Another group who have to endure absence through losing or giving up belonging are those who are emigrants.
The Emigrants
Contemporary society is deeply unsettled. Everywhere a new diaspora is emerging because of hunger and poverty. The subjects of this diaspora are the emigrants. Exile is difficult and disconcerting. You are uprooted. Something within us loves the continuity, shelter, and familiarity of our home place. Among your own people, you can trust the instinctive compass of your words and actions. You move in a natural rhythm that you never notice until you are away. Exile is difficult because you find yourself among strangers. And it is slow work to find a door into the house of their memory.
While at university, I worked a summer on the buildings in America. I met an old man from our village in the West of Ireland. He was over eighty and had left home at eighteen and never returned. He talked so wistfully of home. He could remember the name of every field and well. As he intoned the litany of Gaelic place-names, his eyes kindled in the warmth of belonging. Even though he had lived in exile all his adult life, there was a part of his heart which never left home. I imagine that he withdrew into this private sanctuary of memory when times were raw and lonely. Those in exile understand each other. You’d see it in the way they meet and talk. What they can presume about each other. How easily they slip into the rhythm of companionship. You’d see it in the Irish in a Kilburn pub, a group of Turkish people sitting by a river at the weekend in a German town, or the Filipina girls who gather near a bridge in Hong Kong every Sunday to talk of home. When you emigrate, you fracture your belonging to the language of your homeland.
Language and Belonging
Each language has a unique memory. The thoughts, whispers, and voices of a people live in their language. Gradually, over time, all the words grow together to build a language. The sound of the wind, the chorus of the tides, the silence of stone, love whispers in the night, the swell of delight and the sorrow of the darkness, all came to find their echoes in the language. As it fills out, the language becomes the echo-mirror of the people and their landscape. No one knows the secret colour and the unique sound of the soul of a people as their language does. A language is a magical presence. It is utterly alive. Because we use it every minute to feel and think and talk, we rarely stop to notice how strange and exciting words are. It is like the air: we cannot live one moment without it, yet we rarely think of it. The most vital centre of your life is your mind. Your world is moored to your mind. Now there is no power that awakens and opens the mind as language does. Words form our minds, and we can only see ourselves and the world through the lenses of words. As they age over centuries, words ripen with nuance and deeper levels of meaning. The memory of a people lives in the rich landscape of its language. The destructive things done by them and to them live there too.
When strangers intrude and take over what is not their own, everything in the place reminds them that they do not belong there. Their guilt and unease can be assuaged by making the take-over as clean and thorough as possible. They must control everything. This is what a colonizer does. Our Irish language was targeted in this way. The flow between the feeling and the language was broken. Your own language fits your mind. Ancestral memory and nuance break on the shores of thought.
A Philosophy of Dúcas
The longing of a people is caught in the web of their language. Dreams and memories are stored there. A language is the inner landscape in which a people can belong. When you destroy a people’s language through colonization or through the more subtle, toxic colonization of consumerism, you fracture their belonging and leave them in limbo. It is fascinating how a language fashions so naturally the experience of a people into a philosophy of life. Sometimes one word holds centuries of experience; like a prism, you can turn it at different angles and it breaks and gathers the light of longing in different ways.
In the Irish language, there are no specific substantive nouns of longing and belonging. This must mean that the Irish mind never saw them as fixed, closed realities, nor as separate things; or perhaps it means that the experience of them was constantly in the consciousness. Both belonging and longing come together in a wider, implicit sense of life and living. The word “dúcas” is the larger embrace. Dúcas captures the inner sense and content of belonging in that it means one’s birthright and heritage. This brings to expression the particular lineage of belonging to which one became heir on entering the world. The act of birth brings possibility and limitation, but it also confers rights. Dúcas also means one’s native place. This is where you were born and the networks of subtle belonging that will always somehow anchor you there. There are many deep and penumbral layers to the way we belong in the world. There is none more dense and difficult to penetrate than the time and place of our first awakening as children. In the Irish tradition, there would be a deep sense of the way a place and its soul-atmosphere seep into you during that time.
The phrase “ag fillead ar do dúcas” means returning to your native place and also the rediscovery of who you are. The return home is also the retrieval and reawakening of a hidden and forgotten treasury of identity and soul. To come home to where you belong is to come into your own, to become what you are, to awaken and develop your latent spiritual heritage. Dúcas also means the nature of the relationship you have with someone when there is a real affinity of soul between you both. When you have dúcas with someone, there is a flow of spirit and vitality between you. The echo of each other’s longing brings and holds you both within the one circle of belonging. In this sense, dúcas is what enables and sustains the anam-cara affinity.
Dúcas also refers to a person’s deepest nature. It probes beneath the surface images and impressions of a life and reaches into that which flows naturally from the deepest well in the clay of the soul. It refers in this sense to that whole intuitive and quickness of longing in us that tells us immediately how to think and act; we call this instinct. An old Irish proverb believes that instinct is a powerful force within us. It may remain latent for ages but it can always break out: “Briseann an dúcas amac trí súile an cait,” i.e., Dúcas will break forth even through the eyes of the cat. Dúcas is often used to interpret, explain, or excuse something in a person. “He cannot help it—he has the dúcas for that. In some sense, dúcas seems to be a deeper force than history. You belong to your dúcas; your dúcas is your belonging. In each individual there is a roster of longing that nothing can suppress.
Dúcas suggests the natural wildness of uninhibited Nature. There is also the proverb which says dúcas is impervious to outside training: “Is treise an dúcas na an oillúint,” i.e., Dúcas is stronger than education or upbringing. Dúcas shows the faithfulness of memory but accents the inevitable results of instinct. Without an awareness of dúcas, we are blind to what we do. Soul-searching is the excavation of the dúcas in and around us in order to belong more fully to ourselves and to participate in our inner heritage in a critical and creative way. Given the sense of homelessness in modern life, there is anxiety and fear and a tendency to prescribe a style of belonging that has no self-criticism and wants to corral longing in fixed, empirical frames. This is fundamentalism.