Eóin Flannery

Rites of passage: migrancy and liminality in Colum McCann's Songdogs and This Side of Brightness

This article deals with two novels by the Irish writer Colum McCann: Songdogs and This Side of Brightness. Reading the narratives of both texts through the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, the essay reveals how McCanns characters undergo processes of liminal experience, which occasion structural changes in their familial relationships and in their individual identity. Turners work primarily focused on the ritual behaviours of tribal groups and how liminality was used as a physical means toward spiritual ends; I diagnose similar dynamics in McCanns two literary fictions.

‘A Land Poisoned’: Eugene McCabe and Irish Postcolonial Gothic

While many of Eugene McCabes works adhere to the recognisable features of literary naturalism, including a fraught exposition of character, realist narrative language and pessimistic tone, it is my intention to spotlight the formal Gothic dimensions of these literary fictions. I will address, primarily, his most accomplished work to date, the novel Death and Nightingales and his acclaimed, and later televised, short story trilogy, ‘Cancer’, ‘Heritage’ and ‘Victims’. Land and violence are at the core of these narratives and, while the later novel is set in a pre-partition context, many of the same political strains surface across the stories. Appropriation, division, loyalty, and threat are pivotal to the narrative momentum of McCabes tales, as the author seeks to relate the indelible traumas that stain the physical and cultural landscape of both a pre-partition Ulster and post-partition borderland.

‘So many destinations in one place’: Chris Arthur's Words of the Grey Wind: Family and Epiphany in Ulster and Irish Elegies

‘[The historian]’, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes in Truth and Method, ‘knows that everything could have been different, and every acting individual could have acted differently’. Gadamer’s point, in his discussion of Ranke, gestures to the problem of embracing human diversity and freedom within the representational borders of modern historical practice. But what one can also detect in Gadamer’s reflection is the struggle between contingency and narration within modern historiography, and this seems to be one of the thematic keynotes of Chris Arthur’s most recent essayistic meditations. Ranging from the political to the deeply personal; from the secular to the numinous; and from the local to the global, Arthur’s two collections, Words of the Grey Wind and Irish Elegies, are both informed by the author’s anxieties about the fleeting, insubstantial and arbitrary nature of human existence, and a compensatory counter-intuition, which exults in the sheer luck of such existence having ever materialised at all in the first instance. Thus, Arthur’s essays progress with a kind of philosophical counterpoint at their heart; at once revelling in the suggestiveness of the most minute object or memory, while at the same time detailing the brute facts of life’s transience. Such a compositional tactic serves Arthur well, as the tones and moods of his most successful pieces fluctuate, and provoke empathetic responses from the reader. In another register, Arthur’s work has always been deeply ecological in its vision. Not only are natural objects taken as memorial catalysts by the author, but his historical perspective locates human histories within the protracted continuum of ‘deep history’, a key concept in contemporary ecocritical writing. Arthur’s temporal frame, then, urges a level of historical humility, which is, again, consistent with the ethical project of ecocriticism and that strives to expose and to undermine the hubris of capitalistic modernity. Words of theGreyWind is a selection of previously published essays, taken from Arthur’s earlier essay collections: Irish Nocturnes (Davies Group 1999) (‘Ferrule’; ‘Kingfishers’; ‘Linen’; and ‘Meditation on the Pelvis of an Unknown Animal’); Irish Willow (Davies Group 2002) (‘A Tinchel Round My Father’; ‘Table Manners’; and ‘Train Sounds’);

International Human Rights Law in an African Context

[Review] Richard Price, Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008), xxix þ371 pp., £50 hardback, ISBN 978-0-521-88968-1; £18.99 paperback, ISBN 978-0-521-71819-6.

Hopes and impediments

In the shadow of the increasingly dense theoretical disposition of contemporary postcolonial studies, it is both edifying and chastening to reflect upon Ken Wiwa’s memoir tracing the evolution of his relationship with his father, the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed in Nigeria in 1995. Wiwa, a Canadian-based journalist, explores this evolution in terms of both the personal/individual intimacies of a father/son relationship and the broader context of Nigeria’s recent and ongoing history of political and neo-colonial exploitation. In the Shadow of a Saint proposes that Wiwa’s personal tragedy is symbolic, perhaps even paradigmatic, of the malignant neo-colonial nexus that has repressed post-independence Nigeria and in particular his ethnic tribe, the Ogoni. In a 2002 lecture at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, Wiwa remarked that ‘in short, an imperfect past makes the future tense’. The history of Nigeria, and specifically that of the Ogoni, is imbricated with the history of two generations of the Wiwa family, and Wiwa’s narrative exploration of the possibilities for personal reconciliation thus also resonates with the possibility of alleviating future political tension and conflict in Nigeria. His memoir, coupled with his continuing participation within the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), may be read as symptomatic of Wiwa’s desire to resolve the imperfections of the past in both personal and political terms. In the Shadow of a Saint opens with the words ‘My father’, immediately followed by a series of six questions as Wiwa sets the tone and the theme of the subsequent discourse. Wiwa’s search is never an uncomplicated reflection on his often-distant relations with his father, but is punctuated by the staggering political and economic commitments in his father’s life. The text is a double interrogation of what the author terms ‘the conflicting emotions I felt, or was supposed to feel, about Ken Saro-Wiwa and my father’. But equally, in the light of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s international fame as both a writer and a political martyr, the memoir is also in some ways akin to a public burial. In recognising this public role, and Saro-Wiwa’s status as a, if not the, Ogoni patriarch, Wiwa’s narrative serves as a meditation on the public–private dichotomy of his father’s life as well as a document of personal feeling and individual reflection made public. Ken Saro-Wiwa was instrumental in the formulation of the Ogoni Bill of Rights in October 1990, a document that demanded fundamental political