Your identity: What do memories make of you?

It was the most awesome T-shirt I had ever seen. A funky deep purple dye and a cartoon of a drunken cat on the front. Thirteen years old, I stared at in gobsmacked delight. Gimme! The cat was all starry-eyed with a wasted grin on his face and he was lying inside a whiskey bottle. “Awe, Mom, why can’t I have that T-shirt?” I said over the phone. For some reason my mother had laughed when she saw the T-shirt in a shop and said she would discuss the matter with her friends at work before buying.

“I just don’t think it is such a good idea,” my mother said with a big smile in her voice and I could hear one of her friends laughing in the background.

I was bewildered. It was civvies day at our school soon and we could all wear casual clothing instead of school uniforms and my heart was set on wearing that T-shirt. It was just a picture of a drunk cat, for heaven’s sake, I thought. About a decade later, I was reminiscing about my school days and suddenly there was that memory of that T-shirt of the inebriated cat inside a bottle. What I also remembered, with renewed impact, was the slogan on the T-shirt: “Happiness is a tight pussy”. Ahem. Memory shifted meaning. For the first time it occurred to me why my mother laughed and refused to buy the garment.

We just seem to be chock-a-block with memories and undreamt-of associations that we only make some sense of much later in life. Some are even built into our genes or our souls if we still choose to believe that.

The most powerful, for me, was visiting Ireland. I am of Irish descent and proud of it. Singing in pubs is a pastime of theirs, and of mine, even before I became aware of that trait among fellow Paddies.

My first experience of the Irish proper (as in those who live in Ireland) was the ferry from Holyhead in Wales to Dun Laoghaire just outside Dublin about fifteen years ago. The ferry was just a huge, floating pub. I sang as best and lustily as I could with the lads at the bar counter, many of whom had baggage trolleys loaded with boxes of Forster’s beer which they were taking back to Dublin for their shebeens, I gathered. I recall sitting back with my head raised and arms folded (just like them, it came naturally, that posture), extolling the virtues of Van Morrison’s “Brown-eyed girl”, but could not keep up with all the real Irish ditties they all knew so well. I was jealous. Their music was deeply tattooed into their identity.

But still, South African born and bred, I was absolutely at home with the Irish, and it was definitely an ancestral resonance, a sense of belonging that lay deep below the surfaces of verbal memory.

That sense of belonging was temporarily removed when we got to the passport check-in at Dun Laoghaire (Dun Leary in English). The tubby, blue-eyed official grinned and waved the lads through with their crates of Forster’s beer and without checking their passports, no less. And they were reeling drunk, singing at the top of their voices. He looked at me and my girlfriend at the time (this was long before the advent of the Chook) more cautiously, but friendlily enough. He checked my passport, which was Irish and which I produced with a proud flourish.

The passport official then started asking me questions about the duration and nature of my stay in Ireland. What I was going to be doing and so forth. The cheeky bugger, I thought. I am an Irish citizen, as evinced by my passport and did not need to answer such questions. “Long as I like, mate,” I said in my best, cringeworthy, fake UK accent. “This is an Irish passport and I have as much right to be here as you have … and here is my Irish birth certificate,” which I produced from inside a flap of the wallet into which my precious passport was inserted. The document was a cherished “particulars of a foreign birth”. The official had a sort of blank grin on his face while the momentous nature of our brotherhood sank in. “Catch you later, mate,” I primly announced and stalked into Ireland.

Ireland! Many times on my trip there I could not shake off the feeling that I had been there before. You have been here before, echoed something through me, not so much the words, but an electric surge that contained the deeper meaning underlying those words, buckets drawn up from some unfathomably deep well. It was eerie; it was déjà vu. I could feel and smell the history of me — an ancestral me — on solitary walks down those beautiful stonewalled roads all over the Irish countryside.

I tried to put into the following lines my experiences of Ireland

Pick two of her stones, bright and bare —

Your words will soften them, creating her eyes.

She is this country: her unbridled lips

Gentle you into verses, wetting the mist and the noon

On this road which is narrowed in the glow

From coal-damp stone walls. Stones are everywhere

And grant this scene the burden of the ages.

Listen: The pulse of boots, gunfire, hooves.

This was in the mid-nineties, South Africa was a barely-born democracy which I was tremendously proud of and very hopeful about. I found myself associating my identity as a second-generation South African with my ancestral identity as an Irishman. Of course, I was also aware of the sad, cruel history of Ireland, or rather, both Irelands:

Today, rain-tender as mourning often is

In the ancestral home of County Antrim,

You are a journal untouched, a language unfingered

In two South African generations of saddening

Into the senseless. That’s why she’s called you –

To put these stones and their stories into

A hearth of words, to take them back

To another home, a dwelling of a kind.

County Antrim! Before writing the poem I actually had no idea where my grandparents came from in Ireland. The sense of belonging, of deep, wordless, tugging memories, you have been here before, been here, been there was strongest in County Antrim. At times my eyes were watering with the power of the déjà vu. And “it was getting weird, like!” as the Irish might say. When I got home to Joburg I phoned my mother in Cape Town to find out where my grandparents came from. Yes, you guessed it: County Antrim. We are, I realised, our histories, in ways much deeper than we can cerebrally know. The scary or sobering thing is we are not tuned into our histories, our deeper identities. For some reason, and only to some extent, I was tuned in when in Ireland. My experience of my ancestral home was one that I will hold high and cradle close as something sacred, venerable. There is something poetic and musical about us Irish. And the sad thing is I will probably never live there.

So what is your identity? What have your memories made of you? In the rest of the poem which follows I often compare Ireland to a sacred but violated woman, a Mary figure, a Guinevere. Dropping the stones partly means letting go. The rest? A wordless significance, brimming with ancestry, identity and a wish to belong somewhere, somewhere, still resonates nearly fifteen years later:

Two homes, two histories,

As blunt as the stones in your hands.

The one where you now hike, stop and crouch

Holds an ancient, terrible loveliness.

She tugs

At you until your bones ache.

Your body sags, feeling its ghost-light

Brimming through the skin at the sight

Of her body and its old, stupid hurt.

Her eyes — like stones they’re everywhere,

Watching you find the history of her.

If words