Sparkly green wigs, belligerent drunkenness, “Kiss me, I’m Irish” pins everywhere—it couldn’t be any day other than St. Patrick’s, when everyone is Irish. As much as I love the spectacle, I used to resent the cheesy way that everyone chose to be Irish on that day. It was so different from my way of being Irish.
Whenever we had multi-cultural days in grade school, I was jealous of the kids who got to tell us all about their exotic backgrounds. When my turn came, though, everyone sort of tuned me out—they’d seen the Lucky Charms Box and Riverdance. I didn’t like talking about my heritage; I thought somehow that overtly flaunting it would make people construe me as being as tackily ethnic as I considered the St. Patrick’s Day parade to be.
My name, my red hair and my incurably pale skin are dead giveaways. Most people easily guess my background, so I never feel the need to wear it explicitly on my sleeve. I formed my Ireland internally as possessing a sort of paradoxically rough-hued refinement—a dreamscape of Yeats and Joyce, Michael Collins, fierce tempers, Celtic mythology, bawdy drinking songs and haunting scenery. I resented when people seemed to center Irishness merely on the glorification of drinking, but even as I despised that unappealing stereotype I secretly liked to credit my genetics with my literary inclinations and emotional impetuosity. From where I sat in my suburban bubble, I selectively chose everything that appealed to my sense of aesthetics.
My family lives in a house with a white picket fence in a tree-lined suburb, the very picture of the American dream. Just a few miles away lie the poor, working-class Hough and Collinwood neighborhoods of downtown Cleveland. My grandparents grew up there, the children of janitors and maids and construction workers. Their immigrant parents exist for me only in the family albums my aunts and uncles love to pull out at family gatherings, telling me I have the Brennan forehead, the Kinnarney eyes, or the McNally nose, until I feel like a Hibernian Frankenstein.
But try as I might to see myself in those pictures, those stern-looking, posed ancestors of mine seem removed from my life. For my parents, they existed as part of their American reality, but for me, they are part of the dreamscape.
Those great-grandparents are fully fleshed characters in my imagination, an integral part of what I consider “my” Irishness in a million small ways. I love hearing family lore about them—my great-grandfather’s feats of strength, my great-grandmother’s intelligence and generosity, the sacrifices they made to ensure that their children were able to advance in American society.
Like most immigrants, they dealt with a foreign land by carving out a fierce pride in their national tradition. As much as they assimilated, they passed on what was most important. My unorthodox lullabies were the songs my father had learned from his grandfather—”Sweet Rosie O’Grady”, “Wild Rover”, “Molly Malone”. I took Irish dance lessons and read bedtime stories about Deirdre of the Sorrows and Cucullain. We used their soda-bread recipes, inherited their china, religion and politics.
But the cultural inheritence I’ve received has been filtered through generations of selective remembrance. If I met them today, perhaps in my simplistic snobbishness I might have deemed my immigrant ancestors’ brand of Irishness as being “tackily ethnic” without looking beyond to what was beneath the surface motivating it.
It doesn’t mean I’ll be donning a green wig anytime soon, but I’ve come to appreciate the over-the-top quality of St. Patrick’s Day as it’s celebrated here. It’s Irish-American, not pure Irish. Perhaps it’s a different strain of selective remembrance and a different way of being Irish than the one that was handed down to me, but it has its origins in that same fierce immigrant nationalism.
That’s something that is part of the dreamscape of every single American, and maybe that’s why everyone wants to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.
