I was standing at the base of a rocky green mountain in the austere, blustery region of Ireland known as Connemara, my eyes tracing the low rock walls that started from the base of the mountains and wound their way to the top. They were straight walls, about the height of a man and maybe two feet thick, made of countless stones and with no earthly reason for being there. There was a wall every hundred yards or so, each tracing a route to the top of the mountain.

I was listening to the tour guide explain how these walls came into being and I found myself getting angry. These were Famine Walls and they were built during the Famine of the 1840s as a means to keep the hungry masses out of the estates of the landowners. We learned it was the usually homeless Catholics who built the walls, for a few scraps to eat. According to our guide, massive, largely pointless work projects like the Famine Walls and the Famine Roads kept the masses barely alive during the four years that the potato crop failed. The British rule had proclaimed that the poor had to work for sustenance and not be given charity. And that stoked my growing anger.

I have a long fuse. It takes a lot to provoke me and I think the last time I threw a punch was in eighth grade, but the anger was welling up and I could not tell you from what source. I am a second generation American of Irish descent and a Catholic, but that wasn’t it. I grew up in a mostly Catholic, largely Irish Chicago neighborhood, but it seemed in the 1950’s and 60’s that it was more important to be an American, just as it had for the generation before. The things we took pride in were American things: landing on the moon, winning the world war, JFK, our position as world leader, our great democracy.

On top of that, immigrants to the United States have always known the importance of assimilation, of becoming part of the American Dream. With assimilation comes access to better jobs, more education, bigger homes, and opportunities denied to those just “off the boat.”   The Irish knew this better than most, and cemented themselves into power in Chicago and elsewhere. It seemed to me that only in the last twenty or thirty years and with a new generation on board that we amped up our celebration of heritage, with bagpipes, Irish dancing, and an ever escalating emphasis on St. Patrick’s Day and all things Irish.

So I was much more American than Irish. But the anger was there, anger against the British. Those were the same British I had been taught were America’s Best Friends. Our Cousins. Our staunch allies in two wars, the country that produced Winston Churchill, that stood alone against the Nazi menace. The same country whose language we spoke.  Now I was both angry and confused.

Those British who managed to turn the Great Famine into a near genocide were long gone… gone even before my grandparents were born in Ireland, but there was a connection to them I did not recognize until that day. And it was not an intellectual connection, but an emotional one.  But from where? Was it some faint echo of the emotions of my ancestors who perhaps had to help build those walls? Was it a lost fragment of the passion that caused someone in my family tree to pick up an IRA rifle in 1918?  Was it the dim memory of the shame and hatred one feels when you are part of a class that others look upon as lesser beings because you are poor, or Catholic, or both?

We are who we are, as defined by our behavior, our values, our duties and station in life, and those we love; but we are also the accumulation of so many other lives already lived and ended.  Our DNA is the blueprint that dictates our physical appearance, our health, lifespan and more. That accounts for tall people and short people, red hair and no hair, ears like car doors, and all things physical.  It is passed along, parts of it refined, parts of it suppressed from generation to generation, strands from mothers and fathers comingling with their pasts and forming new variations that become us.

But do memories, thoughts, and feelings somehow come along for this genetic ride? Can the anger, shame and fear felt by the hungry workman on the Famine Walls be passed along not just in stories and songs, but in our souls?  Can powerful memories somehow imbed themselves in that complex genetic coding, invisible and undetectable to even the most intuitive of scientists? Or are these feelings only lurking like ghosts at the foot of that Connemara mountain, waiting to inspire emotions only when you actually get to that place on the map?

I’ll never know. My anger cooled and I shifted my attention to the more pleasant things to see and do in Ireland; especially the precious time we could spend with my sisters’ families. My sisters returned to Ireland as young women and have spent their adult lives there, raising their families. They retain their American pride, but they are much more Irish than I, and that’s as it should be. But I still recall the unexpected visit from an anger I did not even know existed, and I wonder if, in fact, I am more Irish than even I know.

Save