Retour
Irish emigration and the defining characteristic of a people
Michael D. Higgins, the president of the Republic of Ireland, declared in 2015 that "Emigration has been a defining characteristic of the Irish people." After the Famine in the $\rm 19^{th}$ century, many Irish people left their island and went mostly to Britain and the US. This went on during the $\rm 20^{th}$ century and by the mid-1950s, when as many as 60 000 people a year left their native island. Very few went back.
Literary representations of emigration
In his short story Home Sickness (1903), the Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) tells the story of James who, after spending 13 years in America, moves back to his native Irish village. However, he realises that he no longer truly belongs there and goes back to New York. At the end of his life though, "the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake…" which he had left behind in his native country.
The American singer Bob Dylan evokes the plight of immigrants in the song he wrote in 1967 "I Pity the Poor Immigrant". In a few lines, the singer sums up the dilemma of many immigrants who feel torn between two places and two cultures, unable to really belong anywhere : "I pity the poor immigrant Who wishes he would've stayed home…"
The challenge of bilingual identity
In Bilingual Blues (1981-1994) the poet, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, who was born in Cuba in 1949 and then emigrated to the U.S., stresses how hard it is for a writer to go back and forth between two languages and two cultures. In an interview, he complained that "I have the feeling I am not fluent in either one" (NPR, 17 October 2011). Emigrating does not just involve leaving a place and moving to another one. It also means adopting a new language.
America as a nation of immigrants
As J.F. Kennedy (1917-1963) pointed out, America is a country of immigration : "Since 1607, when the first English settlers reached the New World, over 42 million people have migrated to the United States." (A Nation of Immigrants, J. F. Kennedy, 1958). In those days, people referred to the U.S.A. as a "melting pot", a place where different cultures mixed and became American. In the late $\rm 20^{th}$ century, this metaphor no longer applied and America was described as "a tossed salad", in other words a place where different groups retain their specificities while living together. Most Americans pride themselves on their hyphenated background and will introduce themselves as "Italian-American" or "Chinese-American" for example.
The exception : Native Americans
However Kennedy when describing America as a nation of immigrants did not forget to mention "the exception of one group" : Native Americans whose territories were taken away from them and who, as a consequence, were displaced in their own native land. In the Prologue to his novel There There (2018) Tommy Orange, who is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, writes that "All the way from the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image". This book is "A sorrowful, beautiful debut novel [which] follows a group of young "Urban Indians" struggling to make sense of their identity" (The Guardian, 18 July 2018).