Joyce, the Irish, and Black People: There Is No Comparative Suffering

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has been anachronistically ascribed the title of Postcolonial work as Joyce’s first novel exudes many principals of what is Postcolonial literature. Although, the novel was written during a time when Ireland was in the throes of British occupation. Joyce understood the necessity of challenging the English identity being brutally forced upon the Irish people. Joyce and other Irish writers of the period understood that the people of Ireland needed to necessarily form their own unique Irish identity completely divergent from the English if that could ever be possible. There has been much research on James Joyce as a Postcolonial writer and as Vincent Cheng wrote in Joyce, Race, and Empire “It seems to be indisputable that, Joyce wrote insistently from the perspective of a colonial subject of an oppressive empire” (82). James Joyce has been studied and will be studied for decades to come. His works could be considered in the pantheon of many of the period or style denoting terms; Postcolonial, Modernist, Post-Modernist, and others. The purpose of this essay is not to argue how to impossibly place A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into a single canonical framework but the essay does concede that James Joyce can be considered, and should be considered a Postcolonial writer.

James Joyce’s work represents an Irish national consciousness that knew that English authority in Ireland should not be, so it could not persist. It may be no coincidence that A Portrait was finally published at the end of 1916, as Easter Rising was a few months earlier. James Joyce seemed to accurately display in Stephen Dedalus the frustration of the Irish people with English occupation. The Irish identity that Stephen Dedalus was searching for had announced itself in the first armed conflict against the English since the end of the 18^th century. While the Irish were fighting for their own identity and freedom at home, they were suppressing identity and freedom abroad. The Irish have been on the land that is now called the United States of America since colonial times, Charles Carroll is a notable Irishman as he was an original signer of the Declaration of Independence. A document signed while Black Africans were in bondage. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a Postcolonial work that outlines the necessity for the subjects of colonial power to seek a cultural identity that has not been influenced or forced upon them by the oppressive colonial force. The newly formed cultural identity and the inherent need to protect that labored for, newly gained pride in culture, undoubtedly leads to the destruction of empathy for foreign cultures, even those who have shared or similar histories, specifically, Black Americans. The relationship between the Black African and the Irish is proof that there is no comparative suffering and that most oppressed people will look for any avenue to be considered apart of the oppressor class.

Bruce Nelson in his work Irish Nationalism and the Makings of the Irish Race wrote, “The Irish quest for national identity and racial vindication was marked to a significant degree by this inheritance [of British racial attitudes towards the Irish]. Many historians have portrayed Irish nationalism as a force that was turned inward, preoccupied overwhelmingly with ‘Ourselves,’ expressing little, if any, interest in parallel movements for emancipation in other parts of the world” (12). The Irish and the Black people in the United States not only had parallel plights they simultaneously had intersecting plights that placed them nearly at equal rungs in the society, as both groups were enslaved by the English. The Irish overwhelming were still anti-Black, expressing the same sentiments as the dominant Anglo-Saxon society.

This is not to equate or conflate the two groups experience in bondage. The duration of the slave trade from Africa and the length of slavery's institution in the western hemisphere and the number of people transported alone disallows for any fair comparison (not to mention the effects of colonization on the nations that were being pillaged of people). Conversely, there was a time period where the Irish were also sold into slavery by the English, and endured very brutal conditions, similar to that of the African slaves. In fact, many Irish worked on slave plantations, particularly in The Caribbean. John Donahue writes in his article The Curse of Cromwell: Revisiting the Irish Slavery Debate, “In 1723 Cornelius Nary estimated that ‘fifteen thousand to twenty thousand souls’ had been transported into ‘slavery’. The United Irishmen blamed Cromwell for the ‘many thousands transported to foreign parts’, especially ‘Barbadoes’. By the twentieth century, the estimates had grown much higher. In Ireland under English rule, Thomas Addis Emmet, the American grandson of the United Irishman of the same name, claimed that 120,000–130,000 were shipped to the colonies” (24). Both the Irish and the Black African were sold into slavery by the same colonial power during the same period, in varying degrees, but both groups had the same oppressor, even working on the same plantations together. In the United States, the Irish were more likely to be indentured servants and would often work alongside slaves in the fields and other capacities at the behest of their shared master. In The Carribean, there was no distinction in status between African slaves and the Irish slaves.

This may validate arguments that slavery perpetrated by the British may not have been racial in its inception as “to assert that their [English] race prejudice, which was considerable, led Englishmen to enter the slave trade – even if we immediately add that slave-trading and slavery perpetuated race prejudice – is to make it harder, not easier, to understand Britain’s rise to the position and staying power of foremost slave-trading nation in the world. It was their drive for profit that led English merchant capitalists to traffic in Africans. There was big money in it. The theory came later. Once the English slave trade, English sugar-producing plantation slavery and the English manufacturing industry had begun to operate as a trebly profitable interlocking system, the economic basis had been laid for all those ancient scraps of myth and prejudice to be woven into a more or less coherent racist ideology: a mythology of race” (Freyer, 136). The Irish and Black African were similarly used as a capitalist labor force. Their races were equally exploited for a singular reason, capital and all that it could buy and was going to be able to buy in the future. Both groups similarly were used as a disposable commodity for the burgeoning capitalist machine.

The British needed bodies for labor and they wanted to pay as minimal for those bodies as possible. That principle is still one of the essential pillars of capitalism, pay labor what will be forgiven or the lowest wage labor is willing to accept. The eminent robot revolution is not a sign of technological advancement it is the perpetuation of the principal pay labor as close to nothing as possible. Robots are not and will never be more advanced than humans but robots are easier and cheaper to maintain than humans.

            

The English have also portrayed Black Africans and the Irish essentially the same over the centuries with varying degrees of vitriol and insult. The British have typically used not just the system but their art to portray and propagate an image as to program their masses to stereotype the colonized people with the intention that the masses have no will to feel empathy for those being barbarously subjugated. The British inherited this from the Romans. The Romans invaded Britain, what is now England in AD 43. The Romans portrayed the Britons (modern-day English) as barbarians as well. A Roman civil servant Herodian in his work a History of the Wars, “Most of Britain is marshland because it is flooded by the continual ocean tides. The barbarians usually swim in these swamps or run along in them, submerged up to the waist. Of course, they are practically naked and do not mind the mud because they are unfamiliar with the use of clothing, and they adorn their waists and necks with iron, valuing this metal as an ornament and a token of wealth in the way that other barbarians value gold” (VIII. 42-48).

            

Similarly, the English also portrayed “the Irishman as by nature ‘wild’ and uncivilized, even uncivilizable; regressive in his way of life, pagan in his religion, licentious in his sexual mores, treacherous and savagely violent; in short, a dangerous barbarian” (Hayton, 6-7). Hayton continues, “William Lithgow wrote in 1632 that the ‘vulgar Irish live more brutishly than the undaunted or untamed Arabian, the devilish idolatrous Turkoman or the moon worshipping Caramines.’ Cromwell himself possessed like his compatriots with the tales of Irish cruelty gathered in Temple’s history of the 1641 rising, could declare of the Irish that ‘all the world knows their barbarism’, while the English press in the 1650s could pronounce the Irish people to be ‘the most barbarous in the world’. So affected were some Parliamentarian troops by assumptions of Irish bestiality that many were prepared to swear after the butchery of a garrison at Cashel in 1647 that the corpses included some with ‘tails near a quarter of a yard’” (7-8). The tail is one of the most significant stereotypes against the African worldwide and the Irish were also described as having a tail, to turn them into beasts of burden, into cattle, whose only will should be to till the fields and serve their masters.

            

Africans were similarly “othered." Thoughts around the same time period as Hayton’s descriptions, “According to Sir Thomas Herbert, in 1634, ‘But what else could you expect of savages, of people who lived like animals? A people of beastly living, without a God, law, religion, or commonwealth. How could such people be trusted? black-faced Africans, are much addicted to rapine and thievery’. According to Ogilby, in 1670, it was an ‘innate quality’ of the inhabitants of ‘Negroe-land’ to steal anything they could lay their hands on, especially from foreigners. Crafty, Villainous and Fraudulent, and very seldom to be trusted .  .  . they indeed seem to be born and bred Villains’. To John Oldmixon, reporting on Barbados in the same period, ‘the Negroes are generally false and treacherous . . . for the most part they are faithless, and Dissemblers’” (143). Blacks and Irish were propagated essentially the same way by the English (and other Europeans) during the very same time period. They are both described as being subhuman and irredeemable and those qualities are what demanded their subjugation not simply justified it, the brutality against the oppressed subject is warranted, it is necessary, because of the traits described. The traits that are being ascribed equally, in my opinion, to the groups by the English and race was a factor but not a huge factor at the time.

           

Despite those stark similarities in their struggles, Blacks and the Irish never came together and recognized that they had similar interests in uniting against a common enemy. Although slavery may not have initially been based in race, once it was entrenched in the society and its imminent demise further illuminated a very resource limited capitalist society, there had to be markers that could make it easier to stratify the society. The Irish were afforded a path to citizenship and their experience in Ireland had indoctrinated the community with a need to protect themselves from subjugation. They were afforded a path to citizenship, to becoming closer to being identified with the dominant society, and that was the white race “by becoming more ardent in their statement of loyalty to the United States and in their emphasis on their support of republican institutions” (Murphy, 11). Once the Irish were no longer needed as slaves or indentured servants they were able to assimilate, albeit with great difficulty, into the society as long they supported the American political structure. This thought process even allowed for the Irish to limit their fight against the repeal of the 1800 Acts of Union, ostensibly slowing the movement for Irish independence. 

Daniel O’Connell was a famous Irish Abolitionist who was for the repeal of the Acts of Union in the United States. He called for his “Countrymen and Countrywomen in America to support the cause of abolition” (50). Repealing the Acts of Union was a controversial topic in the United States’ Irish community and descent or ascent for repeal typically depended on how American chattel slavery affected their lives as “those in the South were predictably hostile and those in the North ambivalent at best (much like the rest of the country).” O’Connell lost much support when he directly addressed repealers about their position on slavery remarking that he addressed “the American repealers as Irishmen [and] they responded to him as Americans” (149). O’Connell also “pronounce[d] every man a faithless miscreant, who does not take a part for the abolition of slavery. . . . Over the broad Atlantic I pour forth my voice saying ‘Come out of such a land, you Irishmen; or, if you remain, and dare countenance for the system of slavery that is supported there, we will recognize you as Irishmen no longer’” (122). The immigrant Irish were more concerned with their status as Americans than with the abolition of slavery and they were willing to sacrifice their support of the repeal of the Acts of Union, which was tacitly support for continued British rule in Ireland. The cause for Irish Independence, not coincidentally was fought with more fervor after the American Civil War. Slavery, along with other factors, like the Great Famine, arguably hindered the Irish Revolution for decades. As no major movements against British rule of the island continued in mass until after slavery had officially ended.

            

The American Civil War is an instance in which the Irish and Black African would violently collide, this time it was the Irish enacting the racism that the English had indoctrinated them with, a racism that is necessary to be considered an American. The Civil War was not simply a war to emancipate slaves, it was not waged to end slavery, but it did formally end American Chattel Slavery. The United States famously instituted the draft and drafted many Irish Americans. The violence began “In 1862 and 1863, longshoremen began striking in order to combat low wages. When the Erie Railroad Company hired blacks to move bales of cotton during a strike, the crowd beat them until they left the waterfront. The Hudson River Railroad hired both black and white strikebreakers when employees decried a loss in wages, but only black workers were targeted for violence. Once the Civil War draft began in July 1863, many Irish workers had maintained a longstanding distrust of their black peers. Therefore, when people were told they could opt out of the war for $300 (over $5,500 by today’s standards, and an impossible fee for the working class), Irish felt their black countrymen were to blame. A mob of about 500 armed men subsequently set fire to about 50 buildings, including the Colored Orphan Asylum, which housed over 230 children. Included in this mob were volunteer firemen who came to be known as the “Black Joke Engine Co. No. 33.” The riots picked up in intensity for four days and wreaked havoc on the black population and on downtown structures, including businesses contributing to wartime production, burning many to the ground. After the riots, the black population in New York diminished by 20 percent” (Luders-Manuel).

            

Admittedly, the New York City Draft Riots were in one part of the country and one citizen or group of citizens of an identity does not reflect on all people who identify as those misbehaving citizens. That is to say not every Irish person in the United States agreed with the draft riots. Ryan Keating in his book, Shades of Green, writes, “At the height of the success of the Irish regiments from Connecticut, Illinois, and Wisconsin on the battlefield, the national views on Irish American support for the Union [because of the draft riots] were dealt a devastating blow” He continues quoting a letter a private in the Union army wrote concerning the draft riots,  “It was a Pitty that one of those Murderers Should escape I hope the Police will furit every one of them out and hang them. You will find that if they Soldiers are Called on they will do their Duty. Those Simpitizers of the North has done more to Injure the Cause than a hundred thousand Rebels in Arms. I hope the whole of them will be hanged” (132). The Irish community had many who still believed in the cause for abolition and understood that, even if they agreed with, and empathized with, the position of their countrymen and women they vehemently disagreed with their violent expression, their misplaced rage, and its racialized target. The strictures of the intense competition for work and the low wages in the citadel of capitalism, New York City, undoubtedly intensifies survival instinct. But the target of only the Black competition signifies that the New York Irish community does not mind competition, and does not mind the capitalist structure or those who truly perpetuate capitalism and its ideals, they were willing to remain on strike for perpetuity until they used Black scabs.

            

Joyce was born nearly 17 years after the American Civil War, so his novel could not have affected his countrymen and women who were being shipped to the English colonies as slaves and indentured servants or on the ships as immigrants searching for a new start. What Joyce’s novel represents is a sentiment that the Irish and Black African communities have shared, a necessity to find an identity and relieve themselves of the overt and covert influences of the English oppressor. Joyce’s novel also was written while the Irish were fighting for freedom on their home soil and fighting to assimilate in the United States of America. More Irish fought for the freedom of the United States of America than for the freedom of Ireland and Ireland endured decades more suffering because of it. Because the Irish in the United States wanted to assimilate and emulate even in discriminatory practices the English the aggressor in the 800 years war, the colonizer that is the impetus, the catalyst for the need to run to the United States (an English colony). The Irish allowed for decades more subjugation just for a chance at being identified with the dominant English society.

            

There is no comparative suffering because there is no collective empathy. The simplest of divisions, the most incidental of human characteristics can obscure a shared reality. Not just race but also along the many proposed spectrums of identity formation but most starkly race because it is the most visible marker of difference. You may be oppressed. Surely, you are but there is no comparison.