It is a week late, but we are headed to my mother's house for a St. Patrick's Day dinner. Such is the way of things with families. Regardless, the dinner has gotten me thinking: what does it mean to be Irish? I do not know, but with a name like "Patrick Callahan" I occupy a nether region. When asked, I say, and this is plain fact, that I am an American. "But your name," say my interlocutors, "you must be Irish?" To which I reply, "By the badge of patrimony only,"
If I am honest, though, there is something more, a deep inchoate feeling that justifies my rage at injustice, that inspires me to read and reread and reread "Easter, 1916," that causes me to find inordinate pleasure, almost lusty, in the bastard language of the colonized: procreant, broad, and unfinished. Perhaps it is the ghost of ancestral spirits sluicing through time on the tendrils of ancient peat fires for me to inhale in my own post-colonial bastardized now, a constant reminder that the I am is always ephemeral and complicated, comprised of vanishing and recurring scents, spirit eddies on unpredictable winds...
So what does it man to be Irish? Surely I do not know; nevertheless, I follow lonely impulses of delight, revel in the banter that 3,500 miles away they call "the craic," and I listen to rebel songs with a fury that feels my own.
