Address at the Launch of Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor
Morro Cabaña, Havana, Cuba, Thursday, 16 February 2017
Es un placer estar aquí en la Feria Internacional del Libro de La Habana, y tener esta oportunidad de asistir al lanzamiento de la edición cubana del libro del autor irlandés Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea [El crimen del Estrella del Mar]
[I am delighted to be here today at the Havana International Book Fair, at the launch of the Cuban edition of 'Star of the Sea' by Irish author Joseph O'Connor.]
I am also delighted that Irish and Irish-linked writers Colm Toíbín, Michael McCaughan, Lisa McInerney, Dermot Keogh and Purs Lopez Colomé are participating in this most important event in Cuba’s literary calendar, and by their presence deepening cultural links between our two countries.
Some writers of recent times have told us of centuries old connections, such as Tim Fanning whose 'Los Paisanos, the Forgotten Irish of Latin America' will shortly be available in Spanish and the wonderful Dervla Murphy whose 'The Island that Dared' was published in 2008, and gives details of Cuban life as experienced by a visiting family travelling through mountains, by the sea, in the swamps or the city.
Joseph O’Connor’s famous novel Star of the Sea is I believe the first Irish novel to be published in Cuba since James Joyce’s Ulysses. This makes today a great occasion, and of course it is a great accolade for Joseph, and a well-deserved one. Tá súil agam go mbeidh i bhfad níos mó aistriúcháin déanta amach anseo, de leabhair Chúbaigh agus leabhair Éireannaigh. [May there be many more translations and in both directions.]
From its first publication, Star of the Sea has justifiably received international acclaim and has won many awards including the Prix Littéraire Européen Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year, Italy’s Premio Giuseppe Acerbi for New Literature, The Hennessy/Sunday Tribune ‘Hall of Fame’ Award, and the Prix Millepages for Foreign Fiction. It has also been a number one bestseller in both Britain and Ireland and has been published in many languages.
As to the author - six years ago, I had the privilege of presenting Joseph with the Irish PEN Award for literature. I spoke, on that occasion, of how it was an accolade from his peers that recognised Joseph as one of the most important and influential voices of contemporary Irish literature, at a time that is experiencing little less than a golden period of the novel. Today, Joseph O’Connor continues to be one of the great Irish diplomats of literature, renowned abroad and loved at home for the elegance of his prose and the disciplined acuity of his themes.
Star of the Sea, as a novel, is set in 1847 against the backdrop of the Irish Famine. The reader is brought aboard a famine ship making the journey from Ireland to New York, a vessel on which hundreds of desperate refugees are disposed in their different locations according to class and circumstances. First published in 2004 the novel brought Joseph O’Connor’s name as a novelist to the attention of a very wide and international readership and he has gone from strength to strength in his work.
The Great Irish Famine of the 1840s was the greatest social catastrophe of 19th century Europe. Yet while the historiography of the period between Cecil Woodham Smith’s The Great Hunger and John Kelly’s The Graves are Walking’ has been vastly explored, An Gorta Mór, the Great Irish Famine has inspired surprisingly little creative writing. Addressing this gap, described, by PJ Mathews in the Irish Times as ‘a missing link in the Irish literary tradition Star of the Sea is one of the most important creative works to emerge from Ireland in recent years.
La tristeza de la emigración forzada, así como la injusticia histórica en la cual se enraízan muchas comunidades en exilio, son temas que tienen una fuerte resonancia aquí en Cuba.
[The sadness of forced emigration, and the historic injustice in which so many diasporic communities are rooted are themes which will have strong resonance in Cuba.]
In chronicling the lives, backgrounds and motivations of its characters, fleeing the devastation not just of famine but of a tiered, but collapsing system of exploitation and the grinding poverty it created but chose to ignore Star of the Sea provides us with what is a harrowing, brave and imaginative confrontation of that bleakest of bleak moments in our past.
Ach ní hé tragóid an Ghorta Mhóir, a íosphártaigh nó a theithigh, a chum an leabhar seo "Star of the Sea". Is scríobhnóir ard-chumasach a rinne é sin.
[The events of that tragedy of the Great Famine victims and exiles themselves did not produce Star of the Sea. A brilliant novelist did.]
It is a work that brilliantly and unflinchingly allows the searing reality of this critical event in our ancestors’ lives to unfold for us - a disaster that, between 1845 and 1855, saw the Irish population of almost 8.2 million shrink by a third: starvation and disease killing 1.1 million; emigration claiming another 2 million; and slow deaths from hunger, typhus, exhaustion. The great Irish Famine left a legacy which understandably remained embedded in the Irish psyche.
Yet we too easily engage with it, and when we do at all, it is often in terms of its general features, often thus missing the personal experiences, family tragedies, of which it is composed.
As a novel Star of the Sea is ambitious in structure and the stark, austere and greatly honest writing, and the complex mix of verbal forms through which the story is told - including first person narratives, letters, the Captain's log, newspaper clippings, and historical documentation – give a profound authenticity to this great novel, and is a wonderful achievement which I know will be appreciated by a Spanish-speaking readership.
For a rapidly growing number of Irish at home and abroad interested in social history, Star of the Sea presents us with a microcosm of the working through of class in Irish society as it was at the time; the despair of the landlord classes who have lost the source of both their privileges and their abuse, including the number of repentant landlords in their number, the struggle of the poor and destitute as they seek a future, and the many personal stories that characters bring with them as they attempt to flee from the past towards hope in exile.
This novel, Star of the Sea, joins with other works on breaking a silence on an event so deeply tragic as to be too traumatic to recall, and the consequences too which would follow. Silence for others was profoundly ideological. Among the many moving lines that will remain with the reader are lines given to the musing of Grantley Dixon, the American journalist who is the chronicler for the ship’s passage who considering the significance of the evasion of what happened says:
“To remain silent, in fact, was to say something powerful: that it never happened: that these people did not matter.”
These moral reflections should remind us too of the Quaker contribution to famine relief. Such sacrifices made and solidarity offered by families such as the Ellises in Letterfrack, and the Tuke family, father and son in Connemara, who died delivering that relief, and the exceptional, warm estimation they held of those they helped. Their words of kindness, and their actions, speak to us across centuries, decades and generations. Theirs were words such as the moving words of the ship’s captain in the novel:
“as certain as I know that the dawn must come, the people of Ireland would welcome the frightened stranger with that gentleness and friendship which so ennobles their character.”
Star of the Sea defies any narrow categorisation, being part historical novel, part Victorian epic, and part intriguing mystery. It reminds us of Joseph O’Connor’s great capacity to break new ground in his writing, and of his deserved reputation for being both a brilliant writer and an accessible one; a realist who also delves courageously and imaginatively into a past that leans so much on our national character.
There can be no doubt that, as a country, we are fortunate to have contemporary writers of his calibre and the brilliant translators who deliver it for us in Spanish, writers who so beautifully and often so poignantly capture those important moments in our history, parts of our past that surely are key to our understanding of the society we live in, and are challenged to change.
This is a great occasion for Irish Cuban literary exchange for writers and translators and, as President of Ireland, I am privileged to share it with you all.