The Speckled People

Hugo Hamilton

This is a deeply moving book: a naive exploration of personal as well as national-regional identity and survival. Identity is bound to historical points in time, language, social community, culture, gender, voice (whose voice, how it is used and by whom) and religion. It is an essay on Foucault's idea of inscription: the inscribing of mind and body, in this case of the child (children) by their father, and to a lesser extent their mother, in an intimate battle of wills. Yet ‘the other' (in every sense) is the fulcrum of the story. The narrative is a big political canvass; every idea a spin off from distorted political thinking and historical narrative. Hamilton tells the story of his childhood and his own resistance to his mixed culture: Irish nationalist father and German mother. The father violently attempts to inscribe his past and Ireland's past on his family while the German mother who'd suffered violence, rape and abortion during the Second World War attempts another gentle inscription using a philosophical yet sad humour. The demise of the father, agonisingly stung by his own bees (one of his many passionate but short lived, never completed, creative hobbies) was somehow apt: he was a blustering delusional fool.

Unwittingly the book is a case study on R.D. Laing's divided self. It is an excellent case study of children being raised in a divided environment with the risk of becoming divided selves; the risk of schizophrenia never far from sight. It was the mother who, somehow, in her gentle philosophical way saved these children from such a fate even though she was a troubled soul herself.

It is almost as though Ireland's divided history was promulgated and projected into and onto this family. This was in juxtaposition with the mother's German canvass of harassment, cruelty and torture during the Nazi reign in Germany. The mother had an alternative way of dealing with her divided and damaged self: she had had healing people around her throughout her tragedies and learned forgiveness and tolerance; although she refused to speak Irish and had difficulty with her Irish neighbours.

The father's inscription was grounded in his unresolved losses: the father whose memory was banned by his ageing mother, shame; the Catholic Church and the Irish Nationalist Movement A moody, irrational yet intelligent and creative man messed up by life, projecting his disturbed personality on his children: He was a bully.

One of the most moving passages is his declaration to his son that he needed his wife more than she needed him. How often is this the case and yet women (historically and currently) subjugate themselves to this need because violence (real or imagined, verbal or physical) is the threat that tames them: and without an income they fear they cannot protect their children, raise them themselves.

This book offers a portrait of liberal Germans after the war: the story of their survival and their philosophical thought. The mother is amazing as she bravely attempts to deal with complexity and complication in her daily life: her love for a complex man, difficulty with a new language and culture as well as her personal trauma. How often we forget the gentle Germans and their suffering. She was naïve and wise at the same time, her wisdom flourishing as she struggled to cope making her children her priority. She had grown from her experiences, while her husband shrank from his: shouting them angrily aloud at every opportunity. Her sense of humour is a lovely trait, demonstrated in her struggles throughout the narrative about her new life, language and culture. This probably saved her children.

The narrative style, ‘the child voice', took some getting into but gave the book a poignancy that otherwise may have left it ‘as yet another memoir.' We can all learn from this book: it is a treatise on child rearing in divided nations. How do children in divided nations survive and cope with competing inscriptions: Palestine vs Israel; Bosnia/Croatia; south vs north (in any country), west vs east, male vs female, children vs adults, religion vs religion?

The mother opted out of such competition using humanism, love, communication and courage to be her self. No one has the right to inscribe another's personal canvass: the battle for the mind cannot be won by force.