The Great Blaskets

Twitter Photo: Dr. Kate Riordan @cathorio

ἐξίσταται γὰρ πάντ' ἀπ' ἀλλήλων δίχα

(existatai gar pant' ap' allêlôn dikha),

"for all things change, making way for each other."

—Euripides's Heracles From the fronticepiece At Swim-Two-Birds

An old college friend, poet Jack Crimmins wrote a note on Facebook saying that during the summer of 1981, the year Bobby Sands died of the hunger strike, he went to the Dingle Peninsula. Well, now, handsome blue-eyed Jack spent a week in Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland, writing, writing, writing. An scriobh. I was immediately jealous of that experience, wanting it for my own.

This then, was my reply, which, of course, morphed into something entirely different, as is the wont of blogging, one-eyed-jacks, and wild card Monty Pythonisms. Once I began expanding and explaining the note, it went feral, or ferile as in rhymes with all riled up—as we like to say it.

You'll hear the Irish-English tone change, which I may revise at a later date, but I was after hearin' my great aunt Aine speaking t'rough me, and there's no denying of that. You DO know that prepositions do all the durthywork in Irish, right? Well, then, hard "T"s aside as the divil's own tongue, and now you have it.

Now, understand, Jack Óg, that I grew up with two Englishes—make that three Anguishes. 'Mericun-Englush and British-Anguish. A h-aon, a do a tre... Betwixt and between was the Irish-English, or as Oscar, the little Wilde deer, put it, Hiberneo-English—which I hid from my classmates. Except for the word, "oft-ten" which tripped me up. Tangle my tongue with hidden "T"s and hyphenations. Everything was in translation. No Irish Need Apply. Please spit here. I was such a walking linguistic sham-rockery, people mistook me for being British! Now, ain't that a twist of treason!

And in the midst of all this prattlin', Maurice O'Sullivan steals the story of my relative Aine, out from under me, and runs away with it. Maybe I'll be linear and wrestle them apart and make two stories with no point to them at all. But this will have to suffice for now. As writing is its own ugly beast rising from the bog. This is why I am not a novelist.

I secretly wish I was a rebellious Guiness-drinking protagonist blinded by beauty in aka Flann O'Brien's novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, asking what was the color of the wind on the day of your birth? But then, I'm no Fionn mac Cumhail or King Suibhne. Fuck the Puca and the goat pizzlin' on the blackberries mid-winter! Language's job is to do its appointed work.

Words are Nantucket sleigh rides, or more like slay rides... To be on the slaying road is a metaphor to go to war, the Irish sluaighan, spawned the Anguish word slogan. And I am certainly at war with a sluaigh or is it a slough of words. Perhaps Jack, you will share your Irish writing with us someday.

Well, now, Jackín, didn't I have a great-aunt, Aine Sullivan, who married a Sullivan by way of Walsh, with only a generation or two of Walshes separating them. My great uncle Mícheál Walsh's mum was a white-eyed Sullivan (my great-grannie). And yes, Mícheál is how you spell it in Irish. Pronounced Meehaul. But he went by Mikie. Short for Michéalín (little Michael). And him in his near-80s.

Jane Rose Sullivan Walsh, Bantry

My relatives, Mikie and Aine were a rotund elderly childless couple living next door to the family of my first cousin once removed, Mary Walsh, in Bantry Bay. Mary's lot had a large brood packed clean to the rafters as if to make up for the profound lack of children next door.

We sat in Aine's kitchen drinking tea and she went on talking to herself and the peat smoke blackened tea kettle, calling it dubh, as if we weren't there, come all the way from Amerikay, we did, a once in a lifetime visit—and she was talking nonstop to Mikie and the damed cat, Piscín.

And when Aine spoke, I couldn't understand a word she said—and her speakin' the Queen's English to the cat with a heavy Gaelic singsong lilt peculiar to that of the Blasket Islanders. English was her second language, after all. That, or maybe church Latin. Anguish ran a rare t'ird leg.

I drank tea strong enough for mice to skittle across and nibbled on chocolate-covered graham tea biscuits as she talked non-stop. I marveled that in the late 20th century, living in the middle of Bantry town, they still used an outdoor "bog" and would I have to use it too?

Well, Aine (Awnye) might have been an Ó Súilleabháin—versus the Anglicised Sullivan. Certainly the Anglicised spelling is easier on the eyeteeth to pronounce it right. The Anglo-Norman addition of O means "of the clan" and the Sullivans were a large bear worshiping tribe. O' Sullivan Bear—Clan of the Cave bear, er, make that Beare to be exact. My grandmother said there was a cave near Bantry where there was found a painted cave bear skull on a stone altar pyre...

But we were just ordinary vanilla Sullivans. Not O- nor were we -Bear. In other words, our family was part of the original lineage as in O'Sullivan Mhor along with our near cousins, the MacCarthys of Bantry.

Mor means big or great or main lineage. There were so many Sullivans in Munster that the Beares split off from the Mors just to keep everybody straight. All the Sullivans, peaceable cattle-rustlers and goldsmiths, were the descendants of the MacCarthy Mhor, said to be a descendent the original Munster Eoghanachta, whose ancestors were the Children of Owen, aka the Eoghanachta, who settled in Bantry Bay and the Ring of Kerry, ca. 1600 BC.

There was also the silver-tongued MacCarthy Mhor who won back his baronial lands from Queen Bess with his honeyed words, but that's another story about why we don't need to kiss the Blarney Stone, we're born with the argentish gift of the gab. A convoluted story, yes. I've a poem about that somewheres. I didn't say it would be easy. Or aysy. All this to say, my family's lived in Bantry and Kerry for quite some time.

After the Battle of Kinsale, (1600 AD) this Gaelic sept of the Sullivans did not flee to Spain during the Flight of the Earls, aka as the Flight of the Wild Geese. My grandmother said that in 1603, a thousand surviving Sullivans left the war-ravaged rout of Kinsale (Ireland's sovereign demise became Britain's prize); they fled to the Ring of Kerry and to Bantry Bay, but only 35 survived the arduous journey. It was our own Trail of Tears— and presumably they were our ancestors. Only bones, says Cúmla.

Not like the O'Sullivan Beares who fled to Spain, we stood our ground—what was left of it as there was no place else left to go, other than into the sea, or to the Great Blaskets beyond, or to Tír na-nÓg, that undiscovered country from which no man returns. "Make no mistake about it, we stayed put," she said. Though Donal Sullivan did go to Spain, he died back home in Kerry.

Súill means eye, and ban means white. The Sullivans were the white-eyed ones. Either that, or they were squinty blind, or perhaps they were the Seers. Or both squinty and blind Seers. Or maybe they had light blue eyes. Another take was that they were weak-eyed, one-eyed, or hawk-eyed, or shifty-eyed. Still, we do have the characteristic Sullivan squint.

Dall is the Irish word used for purl-blind—but it means half-blind, as in sam-blind, or sand-blind. Seers seems to fit the family legend as there are no light-eyed ones among our clan. Most of us have the gorm-grey Celtic eye, verging on hazel. We do, however, have the gift of the Second Sight in the family.

I had no idea of the ethnologic significance of the Blasket islanders until decades later when I read “Peig.” I fancy the notion that Aine was related to Maurice O'Sullivan, aka, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin who, out of the blue, never having written a literary thing in his life, let alone, a metaphor, wrote (Twenty Years A-Growin' or, Fiche Bliain ag Fás, as it was originally published in Irish in 1933, and translated into English in 1953).

It was entirely possible that Aine and Muiris (pronounced Mweerish, not Morris, ancd certainly not the French, Moriceee!) were related since most people on the island were related to each other. Such is the nature of island living. Fambly tree goes straight up on both continents—but uisht! That's a fambly secret.

The last Blasket Islanders were moved to the mainland in 1953. Years later, I met Peig's son and scribe, Mícheál Ó Gaoithín, (Maidhc File) or Michael the Poet, at Cody's Books in Berkeley, a poet estranged from his lost homeland and what a right miserable cranky ill wind he was (Gaoithín means little wind)... I have a book of his memoirs and poems somewhere.

Or was it Micheál Ó'Guiheen's book I'm thinking of, A Pity Youth Does Not Last. Now that rings a bell, I will have to dig it up. I'm thinking that Guilheen is merely the Anglcised spelling of Gaoithín. No matter that we've lost an "L" in the translation process. The discrepancy between the spelling and pronunciation of Irish, a highly inflected language, is a wild card, at best.

My cousin Frank Walsh of Tralee was always saying the Blaskets were so far to the west of Ireland, that the next parish was America, or Tír na-nÓg. Now only ravenous tourists go out to the island to take photos of the skeletons of abandoned homes. There is talk of turning it into a Tura-lura-lura-fied Irish tourist destination. Because of its unique culture and heritage, there's also a movement to make the Great Blasket Island a World Heritage site, along with the Hill of Tara.

E.M. Forster rather disparagingly wrote of Maurice's Fiche Bliain ag Fás, as a document of a surviving "Neolithic civilization from the inside." The British were in love with the Romantic notion of the purity of the Noble Savage, stone crofts and peat fires and wise old women bundled in layers of red wool petticoats, smoking pipes by the hearth telling stories of the old ways, suited them—as long as everyone kept their place. Perhaps,"Late Medieval" civilization would have been more accurate moniker than "Neolithic," but you know the British are justly famous for their notorious use of back-handed compliments. The old double-bitch trout-slap.

Certainly the Blasket Islands were one of the last strongholds of uninterrupted rural Irish culture and language to survive half-way into the 20th century. Because of the island's relative isolation, inclement weather and stormy seas conspiring against the lonely sailor, it was left relatively undisturbed by the Catholic church and by the vagaries of the British Crown.

During the post-Classical and early Middle Ages, as poet Kathleen Raine coined it, "the spiritual geography" of the western Irish (and Scottish) islands, were powerful strongholds of the imagination, not to be underestimated. The Irish were fond of ecclesiastical refuges, and often these cells were the last bastion of learning, as the continent went dark. Irish strongholds, Iona, Lindesfarne and Skellig Michael stand in mute testament today. The Great Blasket was a safe haven for an invention of poets to flourish.

There is something to be said of living in isolation and the flowering of oral tradition. The Blaskets were so isolated, even the notorious Vikings didn't want to land. I guess there was nothing there they wanted. Not like Iona. No ecclesiastical gold, only rabbits, sheep and stories.

It didn't mean the Blasket Islanders were irreligious heathens. On the contrary, there were stories of wild island men rowing their women three rough sea miles across Blasket Sound to mass in the parish of Dún Chaoin (Dunquin), on the mainland, in naomhógs, (young heavens/skies), or tiny curraghs, the leathern ox and seal hide boats made famous in the St. Brendan Voyage tales.

Imagine the islanders being moved from one island to another island like cattle—for their own good. What was the sense in that? Echoes of an earlier forced relocation by the Lord Ventry in the early 19th century. And they, just barely recovered from the Great Hunger that came late to the Blaskets. But by the 1940s, most of the young people had emigrated to America. There was no one left to look after the old ones.

And the massive storms of '46 and '47 left the Blasket Islanders stranded and starving. Evacuation began in 1953, a year after I was born. When I was 19, I stood at Slea Head and Dunquin Pier with my cousin Frank, looking a long time at that island, thinking I'd missed out on something so intangible I couldn't put a finger on it. But I was 19, what did I know?

Twitter Photo: Dr. Kate Riordan @cathorio

For such a tiny group of islands, the Blaskets have spawned a lot of writing. An astonishing 40 books from a population that never exceeded 200 people. many of them illiterate. To be fair, several of the books listed below were not written by Blasket Islanders themselves, as they, themselves, were the subject matter of visiting ethno-anthropologists and the like. For further reading, see:

• “The Islandman” — Tomás Ó Criothain, "An tOileánach" in Irish. Translated by Robin Flower (see also his diary, "Allagar na hInise")
• “Twenty Years A Growing” — Maurice O Sullivan (translated by Moya Davies and George Thompson)
• “Peig, My Own Story” — Peig Sayers (scribed by her son Michéal)
• "The Blaskets, Next Parish America" —Joan and Ray Stagles
• “The Blaskets, A Kerry Island Library" —Muiris Mac Conghail
• "Na Blascaodaí / The Blaskets" —Pádraig Ua Maoileoin


• See also the essay, "The Last of his Tribe: Maurice O'Sullivan and the Blasket Islanders" by B.J. Coman, Quadrant, March, 2005. His essay reminded me of much I'd learned and forgotten about Maurice's backstory, from my UC Berkeley Celtic professors, Joe Nugent, Breen O Conchubhair' and Dan Melia.

At the turn of this century, I was studying Irish at UC Berkeley, in search of the roots of my own Golden Age of poetry. In Joe Nugent and Breen O Conchubhair's, Intensive Irish Immersion class, I struggled through "Fiche Bliain ag Fás" by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, in the original Irish in order to gather folklore and aphorisms direct from the horse's mouth, or from within the culture. The book was written, not for anthropologists, or post Victorian literati, but for the Blasket Islanders themselves. (The old—who is your audience—rhetorical adage.) 


OK, I can just imagine how the first Blasket Island autobiographies generated controversy. There's the adage: two Irishmen = three opinions. Someone in the lower village decided his family was the sole retainer of the correct way to tell the stories and ancient poetic tradition, which led to the rivalry of hurled epithets, accusations of "all lies and invention," replete with verbal beheadings and sartorial accusations for not telling the story right until the village debates squared off into a Wat Tyler-ish skirmish resulting in the Blasket Print Wars beginning with ringleader Tomás Ó Criothain, followed closely by Peig Sayers, her sons, the scribes, and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin; however, world literature is far richer for it. What's amazing about this Blasket Island story is that Peig herself was illiterate, 

Tomás taught himself to read and write in Irish; only Maurice was literate in both Irish and English.

Alas, there is much in Maurice's original Irish version that was not translated into English. As Greek scholar George Thompson noted in 1923, Maurice used the repetition of formulaic verbal phrases prevalent in oral tradition, the catch-phrases of the Homeric past woven into the tangle of time present. Did the introduction of the written word kill the dream that was the Blaskets, but within the realm of the written word, the dream of the Blaskets lives on.

As a poet, I am always hungry for those curious eloqutions and strange turns of phrase, metaphor and aphorisms. Aphorisms, like jokes, don't translate or travel well. But I guess that's true of most translations, for to translate is to lie....

The story goes, that the islanders heard some stories read aloud by visiting Irish student, Brian Ó Ceallaigh from Maxim Gorky's "My Childhood," and they said, "I can do that." Just like when I first heard Gary Snyder read "Manzanita," and I said, "I can do that..." I had no idea what I was in for. Ah, but the apprenticeship was fine.

Note Bene: I read somewhere that Dylan Thomas attempted to write a film script of “Twenty Years A Growing.” I wonder what happened to it? And the island's first famous visitor in 1905, J.M. Synge, wrote of the Blasket folk as well as those of the Aran Islands. But he insulted the King of the island and there was no going back from that. Synge had burned his bridges with the postman.

NB2 There's some silly nonsense that the word Blasket (Blascaodaí) is Norse. Now why would the islanders, who clearly predated the Vikings, want to take a Norse name for their own island? It doesn't make sense. A bit of neo-colonialism raising its ugly head. The Viking origin is attributed to a quip made by English poet-scholar, Robin Flower, a non-native species.

If anything, it was called The Western (or Great) Island. According to Dunquin author, Pádraig Ua Maoileoin, it was known as the Ferriter's Islands in the 13th c., as the family leased them from the Earls of Desmond. He wrote that, in the 14th and 15th c. the names "brasch," and "brascher" and "blaset" were recorded on Italian maps." And in 1597, a Spaniard sea captain recorded it as "Yslas de Blasques." Not Basques! Note the "L." It keeps us out of Iberia, for a while, at least.


Great Blasket photos are used with kind permission of Dr. Kate Riordan.
http://twitpic.com/photos/cathorio
(Feel free. I am delighted you liked them. Only recently became interested in photography. @cathorio)




NB: I wish I could see this entire article—but you need an account. If someone has access, could you please send me the article?

IRISH TIMES archive
Sat 08 Aug 2009Peig's island of sorrows
Great Blasket’s delights are simple, such as walking and swimming, but you can’t escape memories of a vanished people, writes LORRAINE COURTNEY

AN ANCIENT people living at the end of the earth. Beyond you drop off the edge of the world. The double hump of An Blascaod Mór, the Great Blasket, is the biggest island in the fragmented archipelago off the desolate grandeur of Slea Head, in Co Kerry. “Seen from above you would think them sea-monsters of an antique world languidly lifting time-worn backs above the restless and transitory waves,” wrote the scholar Robin Flower in The Western Island.