Category: History

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I’ll culturally appropriate whatever seems appropriate

I guess I’ve been quiet for quite some time on this blog. It seemed to me wise to adhere to a particular wisdom that takes various forms in various cultures.

“Whatever you say, say nothing.”

“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.”

Or this one, from the Hávamál:

I’ve been reading the Hávamál for the first time recently. I’m somewhat of a Norse wannabe. I like the mythology. I can relate to the sense of bone-chilling cold, the strict code of honour and morality. These are familiar things to me. But I am, somewhat unusually for people from the Atlantic Archipelago, entirely lacking in Norse genetics. I’m a wannabe.

My kids on the other hand are of Viking descent (and no doubt other things too). Both have clear blue eyes. One is blond. The other is descended from a town literally founded by Vikings and named for its fjord. I however, am pure Celt. This is less of a boast than a lament on my part. How astonishing it would be to have a diverse lineage. How interesting it would be.

Nevertheless, when Professor Bryan Sykes of Oxford University tested me some years ago, I proved to be almost entirely of North-Eastern Irish origin. The slight question mark was in relation to the possibility that I might have had some Icelandic heritage. However, that’s because the settlers of Iceland came from Norway and, en route, realised they’d forgotten a crucial component for settling a new land – women. So they – erm – collected a few in Antrim en route across the Atlantic.

Thus was a nation born. However, the likelihood that a stray Viking of Antrim descent returned to form part of my lineage is tiny. I accept the fact that my ancestors most likely never traveled further than the Hebrides in thousands of years (and most likely not even that far.)

As an Irishman – a very Irish man genetically in fact – I have a patrimony worth valuing. One of the oldest mythologies in the world is mine to claim. I can also lay claim to other aspects of Irishness, however constituted or conceived. The invention of whiskey and the pneumatic tyre alone justifies the existence of my people I would suggest.

Nevertheless, I choose not to be so parochial. Indeed, I was not raised to be parochial. The education I received valued the cultures of Judeo-Christianity, of Greece and Rome, of the (mostly Italian) Renaissance, and the (mostly Anglo-German) Enlightenment.

By the time I reached university education, postcolonialism was assuming its position in the canon. (I was later to teach this at Trinity College Dublin.) I was exposed to the (English language) literature of Africa, India, the Caribbean.

Later again, I began to find certain other cultures of interest. I was intrigued by China and Tibet, and visited both. I’ve since spent a lot of time exploring Buddhist thought. I likewise found the ancient Mesoamerican cultures fascinating and visited Mexico to witness their ruins and remains, where I encountered their nation’s founding mestizo mythology – the value in a blended culture.

More recently, I have found the palimpsestic cultures of both Turkey and Israel to be absolutely intriguing. Anatolia, arguably the omphalos of the world, has given home to the Hittites, the Hellenes, the Byzantines, and later a series of Turkic arrivals, culminating in the Ottoman Empire, which arguably led the world for centuries.

Likewise, the history of the land variously historically known as Judea, Palestine (and various other monikers) has had an outsized influence on the culture of the entire world. The Abrahamic monotheisms all stem from this slender sliver of land. Some of the cultures there are of extremely ancient origin. Jericho, for example, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the planet.

And the persistence – against enormous odds – of the Jewish people, and in a less attenuated timeframe the Palestinian people, remains astonishing in light of the many, many cultures which have come and went in the meantime. I was educated among Jewish people, and work alongside them. They are an industrious, imaginative and above all, hopeful people. I likewise have Palestinian friends. They too have sustained their culture through enormous trials.

ALL of these have influenced me. They have influenced my thinking. They have influenced who I am. It would be foolish of me to argue otherwise. Likewise, many other cultures, ancient and modern, distant from my birthplace and blood or closely proximate, have also. (It would be beyond foolish, for example, to deny the influence of the English on me. I was educated in their system, watched their TV, imbibed their culture and ultimately lived there teaching English culture to English kids in England.) I don’t believe I am alone in this. Arguably, only the isolate cultures of the Andaman Islands or the inner Amazon could truly argue for their cultural purity.

It is for this reason that, even as I taught postcolonial theory and literature, I innately rejected the concept of cultural appropriation. All of these cultures, ideas, practices are within me. No one loses if I choose to eat Jamaican jerk chicken, or strike a Hindu yoga pose, or chant a Tibetan mantra, or listen to urban American rap, or read 19th century Russian literature. No one. If anything, the people embedded in or descended from those cultures potentially gain a friend, an ally.

So I’ll culturally appropriate whatever seems appropriate, if you don’t mind (and even if you do.) Tonight I will read the Hávamál. I’m not a Viking and never will be. I may be related to some of their descendants, and have visited the lands they inhabited, but that’s not important. What’s important is that I value these cultures, in my own way.

Don’t let anyone police what you find interesting.

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The Song of Amergin (a mistranslation)

Thus far I’ve tried to avoid Irish language poetry, partly because it reminds me of the shame of not speaking my indigenous tongue, and partly because such poems come a little too close to home sometimes.

That said, I’ve tackled Scatha’s warning to Cuchullain in the past, so I guess there’s not really a rule as such here. Therefore, I have added to the hilltop of poetry translations yet another version of the Song of Amergin.

Amergin, in short, was one of the Milesian invaders who displaced the Tuatha de Danaan, or Children of Danu, from Ireland. The latter later morphed in mythology to become the undying, the supernatural race of the Aos Si, or people of the Sidhe, ie the underworld.

The Milesians, or sons of Mil, were according to the same mythological history, Celts who came to Ireland from Iberia originally to invade. This history is told in Ireland’s mythological repository, the aptly named Leabhar Gabala, or Book of Invasions, for many were the invasions of Ireland.

Amergin comes to Ireland therefore as a conqueror, intending to displace the people of the land and take ownership himself. It is told that as the Milesians approached the coast of Ireland, Amergin was suddenly possessed of poetic inspiration and thus emerged his enigmatic song.

I don’t wish to comment or critique it too much. It is after all a product of ancient pagan imagination, likely filtered through layers of Christian sentiment before reaching us in its current forms. What we can safely say is that Amergin expresses the confidence of the conqueror, but a very unusually expressed confidence, in which he already seems to be merging with the flora and fauna, the geography and meteorology, of Ireland itself.

In this sense, he is declaring himself to be a suitable king and custodian of the land, for in that scapegoat primitive society, the wellbeing of the ruler was intimately braided with that of the kingdom and the land itself. Often, in times of famine, a king would be put to death to placate the land and the gods. In his song, therefore, Amergin displays an expansive kind of amor fati. He is accepting this gamble, this fate, and pledging his capacity to fulfill the role of leadership by himself becoming one with the land.

Amergin, however, did not become king, or Ri, of Ireland. He was a bard and sorcerer, a druid not a ruler. Instead the island was divided (then like now) into two kingdoms, north and south, each ruled by one of his brothers. This being Ireland, of course that led to its own difficulties later, even as Amergin became the chief poet and judge of the land.

We can perhaps accept that, in his divinely inspired song, he had at least earned that title. The song is, in a sense, the first judgement he handed down.

“The Coming of the Sons of Miled,” illustration by J. C. Leyendecker in T. W. Rolleston’s Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race, 1911.

The Song of Amergin

I am the air that moves the sea.

I am the sea wave moving.

I am the ocean’s bellow.

I am the seven-antlered stag.

I am the ox who fought seven times.

I am the hawk descending from the cliff.

I am the beam of sunlight in a dewdrop.

I am the most beautiful of flowers.

I am a boar in courage.

I am a salmon through water.

I am a flood on the plain.

I am a hilltop of sorcery and poems.

I am the tip of the battle spear.

I am the god who ignites fires in the mind.

Who is it who sheds light where the mountains meet?

Who knows what lies within the unhewn tomb?

Who declares the ages of the moon?

Who tells the place where the sun sleeps?

If not I?

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When do wars actually end?

World War One started in July 1914, but when did it end? Conventionally, people assume it ended in November 1918, with the surrender of Germany.

But people were still dying many years later. My own grandfather suffered for decades with lungs rotted out by mustard gas at the Somme, and didn’t die for many years, gasping and coughing nightly.

The most recent victims, astonishingly, were as recently as March 2014, almost exactly a century after the conflict started. How is that possible? They were construction workers, who accidentally triggered an unexploded bomb buried beneath where they were working.

During WW1, a ton of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory along the front.

As a result, the French Département du Déminage (Department of Mine Clearance) recovers about 900 tons of unexploded munitions every year. They call it the Iron Harvest.

Unexploded ordinance is left behind after all conflicts. Children are maimed and killed every year as a result of uncleared mines and bombs in Asia and Africa.

The wars we fight today will kill not only us but our grandchildren and great-grandchildren too. It’s time to make war history.

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What if World War III broke out and no one noticed?

What if no one noticed for the same reason that for a long time no one noticed that industrialisation was causing the climate to change? What if World War III is a hyperobject?


We live at a time when empires are decaying, arising and reformulating themselves in new structures and alliances. Does knowing this help us at all? Are we like Europe in 1914, on the brink of a seemingly inevitable global conflagration? Or more like the great empires of the Bronze Age, which collapsed in darkness three millennia ago following their own tragic but elusive hyperobjective moment?

Perhaps AI might yet save us from ourselves, if only it too were not a hyperobject, or worse, the oscillating image of multiple potential hyperobjects, each one more alien and incomprehensible than the last.

So if we can’t rely on a digital messiah, we might be forced to resolve our current issues the old-fashioned way.

No, not war. The OTHER old-fashioned way.

I’ll be giving a talk on all this next month. More info shortly.

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The lost land of Greater Ireland

Early Irish writings, including the ‘Imramma’ poems, identify Irish monks sailing to North America. Later writings, including the Brendan Voyage do likewise.

Brendan's ship sailing by pillars of Ice - art by Jim Fitzpatrick and copyright to him.

The Norse annals, which were intended as historical records, do likewise, in the Landnámabók and the Annals of Greenland, which itself is written evidence supporting the now-accepted fact that the Vikings had reached North America in the 11th century.

A number of Norse sagas, including that of Erik the Red, also cite Irish sailing and colonising North America prior to the Norse arrivals.

Throughout these texts, this land is referred to as Írland hit mikla (Greater Ireland) or Hvítramannaland (White Man Land) due to the perception of those who were resident there.

Even in 12th century Sicily, the Arab historian Al-Idrisi wrote of the existence of Irlandah-al-Kabirah, or Greater Ireland, located to the west of Iceland.

And the Shawnee legends of the Amerindian peoples near Chesapeake Bay refer to the existence in their history of white men carrying poles and using iron instruments.

And artifacts have been found in locations including West Virginia which bear marks cognate with the Ogham script of ancient Ireland, though this is disputed.

This is all generally hand-waved away by contemporary historians as mere mythology, as they quite reasonably insist on incontrovertible archeological evidence.

Mind you, they used to do the same thing in relation to the Vikings until Anse-aux-Meadows was discovered. Even then, they still attempted to argue away the Helluland site on Baffin Island, even sacking the archeologist and her husband and sequestering her evidence.

I’m always intrigued by such historical disputation, and often wonder cui bono? Could a narrative which supported earlier European engagement with North America in anyway undermine Canadian claims to the wealth in and under the Arctic, for example? Such has been alleged in the past.

In any case, I hope they do find Greater Ireland one day, just as they appear to have already found Vinland and Helluland.

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The Waste Hill of the Ancient Roman Oil Boom

Monte Testaccio is a park in Rome, a 35 metres high hill that’s over a kilometre wide. It’s an artificial hill, created during the Imperial period by dumping all the used amphorae (clay jars) used to contain olive oil, which was used for food, cooking, heating and light in ancient Rome.

It’s estimated to hold the remnants of over 53 million such amphorae (which generally could only be used once due to the clay turning the oil rancid.) From this we can calculate the olive oil use of Rome at around 6 BILLION litres of oil throughout the late Republic and Imperial eras.

A city of over one million people for hundreds of years used so much oil that the used up containers are now a manmade hill a kilometre wide.

Today, by contrast, we use up 15 billion litres of crude oil. But where Rome used up their 6 billion litres during the entire classical period, our 15 billion litres of crude is EVERY DAY.
Just imagine, every single day, we use up 2.5 times as much oil as ancient Rome, the biggest city on Earth before the Middle Ages, did during its entire history. It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it?

Furthermore, since the Roman oil was ‘grown’, it was also essentially carbon neutral, though obviously it led to localised pollution in the capital. Ancient Rome, in other words, would have smelt smoky, greasy and rancid. But it wasn’t enough pollution to affect the climate.

To achieve that, we’ve had to take the entire Roman oil use and waste multiples of the equivalent DAILY, for decades on end. It has to stop. We need renewable energy sources to become easy and ubiquitous as quickly as possible.

The world is still dealing with the trash and effects of ancient Rome’s oil use two millennia on. The problems we are creating now will still affect our descendants for unimaginable periods of time, assuming our species survives our own wastefulness and short-term thinking.

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Hands

A brief interlude in the (mis)translations project to offer something original, insofar that any poem may be original. This one is presumably self-explanatory.

Hands

There had to be earlier times that I don’t remember
now lost in the fog of memory, from confabulation
to capitulation, but the weekend that those poor kids
burned in Dublin, a few days before Bobby starved to death,
I went away for the first time with my da,
over to the football on the ferry, a bumpy crossing,
toilets heaving with puking men, ankle deep,
stinking of sour stout, black and yellow,
till we landed in Liverpool, like millions before us,
just after dawn, into grey skies, drizzle you wouldn’t
call rain, all the shops still shut but my stomach
complaining, and it was still Yosser’s town then,
red and angry, Torytortured, the darkened eyes
of the sleepless staring up suspiciously from shopfronts,
and we went looking for sausages and bacon, anything
really to stop my complaining, walked all the way
from the docks to Anfield, my hand in his. In his hand.

I think they even lost that day, those invincible reds,
and I don’t recall the match, just the crowd, a sea of scarves,
the roar of thousands, the fear and thrill of it, a man’s world,
and me manhandled into it, gripping my father’s fingers for fear
of losing him in the crush of the crowd, the swaying terrace
bouncing underfoot, and when, in the dayglo sun of Puglia
I grab my own kid’s tiny hand to arrest his limitless courage
in the face of the big world, the onrushing mopeds, the cars
and traffic he’s obsessed with, this is what I’m really holding onto,
the dead man’s hand, that lost grey world, all victories in defeat.

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Last Universal Common Ancestor

(With huge apologies to Suzanne Vega)

My name is Luca
I lived on the hot sea floor
I lived quite a while ago
About four billion years or more.

They say I came from a meteorite
during the Eoarchaean night
Just don’t ask me when that was
Just don’t ask me when that was
Just don’t ask me when that was

It might be because I’m mumsy
But you’re all descended from me
The lineage is rather hazy
But all life are my kids, you see.

From spirochaetes to amoebae,
cat, dog, whale or butterfly,
every living thing is mine
every living thing is mine
every living thing is mine.

For more info on your oldest ancestor, here’s a nice NYT article on the topic.

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Buon Compleanno, Guglielmo Shakespeare

On this, his 459th birthday, I will dedicate a little time to re-reading some favourite sonnets – originally a Petrarchan form of poetry – by the Bard. I might even pass time with that overlooked early masterpiece Venus and Adonis, or else the now contentious Taming of the Shrew.

I might rewatch the excellent documentary series Shakespeare in Italy, from the BBC in 2012, featuring Francesco de Mosta, although it is alas not currently available on the iPlayer.

Or there’s always Nothing Like The Sun, Anthony Burgess’s tour-de-force novel of Shakespeare’s lovelife, which heavily features a Dark Lady who, for once, isn’t Italian. Burgess is somewhat of an outlier when it comes to Shakespeare. Despite having spent much of his own life in Italy, and married to an Italian, he tends to play down Shakespeare’s Italian connections.

Where most researchers and novelists have followed AL Rowse and identified the Dark Lady as Emilia Lanier, a woman descended from the Italian Bassano family, Burgess presents her as an unlikely Malayan in Elizabethan London.

This has always been my favourite of the covers.

Likewise, where many scholars accept that it is possible, though unlikely, that Shakespeare could have travelled abroad to Italy before his theatrical fame, Burgess elsewhere fictionalised a Shakespeare travelling to Spain to meet Cervantes at the height of both men’s fame. (He also wrote a short story where Shakespeare received literal inspiration for his plays from time travellers, so as a theorist of Shakespeare he was very much an outlier really!)

Despite Burgess, there is no doubt that Italy loomed large as a source of inspiration for Shakespeare. From the sonnets of Petrarch, to the sources of plays like Othello or Measure for Measure in works by Italian authors such as Ariosto, to the imagined Italy of his settings in Venice, Verona, Milan and elsewhere, to the Roman plays, Shakespeare’s work returns again and again to an Italy of the mind and soul.

I recently got the chance to revisit Stratford-on-Avon, and attend a performance of the recent RSC production of Julius Caesar, considered by many to be the best of Shakespeare’s Roman plays.

It was as magical and eclectic as one might expect from the RSC’s troupe. The lethal geopolitics of the late Republic and early Empire are distilled by the Bard into an almost claustrophobic clash of private loyalties and public interests.

I also went to visit Shakespeare’s schoolhouse, which is amazingly still in use as a school today, and was treated to a Latin lesson from his schoolmaster, an entertaining chap who may possibly have been an actor too. For it was of course in Warwickshire and not Tuscany that Shakespeare was first introduced to Italy and the literature of Latin and – by extension – Italian.

The more one reads Shakespeare, the more the influence of Italy, Romans and Italians becomes evident. I haven’t even mentioned his likely friendship with the English-born Italian John Florio, author of the first English-Italian dictionary, and a man who contributed almost as many words to English as Will himself.

Italy has no shortage of writers to be proud of, and no need to lay a claim to England’s finest. Nevertheless, Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without Italy.

Buon Compleanno, Guglielmo.