A continuation of the previous blog entry:
"I'm going to read some more of Trinity tonight. It's easy for me to get interested in the book, because it's a fictional account of the conflict in Ireland, and our family went to Ireland in the summer of 1976. We also went to Scotland and England. I liked Ireland the best, because it was more backward and more picturesque than Scotland or England I thought, and perhaps more tragic."
MANHOOD REDO: If I lived in Ireland and was reading this excerpt, I suspect I would be insulted. "Backward" isn't a word I would use now to describe anything or anyone. I suppose I was referring to things like seeing skinned pigs strung up outdoors where a butcher was selling meat, flies buzzing all around. In the States, where meat is presented in sanitized foam packaging, tightly wrapped cellophane keeping out air, a piece of white cloth paper layering the bottom to soak up any excess juices and blood, the cultural practices are obviously very different. Trained as I was in our food culture, I assumed that the Irish must be spreading all sorts of pestilence by keeping the meat in the open and letting flies land on it.
Who knows what I meant by "tragic"? Perhaps that was connected to Northern Ireland. Perhaps it was connected to England's colonization of Ireland. When I was a sophomore in high school, we had to write weekly five paragraph themes, the topics always assigned and in the vein of "The pen is mightier than the sword - pick a side for or against," except for one time when we were allowed to choose our own. Paul McCartney and Wings had just come out in 1972 with a single called "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" that was a response to Bloody Sunday. I suppose it was too political to do well in here (in fact it only rose to #21 on the charts), and it was banned in Britain, so it kind of came and quickly went, but I decided to write my five paragraph theme arguing that it shouldn't have been banned. I don't remember what my three points were in the body (first paragraph, intro; next three paragraphs, body; final paragraph, conclusion), but I do know that I didn't even mention Bloody Sunday because I knew nothing about it and these were not the kind of papers we researched. I would whip them out in half-an-hour or 45 minutes without any revision of any kind when I had free time during the school day. Each major grammatical error resulted in your grade being signifcantly lowered and for every misspelled word, a letter grade was taken off, so I wrote very simple sentences and used words I knew.
I received a C on the paper - not because I completely omitted Bloody Sunday but because I misspelled "album," putting in an extra "l" - "alblum."
Now I have to figure out what all this has to do with masculinity. There are a couple different directions I could go. On the one hand, if I want to stick with the Irish issue, I could relate it to my own history and manhood. With a last name like McGann, it might be obvious that there is a potential link to Ireland. In Lubbock, a city of a couple hundred thousand, I think there was one other McGann family listed in the phone book, and that varied by year; sometimes we were the only ones. But when I went to Ireland and looked in the phone book of even a small town, there was a long list of McGanns. And I felt I walked among people who looked more like I did than those in Texas. Plus, I've always thought there's a certain sarcastic humor especially present on my dad's side of the family, which traveled to the States from County Cork, that I could connect with the Irish. So in some sense I haven't fully unpacked, there's an Irish element to my masculinity. When we talk about masculinities, then, it's not entirely accurate to generalize and say "white masculinity." Maybe it's more accurate to say "Irish American white masculinity." Perhaps more about this later.
The other direction would relate to the grading of the five paragraph theme and the traditionally masculine approach to learning and knowledge, which tends to be quantifiable. Grammatical and spelling mistakes can be counted. Perhaps more about this later, too.
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3 comments:
In terms of the two topics, I think dealing with race and your place as an Irish-American is a path fraught with peril, but I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.
On the other hand, the patriarchal construction of education, while still controversial, is less likely to offend people and perhaps more likely to enlighten them.
I'd be interested to hear what you see as the peril. As for dealing with the issue further, I'm thinking of something along the lines represented in the book "How the Irish Became White."
Maybe I've just been on the receiving end of too many diatribes about how white men can't know anything about poverty, racism, or oppression in certain women's studies classes...
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