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Research in African Literatures 34.4 (2003) 96-114



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The Poor Mouth:
A Parody of (Post) Colonial Irish Manhood

Sarah McKibben


[B]y our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit?
—Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Widely known in Ireland but not outside it, Brian O'Nolan's An Béal Bocht is a short comic gem in the form of a mock autobiography published in Irish in 1941 and translated into English as The Poor Mouth in 1964.1 It follows its sad-sack narrator in an hyperbolically pathetic journey from the typically "Gaelic" misery of his childhood to a tenuous, still miserable maturation, quickly capped off by a twenty-nine-year prison term for a murder he didn't commit. That Bonaparte O'Coonassa, an "ass" who is indeed "far from good" (or Napoleonic), should terminate his narrative in jail literalizes the carceral logic of the foregoing text, in which characters are trapped by the inexorable march of "cinniúint Ghaelach" ("Gaelic fate"; 73, 84) into squalid lives from which they cannot escape. The Poor Mouth uses this deterministic narrative to parody rigid expectations of what can and should be written in Irish. The Irish language (often called Gaelic) became a talisman of the lost manly virtues of independence and fidelity, as well as much-needed proof of national distinctiveness in an increasingly anglophone and anglophilic society. Such idealized formulations in turn strongly impacted those who fought for independence, in part to recover that vitiated national manhood. Although Irish was the mother tongue of a minority, it became the first official language of the new state, acquiring a symbolic significance inversely proportional to its linguistic currency.2 Because of the importance of Irish to cultural nationalism, and the impoverishment of remaining vestigial communities of Irish speakers, what counted as authentic literature in Irish overwhelmingly concerned the harsh, "traditional" life of the western, coastal poor, seen as unself-conscious, heroic and doomed. In a postcolonial riposte, The Poor Mouth lays bare the servitude of the Gael and his language to the ideological demands of the linguistic majority in the new state—something arguably continuing to this day. The text thereby powerfully critiques a repressive and hypocritical nationalist discourse that replicated colonial attitudes and relations well after independence.

This gendered, postcolonial reading of The Poor Mouth requires revisiting the heritage of Irish nationalism to focus on its preoccupation with masculinity, which in turn strongly marked the cultural ideology of the new state. According to Nancy Curtin, "the ideal of masculine patriotic self-immolation was relentlessly constructed in the 1790s" by the United Irishmen, a radical, interdenominational constitutional-reformist organization that later embraced separatist, physical force nationalism (34).3 The [End Page 96] test of one's republicanism lay in one's willingness to sacrifice oneself (or, if female, one's husband or son) to the cause (Curtin 34, 37). The "liberation" of the imperiled female nation, often tellingly named with one of her many Irish-language sobriquets, "was the test of her sons' manhood," marking their movement from "brutes" to "men" (Curtin 39). "Armed filial devotion to the mother-nation represented, then, a rite of passage to full manhood. 'But our brave Irish boys, / Soon let them know we were united men'" (Curtin 39). By contrast, to fail to live up to the demands of "Mother Ireland," was to be less than a man. Her violation by invaders—or that of the women whose rapes by loyalist forces were broadcast by the republican press—shamed the radicals' manhood. For, "as metaphor or reality, the assault on Irish women" was deeply problematic "in the eyes of republican men, for her virtue was entrusted to the custodianship of a woman's male protector" (Curtin 40). "To violate a woman was to insult and indeed emasculate her male protector" (Curtin 40). The only appropriate response was for Irishmen to "assert their manhood" through republican nationalism (Curtin 40).

A consonant vision of colonial masculine imperilment...

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