However, the genre proved remarkably resilient and a steady stream of books detailing island and Gaeltacht lives continued to appear, creating a whole library of documentation of Blasket and West Kerry life. Myles na Gopaleen’s satire of 1941, An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), ridiculed the idea of glorifying poverty, a pursuit to which many urban Gaelic enthusiasts, scholars among them, seemed dedicated. As a result, such a genre could be seen as obsolete, needing no further subsequent illustration. The Blasket autobiographies, published in the late twenties and early thirties, might be viewed both as defining narratives of Irish island, or indeed rural existence and as the swan song of traditional island life. The Blaskets, whose writers provided the most celebrated and definitive narratives of island life, were finally evacuated in 1953, when the remaining inhabitants decided they could no longer endure the reduced circumstances in which they found themselves. As Ireland’s population declined after the Famine, island populations also plummeted, leaving many completely abandoned. In the case of the Blaskets this meant the abandonment of permanent settlement on the island. The Blasket books represented images of traditional life as lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, appearing as that way of life became more and more affected by modern living conditions. The processes involved in the production of “native” autobiography are an interesting study in themselves, raising a series of significant questions. This was consonant with the ideals of cultural romantic nationalism, whose impulse to recognise the richness and depth of the vernacular culture of the “people” and the Irish-speaking people above all, achieved material expression in these works. Whatever the sources of the stimulus, clearly these iconic books resulted from intervention on the part of outsiders, who convinced islanders they had something of importance to say. Though the works were long thought to have emerged through the encouragement of Gaelic scholars and enthusiasts, a recent study has suggested that the Protestant mission active in nineteenth century West Kerry played an unrecognised role that was downplayed in the overtly nationalistic milieu of fin de siècle cultural activism. Significantly, the two men wrote their own stories whereas Peig’s writing depended on an amanuensis in the person of her son, Maidhc, himself a storyteller, poet and prose writer.ĭespite Peig’s dependence on others to commit her work to writing and Ó Criomhthain’s and Ó Súileabháin’s competence in this regard, it is widely recognised that outside influence played a major role in stimulating the Blasket writers. Peig Sayers’s narrative, also underscoring the straitened circumstances she endured, appears in more than one book, accenting certain episodes differently in each of them. Muiris Ó Súileabháin’s work Fiche Blian ag Fás (Twenty Years A-growing), a more lyrical and poetic account of life on the same island, places more emphasis on the joy and carefree nature of youth for most of its length, making the spectre of emigration and change all the more effective when it finally appears. The image of a hard life lived against the background of an unforgiving environment is nowhere more evident than in Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s classic An tOileánach (The Islandman), which appeared originally in 1928 but whose definitive edition had to wait until 2002. The publication in the 1920s and 30s of the Blasket island books The Islandman, Peig and Twenty Years A-growing, first in Irish and, subsequently, in translation in English and in other languages, promoted a certain kind of Irish identity which the newly emerging state was able to capitalise on. Island autobiographies and memoirs are synonymous with the emergence of a strong voice in Irish language writing, something new for a people who had previously been represented primarily in English by outsiders. Róise Rua: An Island Memoir, by Pádraig Ua Cnáimhsí, translated by JJ Keaveny.
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