Abstract
In John McDonagh’s “The Guard,” Brendan Gleeson’s small-town policeman slags Don Cheadle’s big-dog FBI man during a briefing on a drug smuggling operation. When white suspects appear in the Powerpoint, Gleeson’s character feigns confusion. “I thought only Black lads are drug dealers.” Ordered to apologize for his slurs, Doyle shrugs. “I’m Irish, sure. Racism is part of my culture.”
Indeed, recent Irish fiction depicts casual racism as part of Irish culture, often with cringey humor or equally cringey pathos. This paper will examine encounters between white Irish characters and dark-skinned outsiders in works by Roddy Doyle, Donal Ryan, Anne Enright, and Colum McCann before turning to stories by Nigerian-Irish writer Melatu Uche Okorie. “This Hostel Life” takes readers inside a Direct Provision centre where the mostly African asylum-seekers bond despite mutual suspicions of each other and the hostile institutional rules imposed by their host country. “Under the Awning” depicts a young Nigerian immigrant’s life post-Direct Provision, where it seems no space outside home–not even a creative writing workshop– is free from racism. But the act of writing, of shaping experience into art, provides Okorie’s protagonist with an inchoate sense of belonging, if not yet to Ireland at least to herself.
Keywords
- Melatu Uche Okorie,
- John McDonagh,
- "The Guard"
Disciplines
Publication Date
June 7, 2023
Location
San Jose State University, San Jose, California
Citation Information
Rosemary Graham. ""I'm Irish, sure. Racism is part of my culture." Panel on Irishness, Blackness, and Anti-Blackness." American Conference for Irish Studies National Conference, 2023. Global Ireland: Transnational Networks of Migration and Belonging (2023) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/rosemary-graham/40/