It is a tradition of mine at Easter to write an article in defence of Padraig Pearse. I do this because, in this modern Ireland of ours, Pearse is the most denigrated and despised of all our historical figures. I regard this as sad, most of all for modern Ireland. This year I would like to deal with the accusation that Padraig Pearse was a racist, a charge with clearly damaging resonances in the supposedly heterogeneous Ireland now emerging.
One of the sticks most frequently used to beat Pearse's memory is the misinterpretation of his poetry. Pearse's essays are extraordinarily clear and specific. They outline in detail the specifications of true freedom, and the process by which it is to be attained, leaving little room for ambiguity about what the author saw as being necessary.
This is why they have been let go out of print: their being widely read would open to question some of the falsehoods about the Irish revolution and its present-day implications, which are essential to the preservation of the delusions and short-term interests of the present-day ruling elite. Pearse's poems are allowed to survive because they can be twisted and appropriated to prove what we are required to believe.
The abusive misinterpretation of one poem in particular, The Rebel, is probably the main plank of the process of the discrediting not merely of Padraig Pearse but of the 1916 Rising, and indeed the entire project of national realisation. Those who set themselves up to judge and condemn the men and women who made them free citizens of an independent republic feel free to lavish their pronouncements without undue onus of proof.
But when pushed to, for example, provide evidence of Padraig Pearse's alleged racist tendencies, the most literate among them will advance this poem as confirmation.
These are the lines usually advanced in support of this contention:
I say to my people that they are holy, that they are august, despite their chains.
That they are greater than those that hold them, and stronger and purer.
In these lines, undoubtedly, Padraig Pearse addresses the Irish people and tells them they are better than their English oppressors. In a certain pedantic sense this corresponds to what we now define as racism. But to describe it as such, given the context in which this poem was written, amounts either to colossal dishonesty or profound stupidity.
The Rebel is addressed to what Pearse described as "things": he speaks to his fellow slaves, who "have no treasure but hope", and urges them to throw off their manacles. He speaks as one of "the blood of serfs", who nonetheless has "a soul greater than the souls of my people's masters", and gives notice to oppressed and oppressor of the retribution that approaches.
When speaking to slaves, is it not necessary to take into account the fact that, by virtue of their enslavement, their self-esteem is not what it might be? What then, by way of encouragement, is the leader of slaves to say in order to jolly them along? Is he, in the interests of political correctness, to confine himself to the assertion that they may very well be the "equal" of those enlightened chappies with their boots at their throats?
To contend that the slave is "greater" than his master is, in this context, no more than a simple observation of truth. The slave is indeed better - morally, at least - if only because he is not attempting to subjugate someone else.
BUT THERE IS a deeper context to this poem which, in fairness to those who misappropriate it, is not immediately visible without a particular kind of viewfinder. I have in mind the kind of viewfinder available through the understanding of the true nature of colonialism.
What Pearse was addressing in The Rebel was the condition only clearly identified and diagnosed some 40 years later by the Caribbean-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Fanon identified the cornerstone of slavery as the inculcation of the belief in the colonised native that civilisation is only possible through imitation and emulation of his oppressor.
Thus, in a certain sense, to suggest that liberation resides in parity between the slave and his oppressor is to argue for the completion of the colonial project. Is the would-be liberator, then, to suggest the acceptance of a sense of inferiority by the native in order to preserve his distinctive identity?
This is objectively ridiculous. Clearly, the only option, within the limits that language allows, is to advise the slave that he is capable of being better than his master. Only in this way can the perverted identification of the slave with his master be dispersed.
The tragedy for Pearse, for the memory of the Easter Rising, and indeed accordingly for this society's wellbeing, lies in the fact that Fanon's ideas, first published in the 1960s, did not achieve general currency until the 1970s, by which time the Northern conflict was well under way.
In this climate, those seeking to discredit the Irish revolution could take ready advantage of the intellectual fog arising from fear and censorship to disseminate disinformation designed to prevent us grappling with the paradoxes of self-realisation.
The natural tendency of peoples whose culture has been denied by colonisation is to assert the value of that buried culture until the hills roar with its worth and wonder. But this, as Frantz Fanon never tired of pointing out, is always the wrong approach.
"It would be easy to prove, or to win the admission, that the black is the equal of the white," he elaborated in a remarkable echo of Pearse's poem. But, he continued, "my purpose is quite different: what I want to do is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment".
IN OTHER WORDS, what Fanon was urging was a process of what he called "tearing away" from the influence of the coloniser: by negating the sense of inferiority which the native felt about himself and his own culture, he could re-create himself so as to embrace his erstwhile master as a full human being.
This was Pearse's objective also. The "tearing away" that was required was not from England or the English, but from the process of identification and imitation, and from the slavishness which imprisoned the Irishman in the abusive relationship with his perceived "betters".
Given the disingenuousness of modern Ireland, it is not surprising that Pearse's complex words are now interpreted as the irredentist myopia of a simple-minded nationalist. But Pearse was not a simple-minded man, and in truth he was not talking about nationalism at all, at least not in any sense that is comparable to our present-day concept of it. He was talking about the future capacity of Irish people not simply to be Irish, but to be human at all.