Ahanagran's Loss

A friend of mine says that we can either write books about ourselves or not about ourselves, but, whatever our intentions, the latter are more personally revealing. Richard White has written both in Remembering Ahanagran. It is about his mother. More precisely, it is about his mother’s stories which he interrogates as a historian and a son. As White sees it, the book is an “anti-memoir.” It is, he says, a “conversation” between memory and history. What began as a collaboration quickly becomes, in a telling as revealing as his mother’s stories, a loving struggle between White’s “history” and Sara’s “memories.” By the end, White wrestles with history, too.

Inevitably, then, the book is about Richard White. It is about his memories, sensibilities, sonship, and approach to his craft. Since it is about memory and history, it is also about time. As a character in Wallace Stegner’s Recapitulation (1979; 1986) struggles to recall, “What year? 1929? 1930? He was beginning to discover that the memory had no calendar. Inside there, all was simultaneous. A sense of time had to be forcibly imposed on it” (p. 62). So, whatever else the author wants the book to be about, it is about fact, fiction, and how White decides what is true. It is about how his mother tells stories and about how White does, too.

The stories are mostly about Ahanagran, North Kerry, Ireland, the place of Sara Walsh’s birth, where “land” and “home” had interchangeable meanings, different meanings than they can ever have for her American son. The memories crafted into stories make sense of a life lost at sea on an immigrant’s voyage across cultures and time. The stories are true to the memories, to the emotions, to the order that the teller makes of her life. They are not White’s “history,” which has a different chronology, trajectory, and, sometimes, causality. They are not the same stories told by newspapers, census records, and other witnesses, living and dead. Sometimes Sara’s stories are truer than history, with its silent individuals, lost feelings, and extraneous details. Some of the stories show where history goes wrong. Like the Irish priest who insulted some of his flock by leading his horse out of a driving rain and into their home, the historian can get the story disastrously half right. Yes, the Irish peasants in Sara’s story occasionally bring animals in, but fragile foals to lay in the straw by the kitchen fire, not healthy, full-grown geldings who foul the living room floor. The story speaks volumes about place, class, and the alienation of priest and historian from everyday life.

In Sara’s stories, Ireland’s history and her life fuse. Sara “remembers,” for example, the murder of a local IRA hero. She recalls his bloody body on a road some distance from her home. She “sees the butt of a gun driving into her mother’s back” (p. 30) as part of the same running battle that left Eddie Carmody dead. And yet the historian knows that Sara was not yet a year old when the patriot fell, that she gets details wrong and surely did not witness what she recalls. The chronology is likewise not that of history since the gun felled her mother months later, this time quite possibly in the toddler’s view. “Sara Walsh’s earliest memories,” her son tells us, “come from before she was old enough to have memories” (p. 30).

What Sara’s memory contributes that history might miss is the living presence of Ireland’s troubles, the collective sense of how personal the battles are, how four hundred years of struggle is seared into living flesh. How can you forget when the wounds throb without stop? How can you move on from the tortured bodies that you “saw”? It is as important to know that Sara and others yet to be born witnessed Eddie Carmody’s death as...