Authors: Jason Johnson
She fixes me, as if telling me she wants me to say it.
‘You can’t make me go all dewy-eyed Irish on you,’ I say. ‘You can’t just flick a switch, Imelda. That stuff isn’t my bag. I don’t feel any more at home in Ireland than I do in Holland.’
‘That doesn’t mean you don’t love Ireland.’
‘It means I don’t want to label or define myself in a way that is convenient to others.’
She smiles.
I go, ‘It’s hard, you know. It’s actually hard not to love your country, your first home, where you first breathed, for better or for worse. It’s an opt-out situation, it’s a decision you take to move from the default position. And it’s a decision I have thought through.’
‘Well,’ she says, ‘decisions can always be reviewed.’
I go to speak and she cuts across.
‘I’ll pay the bill,’ she says, ‘if that doesn’t define you too much.’
I say, ‘To define is to limit.’
She nods. ‘Indeed, Aloysius. You know your Wilde.’
And I say, ‘Yes, I do.’
*
I’ll break your chain letter, answer your door at midnight, jump into any lion’s den you can find. I’ll enter the scary house, shout at the shouter, run at the suicide bomber, stand in front of the bullet, blade or train.
I’ll do these things because, all said and done, I have the measure of my own mind, the understanding of the worth of who I am, the sure knowledge that I’m better off dead by you than damned by you. This mind of mine may have holes in it, but I don’t want to fill them with things that have no business being there, things that try to inform every other thought, every other part of me that I have built from nothing and made strong.
Patriotism makes people excited when they put a nationality sticker on the back of their car and take it across Europe.
Patriotism leads to grown men announcing to the world what they are not and cannot be. It announces to the world – like that €5 car sticker – more truly where they’re going than where they’re from. Patriotism makes grown men homesick. I’ve seen people live and die for it, for their country, their nationality, their religion, walking around in their mini-environments like spacemen, sucking in their own gas over and over until it weakens and kills them.
I tell Imelda I hated growing up in Ireland, but it was people who tormented me and people I knew of who I hated, not the land mass I stood and knelt on. I tell Imelda that I love Ireland as much as I love anywhere else, that one rock among all the other rocks is not the right place on which to map and build a belief, a cause.
I tell her that she is losing her mind if she wants me to tell her I love Ireland so that she can feel happier about me killing Irish people.
I tell her, dandering our way arm-in-arm through night-time Amsterdam, through the Red Light District and back to her five-star Dam Square hotel, that she is only as Irish I am.
‘And,’ I say, ‘I’m only as Irish as you. How we feel about the place doesn’t mean a thing. For such a practical woman, you’re a bit of a dreamer. The Irish are no better and no worse than anyone else. They can stoop as low and reach as high as anyone else. We are no braver than anyone else, no more scared than anyone else, no smarter or stronger. Patriotism tells you you’re different, that you’re special, that you’re from a chosen land. It’s just a club, a gang, a group, some kind of fake elite, just one of the stupid things we do as humans to help make sense of the world and our place in it. It’s just definition, just pattern-making on that globe we look at. All we do as humans is define, chase up patterns so we can box and understand what’s around us, to find where we are in it, but we’re only talking about words.
‘I think it’s better to escape that shite, to do what camouflage does, to break up the outline and fuck up the pattern, to break the boundaries and keep going.’
I tell Imelda, ‘You say Irish patriotism? I hear gunshots and victims and charity, loss, greed, pain, busted kneecaps and fucking ballads. I see bowing down and standing too tall, I see too many people doing too much of the hard, wrong thing at the wrong time. I see misunderstood moments and misrepresented people. If I listen closely I hear phobias, nationalism, murder and alcohol. I’m not spending my days getting my head around all that. Life’s too short.’
She pulls my arm tighter, somehow disarming me, somehow making it seem as if I am saying things that make sense in her mind, as if I am being listened to, and it makes me go quiet.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t say potatoes,’ she says gently, ‘or Aran fecking jumpers.’
And I have to tell her that she knows what I mean, but she cuts me off.
‘You’ve been away a long time, Aloysius,’ she says. ‘You have the thoughts of a second generation. So you do. To be sure. Ye boy ye.’
Fuck it.
She knows what I mean.
I shake my head.
We stroll along the canal-side, among high, happy and horny people, weaving around the shocked and thrilled visitors to the city.
We look in windows that are impossible not to witness, at their pinkish, naughty neons as women in underwear smile and frown and shake at passing guests.
Imelda goes, ‘Who did you fight for in Chechnya, Aloysius?’
And she knows she can only play at the edges, that opening one door at a time is enough for now. She knows I won’t answer.
She goes, ‘Why did the Russians take you from there? Why did they give you a new knee and let you go? And what were you doing in Israel, and on the Gaza strip? Whose side are you on, whose side have you been on? Who have you killed and what for? Whose judgement led to you taking the lives you have taken?’
And I can tell where she’s going with this pretty fast.
She says, ‘Have you killed because of the hot momentary decision of some tribal leader? Some rich politician? Have you killed because of the whim of a patriot from some other land? Have you killed because of the fury of a father? I ask all that because you seem to have all the answers. I’m asking because I’m sure you can explain the sense behind all it is you have done with your life.
‘I’m asking you to tell me what wisdom you have, in all honesty, brought to the world. What is it that makes you better than a little old Irish spud like me, Aloysius?’
And I tell her how I know I am no better, no wiser.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘maybe it’s time to start making a pattern, to help the rest of us out. Maybe it’s time to pick a team, to get some loyalty into your heart, to try and fill up some of that empty space you so obviously carry around, that swallows you up when you’re alone.
‘It’s a human imperative, Aloysius, to be some identifiable thing, to have a name. Sooner or later you have to make things make sense, find the point to things, label things, whether you like it or not. We give names to all of this structuring we do around us, we call it the work or God or love or some fucking thing. But whatever we call it, you’re only a man at the end of the day, and you cannot be anything else.
‘Let me tell you, Aloysius, there are much, much worse things in this world than patriotism. Patriotism is kinship, bonding. It forms nations, forges pride and confidence. It is enjoyed by those who demonstrate it, and enjoyed too by those who see it in others.
‘I love a patriotic Frenchman and I’d be disappointed to meet one who wasn’t. Same with the Greeks, the Italians. I could damn well cry when I hear the American national anthem, when I hear Elvis sing ‘Dixie’. I love a Scotsman who sings, drinks and sheds tears for his country, who wears a frigging kilt and beats seven bells of shite out of anyone who slags it off. Tell me what that mad, proud Scotsman is doing wrong? Can you answer me that?’
And she leaves no room for an answer.
‘I admire,’ she says, ‘anyone who can put their hand on their heart and tell me who they are.’
I go, ‘Which can too easily become a way of telling you who they are not.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ she says. ‘You’re estranged from yourself, Aloysius, and I find it both a little pathetic and a little offensive.’
And I feel like apologising.
She goes, ‘This year, 2016, is the centenary of the Easter Rising, a moment when Ireland was redefined by Irish people. A hundred years ago we found some collective fusion and realised, after those bold, thinking men were dispatched at Kilmainham, that something had to give.
‘As a nation, we’ve put a good display in the window this year but made a balls of truly sorting through the stock in the back of shop. We won’t let ourselves talk about the past without talking about its legacy, about the hard politics of it today. Over and over again we are taking it all too literally, living inside what happened, living in narrow facts that none of us saw, and missing the greater power and symbolism of the past. It pisses me off, I can tell you.
‘We’re on the road to 2021 and ’22 now. A hundred years on from the formation of the state. And likewise, it means a lot in a lot of ways.
‘I won’t believe for a second you don’t understand how millions of Irish people will have numbers like those at the fronts of their minds, how they are already discussing what a hundred years on means to our special little green, wet sod. And you choose to bat it all away as if it’s for eejits, as if it’s not in your blood as much as it’s in mine?
‘You’re lying, but only to yourself. You’re no breath of fresh air, Aloysius. You’re no new thinker, no mould-breaker, no man who cannot be put in a box.
‘You’re just a man on the run, just like half the men in the history of our land. Running. Leaving. Clearing out. A Paddy fucking off to find the new, to go and be the cute charmer somewhere else.
‘At least most of those who left before you never denied where they came from, at least they had the balls to accept themselves for who they are, to accept the fact that, land mass full of problems or not, it’s their fucking land mass, and raise a glass to it.
‘This is an important time to be Irish, and all of your theorising and gurning about your own past, whatever violence or rape or mental torture you suffered, won’t change any of that.
‘It’s an important time to be Irish, and a very useful time to get on and do the work I want to do, to give our land reason to pull together, to feel the same thing at the same time. I want to play our country some good mood music at a time when we are wondering what mood to be in.’
And I go, ‘How?’
‘What would you say,’ she says, ‘if we were able to remove people from our society who, by any human standards, by any standards at all, had no right to be alive any longer?
‘What would you say if I could predict the future, that the unmistakable symbolic power of some real events were destined to help act as a rising tide for Ireland?’
I say, ‘I would say that thinking you can play with the future is a very silly business.’
‘Why?’ she says. ‘It’s what you do all the time. You change things permanently, don’t you? What is the term you use – you “hard solve” things. You hard solve problems and it changes lives, makes people relax, makes people more comfortable in themselves. That’s why they hire you, isn’t it? That’s the end result of what you do, isn’t it? People hire you to remove trouble, to brighten their future. My need is no different.’
She goes, ‘What do you want the future to hold for a loan shark so selfish and greedy that he left babies hungry as he beat and raped their mothers, year after year after year?
‘Or what do you want for a paedophile who destroyed thousands of young lives, who is now planning to publish every name and detail from his hellish exploits, yet still has nothing but adoration for himself?
‘What do you want for a woman who is planning a bloodbath, who wants to blast open deep, sore wounds that are only just healing, north of the border?
‘What would you say to all that? Maybe you don’t even know. But I know what 99-percent of Irish people will say – they’ll say “
slán
” – “good fucking riddance” – “happy fucking days”. ’
‘And what a time it would be to say it, after this land has been battered and abused and tricked for decades, battered and abused and robbed from within to the point where people like you have turned their back.
‘What a time to show a few chapters physically closing, to get out and add some welcome schadenfreude to this period of our history.
‘What a time to say “out with the old and in with the new”. What a time to begin again, to capture and lift the national heart. The ends would justify the means, would they not?
‘What if we were to do this, to succeed, to create a cluster of good luck, to give people a foothold towards a bright new century? What if it all came at a time when there’s a re-emerging buoyancy in the fortunes of the state, a fresh synergy at a time when we are looking to tell the world who we are, to tell ourselves who we are?’
I laugh at that.
‘And who are we?’ I say. ‘All sons and daughters of 1916? It’s that simple to you, is it? Is that where you want all this to go? For everyone to look back and go “Those were the days”? We’re more than that, different than that. Not all the blood in Ireland runs green, Imelda. You maybe don’t see it from your locked-tight Dublin office but there are people north of you whose instincts work differently, who would be traitors to themselves, to their loved ones, to their country, to the blood they’ve shed, if they were to magically fit in with your idea of who they should be, of what you think should make them tick. That’s part of your problem, you see, you can’t understand how identity works, just how deep it goes, until it gets challenged.’
She goes, ‘I’m talking about enhancing the good stuff, getting shot of the bad. I’m telling you I want anyone who feels so inclined to feel positive about who they are, not who they are not. I’m talking about spirit and courage, about independence and leadership, not about venom and anger and division. I can’t change Northern Ireland any more than anyone else, and I don’t even think I’d want to – there’s nothing in the world wrong with passion and identity.
‘It’s the Ireland of saints and scholars that I believe in, Aloysius, not the land of shameless soldiers who have their hands out for the dole in between breaking kneecaps and making fucking nail bombs.