Criss-Cross Mo Chara (review)

The Belfast poet Gearóid Mac Lochlainn's publication history has been marked by a complicated bilingualism. After publishing Babylon Gaeilgeoir (1997) and Na Scéalaithe (1999) in Irish-only editions, he provided facing-page English translations in Sruth Teangacha/Stream of Tongues (2002) to make his poems more widely accessible to non-Irish speakers. In Criss-Cross Mo Chara, however, he follows neither strategy; he translates few of the non-English portions of the text, and those that he does translate are not verbatim. Instead, when Mac Lochlainn translates, he situates these poems in conversation with each other, each developing his themes in divergent ways. Mac Lochlainn forces his readers to become active producers of the text, who must either choose to foster bilingualism by translating the Irish language or to remain monolingual by reading only those poems written in English.

His new collection offers voices from characters and narrators who speak in Irish, English, and some Spanish, and the mixing of languages creates a strong sense that a single language is incapable of expressing the full range of the Irish experience. "The Irish Version" and "An Leagan Gaeilge," two poems in conversation with each other, describe an unnamed character aspiring to be an Irish-language poet because, as he says with his "worn blue copy of Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla" in hand, "The Irish one's better. / Is feall an dán Béarla, mar a dúirt an file . . ."("The Irish Version"). However, the only results of his attempt to write an Irish-language poem in "An Leagan Gaeilge" are frustration and decidedly amateur, even nonsensical poetry. The quoted poet's belief is false; the Irish version of the poem is, in fact, not better. Mac Lochlainn deliberately shares his frustration over this realization with the reader, a strategy that appears throughout the collection.

Elsewhere, Mac Lochlainn explores the limits of the Irish belief in shunning rules and shows how this does not always create the change desired. The collection's Wild West theme represents a carnivalesque strategy that amuses while it also distances itself from the reader, involving such bizarre characters as Stumpy, Pete the Feet, and Big Tiny who wander Belfast's busy streets with donkeys and holstered pistols. In "An Damhsa"/ "Pistolero," for instance, a pistol-wielding Mo Chara suddenly disrupts the happy escapism of his friends' dancing by forcing them to dance for his pleasure at gunpoint. Without any discernible motive, Mo Chara shoots up the dance hall and goads the dancers in both English and Spanish to move ever faster, "Shuffling, shaking, / worn out old circus bears. / The roof caved in around us." Asserting his mastery of the room, Mo Chara enacts his own idea of escape, seizing control of his situation regardless of the consequences. However, his vision of escape conflicts with other characters' versions, only increasing conflict. Seeking to create an alternate reality within Belfast, they continue to avoid confronting the escalating violence of daily life even as it intrudes upon them. Their rebellion fails, leaving them trapped in an endless cycle of violence with no momentum to escape.

Despite Mac Lochlainn's unpredictability, Mo Chara holds together poems in the collection because his presence represents a merging of Wild West and Belfast cultures. Like to the omnipresent narrator of Whitman's "Song of Myself," Mo Chara appears almost everywhere, observed by some narrators and speaking directly with others. Although violence characterizes many of Mo Chara's interactions with Wild West characters, elsewhere he is a sympathetic character. In many poems, Mo Chara busks unsuccessfully on Belfast's streets, wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson while insisting on singing Wild West tunes. In "Tuirse," ill and turned out in the rain, he reiterates his exhaustion, "Tá mé tuirseach...Scriosta, traochta, tuirseach." Wild West and Belfast culture blend within Mo Chara, who in "Dry Spell" is described as feeling "Neither here, nor there." Mo Chara, like Mac Lochlainn, feels trapped...