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Holidays
are a time when we think about friends and things
that happened in the past. The fact that I am a committed
long time atheist does not mean that I am impervious
to this or to some of the genuine emotions evoked
by religious holidays. At this time of year as well
as the corporate created shopping madness there is
the genuinely progressive and human desire to give
gifts and to be thoughtful and kind to others. I was
thinking along these lines early this morning here
in Chicago.
My
memory of Christmas growing up in rural Ireland in
the 1950's is dominated by the amount of work this
meant for my mother. It also meant anguish for her
as she could not afford to give her children what
she would have wanted to give them. My first steps
toward criticism of and then opposition to the system
which I later learned to call capitalism came through
seeing and trying to understand why women were treated
so badly in the rural Ireland of the time. One of
the reasons I left Ireland when I was twenty was because
I wanted among other things to learn what this was
all about, this bad treatment of women and what my
attitude was and should be. I was not well equipped
to do this as I was not free from the male chauvinist
attitudes myself.
A
few months after I left Ireland I found myself working
in a lumber camp/paper pulp mill in Northern Canada.
One day a young man, a Quebecois, and I were working
together and talking. He said to me "What do
you think about Joyce". I looked at him and replied
"Who is Joyce". I had never heard of James
Joyce. All the great forces of the Irish state and
the churches had conspired to ban Joyce's writings
from Ireland. I remember the humiliation I felt and
the anger at those who had kept this knowledge from
me.
Some
time after that I was on a merchant ship which sailed
into New Orleans. Still burning over my ignorance
I went to the library and asked to look at some books
by Joyce. They brought me Finnegans Wake. I
opened it and tried to read it. I remember thinking
that I must have concussion. This was the way the
words and images and ideas seemed to come and go and
swirl in and around my head. Ever since I got to know
something about Joyce's work I am convinced that he
would have been quite proud to hear of someone reading
Finnegans Wake thinking they had concussion.
There is a certain sense about it. I think that wee
Joyce would have had a laugh to himself. Maybe written
a limerick about my situation. There was a young man
from old Ireland, who on reading my book etc., etc..
Anyway
I have got to know Joyce a bit and got to know more
about the system that shaped me and so brutally repressed
the women of rural Ireland at that time. So this morning
as on most days when there is a holiday and when I
get to thinking about the past and about Ireland I
read a bit of Joyce.
As
my present to my friends and all on this list I would
like to share a quote from Joyce that I read for the
first time this year and also a comment on Joyce which
I feel is very accurate and helpful. Both these have
given me a lot of excitement and pleasure.
The
critic Colum McCabe had this to say about Joyce. "If
the young Joyce was antipathetic to the national ideology
which his generation did so much to promote, it was
not so much to the specific claims of Gaelic......but
to their service of a notion of Irish purity which
linked a wholly false notion of the Gael to the equally
false notion of the sexually and racially pure Irish
person - to be more specific, the pure woman....
Then
Joyce had this to say himself in describing one of
the ways which the male dominated class society used
to make sure that the Irish woman was "pure".
Joyce wrote: "The vaulting feminine libido...sternly
controlled and easily repersuaded by the uniform matteroffactness
of a meandering male fist". This is powerful,
Comrades.
The
book I enjoyed reading most this year was Nora
by Brenda Maddox. It is published by Mariner Books.
Without the strength and the independent, defiant
sexual spirit of Nora we never would have had the
works of Joyce. I would like to give thanks this morning
to Nora, to my mother and all the woman who one way
or another defied the spirit crushing regime of Irish
capitalism and its closest ally the Catholic Church.
PS
Next year I am going to start a campaign for Santa
to be a woman. The woman do nearly all the work in
the home for Christmas but the hero that brings all
the goodies is a male. I am still trying to figure
out a good name for her. And now I hear Bonnie vacuuming
up stairs so I had better get off here and go and
do my share or I will end up like those whose opposition
to the oppression of women is entirely abstract. S.
O'T.
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