Irish actor Gabriel Byrne says coming home is ‘conflicting’ thing for an emigrant
IRISH actor Gabriel Byrne has said coming home is a “conflicting” thing for an emigrant.
The Dubliner, who now lives in New York, said that those who “have to, or want to leave Ireland” can be lost to nostalgia and then have to adapt to a new land.
Speaking as part of the To Be Irish Christmas series, he said: “The experience of the emigrant or the exile or the immigrant or whatever you want to call a person who is displaced, because when you are any of those things, you are displaced.
“Your relationship to the home country changes. So when you return, you’re looking for something that people who don’t leave there are not looking for.
“One of the first things that happens you when you leave Ireland is that you’re identified as being Irish, you don’t have to identify yourself as being Irish when you’re in Ireland…
“But when you step outside that you immediately have a different identity.
FRACTURED IDENTITY
"So when you return you’re bringing back that fractured identity to a sense of the past and a sense of the present so you look for pieces of yourself in the landscape.
“And there’s a sort of sadness about the landscape that you remember disappearing before your eyes because we like to think we have ownership over the landscape.
“We like to think, ‘why did they build that on that field there. That was a lovely field.’"
He added: “When we come to the idea of what home is, home is a very conflicted notion for the emigrant.
"Where is home? You come back looking for home but you realise with a certain amount of sadness that home does not belong to you, nor does landscape, nor does the city, nor do the people.
“And the memory is precious to you but it is only to you. One of the most powerful Irish myths is the story of Oisin and Tir na nOg, where he goes away and goes to this land Tir na nOg forever young and he misses his friends and his companions.
“And he asks Niamh can I go back to visit, because she recognises the restlessness is in him and she says ‘you can but you can’t put your foot on the soil of Ireland.’
"It’s a very powerful myth because it is also connected in the Bible to Lot’s wife and God says to Lot, ‘Get out of the city and one thing you must do is not look back at it’ and Lot’s wife can’t resist and she takes one look back and she’s turned into a pillar of stone.
“Oisin can’t resist and lifts that rock to help those men and his spirit dies. The message in those myths is you cannot return.
"That’s what that’s about. And there is no such thing between the absolute connection and the past and the present. Home doesn’t belong to us.”
FACING GHOSTS
The 70-year-old director, who often returns to Ireland and has just released a book on his life, Walking with Ghosts, said coming home can be like facing ghosts.
He said: “The past can never be recovered just like the future can never really be brought forward, we must live in the present.
“When I come back, every doorway in Dublin that’s there, every stairway, every pub, is filled with ghosts.
"‘Oh that’s where that used to be, that’s where Sinnott’s was before they knocked it down, there was a barber shop there.
"So that landscape exists only in my memory.
"And it only belongs to me in my memory…“Emigrants come home looking for some kind of resolution about themselves, the past, the present.
"Oftentimes life does not provide you with a resolution.
“Fiction does, poetry does, films do, but life itself has a way of saying there doesn’t have to be a resolution. In fact if you find a resolution you’re doing pretty well.”
LUCKY ONES
Speaking to Niall Burgess, Secretary General, Department of Foreign Affairs as part of the To Be Irish at Christmas conversation, Gabriel said he thinks those who have never had to emigrate are the lucky ones, despite his famous career.
He continued: “I think people who’ve never had to leave their country are blessed that they’ve never had to leave.
"Some people had to leave, some people wanted to leave, whatever the reason you left, you assume a different identity.
“When an Irishman leaves Ireland, Ireland becomes tremendously important emotionally to him.
"Nostalgia, memory, imagination, the yearning to return, all these things swim around in the emigrant’s soul
“Sometimes the diaspora for want of a better word feel that they have this huge connection to Ireland, but there’s not a corresponding connection between Ireland and the diaspora.
"They feel like once they’re gone, they’re kind of forgotten except for their families.”
EXPLAIN THEIR LIFE
And then when they return, he said, they are given just a short time to explain their life away before life goes back to normal.
He added: “I’ve found this myself when I’ve gone home, and I’m not condemning it in any way, I think it’s just the way the world is.
"You arrive home and you’ve been living somewhere in Bangkok or New York or whatever and you come home.
"You get about five minutes to talk about what you’ve been doing and then it goes back to Mrs Doran’s cat.
Most read in FIlm
“The kind of life that you live, the kind of views that you have, what the experiences are.
"Hardly anyone ever asks me what that’s like. What’s it like to live in New York or Los Angeles, there’s very little interest.
Read more on the Irish Sun
“Now on the other end of scale, and it goes back to the famine, there is a sense and this is just my own opinion, there is a sense that if you leave the tribe for whatever reason, it’s seen as an abandoning of the tribe.”
To watch the full interview and others, visit ToBeIrish.ie