The Colony

by Audrey Magee

the interactions between sun and rock boundless, infinite.

an arrogance that I now have to incorporate into my work because your presence influences the outcome,

but gradual, Lloyd, do you hear me?

The Irish here was almost pure, Lloyd,

the fetid blood of war of poverty of blame

For I spent months searching for you, Bean Uí Fhloinn, hunting up and down the western coastline, in and out of houses, on and off islands, told repeatedly that I was too late, that all those women, all those men, were dead, buried, the language with them, but here you are,

a life of buying and owning to mask the bareness of existence. Hide its harshness. Make it more palatable. Tolerable. But I wonder if it does?

My name is James. And you know that. Your Irish name is Séamus. I use my English name. I prefer the Irish. It’s not your choice, JP.

stirring a quiet linguistic civil war that, like the religious divide, lives on in modern Ireland.

the Irish language became marginalised and increasingly an oral language of the poor, relying on poetry and political verse to disperse ideas and ideals.

It’s a language, JP. A way to talk to each other. To buy bread in a shop. Nothing more.

you’re not understanding the light at all, you have it sitting on the top of the sea, but it doesn’t do that, does it? No, it buries underneath, diving between the waves as a bird might, lighting the water from below as well as above.

Bullet to the brain because I like this smell.

and the smell of you panting after my mother, chasing her with your stinking eyes, your always leering eyes, why should I like your smell, Francis Gillan,

Maybe I was born smelling of fish.

and now they’re giving me the mother tongue to look after as well, to save that mother too, to save it all and the other mothers. I don’t want so many mothers.

eternal life granted unto her, unto me, if I let him, this Englishman who looks nothing like Jesus. She smiled. A permanence, I suppose.

a thickening of the wool to keep James warm, as it warmed me, knitted by my mother, though not my grandmother who still calls this English knitting, the English scheme,

Diluted and dispersed. Carried from one ocean to the next. Tiny particles of you travelling around the earth.

That Holy Trinity of men. Amen. No men.

My beloved man drowning in my knitting, drowning in my English knitting.

for that is my job, putting the day in motion, holding it there, in that place, in motion, for the whole day, every day, to do just as she does, as she has done all her life, without question, no question that I have heard anyway.

I have finished the history of your language.

Instead of spending money on a dying language, build houses and hospital beds. This is an ancient language with an ancient history. So was Manx. So was Norse. The world is getting on fine without them. Is that enough for you, Lloyd? To be getting on.

This country was colonised, said Lloyd. Is, said Francis.

Language is a casualty of colonisation, he said. India. Sri Lanka. The French in Algeria.

Masson lifted the bottle, stilling his hand, his thoughts, for you’d like that, Mother, wouldn’t you? Your son in Algeria. Your linguist son working for you, your language, your heritage. You’d adore that.

That’s English, Mairéad. You don’t speak English.

over and over to capture that moment of death, sudden in this case, over in seconds, a jolt, but slow for my father as the sea soaked into his jumper, his trousers, filled his boots, too tightly laced to kick off, the fisherman’s boots so heavy that it is pointless learning how to swim because death, once in the water, is inevitable in those boots.

You must never forget the famine, Masson. You must always remember how our great country suffered under the hands of the French, the French who turned us into a version of France,