Homeplace 

I love the way Eugene Clancy says the words homeplace.

This battle-scarred boxer lets the syllables roll.

They reverberate in his throat – homeplace.

I envy the way he can say it so tenderly-

Just like John Joe up the mountain at Moneen

where all that is left of his family homeplace is a stone floor,

his father’s name carved on the hearth,a chimney and

what was once his parent’s bedroom.

He carved his name too when he left for forty years,

working away but always feeling the tug and dream like draw.

These words are an embrace, a welcome and a safety.

I know that there is no place that I can call homeplace

in the same way as Eugene or John Joe with that sound

so grounded and assured, rooted on a square space

where blood and earth mingle.

It is my earth, too, but not a homeplace.  

This Week in Corrogue…

 ‘Homeplace’ has a unique meaning to Irish people. Germans would translate it as heimat. It is an emotional attachment to place that speaks of family and rootedness to property and townland where generations have lived, worked and died. 

I tend to divide the world into two types of people – the settler and the nomad. The Irish who have left for economic and political reasons tend to view the leaving as an exile. Indeed, in the not so distant past they held what was called the ‘American Wake’ for a child the night before they emigrated. Before the time of jets it was assumed that parents would never see their child again. They stayed up all night – partying, dancing, storytelling – having good Craic as one would say in Irish. At dawn when it came time to set out the family would bid farewell to the child and then lock the front door on them. It was considered bad luck once goodbyes were said for the émigré to turn back for one more hug from a loved one.  

I know of a woman who left in the early 1950s whose family did just that. As soon as they saw her running back they barred the door. She did well in America and owns a house for holidays in the family’s townland. But she still shudders over the remembrance of that ‘farewell.’

 For many people who are settler by nature but are forced by circumstances to become nomadic, there is a perpetual sense of displacement. There is a whole genre of Irish traditional songs that are ‘the émigré songs.’ These songs are laments for the homeplace and are plangent with uprootedness. There is the rock and hard place of desire to return and the knowledge that there is no going back.   

It’s as if they have been flayed alive. And in a sense they have because a profound sense of place – and one’s part in it – is a covering that that is woven into the soul’s skin.  

© 2006 Bee Smith