Tag Archives: Irish

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: The Multi-culti Irish

st-patricks-dayThere is nothing sweeter to a Welshman than confusion about the Irish, especially when the confusion comes from the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States (though only a little, in the case of Mr. Pence) and, best of all, from the speaker of the house, because he is actually of Irish descent—nothing sweeter: nid oes unrhyw beth felysach to Cymro. And in this sweetness, the Irish turn out to be rather multi-culti; a bit Irish, a bit Nigerian, and a wee bit Scot.

Why? Well, it stems, I suppose, from the irrational rivalry between the Welsh and the Irish, a contest that we Welsh have pretty much never won. Of course, despite their endless rivalrly, the Welsh and Irish have often been united. Who could forget the Battle of Banbridge, the 100th anniversary of which approaches in July four ywelsh flag blowingears hence? Then Welsh and Irish stood firm against the Scots and English, achieving Irish independence. But not Welsh independence. And that is why, I suppose, the Welsh love it when President Trump gets an “Irish” proverb so hilariously wrong.

What did President Trump do this time, you might be wondering, if you haven’t been following the “Irish in the News” section of your local paper. Well, according to David Quinn of People magazine, in the midst of the visit of Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny to Washington D.C., Mr. Trump quoted (properly in a speech, not a nattering via twittering) an apparently allegedly Irish proverb:

“As we stand together with our Irish friends, I’m reminded of a proverb—and this is a good one, this is one I like. I’ve heard it for many, many years and I love it.”[1]

shamrocksThis was particularly poignant as Mr. Quinn tells it, because there were no less than twenty reporters from Ireland stationed nearby. There was the annual Shamrock Ceremony, during which the American president ritualistically receives a gift bowl of shamrocks. Then, having accepted the gift, the president is called upon, of course, to say a few words. This is when Mr. Trump’s speech went off the rails, so to say, for he cited not an Irish proverb but the second stanza of a poem, “Remember to Forget,” by a Nigerian poet (Albashir Adam Alhassan), of which I quote the first two stanzas here:

Always remember to forget,

The things that make you sad,

But never forget to remember,

The things that make you glad.

Always remember to forget

The friends that proved untrue,

But never forget to remember

Those that have stuck by you.

Ironically, Mr. Alhassan, according to NBC News (in an article by Mary O’Hara and Alexander Smith[2]) is a Muslim. So, how did Mr. Trump go from Ireland to Nigeria, from the celebration of the legacy of a Christian evangelist such as St. Patrick to the gentle but certainly not Irish words of Mr. Alhassan? Can’t answer that one.

While Mike Pence’s “Top of the Morning,” spoken to a select audience representing Ireland at a breakfast that he was hosting at his residence to honor the Irish, drew the overly sensitive twittering response of an Irish journalist by the name of Órla Ryan, who stated in all caps that the expression is not used, still the more hilarious bit came from another Ryan, our very own speaker of the house, who attributed golf to the Irish (when every real golfer knows that it is a Scottish game in origin).

What lessons can we learn about ourselves—whether we are Irish or Welsh or Nigerian or something altogether different—from this series of ridiculous missteps on St. Patrick’s Day? First, perhaps, we can learn to lighten up. We live in an age when everyone takes everything and everyone else (and themselves!) so seriously. Good gracious, can we learn to be gracious again? Second, maybe we should learn some real Irish proverbs, for some are quite wonderful; even a Welshman will admit that. Try this one, a beautiful and no doubt somewhat familiar Irish blessing:

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face.
And rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.[3]

That’s a nice one, and would have been even nicer than the quote from Mr. Alhassan’s poem. But if Mr. Trump was feeling grouchier, he could instead, had he done his homework, have cited a much stronger verse, also quite Irish, one that doesn’t remember to forget but actually remembers not to forget:

May the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind illegitimate children chase you so far over the hills of Damnation that the Lord himself can’t find you with a telescope.[4]

That’s a lot firmer, as it were, than what Mr. Trump actually said. And given the world in which we live perhaps more appropriate.

But enough of citing missteps that were intended to honor the Irish and making fun of the Irish for it. Let’s close with one more Irish proverb, a good one—multi-culti as it spans all cultures (at least where potatoes grow)—and kind, to boot: “It’s easy to halve the potato where there’s love.” I like that one.

And now, to quote the vice president, “Top of the morning to you!”

irishpoem

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-head-scratching-proverb-more-175229251.html

[2] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/did-trump-s-irish-proverb-come-nigerian-muslim-poet-n734896

[3] http://www.marksquotes.com/Irish/proverbs.html

[4] http://www.marksquotes.com/Irish/proverbs.html

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Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman: Welsh Poets, Russian Icons, and Other Points of Confusion

Russian icon.LenaNot because they are boring but because they are sensible, poets usually contrast things that are quite contrastable. In Prif Cyfarch the first ballad of Taliesin, the oldest of Welsh bards (6th c.)—assuming it is his, and assuming it does date from the sixth century, and assuming his name was Taliesin, and so forth (all topics I leave aside here)—posits contrasts from start to bottom. At the very beginning the poet asks, “Which was first, is it darkness, is it light?” Later, in about the middle of that ballad, he vaunts his capacity as a bard to defy time: “I am old. I am young. I am Gwion [a name], / I am universal, I am possessed of penetrating wit. / Thou wilt remember thy old Brython [Britain] (And) the Gwyddyl [i.e. the Irish], kiln distillers, / Intoxicating the drunkards. / I am a bard; I will not disclose secrets to slaves; / I am a guide: I am expert in contests.”[1]

Taliesin is, too, an expert in contrasts. His ambivalence about humankind’s origins in light or darkness, his conflicting statement about the bard’s sempiternal status of being old and young at once, his assumption that (as opposed to the mead-drinking Welsh) the Irish are drunkards because they are the suppliers of the distillations of kilns, and that he is the keeper of secrets (implying there are those who don’t know the secrets, e.g., slaves) and that as such he is a knowledgeable guide (to those who don’t know)—these are just a few of the contrasts that Taliesin sets out in his first poem, a poet that defines itself, as we all do to some extent, by contrast with those around us.

This poem and a lovely gift I received got me thinking this week about contrasts and cases of things easily mistaken. Before I get to the latter two ideas, let me begin first with the gift, a small plaque of Smolensk’s Cathedral of the Assumption. This gift was gently and generously presented to me by the mother of a friend of mine. That friend, Lena, and her mother both hail from Russia, from Smolensk itself, a modestly sized city of 327,000 most famous, perhaps for the Battle of Smolensk in 1812 when it was besieged by Napoleon where he was opposed by the Russian general Barclay de Tolly. Its most famous monument is the now-lost portrait of “Our Lady of Smolensk” attributed to St. Luke himself. Napoleon assumed that the Russians would defend the church at all costs and therefore stay close to the town, but they came out on the plane to oppose him. The Russians allowed their city to burn as their army retreated. Thus, while Napoleon won the battle, it was a high price to pay, a Pyrrhic victory.

Hodegetria virgin
Virgin Hodegetria, 13th c.

Golden eyeThe Cathedral, however, is not so much famous for that battle (or for the James Bond film “Golden Eye”). The icon itself went missing after the Germans conquered Smolensk in 1941. Was the icon destroyed?[2] Was it simply stolen (and still exists somewhere in some hidden Nazi vault)?[3] These questions are, of course, beyond the purview of this blog.

But I wax art-historical. Let me return to what I wanted to say about the confluence of the portrait of the lovely gift of the Cathedral of the Assumption, now on my desk, and the idea of contrasts that the quite old Welsh poet Taliesin brought to my mind. That idea was the question of anyone’s perception of “otherness,” on the one hand, and anyone’s confusion of contrasting ideas such as foreignness and familiarity, or, more especially, mildly contrasting ones, such as strength and power.

I’ll begin with the former, starker contrast. As I gazed at that image of the church this week, I had to think to myself how different Lena’s life must have been, growing up in Smolensk, and how even more different that of her mother, living much of her life in Soviet Russia. How for her mother, in particular, she had learned of Lenin and Stalin as heroes of the state and of Barclay de Tolly as a local hero—though he was not born in Russia, as he was born in modern day Estonia—as opposed to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. How different than my own—did I really mean “inferior to my own”?—Lena’s mother’s worldview must be.

And then it donned on me, how appallingly provincial my thoughts were and how, inasmuch as I am myself of Welsh descent, I should never indulge in such thoughts, as my forebears came from the tiniest of tiny and “meaningless” places. Though the poets of my tribe may from time to time playfully reference the Gwyddyl’s propensity for strong drink and have made uneasy alliances with Brython, mine is of a surety but a heritage of humility. My family comes from a small and, to most of the world, insignificant place (Llanelli) where, by all accounts, the beautiful if highly guttural and for me, at least, hard-to-pronounce language is waning, perhaps dying. There’s a lesson here somewhere. It’s a lesson of humility.

Battle_of_Smolensk_1812
Napolean at the Battle of Smolensk, 1812 Jean-Charles Langlois – The Bridgeman Art Library, Object 159150 (public domain)

Then I thought about the easily confused ideas of strength and power. Undoubtedly puffing out his chest with pride, pompously perched on prancing steed, Napoleon watched most of Smolensk burn to the ground in August of 1812. Just over a century later, the Germans destroyed much of the city when they occupied it in 1941. It wasn’t a strong place, it doesn’t have a history that proclaims martial superiority. Rather, like most of the world, it suffered loss, it suffered humankind’s inhumane ravishes. Its most beautiful and famous icon is lost. Though after the Second World War it was proclaimed a Hero City, from all external appearances Smolensk lacks power. Yet I have a feeling that Smolensk and the people of Smolensk have great strength. I have a feeling that they have become much stronger from the losses that they endured. I have a feeling their strength is much greater than those of us whose towns have not endured such trials can know.

We human beings all too easily confuse strength with power. Smolensk’s famous Lucan icon did not have power in and of itself. Rather, it preserved the record of power, it embodied strength. Strength? The strength of a baby sitting on the lap of a mother? Yes, that very strength, not simply the image of the powerful relationship of mother and child, but the allusion to the strength that that particular Child would show as an adult in the face of the abuse of power by religious authorities and political figures: in His suffering, in His weakness, strength, admirable strength, masking but presaging cosmic power.

So I close this blog as I began, with a double-hinged idea: a challenge to myself to see the world from the point of view of another—some might even say “the other”—and to all of us to recognize that an apparent dearth of power does not imply a lack of strength. Rather, in may in fact imply an extraordinary Source about which we have but slender understanding.

[1] Trans. by William Forbes Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales (1868) from the fine and thoroughly Welsh website of Mary Jones at http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/t01w.html. I thank Mary Jones for the proper reference.

[2] http://www.bookdrum.com/books/war-and-peace/730/bookmark/128924.html

[3] http://www.russian-icon.com/index.php/en/icon-gallery/general-collection/1dng-mother-of-god-of-smolensk-hodegetria-1-89

 

Commonplace Thoughts of a Residual Welshman

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Over one hundred years ago, the great British writer G.K. Chesterton suggested that the human experience is, like that of Robinson Crusoe, one of collecting soggy broken pieces of life, and trying to survive on a deserted island after a shipwreck; as he puts it, “all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck” (Orthodoxy [New York, 1908] p. 64). LucyHJonesTrunkFortunately, my family made it to America in 1869, and with them they brought, miraculously “a teapot, tea leaves … and a cheese plate, … a frightful one at that, … transported from Wales to Pennsylvania … in a trunk that served as the family’s covenantal ark … the objects of this story, but not the object of this story” (Curious Autobiography, p. 9f.). We were the family of “Great Might-Not-Have-Beens,” to use another expression from the same page of Chesterton’s enlightening book. We might not have been if the boat did not make it; we might not have been if Lucy Hughes Jones had died when delivering her child, Elizabeth Ann (for both of them nearly died at the moment of Lizzie’s birth in 1871). And we might not have been who we became without the journey itself, which, as Elaine notes in her autobiography, is the object of the story.

And who are we to say that we, this small band of Welsh men and women, mostly the latter and yes–we were primarily a matriarchy—became anything at all? This question is ultimately the central focus of The Curious Autobiography of Elaine Jakes and will be the central focus of this blog. Put another way, does an ordinary life, the lives of Welsh immigrants, have any meaning? Is there such a thing as destiny or fate? Put perhaps a bit more positively, is there a purpose for our lives? For life?

Good heavens, we’re waxing philosophical and lest we get bogged down in a blog that is meant to be fun to read, let’s tell a story, as story that may or may not illustrate what we mean. (Before I go further, I should say that I will shift back and forth from the first person singular to the first person plural, as Elaine’s voice still echoes in my head, and she now writes, in a sense, through me—nothing too mystical, just a fact.)

That story is an aspect of one that we tell in the Curious Autobiography, but there remains an important part of that story that we did not include in the book. It has to do with the packing of Lucy Hughes Jones’ trunk for the voyage to America, for which trip she was, for the first and only time, leaving Llanelli (not at all pronounced like it is spelled). Now I should add that, though the Welsh take packing very seriously, in my experience, they mostly hate to travel. That is possibly because the Welsh are said to be descended from hobs, or elfin hobs, to be precise about it. Now we might call these elfin hobs merely elves, but we would be mistaken.

The facts are these. Hobs are quite close cousins of elves, closer even than elves are to leprechauns, to whom they are related on their father’s side—never through the maternal line. A not very precise analogy might be the way the Welsh are related to the Scots, and the Scots to the Irish. Yet, while leprechauns are strictly Irish, hobs are not exclusively (though they are mostly) Welsh, and elves, of course, are not exclusive to Scotland, though everyone knows that they are found there quite often.   Of the three, leprachauns, elves and hobs, the last group most dislikes travel.

But let us return to the admittedly ironic idea that even hobian descendants hate to travel, albeit the Welsh are good packers. It is no small piece of information for our family’s history that into that trunk, that ugly black trunk with the name Lucy Jones clearly painted in what was theAngleCheesePlaten much more distinctly visible paint, went the things that would serve to remind our family in America of our Welsh heritage and, more than that, of our significance. Among these objects were the family cheese platLucyJonesTeapote (whose face always frightened the small children), several Welsh warming sweaters, two quilts, a Welsh serving platter, a Welsh flag, and a tea service, if a quite limited one, the centerpiece of which was Lucy Hughes Jones’ favorite teapot that features brown undulating swirls not so much like the tide of Mumbles by the Sea as that of the inlet that touches upon Llanelli itself.

Those fragile objects might well have tumbled one on the other in the trunk and broken had not an especially curious hob (and thus less afraid of travel than most) named Gwilym[04] Gwilym the elf, at the last moment, just before the trunk was closed, jumped inside. It is said that he used the teapot for his pillow, the platter for his bed, and the cheese plate for his footrest during the journey, thus keeping the most important objects from breaking. Gwilym, by the way, would eventually come to live in the family’s piano, where he stored nuts stolen from dishes put out when company came.  He seems to have enjoyed gathering and hiding his nuts as much as eating them. These objects, not icons or totems or idols, but mere objects, would prove to be symbols that we were not “Might-Not-Have-Beens” but demonstrably “Have-Beens,” which if it has a less than glorious ring to it, nevertheless begs the question of significance, even if, perhaps especially if, you happen to be descended from an elfin hob.

What is the significance, then, of these objects and the lives that they represented, or any family’s significance, any human being’s significance? The answer to that question is one that, even if it is intended for all, seems to present itself only to some, and it does so in most cases only over a good deal of time, often a lifetime.  And so it is our belief that it is tightly bound to the journey, not simply a journey, such as ours was, from Wales to America but bound to the journey that is each person’s life.