The Harlem and Irish Renaissances: Language, Identity, and Representation, and: Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined (review)

The Harlem and Irish Renaissances: Language, Identity, and Representation, by Tracy Mishkin. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998. xv + 127 pp. ISBN 0-8130-1611-8.

Harlem Renaissance Re-Examined, ed. Victor A. Kramer and Robert A. Russ. Troy: Whitson, 1997. 416 pp. ISBN 0-87875-488-1.

In a 1979 interview with Edward Hirsch, the Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott comments on the significance for him of Irish writers:

I've always found some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one realised that they were also colonials with the same kind of problem that existed in the Caribbean. They were the niggers of Britain. Now, with all of that, to have those astounding achievements of genius, whether by Joyce, or Yeats, or Beckett, illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, deprived, oppressed situation, and be defiant and creative at the same time. (Contemporary Literary 20.3 [1979]: 288)

Walcott goes on to discuss the influence of Synge's Riders to the Sea in showing him how to use dialect lyrically, and the importance of a language tied to landscape. Synge's play, he says, "released him creatively" and allowed him to write in 1954 The Sea at Dauphin, the first of many plays that compose dialogue in a local idiom.

Some thirty years before Walcott composed The Sea at Dauphin, James Weldon Johnson had also cited Synge as a mentor in the preface to his 1922 anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry. Johnson lamented the limitations of dialect poetry, and encouraged "colored" writers to turn to Irish models for ways in which to express the "racial spirit":

What the colored poet in the United States needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and punctuation. (xl)

Johnson went on to practice what he preached in his 1927 volume of poetry, God's Trombones. He was not the only African American to perceive the Irish as "the niggers of Europe": W. E. B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, and Lorraine Hansberry all acknowledged comparisons between the situation of the Irish with regard to Britain and African Americans in relation to white American, and all found inspiration in Irish writing as a response to economic, racial, and cultural discrimination.

Tracy Mishkin documents some of these comparisons, and also notes Irish responses to the African American situation, including the adoption in the late eighteenth century by the United Irishmen of the rhetoric of slavery, and Daniel O'Connell's emphatic opposition to slavery. (He invited Frederick Douglass to speak at a meeting of the Repeal Association and introduced him as "the Black O'Connell of the United States"). Mishkin also indicates the ambivalences expressed by Irish and African American politicians and cultural nationalists about such comparisons. Her work is particularly interesting for its detailed exploration of the influence of the Abbey Theatre on the development of a "Negro Drama" by white writers such as Ridgely Torrence following the Abbey Theatre tour of the United States in 1911. Much of the book is devoted to a setting up of the historical background and details of the oppression suffered by Irish and African Americans as "nations within nations," a contextualization that at times seems oversimplified, overly reliant on one or two historians, and not directly related to the subsequent discussion of language, identity, and representation. Mishkin's' method is to juxtapose descriptive accounts of various aspects of each movement, often leaving the comparisons implicit. Her book provides the building blocks for a further and more extended comparative analysis and reflection on the issues of racial identity and literary politics arising from the Irish...