patricios” were executed by the U.S. Army for their treasonous decisions.


A nativist backlash begins.

The discrimination faced by the famine refugees was not subtle or insidious. It was right there in black and white, in newspaper classified advertisements that blared “No Irish Need Apply.” The image of the simian Irishman, imported from Victorian England, was given new life by the pens of illustrators such as Thomas Nast that dripped with prejudice as they sketched Celtic ape-men with sloping foreheads and monstrous appearances.

In 1849, a clandestine fraternal society of native-born Protestant men called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner formed in New York. Bound by sacred oaths and secret passwords, its members wanted a return to the America they once knew, a land of “Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism.” Similar secret societies with menacing names like the Black Snakes and Rough and Readies sprouted across the country.

Within a few years, these societies coalesced around the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, whose members were called the “Know-Nothings” because they claimed to “know nothing” when questioned about their politics. Party members vowed to elect only native-born citizens—but only if they weren’t Roman Catholic. “Know-Nothings believed that Protestantism defined American society. From this flowed their fundamental belief that Catholicism was incompatible with basic American values,” writes Jay P. Dolan in The Irish Americans: A History.

Buoyed by the war-cry “Americans must rule America!”, the Know-Nothings elected eight governors, more than 100 congressmen and mayors of cities including Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago in the mid-1850s. They found their greatest success in Massachusetts where in 1854 the American Party captured all state offices, the entire State Senate and all but a handful of seats in the House chamber. According to Dolan, once in power in Massachusetts the Know-Nothings mandated the reading of the King James Bible in public schools, disbanded Irish militia units while confiscating their weapons and deported nearly 300 poor Irish back to Liverpool because they were a drain on the public treasury. They also barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had spent 21 years in the United States.

Millard Fillmore, the former president most notable for being un-notable, ran on the American Party’s 1856 presidential ticket. Throughout his political career, the 13th president had persistently courted the votes of nativist Yankees fearful of the changes brought by the Great Hunger refugees, and he blamed “foreign Catholics” for his defeat in the 1844 New York gubernatorial election. Although Fillmore finished third behind Democrat James Buchanan and Republican John C. Fremont, who had to swat down rumors that he was both a Catholic and a cannibal, the American Party received more than 20 percent of the popular vote and eight electoral votes.


Nativists use violence to further an agenda.

In 1854, an anti-Catholic mob in Ellsworth, Maine, dragged Jesuit priest John Bapst—who had circulated a petition denouncing the use of the King James Bible in local schools—into the streets where they stripped him and sheltered his body in hot tar and feathers. That same year, the Know-Nothings in Bath, Maine, smashed the pews of a church recently purchased by Irish Catholics before hoisting an American flag from the belfry and setting the building ablaze. When the bishop of Portland returned to the city a year later to lay a cornerstone for the church’s replacement, another mob chased him away and beat him.

The violence turned deadly in Louisville, Kentucky, in August 1855 when armed Know-Nothing members guarding polling stations on an election day launched street fights against German and Irish Catholics. Immigrant homes were ransacked and torched. Between 20 and 100 people, including a German priest fatally attacked while attempting to visit a dying parishioner, were killed. Thousands of Catholics fled the city in the riot’s aftermath, but no one was ever prosecuted for crimes committed on “Bloody Monday.”

A Know-Nothing mob even seized a marble block gifted by Pope Pius IX for construction of the Washington Monument and tossed it in the Potomac River. A pamphlet published by Baltimore’s John F. Weishampel suggested that the stone could be used as a signal from the pope to launch an immigrant uprising to take over America. “The effects of this block, if placed in the monument, will be a mortification to nearly every American Protestant who looks upon it,” he warned, “and its influence upon the zealous supporters of the Roman hierarchy will be tremendous—especially with foreigners.”

Abraham Lincoln was among the many Americans disturbed at the rise of the nativist movement as he explained in an 1855 letter: “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

The good news for Lincoln and those Americans with similar views is that the Know-Nothing Party cratered quickly after reaching its high-water mark, although nativism has proven to be stubbornly persistent. The party splintered as the slavery question superseded the immigrant menace with flashpoints such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and the uprising at Harper’s Ferry steering the country to armed conflict.


The Irish find their footing—at the ballot box.

Although stereotyped as ignorant bogtrotters loyal only to the pope and ill-suited for democracy, and only recently given political rights by the British in their former home after centuries of denial, the Irish were deeply engaged in the political process in their new home. They voted in higher proportions than other ethnic groups. Their sheer numbers helped to propel William R. Grace to become the first Irish-Catholic mayor of New York City in 1880 and Hugh O’Brien the first Irish-Catholic mayor of Boston four years later.

A generation after the Great Hunger, the Irish controlled powerful political machines in cities across the United States and were moving up the social ladder into the middle class as an influx of immigrants from China and Southern and Eastern Europe took hold in the 1880s and 1890s. “Being from the British Isles, the Irish were now considered acceptable and assimilable to the American way of life,” Dolan writes.

No longer embedded on the lowest rung of American society, the Irish unfortunately gained acceptance in the mainstream by dishing out the same bigotry toward newcomers that they had experienced. County Cork native and Workingmen’s Party leader Denis Kearney, for example, closed his speeches to American laborers with his rhetorical signature: “Whatever happens, the Chinese must go.”

Kearney and the other Irish failed to learn the lesson of their own story. Yes, the Irish transformed the United States, just as the United States transformed the Irish. But the worst fears of the nativists were not fulfilled. The refugees from the Great Hunger and the 32 million Americans with predominantly Irish roots today strengthened the United States, not destroyed it. A country that once reviled the Irish now wears green on St. Patrick’s Day. That’s something to raise a glass to.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~hirtle/uujec/white.html

How the Irish Became White

Art McDonald, Ph.D.

Several weeks ago I participated in a three day anti-racism training workshop which was conducted here in Pittsburgh. The facilitators were Rev. Joe Brandt, Executive Director of Crossroads Ministry, and Ms. Barbara Jordan, a community organizer and educator from the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond, a New Orleans' based sister organization to Crossroads. Besides providing a very excellent and intense experience of just how systemic racism is in our society, on a more personal level it was a very rich reunion with these two highly skilled and committed trainers. I had spent a day with Barbara down in New Orleans during the UU Urban Church weekend this past January and she had a very good feeling about UUs. She was delighted to meet someone from Pittsburgh who "had eaten her food, in her community." Just as delightfully, Joe and I realized that we had shared a ministerial experience some years back in the South Bronx. We learned and talked about all of our mutual friends. What a treat for me. Crossroads Ministry is the group which Mel Hoover has collaborated with in developing our UU anti-racist training experiences, so there were nice personal connections all around.

Early on in the workshop there was an exercise which focused on "cultural racism and white cultural identity." Whites in the workshop were asked to talk about white culture. Most couldn't or wouldn't. The expression meant nothing to me. Nevertheless, we all struggled with it. As time went on we discovered that, in a sense, it was a trick question. The facilitators wanted the whites to struggle and to discover that the expression did have little or no content. Racial designations, white and black, are totally social constructs. "What then," they asked, "would you say about your culture? How would you define your culture and your relationship to it?" Though most of the whites had a difficult time talking about her/his culture - some resisted pretty strenuously - the trainers took a clear stand: if whites are to come to the multi-cultural table, they - we - must reclaim our individual cultural backgrounds. In many ways, we were reminded, African Americans are way ahead of European Americans in retaining their cultural identities.

In a sense, the exercise wasn't as tough for me as for some others. I immediately thought of Boston, Irish and Catholic. It was clear to me that's where this UU had to start; the music, the humor, the food - as limited as the menu is - the faith, the working class, it was all there. I was having a good time; it felt very good on many levels. In a conversation later in the workshop, Joe mentioned a recently published book entitled "How the Irish Became White." It's a book about Irish emigration, race, class and U.S. labor history. I knew immediately I had to get a copy and find out just what it was about.

It was a tough read. It was a story of primarily Irish Catholic emigration before and after the potato famine - roughly 1840 to the Civil War - and that people's struggle to survive in this white, Protestant world. It's a sympathetic yet tragic story of how race has been a defining characteristic in U.S. culture and how the race question has also plagued the white working class in this country. One might say that it is a story of how the Irish exchanged their greenness for whiteness, and collaborated with the dominant white culture to continue the oppression of African Americans.

Ironically, Irish Catholics came to this country as an oppressed race yet quickly learned that to succeed they had to in turn oppress their closest social class competitors, free Northern blacks. Back home these "native Irish or papists" suffered something very similar to American slavery under English Penal Laws. Yet, despite their revolutionary roots as an oppressed group fighting for freedom and rights, and despite consistent pleas from the great Catholic emancipator, Daniel O'Connell, to support the abolitionists, the newly arrived Irish-Americans judged that the best way of gaining acceptance as good citizens and to counter the Nativist movement was to cooperate in the continued oppression of African Americans. Ironically, at the same time they were collaborating with the dominant culture to block abolition, they were garnering support from among Southern, slaveholding democrats for Repeal of the oppressive English Act of the Union back home. Some even convinced themselves that abolition was an English plot to weaken this country.

Upon hearing of this position on the part of so many of his fellow countrymen now residing in the United States, in 1843 O'Connell wrote: "Over the broad Atlantic I pour forth my voice, saying, come out of such a land, you Irishmen; or, if you remain, and dare countenance the system of slavery that is supported there, we will recognize you as Irishmen no longer." It's a tragic story. In a letter published in the Liberator in 1854, it was stated that "passage to the United States seems to produce the same effect upon the exile of Erin as the eating of the forbidden fruit did upon Adam and Eve. In the morning, they were pure, loving, and innocent; in the evening, guilty."

Irish and Africans Americans had lots in common and lots of contact during this period; they lived side by side and shared work spaces. In the early years of immigration the poor Irish and blacks were thrown together, very much part of the same class competing for the same jobs. In the census of 1850, the term mulatto appears for the first time due primarily to inter-marriage between Irish and African Americans. The Irish were often referred to as "Negroes turned inside out and Negroes as smoked Irish." A famous quip of the time attributed to a black man went something like this: "My master is a great tyrant, he treats me like a common Irishman." Free blacks and Irish were viewed by the Nativists as related, somehow similar, performing the same tasks in society. It was felt that if amalgamation between the races was to happen, it would happen between Irish and blacks. But, ultimately, the Irish made the decision to embrace whiteness, thus becoming part of the system which dominated and oppressed blacks. Although it contradicted their experience back home, it meant freedom here since blackness meant slavery.

An article by a black writer in an 1860 edition of the Liberator explained how the Irish ultimately attained their objectives: "Fifteen or twenty years ago, a Catholic priest in Philadelphia said to the Irish people in that city, 'You are all poor, and chiefly laborers, the blacks are poor laborers; many of the native whites are laborers; now, if you wish to succeed, you must do everything that they do, no matter how degrading, and do it for less than they can afford to do it for.' The Irish adopted this plan; they lived on less than the Americans could live upon, and worked for less, and the result is, that nearly all the menial employments are monopolized by the Irish, who now get as good prices as anybody. There were other avenues open to American white men, and though they have suffered much, the chief support of the Irish has come from the places from which we have been crowded."

Once the Irish secured themselves in those jobs, they made sure blacks were kept out. They realized that as long as they continued to work alongside blacks, they would be considered no different. Later, as Irish became prominent in the labor movement, African Americans were excluded from participation. In fact, one of the primary themes of How the Irish Became White is the way in which left labor historians, such as the highly acclaimed Herbert Gutman, have not paid sufficient attention to the problem of race in the development of the labor movement.

And so, we have the tragic story of how one oppressed "race," Irish Catholics, learned how to collaborate in the oppression of another "race," Africans in America, in order to secure their place in the white republic. Becoming white meant losing their greenness, i.e., their Irish cultural heritage and the legacy of oppression and discrimination back home. Imagine if the Irish had remained green after their arrival and formed an alliance with their fellow oppressed co-workers, the free blacks of the North. Imagine if they had chosen to include their black brothers and sisters in the union movement to wage a class battle against the dominant white culture which ruthlessly pitted them against one another.

Oh that there had been other Irish Americans such as the soldiers from St. Patrick's Battalion who fought on the side of Mexico in the War of 1848, who did remain green and fought against oppression. So perhaps we Irish in America must reclaim our greenness and, perhaps, our anti-racism trainers are right that we all must reclaim our cultural heritage and bring it to the multicultural table. The only stipulation is that we do it in a decidedly anti-racist manner and in solidarity with oppressed classes of people. Maybe we can all share in the sentiment proclaimed in the 1991 movie about Dublin, "The Commitments," when it was stated that "The Irish are the blacks of Europe, so say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud."

Art McDonald is the Social Advocacy Directory at Allegheny Unitarian Universalist Church

https://www.vox.com/2015/3/17/8227175/st-patricks-irish-immigrant-history

Why historians are fighting about “No Irish Need Apply” signs — and why it matters

UPDATE: After this article was first published, in March 2015, Rebecca Fried published her essay debunking academic claims that "No Irish Need Apply" signs were vanishingly rare. The article has been updated to reflect Ms. Fried's findings and the current controversy.

This image has become a stand-in for an entire narrative about how immigrants are treated in America. It's also the subject of a surprisingly heated academic fight.

In one corner, arguing that an Irish immigrant in mid-19th-century America was relatively unlikely to run into "No Irish Need Apply" postings, is a tenured but ideologically iconoclastic historian. In the other, arguing that they were a lot more widespread, is a 14-year-old with excellent archival research skills.

There's a reason (beyond academic infighting) that the question of whether the symbolic "No Irish Need Apply" sign was exaggerated — and with it, the scope of anti-Irish discrimination during the first big wave of Irish Catholic immigration to the US — is still being fought over almost 200 years later. That's because of the sign's symbolism. When politicians or others refer to "No Irish Need Apply" signs, here's what they're saying: every new immigrant group that's come to the United States has faced discrimination from natives. But over time, the immigrant group has fought back against discrimination and won, and has assimilated into broader American society — to the point that it becomes hard to imagine they ever would have been oppressed to begin with.

As it was with the Irish in the 19th century, the story implies, so it will be with Latino and Asian immigrants today.

So the controversy over "No Irish Need Apply" signs ask the same questions that have been raised for every single group of immigrants since then: are they really being discriminated against in material ways, like work and housing, or are they just the victims of prejudiced attitudes? And if they react by thinking of themselves as underdogs, are they acknowledging the truth, or making themselves into victims?

What's clear, through the controversy, is that Irish Americans chose to identify with the narrative the sign represents. And it's made them a continued ally for immigrants — both Irish and not — straight through to the 21st century.

The case that No Irish Need Apply was less common than you think

In 2002, historian Richard Jensen published a takedown of "No Irish Need Apply," calling it "a myth of victimization." Jensen looked through newspaper classified ads from the 1850s to the 1920s and found, he wrote, that only about two ads per decade told Irish men not to apply. (It was more common for ads for domestic workers to specify no Irish or, more frequently, no Catholics.) Furthermore, Jensen wrote, "there is no evidence for any printed NINA signs in America, or for their display at places of employment other than private homes."

But that left Jensen with a tricky question to answer: how on earth did "No Irish Need Apply" become part of Irish Americans' collective memory? His alternative theory: because of a song.

Anti-Irish discrimination was rampant in Britain, and a song became popular there in the 1850s called "No Irish Need Apply." The song hopped the pond to America — in at least two different versions. In one version, printed in Philadelphia, the narrator recalls being discriminated against in London — but says now that she's in "the land of the glorious and free," she's sure Americans will be more welcoming to her. In the other version, printed in New York, the narrator sees a "No Irish Need Apply" ad in America — and proceeds to seek out the proprietor and beat him up.

Guess which version became wildly popular.

Jensen believed that in America, it was the song that popularized the phrase — not the other way around.

Were Irish Americans stuck in a "culture of victimhood"?

There's plenty of evidence that "native Americans" considered Irish Catholics to be inferior. (Irish Protestants, on the other hand, didn't come in for the same prejudice — and in fact, many of them joined the nativist Know-Nothing Party in the 1830s to protest the arrival of their Catholic counterparts.) But did that prejudice turn into outright discrimination against Irish immigrants? Or have Irish Americans been holding on to the "myth of victimization"?

In other words: was America in the mid-19th century like some say America is today, with some people saying unpleasant things about other ethnic groups but very little widespread oppression? Or was it like another view of 21st-century America, with systemic racism that has material effects on people's lives?

Jensen's in the first camp. As a result, his attitude toward the Irish of the 19th century sounds a bit like conservatives blaming a "culture of victimhood" for the problems facing nonwhites today:

When Protestants denied NINA that perhaps just reinforced the Irish sense of conspiracy against them (even today people who deny NINA are suspected of prejudice.) The slogan served both to explain their poverty and to identify a villain against whom it was all right to retaliate on sight—a donnybrook for the foes of St. Patrick. The myth justified bullying strangers and helped sour relations between Irish and everyone else. The sense of victimhood perhaps blinded some Irish to the discrimination suffered by other groups.

Other historians think Jensen overstates his case when he says there was no widespread job discrimination against Irish Catholics. And there's suspicion that Jensen has an axe to grind, since his characterization of Irish Americans as self-aggrandizing drama queens sounds a little like some conservative characterizations of other ethnic minorities.

But he's not the only one saying racial discrimination wasn't as big a factor in mid-19th-century Irish-American life as people tend to think. Historians of Irish Americans have turned away from the idea that Irish immigrants were considered "not white" when they came to the US, and became "white" via assimilation (and by oppressing African Americans). In the words of historian Kevin Kenny, the "whiteness" question "obscured more than it clarified." And labor historians have suggested that at least part of what looks like oppression based on ethnicity was in fact oppression based on class: "Irish workers were certainly exploited," in Kenny's words, "but they did not suffer from racism."

The case that NINA notices were everywhere, if you knew where to look for them

Other historians protested that anti-Irish discrimination was widespread, but didn't contest Jensen's findings about NINA signs. A couple of them even corroborated his conclusions. For what it's worth, when I originally wrote this article, I did some follow-up research of my own in the Library of Congress' digitized newspaper database — and found, similar to Jensen, that there weren't any more than two wanted ads per decade that specified "No Irish Need Apply."


But the problem was that the databases being used just weren't complete enough. In spring 2015, Rebecca Fried, a 14-year-old whose father had brought home the article from work, checked out Jensen's claims. She found much more evidence of "No Irish Need Apply" notices than Jensen's article had allowed.

Fried turned up about 50 businesses putting "No Irish Need Apply" in their newspaper ads between 1842 and 1903. The notices were especially popular in New York (which had "No Irish Need Apply" ads for 15 businesses in 1842-1843 alone, and 7 after that) and Boston, which had NINA ads for 9 businesses. Of course, these were also the centers of Irish immigrant settlement at the time. And she found several news reports that mentioned "No Irish Need Apply" signs — the ones that Jensen said there was no evidence to believe ever existed — being hung at workplaces, as well as public accommodations.

So while Jensen's research turned up about 2 ads a decade, Fried's turned out closer to one a year — although that varied a lot depending on where and when you were.

This obviously doesn't cover every newspaper published during the period. But it's hard to tell how to extrapolate it. Databases like the Library of Congress', which really don't have many "No Irish Need Apply" ads, are obviously incomplete — but so are databases that do have them. What's most representative of all newspapers of the time?

There's a pretty spirited academic back-and-forth between Fried and Jensen about Fried's findings, as covered in this article in the Daily Beast. Jensen points out that any given Irish immigrant, on any given day, was unlikely to open a newspaper and see a "No Irish Need Apply" ad  — which may very well still be true. But Fried argues that the point is that they did, in fact, exist — and so it makes sense that they'd become part of how Irish Americans understand their role in American history.

Discrimination was real — but memory has outlasted it

Three things are clearly true. There was obviously widespread prejudice against Irish Catholics during the mid-19th-century wave of immigration to the US, and that prejudice led to actual discrimination in at least some cases (and, probably, fairly often).

The second truth is that Irish Americans have been resisting discrimination for as long as they've been experiencing it. Alongside the want ads requesting "No Irish Need Apply" that Fried found were reports of Irish workers filing libel lawsuits, holding protests, or even going on strike in response to such ads. Those reports are almost as old as the first NINA ads that Fried found. And that's not to mention jokes that both Fried and I found in our research that would be reprinted from one paper to another, using "No Irish Need Apply" as a springboard for humor: one common joke involved an Irishman, with an exaggerated accent, pretending to be French to get around the sign.

That last category included several papers reprinting the lyrics of one version or another of the "No Irish Need Apply" song that Jensen says was so important. And remember, the version of the song that became popular wasn't the one in which coming to America was a happy ending; it was the version in which, even in America, there were bigots who needed to get beaten up. Fighting back was as much a part of Irish American history, as remembered by Irish Americans, as being held down.


But here's the third truth: memory of "No Irish Need Apply" has long outlasted actual anti-Irish discrimination. Many of the people who claimed to have seen NINA signs almost certainly didn't — just like some of the places that claim "George Washington Slept Here." The late Senator Ted Kennedy used to talk about seeing "No Irish Need Apply" signs growing up; Kennedy was not only born in 1932, several decades after anti-Irish prejudice had peaked, but he also grew up in an upper-class neighborhood where (in Jensen's opinion) he was unlikely to run across any stores that might have posted NINA signs. And replica signs, like the one on top of this article, are so popular that maybe they really are more common than real signs ever were.

Jensen might argue that this is because of the "myth of victimization" — what other pundits might call a "culture of victimhood." But historians have floated another idea: that Irish Americans, more than any other immigrant group, saw themselves as exiles from their home country, rather than as people who were choosing to come to the US for a better life.

The "exile hypothesis" painted this as a bad thing: Irish immigrants were mostly powerless in the face of historical forces, both in Ireland and in the US. But just as the exile hypothesis was becoming popular, in the mid-1980s, another wave of Irish immigrants were coming to the US — and the reaction to them made it clear there was a substantial upside to Irish Americans continuing to identify with victims.

How the Irish still shape immigration policy

During the 1980s, tens of thousands of Irish immigrants came to the US — many of them coming on student or tourist visas and then staying after those visas expired. Irish Americans welcomed the new unauthorized immigrants — their Irishness mattered more than their legal status. And because Irish Americans had political power, politicians set about to fix the immigration system so it would be easier for Irish immigrants to come the right way.

In 1990, Congress passed an Immigration Act — championed by none other than Senator Ted Kennedy himself. The law created a new visa lottery, which is today called the "diversity visa" — it gives visas to people from countries that don't otherwise send many immigrants to the US. But for the first three years of its existence, the law required that 40 percent of the visas — called "Donnelly visas" — needed to go to Irish immigrants. Furthermore, an additional temporary program gave "Morrison visas" to Irish immigrants for the three years after the law passed. (Both visas were named after the Irish-American members of Congress who had championed them.) Between the two visas, most of the unauthorized Irish immigrants in the US were able to achieve legal status.

Today, the Irish aren't among the top 25 countries for unauthorized immigrants living in the US. (The only European country that cracks the top 25 is Poland.) But Irish Americans and Irish immigrants maintain an outsize presence in arguing for immigration reform to give legal status and citizenship to unauthorized immigrants. (The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform has been a presence in New England and Washington for nearly a decade, since the beginning of the current reform fight.) And even the Irish government praised President Barack Obama for his executive actions last November, allowing millions of unauthorized immigrants to apply for protection from deportation and work permits.

Ostensibly, groups like the Irish Lobby are fighting on behalf of the 50,000 unauthorized Irish immigrants. But they're putting in more effort than, say, Polish groups, despite having less of a direct stake in the outcome of reform. And Irish-American politicians continue to draw a direct line from the memory (founded or not) of "No Irish Need Apply" signs from 150 years ago to the unauthorized immigrants in the shadows today.

Here's another version of the "No Irish Need Apply" song. In this version, the narrator takes a deep breath and decides not to beat up the proprietor. Instead, he educates him: "Your ancestors came over here like me, to try to make a living in this land of liberty." That's the role the Irish play in today's immigration debate — except now, they are both the "ancestors" and the new immigrants trying to make good.

CORRECTION: This article misidentified Michael Fried, Rebecca's father, as a history professor. He isn't.

Tasks for March 29th

1. Watch this short video about Frederick Douglass in Ireland. What are the connections between Frederick Douglass and Ireland?



Explain the quote on the right side of this Belfast mural. How can you explain this apparent contradiction? What is Douglass campaigning for in making this statement?

“Perhaps no class has carried prejudice against colour to a point more dangerous than have the Irish and yet no people have been more relentlessly oppressed on account of race and religion."



Read this blog entry about another Frederick Douglass mural in Belfast.
http://leighfought.blogspot.com/2011/11/douglass-in-belfast.html

How many of the people in the mural can you identify?

Are any of the names mentioned in the blog post unfamiliar to you? Look up 2 or 3 of the people in the mural and be prepared to tell others something about them.

2. This week you are going to use the information you have acquired about the experience of Irish emigrants to the United States in order to write an article for the Irish newspaper The Nation.

The year is 1852, you have been living in Boston, Massachusetts for the past 4 years. The Irish newspaper The Nation is running a series of articles by Irish emigrants who want to share their experiences and reflections with those who stayed behind in Ireland. Use your imagination, as well as some figurative language. This is a personal account, not an academic article.

Choose one of the following topics to write about:

a- When the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass came to Belfast in 1845 you went to hear him speak and were very impressed. Write an article for The Nation explaining your observations and reflections about the situation of Black people in America, comparing it to that of the Irish.

b- You came to the United States looking for a better life and believing in the American Dream. However, reality is very different from what you were led to believe. Write an article for The Nation explaining the differences between your expectations and reality in order for other potential emigrants to know the truth before making such an important decision. Your intention is to persuade your fellow Irishmen not to come.

c- Coming to the United States has given you a new start in life. Even if things aren't perfect, they are much better for you than they were back in Ireland. Write an article for The Nation explaining your experience, how America really is the land of opportunity and providing some advice on how to take full advantage of that opportunity. Your intention is to persuade your fellow Irishmen to come.

3. Just a reminder that on March 29th we will be doing the Listening comprehension part of the mock exam.

Post for answers previous post

Tasks for April 12th

1. Some of you might have seen Martin McDonagh's THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE at the Teatre de la Biblioteca de Catalunya a few years ago. I did and I was blown away. A few years earlier, another play from his Leenane Trilogy, A Skull in Connemara, was playing at the Villaroel. And yes, this is the same Martin McDonagh who wrote and directed the movie The Banshees of Inisherin, which was nominated for nine Oscars this year and which I know some of you have seen.

As it turns out THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE will be playing at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast while we are there and I think it would be a great opportunity for us to go and see it. So over the holidays I would like you to read the play

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10qBdwYCTMUeQsteOxam91q96_VuQwZRL/view

and answer the following questions.

Discussion Questions:

a) Earlier Irish playwrights like Synge perpetrated idyllic visions of Ireland’s pastoral west in their plays. How does McDonagh portray rural Irish society? What elements of that society is he criticizing?

b) Maureen and Mag have grown up in two different Irelands. How do they exemplify the intergenerational clash of values?

c) The toxic relationship between Maureen and Mag can be seen to represent what other toxic relationships in Irish history? In which way is their relationship manipulative, dysfunctional and codependent?

d) What clues does McDonagh give us about Maureen’s mental health? At what point do we realize that she is unable to differentiate myth from reality? Does this change the way we feel about her?

e) McDonagh has been quoted as saying, “I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. And yeah, I tend to push things as far as I can because I think you can see things more clearly through exaggeration than reality.” How is this exemplified in the play? In your opinion, does the violence and exaggeration make the play more or less impactful?

f) Checkov famously wrote “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.” Which object in the story functions in this manner? How is it symbolic?

g) What mixed feelings does Pato express towards Leenane? Do you think Pato would stay in Leenane if he were able to make a living there?

h) At one point Maureen says, “if it wasn’t for the English stealing our language, and our land, and our God-knows-what, wouldn’t it be we wouldn’t need to go over there begging for jobs and for handouts?”
To what extent is this true of all emigrants from countries with a history of colonialism? Do you think the issues portrayed in this play are specific to rural Ireland or are they universal?

i) The dialogue between Ray and Maureen at the end of the play is reminiscent of an earlier dialogue between Ray and Mag. What is McDonagh insinuating by this? What other elements at the end of the play would support this interpretation?

j) Why is it significant that the play ends with Maureen in her mother’s rocking chair listening to “The Spinning Wheel”?


If anyone who has not signed up yet is still contemplating the idea of coming on our Belfast trip please let me know asap as I am in the process of finalizing all the arrangements. We even have two extra beds, one in a 4-bed male ensuite and one in a 4-bed female ensuite. As Julia mentioned, there are plans for the peace walls to come down so this might be your last chance to see some of the murals!

https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/it-wont-happen-by-2023-target-but-work-continues-to-remove-northern-irelands-peace-walls/41441423.html

2. If you have not done so yet, please upload your article.
https://agora-eoi.xtec.cat/eoi-hospitalet/moodle/mod/assign/view.php?id=132615&forceview=1

Post for answers previous post:

Discussion Questions:

a) Earlier Irish playwrights like Synge perpetrated idyllic visions of Ireland’s pastoral west in their plays. How does McDonagh portray rural Irish society? What elements of that society is he criticizing?

b) Maureen and Mag have grown up in two different Irelands. How do they exemplify the intergenerational clash of values?

c) The toxic relationship between Maureen and Mag can be seen to represent what other toxic relationships in Irish history? In which way is their relationship manipulative, dysfunctional and codependent?

d) What clues does McDonagh give us about Maureen’s mental health? At what point do we realize that she is unable to differentiate myth from reality? Does this change the way we feel about her?

e) McDonagh has been quoted as saying, “I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. And yeah, I tend to push things as far as I can because I think you can see things more clearly through exaggeration than reality.” How is this exemplified in the play? In your opinion, does the violence and exaggeration make the play more or less impactful?

f) Checkov famously wrote “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.” Which object in the story functions in this manner? How is it symbolic?

g) What mixed feelings does Pato express towards Leenane? Do you think Pato would stay in Leenane if he were able to make a living there?

h) At one point Maureen says, “if it wasn’t for the English stealing our language, and our land, and our God-knows-what, wouldn’t it be we wouldn’t need to go over there begging for jobs and for handouts?”
To what extent is this true of all emigrants from countries with a history of colonialism? Do you think the issues portrayed in this play are specific to rural Ireland or are they universal?

i) The dialogue between Ray and Maureen at the end of the play is reminiscent of an earlier dialogue between Ray and Mag. What is McDonagh insinuating by this? What other elements at the end of the play would support this interpretation?

j) Why is it significant that the play ends with Maureen in her mother’s rocking chair listening to “The Spinning Wheel”?

https://agora-eoi.xtec.cat/eoi-hospitalet/moodle/mod/assign/view.php?id=132615&forceview=1

An article in an Irish paper


This week you are going to use the information you have acquired about the experience of Irish emigrants to the United States in order to write an article for the Irish newspaper The Nation.

The year is 1852, you have been living in Boston, Massachusetts for the past 4 years. The Irish newspaper The Nation is running a series of articles by Irish emigrants who want to share their experiences and reflections with those who stayed behind in Ireland. Use your imagination, as well as some figurative language. This is a personal account, not an academic article.

Choose one of the following topics to write about:

1- When the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass came to Belfast in 1845 you went to hear him speak and were very impressed. Write an article for The Nation explaining your observations and reflections about the situation of Black people in America, comparing it to that of the Irish.

2- You came to the United States looking for a better life and believing in the American Dream. However, reality is very different from what you were led to believe. Write an article for The Nation explaining the differences between your expectations and reality in order for other potential emigrants to know the truth before making such an important decision. Your intention is to persuade your fellow Irishmen not to come.

3- Coming to the United States has given you a new start in life. Even if things aren't perfect, they are much better for you than they were back in Ireland. Write an article for The Nation explaining your experience, how America really is the land of opportunity and providing some advice on how to take full advantage of that opportunity. Your intention is to persuade your fellow Irishmen to come.

.