White Skins, Black Masks?: Celticism and Négritude

WHITE SKINS, BLACK MASKS?: CELTICISM AND NÉGRITUDE DECLAN KIBERD the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century program of cultural decolonization in Ireland is an important precursor of a related struggle in Africa more than forty years later. Undoubtedly England’s only European colony differed from imperial territories in Africa, most obviously as a result of Ireland’s centuries of enforced intimacy with England—an intimacy based on proximity and affinities of climate, temperament, and culture. And while Europe’s race for empire in Africa occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century, England had occupied Ireland for more than 700 years. Thus at the time of Irish decolonization, the imperial culture had penetrated far more deeply than in Africa or Asia. Despite such differences, however, the shapers of modern Africa (as well as India) looked on occasion to Ireland for guidance. But if Ireland once inspired many leaders of the “developing world,” today the country has much to learn from them. In spite of episodic involvement with India’s decolonization, Irish nationalists and writers were slow to identify with other resistance movements , preferring to see their own experiences as unique. Moreover a strain of white triumphalism, running from John Mitchel to Arthur Griffith, would never countenance Irish solidarity with the anti-imperial struggles of other racial groups. And although many nineteenth-century Irishmen, serving in the British army, had assisted in the conquest of India and Africa, the English colonizers imputed many of the same qualities to natives in these remote territories that they were attributing to the Irish. A comparative cross-cultural study identifies significant similarities between the Irish experience and those of other emerging nations. In addition , postcolonial theory from Africa, India, or the West Indies provides useful interpretation of Irish resistance, a movement less richly theorized than later decolonizations. In both Ireland and Africa, for example, the central role of the artist was to question the assumption that culture arises only WHITE SKINS, BLACK MASKS?: CELTICISM AND NÉGRITUDE 163 when imperialists arrive. The comparable roles of an alienated urban elite in African and Irish nationalisms, similar debates about the role of native languages, and parallels between cultural movements like Celticism or Négritude (arising in French Africa) reveal how native cultures the world over contain, in the words of West African polemicist Amicar Cabral, the seeds of resistance. In Ireland, anti-imperialism emerged in different stages, often creating an identity merely reactive to that imposed by the ruling colonial class. Thus if England characterized its subject people as imaginative, childlike, or feminine, political nationalists, in reaction, created a hyper-masculine identity . The limitations of Celticism (and Négritude in Africa) emerge from its sources in such a binary opposition to imperial definitions, a reaction with origins in a sense of inferiority rather than in a vision of liberation. However, Irish cultural nationalists—such as Douglas Hyde, through his founding of the Gaelic League in 1893, or William Butler Yeats in his early poetry—sought to create alternative modes of expression for a nation struggling to invent an autonomous identity. Hyde’s project of deanglicization , as well as Yeats’s use of fairy lore and Gaelic saga material in his early poetry, drew on an explicitly Irish cultural memory. Both writers, although never moving from cultural nationalism to political resistance, emphasized returning to the sources of a national identity. Like John Millington Synge, Hyde and Yeats avoided a narrowly anti-British focus of a politicized Irish-Irelandism, even as they provided the cultural basis for liberation. This process pioneered by Hyde and Yeats had followers also in Africa. The subtle program of cultural freedom mapped by Amilcar Cabral, the scourge of Portuguese colonialism, was one that “without underestimating the importance of positive accretions from the oppressor” (Cabral 43) found in native culture the seeds of resistance. Because the conquest of Africa had been confined to major cities and their immediate hinterlands, the urban middle class there seemed to have assimilated the new codes, which led its members foolishly to consider themselves superior to their own people (very much in the manner of Ireland’s “Castle Catholics” and “West Britons”). Outside of these centers, the influence...