Miriam Nyhan Grey (editor) - Being New York, being Irish : reflections on twenty-five years of Irish America and New York Universitys Glucksman Ireland House

New York Universitys Glucksman Ireland House opened in 1993 to foster the study of Ireland, Irish America and the Irish diaspora, and since then has led and witnessed significant changes in Irish culture globally.

Through deeply personal essays that reflect on their own experience, as students, scholars and writers, some of the best-known Irish personalities on both sides of the Atlantic commemorate Glucksman Ireland Houses 25th anniversary by examining what has changed and what has not in Ireland and in Irish America since 1993.

Alice McDermott writes about her sons Irish awakening through the medium of music; Colum McCanns Joycean essay is a brilliant call to action in defense of immigrants and social justice; Colm Tibns first visit to New York coincided with the first St Patricks Day parade led by a woman; Dan Barry reflects on Frank McCourts Angelas Ashes ; John Connolly highlights the role of New York University in scholarly engagement with the crime fiction genre and a poem by Seamus Heaney, which he read at New York University just months before his untimely death, is memorialized.

BEING
NEW YORK,
BEING IRISH

Reflections on Twenty-Five Years of Irish America
and New York Universitys Glucksman Ireland House

Edited by

TERRY GOLWAY

Assistant Editor

MIRIAM NYHAN GREY

First published in 2018 by

Irish Academic Press

10 Georges Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.iap.ie

Terry Golway & individual contributors, 2018

9781788550499 (Cloth)

9781788550505 (Kindle)

9781788550512 (Epub)

9781788550529 (PDF)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

An entry can be found on request.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

An entry can be found on request.

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From One, Many

To Find a New Way of Belonging

But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

Yes, says Bloom.

What is it? says John Wyse.

A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if thats so Im a nation for
Im
living in the same place for the past five years.

So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he,
trying to muck out of it:

Or also living in different places.

James Joyce, Ulysses

COLUM McCANN

S o many skies. Over Belfast. Over Limerick. Over Ramallah. Over London. Over Paris. Over Beijing. Over Cape Town. Over Sydney. Over Brooklyn. We are a scattered people, in so many more senses than one. Our psychoses. Our passivities. Our pretensions. Our prejudices. In search of a debate over who and where we are. And where we are going. And how we are going to get there. Or if, indeed, we ever will. To be critical. To be nuanced. To understand we are as complicated as those varied skies. Not to pat ourselves too heavily on our backs. Nor to rip ourselves asunder either. To stop perpetuating ourselves from the inside. To quit being imprisoned by what they say about us on the outside. To throw our voices and tell a new story. To know that the voice comes from both within and without. To create new and sustainable moments. To reflect. To criticize. To smash the clichs embraced by the corporations, banks, government and, yes, ourselves too. To dismantle the stereotypes. To give contour to the manner to how we are seen from afar. To forge the uncreated credo. To echo. And re-echo. To be angry. To spark the smithy. To permeate the quiet corners. To chase away the craven. To sculpt a national identity that doesnt kowtow to ease. To make bridges. To remember canals. To quit the lip-service. To be smarter than what we give ourselves credit for. To go quiet on Saint Patricks Day. To sing late on Bloomsday. To make an Ireland of our many Irelands. To engage with what has been created. Our music. Our theater. Our painting. Our film. Our sculpture. Our literature. Our dance. All of it. The mystery of it all. To go beyond again and again. To extend past the grandiose, the narrow, the elitist. To meld and to change. To be agile. To make mistakes. To sustain the imaginative effort. To be propelled beyond the platitudes. To be properly doubtful. To do the things that dont compute. To shine the light out of the cave. To shadow-turn. To abandon destination. To embrace being lost. To practice what we have neglected. To recognize what we have ignored. To get another chance at telling. To get at the rougher edge of truth. To be raw, fierce, intelligent, joyous. To be in two places, three, four, twenty-six, thirty-two, all at once. To embrace the vagrant voices. To imagine what it means to be someone else. To learn the expansiveness of others. To accept the alternative. To create the kaleidoscopic. To crack the looking glass. To have our stories meet other stories. To be agile. To showcase our talent. To have the abandoned voices drift back in. To understand presence as opposed to absence. To demolish borders. To acknowledge the leaving. To embrace it. To allow the wound. To discover the pulse of it. To find a new way of belonging. To be also living in different places, but in diffident places too. To be everywhere. To understand that we are as much a people as we are a country. To recognize our languages. To let loose. To un-mortgage the future. To know that we cannot coordinate that which is not yet there. To stop the demolitions of what we know is good. To quit building laneways leading off into mid-air. To oppose the dismantling of enlightened social legislation. To refuse the vapid political simplicities. To end the stunned submission to greed. To shout out against the evisceration of our heritage. To make up for what we have lost. To have another chance at history. To not condescend to the past. To reimagine ourselves. To never give up on the presumption of hope. To look out for the enquiring, lighted minds. To stand in opposition to the lobotomizing weight of expediency. To free ourselves from the small hatreds. To chant our peace. To talk principle. To sustain our self-critique. To know that what has been handed to us is precious. To weave a new flag, then wave it. To give emigrants a return. To fold the gone back into the debate. To make of ourselves an international republic. To profit for culture rather than from it. To know that there is land beyond the land. To be aware that there is territory in our imagination. To flex our muscles. To flux them. To embrace contradiction. To be joyous and critical at the same time. To shore up our commitments toward reality and justice. To be real. To be tough. To spirit on. To engage. To explore. To never forget that we have a sense of humor. To stop talking shite. And then to continue talking shite. In fact to talk more shite than anyone else. Especially when we are told not to. Then to test both theories and find an answer in each. To say then finally and almost finally well, almost finally to reach a beginning to never end that we are in the continual act of composition. That there are no limits. That this, then, is our ongoing nation.