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FAQ: Why am I staying?

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FAQ: Why are you staying? Over the past months I’ve been asked that question frequently. By friends and family, here and at home, locals and strangers. “ What have you found here?” “Was it love or work?” Those were my two options. It was neither to begin with. It was never so clear-cut at all, and I suppose I still don’t know why I’m here. But this place knows something about me that I don’t, and I want to be around when it’s ready to tell me. Becoming a wanderer I always envied those globetrotting cosmopolitans before I became one. I studied in Utrecht with adventurers and expat kids carrying dual citizenship and finding homes in faraway places. I dreamed of taking wing myself. Five years ago I did, and landed on the other side of the globe, where I learnt the scent of fig trees, let the furry arms of redwoods support my clambering bare feet, lost my heart to scores of scruffy people and for the first time, to a different land. California turned me into...
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Billy and the Bonnies, Live from Titanic Town

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The Twelfth of July is a time of sparks and short fuses here. It’s the day when loyalist Northern Ireland commemorates the Battle of the Boyne, where the Protestant Dutch king William III defeated the Catholic James II on the 12 th of July 1690, vanquishing the Irish for the British crown and ramping up the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. King Billy had been invited to the English crown by Protestant opponents of James. He came, with 40,000 men and the blessing of the Pope who didn’t like James’ ally, king Louis XIV of France. He sailed across the North Sea with a huge fleet in 1688, and pursued James when the latter retreated to Ireland. The great bonfires lit on the night of the Eleventh of July mimic the fires lit to pilot Billy’s 300 ships into Belfast Lough in 1690. ‘Séamus An Chaca’ (James the Shit) didn’t put up much of a fight and deserted his Irish soldiers in an escape to France, delivering Ireland to easy conquest by Billy at the river Boyne. Though a st...
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The Bridge Builder and the Warrior

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In my last piece on language I quoted Elif Shafak who wrote that wars arise over little more than semantics: “In a world beset by mistranslations, there is no use in being resolute about any topic, because it might as well be that even our strongest convictions are caused by a simple misunderstanding.” I hold in high regard such Buddhist equanimity. But not without question. To balance things out, let me dedicate this writing to the opposite movement in me, and juxtapose Shafak’s quote with one from Martin Luther King Jr., who once argued against impartiality in quite unambiguous terms: “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.” This is the paradox between the bridge builder and the warrior, one that I embody as my own most poignant inner conflict. The bridge builder I am characterised by a genuine interest in the wide range of human expression, a social scientist and philosopher with an ability to hold...
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Secrets of Language

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Language and politics I’ve been meaning to write about language and Northern Ireland for some time. It’s taken a while, the reasons for which the ensuing will shed some light on. Being the language nerd that I am, I didn’t think twice last year when I lived in Sweden to learn the basics of its language and play around with it a bit. It made sense, it was fun, and it gave me some new words for my collection of ethno-linguistic field notes. Here in Northern Ireland it’s different. I’m hesitant to go near the native language, apart from the fact that Irish is impossibly complex, an unintelligible jumble of random letters. Swedish, triangulated with Dutch, English, and a bit of German, held pretty much no surprises. Irish on the other hand… “Mo sheacht mbeannacht ort.” I mean, what? But apart from all that, I hardly dare touch it. As so much else in this corner of the world, from colours to musical instruments, language has become weaponised, simultaneously appropri...
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