XXIV
Dear old Killynoogan, thee,
Once so full of life and glee,
Lifeless, desolate, I see!
XXV
But, beloved and sacred spot,
Nought of thee shall be forgot,
Till what I am now—is not.
—John Reade, “Killynoogan”[1]
In his poem “Killynoogan,” the Irish-Canadian poet John Reade invokes the idea that memories of life in Ireland are embodied within the people who inhabited the space of Ireland. While this allows for the continuing evocation of his Irish past in his new Canadian homeland, there is also a realization that when Reade dies, his unique and specific memories of Killynoogan, County Derry, will die with him. Like other Irish-Canadian poets of the second half of the nineteenth century, Reade’s fear is that while the space of Ireland will endure into the future, the distinctive culture that existed within that space will begin to fade with the disappearing of bodies from the landscape (especially during and after the Famine). Each Irish individual contains a memory bank of distinctive experiences of Ireland, of its people, and of its society and culture. The death or disappearance of those individuals from the space of Ireland is accompanied by an erasing of a store of memories, unvoiced and unrecorded. It is no surprise, then, that people thrown into great social and political upheaval in the aftermath of the Great Famine would turn to the past for a sense of continuity and cultural pride that would help them face the future with a greater degree of self-worth. The seismic demographic change that occurred in Ireland in the aftermath of the Famine is starkly evident in the census numbers. The census of 1841 put the population of Ireland at 8.1 million. By 1911 the population of Ireland was just 4.2 million; an extraordinary decline at a time when the other nations of the United Kingdom, and indeed other parts of the British Empire, would see a population increase. For the emigrants who found themselves scattered across the globe, the cultural memory of this seismic demographic movement would become central to the creation of a diasporic ethnic identity. In response to such rapid and profound change there was an attempt by many Irish diaspora writers to uncover what was most stable and enduring about Irish identity. Often this search for a sense of endurance across time and space was based on personal memory, such as memory of the Irish countryside, or memory of an Irish childhood. At other times it was based on the collective memory of Irish history or the collective religious desire for a spiritual state unburdened of the temporal experience of pain and hunger.
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