In the aftermath of listening to a beautiful song.

I have been listening to Butchered Tongue by Hozier on loop.

For the past few days, I haven’t been able to stop myself from marvelling at just how drop-dead gorgeous his Irish accent is. In the song, there’s only a little twang here, a little lilt there, with none of the full rhotic landscape that Irish proper can offer, in all of its consonant-shifting, vowel-flattening, aspirating glory. But it is enough, at least for me, to lend effect to the subject matter of the song.

My favourite lines from Butchered Tongue are:

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As a child, it was the place names

Singin’ at me as the first thing

How the mouth must be employed

in every corner of itself

To say, “Appalacicola” or, “Hushpuckena,” like, “Gweebarra”

A promise softly sung of somewhere else.

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There are little nods to the long history of Irish-Native American solidarity in there, with the specific choice of Appalacicola, Hushpuckena and Gweebarra. The way he says each of these words breaks my heart, especially Gweebarra.

I’ve grown up watching Irishness and the Irish English Accent be mercilessly mocked in the global cultural mainstream. Drunks, leprechauns, brawlers, redheads, great green slurring buffoons, Guinness, St. Paddy’s Day, Michael Flatley Lord of the Dance, the whole works. Irish accents have been done to the death in every possible offensive variation. 

I only noticed relatively recently that practically every Irish musician I’ve listened to from the global cultural mainstream had completely cleansed the Irish English accent from their music, whether it be U2, The Cranberries, Enya, Westlife, The Frey, or The Script. I’ve noticed the same with Northern English music, where there’s a little more variation in accent, but it is still relatively neutered. The Rolling Stones, Oasis, Def Leppard, and even The Beatles, they all tend to swim with the current. (I personally think the Northerners sound far more Historically English than the notoriously clean, “polished” RP/Cambridge Accent, which sounds quite artificial to me after a degree in English.)

I find the masking the Irish undertake extremely tragic. The fact that it needs to be done at all, that these little dynamics have shaped what I have even been able to access, make me quite sad. As an Indian, I know the same shame of accent masking, neutrality and self-hatred. We do it to ourselves. If you’re not thinking about it, a fellow countryman will dutifully remind you. Both the Irish and the Indians have the scars of centuries-long language trauma on their tongues.

And this, the Irish relationship with English, simultaneously horrific and beautiful, got me thinking of Indo-Irish Solidarity. There is so, so much throbbing history shared between India and Ireland. So much shared struggle and historical collaboration. And of course, experience. Artificial Famines, Language, Dress, Genocide, Partition, Internal Division. But it seems to me as I write this that we Indians seem to have strayed very, very far from the memory of our anti-colonial struggle. Much further than Ireland, at least. Of course, it goes without saying that the Emerald Isle has its own notorious struggles with memory.

There is so much opportunity for solidarity between us in this shared struggle, in these shared contradictions! From the vast pool of admiration I have for the Irish, let me pick out a little droplet, and dedicate it to the Irish contribution to the English language.

Where would English be without the blood transfusions of creativity that Swift, Stoker, Wilde, Joyce, Shaw, Yeats, and Beckett donated to it? Where would English Literature be without them? I’ve always hated counterfactual history questions (would science have ceased forever and run backwards with its tail between its legs if the apple had killed Newton? NO!), but for the first time, as I consider this vacuum, I am genuinely at a loss for words. To think of English literature without even one of them is to have my heart break in two.

It is not just the Irish intelligentsia I find inspiring. On the tongues of any Irish person, the English language is given wings, and sounds to me like it was always meant to be spoken that way. Its rhythm, and its beauty, simply defies unitarism. I have felt this way about the Nigerian accent too, another gorgeous English accent I have come across. I hope one day that more of my people will understand this feeling of appreciation, and I hope also that the gross fetishisation of the GenAm and Cambridge/RP Accent will cease. I wish for India to come into its own on this matter someday. I do think Ireland might be a sibling, and yes, with its role as the petri dish of British Empire, an elder sibling, in this common cause.

For it is in the Irish that I see the naturalness, and the regality with which I see my own people speak English, whether it be the Tuluva, the Tamilian, the Malayalee, the Kannadiga, the Haryanvi, the Punjabi, the Mizo or the Bihari!