BLOGPOST SPECIAL: Talk on Language, Identity and Nationhood, with reference to Francis Ledwidge

Island Voices lecture series Autumn 2016

‘1916: Language, Identity and Nationhood’

22.9.2016 Museum, Derry

Shovel, bayonet and pen:

Digging for nationhood with Francis Ledwidge, 1916-2016

©Dave Duggan   September 2016

In this talk, in English with some Irish, dramatist and novelist Dave Duggan considers how Francis Ledwidge, navvy, soldier and poet, turned the sods of his own identity, tilling fields of labour, war and language into a complex nationality that continues to resonate today, a century later.

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Tráthnóna maith. Good afternoon. Mo bhuíochas daoibh as a bheith anseo. My thanks to you for being here, for the first, in the 2016 Island Voices series on 1916: Language, Identity and Nationhood, organised by The Museum Services, with support from the Nerve Centre. Buíochas ar leith le Pól, Margaret, Marty agus a gcomhrádaithe. A special thanks to Pól, Margaret, Marty and their colleagues.

Is mise Dave Duggan, drámadóir agus úrscealaí, a chónaíonn i nDoire. I'm Dave Duggan, a Derry-based dramatist and novelist.

The title of my talk this afternoon is:

Shovel, bayonet and pen:

Digging for nationhood with Francis Ledwidge, 1916-2016

It will last about 40 minutes and there will be time then for questions.

We'll meet Francis Ledwidge and many more characters, both real and fictional, some of them alive today, some of them from the recent past and others from 100 years ago.

Let's begin with Alderman Fraser Agnew, MBE, chair of the 100 Year anniversary Battle of the Somme Working Group, in Antrim and Newtownabbey Borough Council, who writes

It is generally accepted by historians that events in history mould us into the people we are. The Battle of the Somme can be viewed as one of those events in British History that helped mould and create the Ulster nation.

The Alderman reveals much about his identity, his language and his nation. Listen to his words again.

It is generally accepted by historians that events in history mould us into the people we are. The Battle of the Somme can be viewed as one of those events in British History that helped mould and create the Ulster nation.

Check with yourself how they sit with you, in particular the words 'we' and 'us'. Attempt a re-write. Feel free to insert The Easter Rising in place of The Battle of the Somme. Thus we voice utterances formed by, and forming of, our own identities, languages and nations.

Pretty soon we're up to our oxters in quagmires of words, allegiances and passions that make this island and its voices so perennially fascinating, never more so than now, in 2016, with echoes of 1916 still resonating.

In April this year, a report in The Irish Times regarding a remembrance wall in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, said that a misspelling of one the Irish words chiselled onto the wall would be corrected. There had already been controversy regarding what names should be included on this wall, in remembrance of those killed during the Easter Rising of 1916.

A set of four letters E i r i, with two accents, one of them in the wrong place, made a mis-spelled word on the wall. The accent 'fada' in Irish tells the speaker/reader to lengthen the vowel. In this case, a 'fada' should appear on the first letter, capital E and on the last letter, small i, giving the word Éirí as part of the phrase Éirí Amach na Cásca, which translates to English as The Easter Rising. Do the stonemasons' hands shake as they chisel these letters into the wall, under the pressure of the controversies of remembrance, 100 years on from the event?

Deirtear gan teanga níl náisiún ann. There is a view which says that a nation only exists when there is a language. And that a language is a dialect with a bayonet. A language is a dialect with an army. A language is a dialect with a regional assembly. A language is a dialect with a literature.

These views stiffen when they assert that to form a nation a language, often external, offering a civic, united, political sense of the nation, is needed. English for America. English and French, still contesting, for Canada. English for Australia. Hindi for India. Mandarin for China. Portuguese for Brazil. Spanish for neighbouring countries. Visit the Horn of Africa and you'll need Italian, French, English and Arabic. Oh, and a number of African languages, perceived as nativist and ethnic, offering cultural forms of nationhood, not civic forms such as French or English provide. These are the quagmires and trenches of language, where post-colonial cultural wars rage on today.

I suggest we climb into those trenches and do some digging, along with the Noble Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, who wrote

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

And having described his father digging with a spade, Heaney affirms his lineage, while picking up the pen and asserting

I'll dig with it.

So let's dig with pen, gun, spade or as the title for this talk says, with shovel, bayonet and pen in the company of another Irish poet, who, like Heaney, also wrote in English, the civic language of this nation.

Ba as Contae na Mí é Francis Ledwidge; file, saighdiúir agus náibhí. Francis Ledwidge, poet, soldier and navvy, was from County Meath. Ag an am sin, tús an 20ú aois, b'Éireannach é san Ríocht Aontaithe. At that time, the start of the 20th century, he was an Irishman in the United Kingdom, a mono-linguist, speaking and versifying in English. As a young man, fired by the passions of youth and the energies of an age of change, he began taking lessons in Irish, like many others across the country, from the gentry around Yeats and Synge to the emerging urban lower middle classes such as Pearse. Their interest in the language of the peasantry was part of the cultural project of a small nation defining itself as such, a small nation. Ledwidge was himself a landless peasant, raised by his mother in a large single-parent family. Look to the biography of Francis Ledwidge by Alice Curtayne for the basics and much more.

What impulse towards identity and nationhood bent Ledwidge to learning Irish? Cad chuige a rinne Ledwidge iarracht ar Ghaeilge a fhoghlaim? What use was it to him? Hardly much use in his working life, as a road-mender, a day-labourer for farmers and a copper miner. The question still resonates today, 100 years later, as does the yearning Ledwidge felt. How many people have you heard say: I'd love to learn Irish?

The revival of interest in the language and culture of the period before the Anglo-Normans arrived, stretched back into mythological times with Lady Gregory and WB Yeats, themselves far from peasants, and generated an understanding that Ireland could also be seen as a great nation, with stirring heroes and a wondrous literature.

So, in terms of language, Francis Ledwidge lived, spoke and wrote as an English speaker, in nationhood terms, a civic language, while trying to learn a native language of his home place, Irish, and, knowingly or unknowingly, using line and verse forms common in the literature of Irish that he could barely read, such as an internal rhyming between the end of lines and the middle of following ones.

He shall not hear the bittern cry

in the wild sky, where he is lain.

Francis Ledwidge grew up in a period when a sense of Ireland as a small nation quickened. Such quickening, often leading to uprisings, occurred periodically. Czech historian Miroslav Hroch, says that small nations “are those which were in subjection to a ruling nation for such a long period that the relation of subjection took on a structural character for both parties”. So, a small nation, like Ireland, has a long history of foreign rule producing close, and often tense, bonds of subjugation and interdependence.

Céad bliain eatarthu, filí Éireannacha, ag scriobh i mBéarla, Francis Ledwidge ag tús na fiche haoise, Seamus Heaney ag deireadh na haoise, iad beirt ag iomrascáil lena náisiúnachas. Almost a century between them, two Irish poets, writing in English, Francis Ledwidge at the start of the 20th Century and Seamus Heaney at the end, both wrestling with matters of British and Irish nationhood. Perhaps.

Did Ledwidge actually experience any such wrestling? He joined The Irish Volunteers soon after it became clear that violence was the dominant method for resolving the political conflicts of his age. British nationalists imported arms into the north-east of the island, clearly in expectation of needing to use violence to maintain the status quo, as pressure for Home Rule for Ireland increased.

This, among much else, in the spirit of the Alderman's remarks, we remember. And, of course, we forget. We forget whole peoples and countless events. French historian Ernest Renan said that nations are founded “on a rich legacy of memories”, which we, for various reasons, edit. “Forgetting,” Renan wrote, “and I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.”

A consideration of indigenous peoples in the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in Australia in the 17th and 18th centuries and in Palestine in the 20th century confirms this. Google Dakota Access Pipeline, to see how the Lakota Sioux nation experiences historical forgetting today.

What forgetting formed the Irish nation that emerged from the ashes of Easter in Dublin and the gory slime of the World War 1 trenches? Any wonder the stone masons hands shook as they chiselled the words on the remembrance wall? Soldiers like Francis Ledwidge were an awkward fit in the new nation, this new small and great nation, needing to be forged from the bravery and sacrifice of rebellion and the superheated myths of the Celtic Gods.

Francis Ledwidge came to Ebrington Barracks, here in Derry, speaking English, his mother tongue and wearing a British Army uniform, in May 1916. Thus, his language and nationhood were straightforward, like any subject of the British Empire. His identity perhaps, that's the most complex aspect of the three elements of this talk. Cérbh é, dáiríre? Who was he, really?

He arrived in Derry after hard years on the eastern front. Chaith sé seal i mBaile Átha Cliath ar a bhealach anseo. Bhí tionchur mór air ag bás Thomas Mac Donagh, file, chara agus saighdiúir eile. He spent some time in Dublin on his way here. The execution of Thomas Mac Donagh, as one of the leaders of The Easter Rising, affected him deeply. Mac Donagh was a poet, a friend and also a soldier fighting for a small nation, in Mac Donagh's case, Ireland.

Was Ledwidge fighting for Belgium? Like the recruiting posters screamed? Was Francis Ledwidge a cosmopolitan, an internationalist? Is that the nation he espoused? A nation of class consciousness? Quickening of that nature was well underway, north and east of where Ledwidge fought, as another Empire, the Russian one, strained and convulsed.

Francis Ledwidge's oft-quoted lines, that he would not have England say that she defended Ireland while Ireland did nothing but stay at home and pass resolutions, took him into the British Army. Ledwidge was not squeamish. He saw action in Gallipoli, against Turks, Bulgars and Serbs. He did more than pass resolutions. Perhaps his conversations with Mac Donagh and others never ventured past poetry, into blood-letting, sacrifice and carnage, in the cause of Ireland.

How did he hold it together, a soldier affirming death and a poet, affirming life, with, what he called, his little songs

This is a song a robin sang

This morning on a broken tree,

It was about the little fields

That call across the world to me.

Francis Ledwidge used a bayonet, and his locale was the killing beaches of Suvla Bay and the trenches of Macedonia, France and Belgium. His soundtrack was shells in fusillade and the cries of dying men, as well as the echoing call of the robin. Does one cover for the other, in the forging of an identity?

Seamus Heaney never used a bayonet and his soundtrack was the acclaim of the Academy and the applause of a wide-ranging public, though directing his pen, when the barricades of insurrection went up around his home place at the end of the 20th century, may have challenged his sense of nationhood. It perhaps brought on a babhta úr iomrascála, a new bout of wrestling, with the native language and mythologies of his place, as seen in his work on Sweeney's Journey in the great sequence, Station Island.

He writes I was a lookout posted and forgotten.

He is perpetually set above the home-place, keeping guard.

Like many people, Francis Ledwidge included, nationhood and identity, are most fixed upon images of home, so that the limits of our national territory is personal and domestic.

Pressure on the soldiers in Ebrington Barracks, in the period July to December 1916, to remember and to forget, was awesome. I suggest we use Ledwidge's time there to further explore matters of language, identity and nationhood.

Let my play, Still, The Blackbird Sings, first produced by the Playhouse in 2010 and just finished a run, in a script-in-hand adaptation, produced by Creggan Enterprises, be our guide to digging; where to hoke with the shovel, where to pin, stab, cut and clip with the bayonet and where to sketch with the pen, those aspects of identity that make humans, in the time and place life finds us.

Ach roimhe sin, lig dom caractair eile a mhealladh isteach. But before that, allow me to invite in two more characters. Writing in the London Review of Books in 1985, Brandywell man and ace literary critic Seamus Deane tells us about Donegal writer, Patrick MacGill.

As Rifleman No 3008 of the London Irish, MacGill fought in the First World War and wrote of his experiences in the trenches, particularly of the offensive which climaxed in the Battle of Loos, during which he was wounded and invalided out of the war. The Red Horizon deals with the preparation for the assault; The Great Push gives an account of the battle itself. The war is a reproduction of the conditions of the labourer’s life in peacetime, more brutal and remorseless, but not essentially different. There is a System, which is impersonal and kills; there is a Sentiment which persuades the victims to accept what is happening to them. In war, it is called patriotism.

Yet why should MacGill, of all people, be willing to give his blood, to be made into an emblem of that idiocy which he attacked so vigorously in his writings? The answer must be, in part, that he did not know what he believed.

Patrick MacGill's confusion about what he believes, as suggested by Seamus Deane, may have an echo in Francis Ledwidge, though their sense of patriotism may not have been as confused as that of Jason Bourne, in his latest Hollywood blockbuster.

Seamus Deane suggests that digging with the shovel (navvying) and cutting with the bayonet (soldiering) are not much different. Certainly MacGill didn't make much difference between them in telling tales of them. Deane sees this as a failure of language. Ledwidge's failure – if you might call it that – to write war poetry like Sassoon, Graves, Owen, Kipling and others may also be a failure of language, but more likely it is a manifestation of the complex patriotism he, and MacGill, experienced as the sentiment that kept them in line. Ledwidge could readily use the shovel and the bayonet for war, but not the pen.

Unlike Deane and Heaney at the end of the 20th century, Ledwidge and MacGill did not live in the Academy, but in the rat-pits and the trenches of the early part of the century. Theirs is a very different experience for persons of similar nationhoods, identities and languages. Irish nationalist in British territory. English speakers and writers in English.

Seo iad anois, Francis Ledwidge agus a chomhrádaithe samhlaithe, sa bheairic i míle naoi chéad is a sé deag. Let us meet, then, my fictional, dramatised Francis Ledwidge in Ebrington Barracks in 1916. On arrival in the barracks, Francis Ledwidge is with his squad of young men, glad to be home, already marking out their personal territories. They banter in a babble of voices. Can you make out Lance Corporal Francis Ledwidge?

This - most certainly - is not my home.

Closest you’re going to get to it for a wee while.

I’ll be up that road to the city of Belfast just as soon as I get the sand out of these boots.

Belfast is nothing but a bogging village.

And what “village” are you from kiddo?

Drumahoe.

Never heard of it.

There’s nothing in Belfast only a swamp.

Not another country boy! Are yeez all country boys or what?

What do they call you?

Mc Laren. Right men. Settle down.

Frank! You made it.

Add me to your list of countrymen, Mc Laren. Cadden. Right?

That’s right. You know me from Suvla Bay.

We dug in together, thousands more of us stretched along the beach.

Damn right we did. And we gave those Turks hell.

By their voices, accents and home places, the soldiers assert, contest and affirm their identities and their language in ethnic, almost pastoral, word play until the killing beaches of Suvla Bay confirm their current lot.

As to nationhoods, the civic language of the Empire is required to bring that on stage. Francis Ledwidge clashes with Major Willock, a professional soldier. Again, can you hear the Lance Corporal wrestle with his complex nationhood, while Major Willock is having none of his lip? Éist le Major Willock, ag éirí mí-fhoighneach.

And Ireland’s duty lies with his Majesty The King and with the Empire. At least until this war is over. Tell me, Lance Corporal Ledwidge, are you loyal?

I am a soldier, sir.

And something of a poet I believe. You knew some of the insurrectionists?

I met Pearse, sir. MacDonagh was my friend.

Your ‘friends’ were anti-British when they attacked our troops in Dublin.

They were Irishmen, doing what they thought was best for Ireland, sir.

Your poets are rebels, Lance Corporal Ledwidge. True Irishmen are in this uniform.

My countrymen are fighting for freedom and the self determination of small nations on many fronts. In Belgium, France, Gallipoli, Serbia. And here.

The cataclysm that was World War 1 plunged Francis Ledwidge into a maelstrom, where small nation projects were fending off the dominance of large nations, with actions that were essentially ethnic in character, where the impetus came from a charged mix of the cultural (locale, religion, language, descent, myth) as opposed to the political or civic sense of group identification, known as nationhood.

Often, for their own ends, imperialists, even today, describe certain other nationalisms as ethnic (that is irrational, nativist, inherited) and their own as civic (voluntary, rational, consensual), when it is quite clear that all nationalisms are composed of ethnic and civic features and that civic nationalisms, such as the French or American, can be just as exclusive and xenophobic as ethnic ones.

The 'small nation' description often suggests a degree of similarity between Ireland and the postcolonial world. This interpretation was reinforced by John F Kennedy’s 1963 speech at Leinster House, where he proclaimed that “every new nation knows that Ireland was the first of the small nations in the twentieth century to win its struggle for independence”.

Is this the nationhood Francis Ledwidge espoused? And how fares it today as Ireland's state forces move into closer and closer international co-operation with the UK, where we, in the UK, have voted to leave the massively-flawed, cross-national entity that supports European economic, cultural and social ties, the EU, while remaining within the military one, NATO?

All nationalisms draw upon the mythology of a glorious past and create a narrative of greatness. A grander version of Irish nationalism, almost tongue-in-cheek, in music festivals and on golf courses, is heard today in phrases like 'little island, punching above its weight' and 'you'll never beat the Irish' and seen in St. Patrick's Day parades all over the world. Everybody is Irish for at least one day. Is that the nationhood Francis Ledwidge lived? An í seo an náisiúnachas a mhothaigh Francis Ledwidge?

The bottom line with nationalism, whether derived from smallness or greatness, is that nationhood has to be the most important group we're in and that every nation should have its own state. A complex formulation in the early part of the 20th Century for Ledwidge, MacGill and others of peasant stock, in the midst of the convulsing of British, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.

David Rieff, in his recent book, In Praise of Forgetting, wonders if

a decent measure of communal forgetting is actually the sine qua non of a peaceful and decent society, while remembering is the politically, socially, and morally risky pursuit? Or, to put it somewhat differently, what if the past can provide no satisfactory meaning, no matter how generously and inclusively … it is interpreted?

What people choose to remember and are enabled to remember for the creation of identity, nationhood and language, as in the outline given by the Alderman, is an edit. Rieff also points out that

the historical importance of an event in its own time, and in the decades that follow, offers no guarantee that it will be remembered in the next century, let alone for many centuries after.

Agus ná déan dearmad ar an foláireamh cáiliúil a thug an úrscealaí, Milan Kundera, dúinn. Of course, there is the famous caution offered by novelist Milan Kundera, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, that

The struggle … against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Who does it suit that people forget events, languages, identities and nations as we forge our languages, identities and nations?

Seamus Deane tells us that Patrick Mac Gill's first novel, The Children of the Dead End, sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight in 1914. In the same year, James Joyce's Dubliners sold a mere 499 copies, a fifth of them to himself. Most of the MacGill sales occurred in Britain and further afield. We have here an example of what the historian Rieff said about forgetting. The cosmopolitan view of the modernist Joyce seems better remembered in the early 21st century. Joyce spurned the nationalist view that you must have a nation before you could have art. In the artistic manifestation of his own nationhood, Joyce is an Irish writer, writing in English, travelling across Europe, much as Ledwidge did, but without shovel or bayonet, while continually writing about home. Mar a rinne Ledwidge. Much as Ledwidge did.

In my play, the fictional Francis Ledwidge meets the fictional Rosie Friel, a serving girl at the home of Lord Dunsany, Ledwidge's officer and literary mentor. Dunsany teases the young woman about love. Does Rosie's assertion echo Ledwidge's?

And what about love then, Rosie? Do you know anything about love?

What would I know about love, sir?

Oh, come now, Rosie, surely a young woman like yourself must sometimes think about love?

I leave that to the poets, sir.

And to the soldiers no doubt?

The soldiers have their fighting and their killing to do.

You don’t mention their dying.

They talk enough about that themselves. They should talk more about their living and their lives at home.

Then you don’t think about the dying of soldiers?

I do.

The ones at the front?

I think on them. And I think on the poets in Dublin.

My God, Rosie, are you a rebel?

I’m an Irishwoman, sir.

Ba téagartha é an strus a mhothaigh Ledwidge is a scuad is iad bailithe in Ebrington Barracks, i míle naoi gcéad is a sé déag. When Ledwidge and his squad gathered in Ebrington Barracks in Autumn 1916, the stress among them was immense. They awaited their next posting, knowing that their chances of surviving were decreasing each time. Ba bhreá leis na saighdiúirí feastal ar na tabharní i Sráid Duke, leis an strus sin a laghdú. The soldiers delighted to go to the pubs in Duke Street to relieve this stress. Bhí siad ar bís le nuacht faoi ordaithe úr, len iad a thabhairt chun an Fraince. They were delirious for news of orders that would take them to France. Listen to their arguments, spilling over into violence. What do you expect with soldiers, even those working with the pen, as well as with the shovel and the bayonet? Is saighdiúirí iad, cad chuige nach mbeadh foiréagan ann?

You thought Johnny Turk’s shells had got you, only to find yourself waiting to cheat death once more. A strange thing happens in the course of war, my friends. We transform. No longer human, we alchemise into … cats.

Miaow! Miaow!

Enough of your tricking, Ledwidge!

In this way the generals are guaranteed at least nine lives out of each and everyone one of us. So drink up, my fine, Irish feline friends. Who’s to say, when the English generals will want us out there again, losing our lives at the front?

Treachery.

Listen! Cats! All hissing and spitting.

You’re two-faced Ledwidge.

Fights bubble up through the comradely surface all the time. The word 'traitor' is used as the vilest curse. A fellow-soldier chastises Francis Ledwidge:

You’re two-faced, Ledwidge.

This echoes the description Seamus Heaney gives in his poem,

In memoriam Francis Ledwidge

In you, our dead enigma, all the strains

Criss-cross in useless equilibrium.

The 'useless' is harsh here. Does it reflect on Heaney's efforts to juggle his own sense of nationhood?

Many writers have been drawn to Ledwidge, an enigma, surely, as are all the dead. Dermot Bolger has written marvellously about him, including a fine play called Walking the Road. There are memorialising societies in Slane, Inchicore and elsewhere. Scríobh mise faoi Francis Ledwidge don chéad uair, i míle naoi chéad is a nócha seacht. I wrote a radio talk about Francis Ledwidge for the RTÉ programme Sunday Miscellany, in 1997, - an age ago - after I visited his grave in Belgium, in Artillery Wood Cemetery, near Boesinghe.

I wrote

Grave number 5, Row B, second plot. There is a corner of a foreign field that is forever Ireland.

I stood amidst the gravestones, pleased somehow that Ledwidge should be lying among the green fields outside a small village. No Boyne water rushed by, but a small river passed under a bridge.

I thought about the poet and the lines from his own poem, A Soldier’s Grave

And where the earth was soft for flowers we made

A grave for him that he might better rest.

So, Spring shall come and leave it sweet arrayed,

And there the lark shall turn her dewy nest.

Let me draw upon the reflections of philosopher Richard Kearney to bring these considerations of Francis Ledwidge and his language, identity and nationhood to a close. Writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books in July this year, Kearney underlines doubling.

A year of double remembrance for the Irish, 2016 marks the centenary of Ireland’s Easter Rising against Britain, when almost 500 Irish citizens died, and it commemorates the Battle of the Somme in Flanders, in which 3,500 Irish expired in a single day fighting in British uniform against Germany.

Richard Kearney invokes a symmetry, an equivalence of nations as between ethno-religious groups, when, on a civic level, the nations were far from on a par. This historic asymmetry has changed in the passing century, though in economic terms, it essentially remains. The body politic in Ireland is shaken as the UK tentatively embraces Brexit. Fears erupt, from considerations of trade, the free movement of people and the survival of the peace process.

Could we imagine if Brexit, call it Eire-exit, were the other way round? Unlikely. Furthermore, that the Union in the United Kingdom is under stress, from Scotland to Cornwall, from Londonderry to London, no one would deny. Where might Ledwidge's nationhood get to now?

Richard Kearney advises that we retrieve unfinished stories, as we hold to memories that emancipate rather than incarcerate. He sees in Ledwidge and the impact on him of Easter 1916 and the Somme a useful doubling, a way of intruding and/both into our considerations, rather than either/or. I'm with him on this, in regard to identity, language and nationhood. I suggest we could reach for more.

Ledwidge's story is retrievable among his work with bayonet and shovel, because he also worked with the pen. The great many more who worked without the pen, who laboured in fields, trenches, behind barricades and under fusillades, with just bayonet and shovel, their stories are not retrievable. They left no marks, no little songs, such as Ledwidge's. How do we retrieve these? An bhfuil a scéalta, a saolta, caillte go deo? Cad é a chiallaíon sinn don náisiúntacht? What does that mean for nationhood?

I fear doubling the remembrance of Easter and the Somme 1916 offers a convenient salve to the slaughter rather than a meaningful narrative healing, as sought by Richard Kearney, who says you cannot commemorate a contradiction, such as Ledwidge's effort. We can relish it, however, for what it is – as human a life as any other, encouraging us to push against either/or, on to and/both and then to push further on yet, through singles and doubles, onto multiples.

Not only and/both but also more/all.

I suggest we view Ledwidge's identity, language and nationhood in this way. There are no direct equivalences. Oppression on an imperial scale occurred then and occurs now. Easy doubling will not assist with Heaney's 'useless equilibrium'. The dynamism of multiplicity, more whirl-gig than see-saw, offers us the best hope.

The notion has taken hold publicly that it is a 'good' thing that large numbers of Irish Catholics died at the Somme and in other World War 1 battles and, that it is also notable, if not exactly 'good', that Irish Protestants played revolutionary roles in the early 20^th century – think of Sean O'Casey, as secretary of The Irish Citizen Army.

All I see is a failure to face the immolation of the early 20^th century and to commit to making it never happen again.

I see Ledwidge, not motivated by a noble if unfulfilled dream, as Richard Kearney suggests, but as a human in his time and place, making choices, contingent life choices, by acts of remembering and forgetting. What's the point of remembering and forgetting, if we do nothing about what we remember and forget? Our past, including Francis Ledwidge's, holds different meanings, depending on the future choices we build from it.

The most telling act of remembering we could make now, I suggest, an act of retrieving that might create a genuine healing narrative from which to forge the future, would be to chose to remember the slaughter and to actively work towards it never happening again.

What would Ledwidge's nationhood, language and identity be then, with the bayonet re-cast as software, a digital ploughshare for the age, in support of the shovel and the pen?

Thank you. Míle buíochas.

© Dave Duggan 22.9.2016

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