The 'Troubles' - in Ireland & the Bronx
Jackson, Dan
REFLECTIONS ON HISTORY 8c VIOLENCE The Troubles' in Ireland & the Bronx DAN JACKSON "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." -James Joyce THERE ARE SOME common denominators...
...We met some friends from the old country and learned there was big trouble in the North that involved my "matching cousin...
...He used a frail, seventy-year-old voice to sing his anthem, "Soldiers Are We," with the small crowd...
...as if amosaic were perfectly arranged to use all parts of a bloody, kaleidoscopic mess...
...It might have been worse...
...After a while, I stopped trying to understand such things...
...Sometimes he asks about Ireland and about whether we could ever go there...
...And for my own son to sit upon your lap learning the language as you do now in your old age is to have tears dried, wounds closed and death forgotten...
...When I read of muggings or watch news coverage of bombings, I am prompted to share this special viewpoint with those who find such events inexplicable...
...Speeches were made about the cost and beauty of freedom...
...Sometimes I participated by choice...
...It was 1955...
...James Joyce THERE ARE SOME common denominators between my father's childhood in Northern Ireland and the lessons I learned growing up in the Bronx...
...And whether he'll someday agree with what I tried to say about us in this poem: E mise scriobh amhram, m'athair, sa gaeilge tu riamh lhig foghlaim ta e sinn maith an domhan e go leir a dhean se agus ni dhean se duinn...
...Like me, he's the father of two children...
...Most, like my uncle Michael, took it upon themselves to even a score that left the bodies of children, the tears of women, and the faith of men strewn across the landscape of a country that deserved better...
...Everything else fit...
...The last time was in Manhattan at a funeral ceremony for Frank Stagg, an IRA man who starved to death in Wakefield Prison, England...
...Self-consciously, I started calling myself a pacifist...
...When we came back to the States, my worldview was changed...
...Back home, the situation was worse...
...saying that families like ours supported the rebellion for vengeful purposes...
...Very anxious to learn of the hows and whys and whens of a world that seemed so mythic to my mind...
...When I see film footage of the recent trouble, I look carefully for places I might recognize before turning off the TV in disgust...
...There are tears everywhere...
...We're all happy, American suburbanites now...
...Nations are born as infants...
...When we visit New York now, he inquires about the streets on which I played and fought...
...Rice paddies...
...I know about the mountain hideouts on the border that are used for various purposes...
...The casket was draped with a flag that was green, white, and gold...
...But this exposure to routine misery made me forget how far my father had moved us from the agony of his childhood in Ireland...
...Only the thrashing of the Nazis on the Pentagon steps in 1967 seemed out of place...
...Only Pearse seems to have had poetic reasons for proclaiming the independence of Irish men and Irish women...
...A Memphis balcony...
...hotel...
...And I'll soon have to decide if I should tell it to my six-year-old son in the way I've shared it here...
...My brother-the-priest is a former Marine sergeant who started Villanova's program in peace and justice...
...My involvement seemed natural...
...His was the first funeral I attended...
...My Catholic dad was born in 1905...
...They taught me about the urge to kill and showed me how to understand terrorism's retaliatory violence as an appropriate response to frustration...
...In terror...
...Few in the North felt as Yeats did about the cultural castration that outlawed Gaelic in the schools...
...I was taught to describe injustice with words my father never knew so that I could write in a way he couldn't...
...The other's a teacher...
...In school I learned the distance between fact and fiction...
...I write . . . about how things are . . . and about how they were...
...I wonder what he will remember of the burned-out tenements he's driven past...
...Like me, he's thirty-three years old...
...In late January, he received a fifteen-year sentence...
...No news about him came for months...
...Very impressionable...
...I was eight...
...Today it's labeled "malnutrition...
...is ea ra agus is ea creid is Eireannaigh sinn...
...Not all Republicans read Marx as Connolly had...
...That knoll at Kent State...
...Then he began to weep...
...When I had the chance, I didn't throw bombs...
...I could still find the cathedral steps, although I haven't returned since, on which a puppet judge was machine-gunned for having sentenced rebels to death...
...He left the North for a thirty-nine-year career as a New York City busdriver and raised four children in the Bronx...
...REFLECTIONS ON HISTORY 8c VIOLENCE The Troubles' - in Ireland & the Bronx DAN JACKSON "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake...
...The honor guard wore the uniform of the IRA...
...My father survived...
...One sister's a nurse...
...While we traveled though County Down and County Armagh, I was told of raids, executions, and causes...
...TV gave us what Dante and Bosch had shown their centuries of the spiritual vacuity of life in hell...
...Uncle Michael, who also emigrated to New York, died...
...Like me, he dwells on our family's nightmares...
...Now the Bronx seemed foreign...
...I cried...
...And human suffering does touch the soul...
...Many innocent people died in the trouble that preceded the 1921 creation of the Republic of Southern Ireland...
...Sometimes I covered those actions as a young journalist on assignment...
...He told me about the things a man shouldn't do just to save his nation...
...the first body I saw laid out...
...They were carted off to another county to work the fields as seasonal laborers...
...Their plight was extreme...
...His anthology of readings on peace and justice from world literature will be published shortly by Villanova University...
...None of us are terrorists...
...Toward the end of winter his brothers became seriously ill...
...The kitchen floor of some L.A...
...But even then I knew there was much that ought to be destroyed, much that needed to be torn down, much that should be wiped out...
...Then we heard of his arrest...
...The revolution of his youth was paralleled by the turmoil that swept the campuses I attended in the 1960s...
...I told students about language, manners, and reason...
...Or what he might think of the bullet holes in that railroad trestle if we ever went back to the North...
...Our family's involvement with the IRA and the violence I've witnessed give me a unique perspective...
...A younger brother died from what was then called starvation...
...The dampness of the barn in which they were kept had something to do with their sickness...
...It is to say and to believe "We are the Irish people...
...It is to be asked "Who are you...
...The trial was complicated and well publicized...
...The historical record would not be complete if I did not mention that such occurrences were typical, if not commonplace, in Ireland at the turn of this century...
...It was a solemn ritual...
...For me to write a song, father, in the Gaelic you were never permitted to learn is for us to forgive the world for all that it has done and not done with our lives...
...Our dreams are filled with ifs and maybes because we know how different our lives could have been...
...Agus e mo fein leanbh eire ar do gliun foghlaim teanga chomh tu dean i do sean aois ta agam deora triumu gortaiodh dunta agas bas imithe is ea a duine eighin fiafraigh ce tusa...
...Vergil's right...
...When we were growing up, we went back to Ireland one year...
...This story hurts...
...They said he murdered a British officer who'd infiltrated the IRA...
...I can still see the bullet holes in the railroad arch that rises over Newry where Uncle Michael's cadre ambushed an English convoy of half-tracks at a time when the sun never set on the king's dominion...
...My father and I marched together for the first time...
...It's been five years since I demonstrated...
...They never found the body...
...But I stopped wondering why others did...
...FOR A WHILE I taught in the South Bronx...
...A few years later, after his mother died, he was taken to a public auction outside Belfast at which he was purchased with two of his brothers by a Protestant landowner...
...In fright...
...Loneliness and the severity of the chores might be called factors...
...Nor would it be fair to explain the 1916 uprising without DAN JACKSON has written for the National Catholic Reporter, and The New York Times...
Vol. 109 • February 1982 • No. 4
