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5. “Fabled by the daughters of memory” Roger Casement, James Joyce,and the Irish Nationalist Hero
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79 5 “Fabled by the daughters of memory” Roger Casement, James Joyce, and the Irish Nationalist Hero T R ACE Y SCH WA R ZE Sir Roger Casement—Irish crusader for the rights of Congolese Africans and Putumayo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon basin, knighted for this work by the British government in 1911, and hanged by the same government for treason in August 1916 after a failed attempt to secure German arms and recruit Irish POWs to aid the Easter Rising in Ireland—is undoubtedly a figure of complex personal and political identities. Stripped of his knighthood on June 30, 1916, immediately following his conviction of high treason, Casement had enjoyed a significant career in the British consular service. His report detailing atrocities in the Belgian Congo’s rubber trade was published by the British government in February 1904; his report of natives similarly abused by the Peruvian Amazon (Rubber) Company followed in July 1912. Casement attributed to his experience as an Irish colonial under British rule his ability to recognize imperialism elsewhere, and his distaste for such systems at home and abroad led him to take an active role against British rule in Ireland in the years prior to the 1916 Easter Rising. As he wrote in a letter to the Times in 1913, “Whatever of good I have been the means of doing in other countries was due . . . to the guiding light I carried from my own country, Ireland, and to the very intimate knowledge I possessed not only of her present-day conditions, but of the historic causes that had led up to them. With a mind thus illumined, I was not ill-equipped for comprehending that human suffering elsewhere . . . originated in conceptions of human 80 Tracey Schwarze exploitation that are both very old and very widespread” (Casement 1913, 5). It has been suggested that Casement’s role in the Rising was minor (and ineffective) enough that he might have been able to win a reprieve from execution if it had not been for the surreptitious circulation by the British government during the spring and summer of 1916 of the notorious “Black Diaries,” which revealed details of Casement’s numerous homosexual liaisons to members of the press, key British and Irish officials, and intellectuals in England and the United States. The furtive distribution of Black Diary excerpts successfully dampened efforts to agitate on Casement’s behalf (Lewis 2005, 367); it also set in motion complex questions about the nature of Casement’s public legacy and how his sexuality might affect that legacy. Casement’s defenders unsuccessfully countered that the diaries were forged,1 a claim that made no difference to Casement’s immediate fate—death by hanging—but one that preserved a chance for Irish martyrdom that otherwise would have been denied by a moralistic nationalist ethos that had insistently excluded homosexuality from its definitions of nation and identity.2 Significantly, Casement’s diaries positioned him with Charles Stewart Parnell as a sexually polluted and therefore problematic figure in the pantheon of Irish nationalist heroes, one whose public achievements potentially were threatened by his sexual escapades. 1. Scotland Yard investigators found the volumes, dating from 1903, in a trunk that had been left behind in Casement’s London lodgings. According to H. Montgomery Hyde, Casement acknowledged them as his personal diaries (1960, xxxii). Though the diary excerpts were widely circulated, they were not introduced at trial. Debates over the diaries’ authenticity began almost immediately; in 2002, forensic tests and handwriting analysis concluded the diaries to be Casement’s (Lewis 2005, 364). 2. As Adrian Frazier has noted, this ethos was characterized at the turn of the twentieth century by a hypermasculinity that effectively “othered” any other style of manliness, including homosexuality, which was perceived as both degenerate and effeminate. Not even the Irish literary revival was immune from this dichotomous thinking, according to Frazier: “The veterans of the Irish movement, the O’Duffys and Morans, spoke sourly of the effeminate character of the new Irish literature: in the current mode of deprecation, these poets ‘crooned’ or ‘lisped’; real men, the implication was, shouted and argufied . . . Nationalism, pure and simple, . . . was male—a matter of guns behind the hedge, cigars in the lobby at Westminster, and ballads to Mother Ireland” (1997, 9). [44.202.128.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:54 GMT) Roger Casement, James Joyce, and the Irish Nationalist Hero 81 Such status likely rendered Casement a figure of special interest for James Joyce...