IRELAND
Bock the Robber
What’s the most powerful human emotion?
You might say fear, since it’s the primal impulse to survive, but you’d be wrong. You might say anger. Bah. That hardly counts as an emotion at all. Even insects get angry. Romantics will of course say love, while cynics will say greed, but it’s none of the above. The most powerful, overwhelming, all-dominating human emotion is shame. Salman Rushdie set out this concept in his novel of the same name, describing how an entire nation, its people and its beliefs could be defined by shame, and what holds true for a vast population like Pakistan’s is equally valid for a tiny bunch of disordered famine-survivors like the Irish.
You think I joke? You think it’s stretching it a bit to describe us as famine survivors, with our well-fed bellies and our ostentatious double-breasted houses (even if we are a bit down on our luck these days)?
Think again. The Irish famine is but a blink away in history yet it shaped every last thing about who we are today. There are few degrees of separation: my grandfather knew many people who lived through the famine. They swaddled him as a baby and perhaps they bounced him on their bony old knees. They told him stories in his cot, but one tale they never told was the tale of how they survived when so many did not. This was not a tale to be passed down the generations, because it carried not one, but two great shames embedded in its broken heart.
The first was the shame of survival and the second was the shame of oppression.
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