Human to Humus: Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille and Ecocriticism as a Decolonialist Strategy

Most criticism shares a conception of Western cultures as uniform and universally invested in human mastery of the environment and identifies this monolithic culture at the root of environmental destruction. Anna Tsing, in her work The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), characterizes this scholarly understanding when she writes, "Ever since the Enlightenment, Western philosophers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man, which could tame and master Nature. It was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilizational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human."¹ This article contests the idea of an indigenously monocultural West, through a close reading and foreignizing translation of the modernist Irish-language writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain's 1949 novel Cré na Cille.² In her work Against World Literature, Emily Apter points out words in minor European languages that challenge what she calls Eurocentrism within Europe—the idea of a lineage of Greece to Rome to France to Germany to England as the cultural genealogy of Europe as a whole.³ Written in Irish, Cré na Cille's language demonstrates such a different cultural legacy, which sees humans as part of the natural world and not the world's masters.

The novel is comprised of a series of scathingly satirical conversations among corpses in a graveyard, which are occasionally interrupted by pronouncements from the Trumpeter of the Churchyard, a character who articulates views consistent with Celtic nature spirits. The Trumpeter reminds the reader of the complex and interdependent system of life the corpses are participating in through their transformation from human to humus. This understanding of human lives as bound in complex relations with nonhuman beings and the environment exemplifies Donna Haraway's call for humanity to attend to the earthly, chthonic ones.⁴ Cré, in Irish, can mean either "earth" or "creed."⁵ The title's linguistic connection between the earthly ground the corpses are decomposing in and the beliefs expressed by the Trumpeter manifests an understanding of human culture as bound in complex interdependence to the earth and as chthonic ones ourselves as we transform from human into humus.

Cré na Cille was not translated into English until 2015. Yale University Press released two complementary translations of this complex and highly colloquial Irish-language novel: Alan Titley's The Dirty Dust⁶ and Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson's Graveyard Clay.⁷ Comparing these twin English translations with the Irish-language original and my own, highly literal translation shows how the Irish language conveys an understanding of human life as interdependent with the natural world through allusions to Celtic nature spirits and in Irish grammatical structures, which English translation can occlude. This way of expressing human life is fundamentally different from colonial culture and illustrates how Celtic culture, despite being western European, does not assert a humanity uniquely apart from nature and capable of mastering it.⁸ These translations reveal how Western cultures can cultivate environmental awareness by reviving subjugated cultural lineages, which have a greater affinity with non-Western understandings of nature than they do with colonial culture.

Decolonization and Cré na Cille

Ó Cadhain wrote Cré na Cille in the aftermath of both the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War. In order to mobilize people to fight in both of these long and bloody wars, proponents of independence strove to differentiate "authentic Gaelic civilization" from the colonizing English culture and asserted that Celtic culture "was the antithesis of English values and mores."⁹ This retrieval (and in some cases imagining) of Celtic culture, after nearly eight hundred years of Anglo colonization in Ireland, was seen as necessary in order to claim independence from England. While it may now seem self-evident that Ireland is culturally distinct from England, this campaign was understood as foundational for mobilizing people to fight and die. Many saw a distinct language as...