A short scattergun update
I am, it transpires, still alive
Hi,
This one won’t be about one topic in particular. But I’ve a newsletter’s worth of things to talk about, my own and other people’s, so let’s have at it.
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Last week featured two linguistic firsts for me: the first time I’ve published an essay written in Italian, and the first time I’ve done a public interview in Irish.
The essay (front page pictured above) is one I adapted from a speech I gave in Bari last year about the impact of the Victorians on my work, the patronising assumption that there is necessarily an insular ‘wave’ of young Irish writers afoot who only read and are only influenced by each others’ work, and why creativity does not consist of inventing something from zero (atomically impossible) but of recombining elements of this and that into something new.
Writing in Italian is lots of fun for me. I can completely understand why Jhumpa Lahiri jumped ship from English. I’ve not thrown myself into Italian so completely as she did – I’m too greedy for that, too keen to maintain the other languages I speak and acquire ever more of the dratted things – but when I do write in it, I enjoy its flexibility and its drama.
The interview was on Raidió na Gaeltachta about recognition for Irish-language literature in the English-speaking world. I had not planned to do anything in Irish so soon after coming back, but it felt important to add something to the conversation happening now – an old one, but it comes and goes in waves – since the burden is normally on Irish-language writers to keep screaming into the void about these things without any sign that the English-speaking literary scene is listening. The accuracy of my Irish has declined a bit from not speaking it in ages, but I can still express myself without too much hesitation or searching for words. I’m excited to sharpen it and deploy it more in the year ahead.
I also wrote a column getting into why speaking Irish is marked with guilt and shame for me in a way none of my other non-native languages are. This is something I hadn’t been thinking about when I wrote my essay for Wired Our Own Way (more below) on English being the language I feel least socially comfortable in. I still think that’s true on other levels; in English I have some explaining to do, whereas in the others (Irish/French/Spanish/German/Italian, in the order I learned them) the fact that it’s not my native language accounts for all manner of off-kilter statements/behaviour. But since coming back to Ireland, I’ve been considering why exactly speaking Irish makes me feel so awful. Yes, I make the odd mistake, but my Irish isn’t terrible; I’m a fully independent user of the language. But this shouldn’t feel like a hard-won capability, and it shouldn’t be something that surprises people; it should have been mine without question, and it would have been if history had been fair. When Irish people feel bad about our Irish, we’re not just experiencing generic second-language embarrassment. We’re encountering the grief of what was lost. I think part of the previous generation’s overall indifference – affected or genuine – to the language comes from a repression of that grief.
Anyway, I think I’m getting back into the swing of things now. I’m looking forward to doing more things i nGaeilge.
On Wired Our Own Way: it’s the first ever anthology of essays from autistic Irish writers and thinkers. So much is published about us, and so little is published by and for us. I hope it speaks to some of you reading this.
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One last thing I wanted to signal boost: this must-read Guardian article from last Wednesday about how British publishing is now less accessible to Black authors than before 2020. At the time of the 2020 protests, I remember a mixed energy within the publishing industry: excitement that more Black authors – debut ones, particularly – were getting fair opportunities, mixed with fear that they were being treated as a ‘trend’ and that this superficial interest would soon fade. Well, it has.
Here’s what my friend Sharmaine Lovegrove, the founder of Dialogue Books and one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, contributed to the article:
‘We didn’t think we couldn’t go so far so quickly, and go back to where we started. I think it’s harder because people will say “well, we tried”. When people say “we tried” they’re reluctant to do that again and that’s heartbreaking. […] The biggest mistake was seeing it as a trend as opposed to an opportunity to cultivate something meaningful that was missing. It’s as if the industry is saying: “It’s all very difficult and these books haven’t done very well so we’re literally not going to try again with someone from the same background”. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.’
Sharmaine also said in the article that Black authors are often labelled ‘difficult’ for self-advocating. We talked about this point at length over Vietnamese noodles at her local marketplace when I was in Berlin last week: how rare it is for Black people to publish a book without first having achieved success in some other field, how they’ve learned from this experience that they need to stand up for themselves to get fair treatment, how they cannot – and probably shouldn’t – trust that letting the system motor along without comment will give them the publication they deserve. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Say nothing and their books will be sidelined. Speak up and they’re being too much.
A huge aspect of the problem, I think, is that people within publishing have an unfairly narrow conception of what readers will enjoy. Even when editors or marketers themselves admire a book, they tend to assume they can’t sell it unless it matches an existing cookie-cutter model of success. That’s always going to work against minorities of any kind, but also against artistic experimentation more generally. As individuals not privy to the acquisitions meetings, the best we can do is continue to read widely and to shout about the books we enjoy, particularly if they fall outside the parameters of whatever publishing considers the hot new thing.
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Speaking of, my quest to read more books in Irish continues. I’ve just finished Celia de Fréine’s drama collection Leanaí Séanta, which features the Irish word (‘An sásamh a bhíonn le brath agat féin, ní ag an liúdramán faoi chaibidil agat’) whose anglicised form was just added to the OED. I’m now on Breandán Ó hEithir’s Lig Sinn i gCathú, the first Irish-language book to ever top Ireland’s bestseller list in 1976. I can see why; it’s a rollickingly amusing campus novel with a sharp eye for bureaucracy and small-town pettiness.
There’s a fair amount of travel ahead of me next month: Italy, Maynooth, Galway and maybe France. I will try to keep my hair on and my temper even.
Le meas,
N