The New York University Conference on. International Hunger focused primarily on the Irish Famine.
“You stood in the presence of a dread, silent, vast dissolution.”
John Mitchell
Ireland’s President Mary Robinson called upon the audience to “break the silence about the disaster that overcame us.” President Robinson was speaking to a thousand people who came to New York University for a conference on international hunger sponsored by the Center for Irish Studies at the Glucksman Ireland House. While the conference included panels and discussions of hunger in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, an attempt by Professor Robert Scally, the Director of Ireland House, to broaden the discussion beyond Ireland, the Irish Famine was the starting point and center of the two-day gathering.
One hundred and fifty years after the phytophora infestans fungus made its circuitous and deadly route to Ireland from the East Coast of the United States, scholars, literary critics, and policy activists gathered to sift through the wreckage of the Irish Famine, and to engage in acts of recovery, remembering, literary representation and indeed, public mourning.
The “unearthly silence” of death that 19th century Irish writer and Fenian John Mitchel “heard” during the Irish Famine is being shattered by a new generation of Irish and American historians who have broken through what for many years was a curious scholarly reticence to engage the events and deeds of that monumental period.
But why was there a silence that needed to be broken? Organizer of the conference Robert Scally suggested two reasons. The Famine has been and still is a sensitive subject, particularly in Ireland where many feel that the passions raised could be counter-productive to the peace process. And, Scally suggests, there is the shame associated with victimization, a kind of collective amnesia that can follow historic defeat. But it is time, Royal Irish Academy Historian Kevin Whelan admonished the New York gathering, “to reclaim our famine ghosts from their enforced silence and invisibility,” to acknowledge that the Irish and Irish-American national and cultural identity is inextricably linked to that tragedy. The “nightmare images” still need to be negotiated into the present.
Understanding and integration often begin with history, how the past shaped the contours and meaning of the present. As it should be, at this conference historians were the center around which the literary critics and policy experts moved. Clearly, the famine’s impact was worldwide. The Irish diaspora was sent to every corner of the globe, uprooting a people in the same way as the slave trade sent Africans into unwanted exile.
So in many ways it was appropriate the first major conference in the United States this year took place in New York. Several historians pointed out that New York was where “Irish-America” was first created. In her paper, “New York, The Most Irish City In America,” historian Hasia Diner pointed out that between 1845 and 1851, twelve percent of America’s Irish population resided in New York. Over a quarter of New York’s population in these years was born in Ireland.
In the crucible of New York political and economic life the Irish diaspora was transformed, and in turn they changed America. University of Missouri historian Kerby Miller described the symbiotic relationship that developed in New York between two distinct but related Irish communities. The larger consisted of men and women from peasant and rural backgrounds, their identity tied to particular communities, families, and folkways, their economic calculus often precapitalist. A more affluent and politically ambitious professional class needed the votes of the Irish masses (often secured through illegal registration) to assert their political power, while at the same time channeling traditional sensibilities and political impulses into an acceptable political and social structure. The Democratic Party, trade unions, the Catholic Church and social and cultural organizations provided the institutional mechanism for that assimilation.
These famine immigrants were a people in transition, thrust into a society going through a fundamental reshaping. They were people who looked backwards and forwards simultaneously.
Joel Mokyar, author of Why Ireland Starved, a seminal work on the economic pre-conditions for the famine, opened the conference with an exhaustive overview of how people died — dropsy, diarrhea, dysentery — the micro-organisms of death by hunger.
Indian scholar Amartya Sen got to the center of that political understanding in a concise and lucid way by going directly to the point where hunger, the overall economy and politics interact. In the Irish context, the general prevalence of poverty and the overdependence upon the potato made cottiers, agricultural laborers and small farmers particularly vulnerable to the recurring blight that began in 1845. But Sen also pointed out that famines are not hard to prevent provided there is the political will and determination to act forcefully and quickly to reduce mortality.
England in the 19th century may have been committed to preventing starvation within Britain but that same commitment did not translate to the empire nor to Ireland. It is clear, for instance, that the Irish Poor Law was inferior in many respects to its English counterpart. Relief was to be confined to a workhouse and no “right” to relief existed, meaning that when the workhouses became full the responsibility of the relief system was complete.
Sen forcefully pointed out that an ideological rationale for minimal intervention by the government underpinned a fundamental alienation of the rulers from the ruled. “Irish poverty,” Sen noted, was viewed as being caused by laziness, indifference, and ineptitude. England’s mission was not to alleviate Irish distress but to civilize her people. That “civilizing” process had catastrophic results.
If the distinctive Irish experience, as Denis Donoghue has argued, is one of division, then this ambitious and successful conference reflected that reality. But the division was not one of North and South, urban and rural, Irish and English, Protestant or Catholic. The crucial division was stated forcefully by one of the few non-historians there — Mary Robinson. Her challenge was to bridge the chasm between the idea of hunger and the fact of it; to relate the experiences of the Irish Famine not as historical facts to be polished and preserved in dusty archives, but by bringing the questions that the Irish Famine confronts us with into a public arena. Starvation in Ireland in the 1840s and in Sub-Saharan Africa today, is then, a political question.
Understanding comes with remembering — restructuring a community of memory that moves beyond the individual to the collective — the societal. In one of the most emotional and talked about presentations, University of California English Professor David Lloyd spoke of the collective psychological damage inflicted upon Ireland by the famine, laying Ireland upon the psychoanalytic couch. He opened his talk by playing the beginning of Sinead O’Connor’s song about the famine, a mournful, rhythmic wailing, a rock star version of keening.
If the Irish are a melancholy people, a stereotype that Lloyd argues is also a form of knowledge, that melancholy is the result of incomplete mourning, a repression of deep sadness and rage, a necessary emotional catharsis that keening once provided. O’Connor becomes then, the professional keener for a culture marked by loss, the famine experience embedded in Ireland’s collective psyche.
After Lloyd’s talk, lines formed behind the audience microphones as people spoke about their own sense of personal loss threatening to turn at least this part of the conference into group therapy. The dead, it has been suggested, cling to the living and won’t let go.
A number of conference participants wanted the famine dead to speak, to “amplify” the “frail voices” of Ireland’s past. But the famine dead will not speak.
They cannot write their own history or tell us what they think about the historians who are writing it for them.
Denis Donoghue, the Henry James Chair of American Letters at New York University, closed the conference on a note of caution and frustration. He asked whether historians within the “revisionist” school of Irish history may have become “dissaffected with the whole story of conflict in Ireland and wish to see it erased.” In this “bland school of history” there are only fools and incompetents but no villains. It’s a desire to remove the blame and pain from Irish history, to “call out a different future by narrating a different past.” Donoghue doubted that the Irish famine could be narrated coherently at all, that it could not, perhaps should not, be rendered familiar. Ultimately we must remain unreconciled.
A decade ago, literary critic Irving Howe wrote about the Holocaust in the same way. There are some events that simply leave us intellectualy disarmed, staring helplessly at reality. “There are some losses,” he wrote, “that cannot be made up, neither in time nor eternity. They can only be mourned.”
Kelly Candaele is a writer and political consultant living in Los Angeles.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the July/August 1995 issue of Irish America. ♦
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