“Or am I seeking home?”: Arrivals, Departures, and/or Returns as Identity-Shaping Experiences in Contemporary (Non-)Irish Women’s Literature
From Firenze University Press: Studi Irlandesi. A Journal of Irish Studies
Martina Zanetti, Università degli Studi di Torino
The editorial team of Firenze University Press poses the question: “What does “true Irishness” really mean today in a country that has seen millions leave and return?”
A land historically marked by the sorrows of astonishingly numerous (in-voluntary) “emigrants” and/or “exiles”, in recent decades Ireland has also undergone remarkably significant waves of immigration and return migration, which have inevitably questioned the nature of “true Irishness” today.
Drawing on fictional and non-fictional narratives of metaphorical and/or literal (e)migration produced by the contemporary generation of (non-)Irish women writers, this paper aims to shed light on the personal and national implications related to a woman’s “decision”/“necessity” to seek, leave, and/or return to a “new” homeaway from home, and therefore to her attempt to “reconcile” with or forge her identity/ies and ambivalent longing and sense of (not) belonging elsewhere or within an ever-changing Ireland.
“About 10 million Irish men, women, and children have emigrated from Ireland since 1700”: this is how Kevin Kenny, among the most distinguished scholars of the Irish diaspora, begins his recent “Two Diasporic Moments in Irish Emigration History: The Famine Generation and the Contemporary Era” (2019, 43). In order to emphasise the Irish migratory phenomenon’s devastating impact and persistent importance since its earliest phases — attested well before the Great Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century –, Kenny further adds as follows:
Remarkably, this figure is more than twice the population of the Republic of Ireland today (4.8 million), it exceeds the population of the island of Ireland (6.7 million), and it is higher than the population of Ireland at its historical peak (8.5 million) on the eve of the Great Famine in 1845. (Ibidem)
Contemporary migration challenges traditional definitions of belonging: “home” is no longer just a geographic place, but an emotional and cultural state.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/SIJIS-2239-3978-16596
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