What
links The Blanket's mission of republican,
principled protest and informed dissent to one man's
quest to recover fragments of our island's 'oriental
and maritime heritage'? Bob Quinn's been a maverick
in his careers as not only writer but especially
filmmaker and television director. He confronts
received knowledge and upends the status quo. Living
in a Conamara gaeltacht since 1970, his adopted
locale inspired him to ask two questions that impelled
the saga adapted in this update (Dublin: The Lilliput
Press, 2005, 20 euro) to his 1986 work, Atlantean.
Bono, in an interview with Bob Dylan, cited Quinn's
initial contention: tracing ancient Gaelic song
to North Africa. A new edition's range of illustrations,
attractive font and design, and incorporation of
material gleaned from refinement and elaboration
of his initial foray into largely uncharted intellectual
waters presents iconoclasts with a model of how
to construct an alternative to what everyone assumes
to be the only way from which to perceive 'reality.'
Looking at the púcán boats that once
dotted his Atlantic coast, he noted their resemblance
to lateen sails on Egyptian dhows; listening to
sean-nos melodies, he marvelled at their pentatonic
counterparts from the Arab realms. Quinn targets
cultural echoes, archaeological evidence, and linguistic
links tying Ireland not to the conventional La Tene-Celtic
and thereafter European-centred diffusion pattern,
but to a neglected nautical passage that, he reasoned,
had long escaped the gaze of Continentally ethnocentric
scholars fixated on an Indo-European genesis for
the peoples and crafts that entered into the island.
Now, Quinn's thesis contradicts the Celtic origins
which many Irish have celebrated for 300 years.
His findings, necessarily scattershot and rather
random, resemble a Victorian vicar's parlour-displayed
assemblage of bric-a-brac. (Only source titles,
not precise citations, fill his endnotes, frustratingly.)
I suppose Quinn might retort it's instead structuralist
bricolage, a bold thrust to delve deeper below the
psuedo-Keltic veneer appliqued by Revivalists and
Romantics to excavate the broken shards and ghostly
palimpsests abandoned by those who travelled the
"wine-route" from as long as 5000 BCE
along the Southern Mediterranean littoral, until,
drawn by tin from Cornwall and smugglers to Ireland,
moving up the Iberian coasts until they continued
due north to the first landfall the western and
southern island shores. He advances that the true
impetus for Irish culture came from North African,
Egyptian, and Mediterranean lands rather than Central
Europe, the Roman empire, and its successors.
Neither the ancient classical nor the native Irish
authors, Quinn insists, called the indigenous people
in our island 'Celts' -- this being an antiquarian
and so relatively early modern coinage. In what
was for me the most intriguing section of his study,
he contends that North African substrata underlie
our Irish language itself, and he relates the legendary
accounts of the Iberian and Egyptian origins of
the island's first ancestors to the migrations that
would have brought trade, colonisers, refugees from
early Christian persecutions, and monks to Ireland
before the suspect arrival of a largely fabricated
Patrick. While I lack the familiarity that Quinn
has with his many sources, I wondered why, however,
his use of mitochondrial DNA studies to support
his claims cited Bryan Sykes (his eloquent Seven
Daughters of Eve. London: 2001) of Eve, but
not the concurrent team led by David Bradley from
TCD, whose assertions a few years back in Science
appear to complicate what Quinn simplifies about
the coming of the earliest settlers from Asia Minor
to Connaught thousands of years ago, Bradley's team,
also depends on genetic markers still overwhelmingly
present in natives to the West today.
Yet, the TCD team seems to clash in its findings
with Quinn's Mediterranean-African genesis for the
early Irish. Bearing the traces of peoples pushed
ever westward as farmers advanced, a kilometer or
so a year, the peoples (whose genetic traits distinguished
at 97% in the West of Ireland among males of native
descent vs. 3% in today's Turkey) came not over
water but presumably over land--driven across Europe
as they were pushed ahead by agriculturalists---unsettled
folks from the Fertile Crescent who were shunted
ever westward as farmers ploughed Europe over thousands
of years. The remnants of those pre-farmers wound
up settling finally into Connacht's spaces--the
last nearby refuge on the North Atlantic fringe.
Again, certain portions of Quinn's argument, even
to this general reader, appear akin to romanticised
notions of solidarity with au courant Arab and Third
World solidarity rather than the 'Thomas Cook model'
of radial diffusion from an Alpine or Danubian homeland,
favored by many 19 and 20c scholars. The evidence,
as Quinn admits at times, for a maritime rather
than continental dependence influencing Irish development
depends far too often for academic scrutiny upon
perhaps coincidental or random findings, albeit
painstakingly and cleverly compiled by Quinn over
three decades and more. His basic reliance upon
his interpretation of Irish from its status as a
living language rather than using Romanised inscriptions
to re-create a Celtic tongue appears convincing,
and I await further scholarship to clarify Quinn's
educated guesses. Like the vicar, his collection
impresses somewhat but also leaves the viewer muddle-headed
as he examines many labels, evaluations, and connections
between displays.
Chapters on Wales, Vikings, and Sheela-na-Gigs sway
uneasily beside steadier accounts of monastic art,
mythmaking, and the pirate trade with Algiers and
Morocco. The Berber-Irish parallels again smack
of the type of overly enthusiastic detective fieldwork
that Lorraine Evans (Kingdoms of the Ark.
London: Pocket Books, 2001) presented in establishing
archaeological patterns making Queen Scota of Milesian
lore into the eponymous ruler over Ireland's hordes
and the instigator of the British race. I enjoyed
both Evans and Quinn's attempts to scour the taint
of British Israelitism off of their navigational
tools, and I wondered why the latter author neglected
the former, but I fear that those hidebound and
tenured will publish on largely unconvinced by either
freelancer's revolutionary reports.
Frustration emerges as Quinn recounts throughout
his revised work the skepticism he faced from this
establishment. His pilgrimage of confrontations
may remind readers of The Blanket of republicans
continually staring down the wardens, soldiers,
or perhaps other vicars in pushing ideas and visions
into practical agendas and concrete strategies.
Re-orientalists, as I term Quinn and Evans, preach
to British and Irish audiences that their 'myths
of origin' need not be based in a proto-Brussels
conclave.
Many
today, in classrooms and libraries, may not pay
much attention to such independent scholars and
thinkers. We who make up The Blanket's community
may relate to this marginalisation. Perhaps the
late Edward Said might have claimed from his earthly
home (via Cairo if not Columbia!), that Quinn perpetuates
in his subtitle an Occidentalism dangerous to the
interests of Said's Arab polity. Yet, I applaud
for Quinn that he speaks boldly from his own, equally
defensible, certainly progressive, sea-ready fastness.
If republicans sunder a Celtic heritage, we can
then boast our descent from Atlanteans.
Anyone driving from Galway city through to, say,
Carna, might agree with Quinn. You hug the sea more
than the mountain in drawing your bearings, your
domain, and your living. Its towns and enterprises
meet the needs of those traditionally travelling
by huicear and not Honda, currach and not Cortina.
Commonsense shows, in what Quinn should have displayed
with localised and more modern archaeological maps,
that from Neolithic times contacts can be charted
drawing the West and South of Ireland into Spanish
ports and settlement and trade more than European
markets. For all the willful and accidental vagaries
within Quinn's spirited and never less than readable
chapters, this author takes on the 'Celtic' giant
and chops his Irish progeny down to a less Eurocentric,
more portable and shipworthy size. From the Arabic
term for any trefoil, by the ways Quinn unveils,
we import shamrakh.
