This week’s Bewilderment is a comic called “Being Here” that I made in fall 2022, when we were newly arrived in Ireland. I made it to be part of the Home anthology put out by Dublin Comic Arts Festival. The call for work asked people to talk about what it’s like to think of Ireland as ‘home’—for immigrants, emigrants, and people with other tenuous or attenuated relationships to this place.
Before I get to that, though, just a note about a few upcoming events in November and December.
First of all, on November 9 at 7 p.m. Irish time in the Classics Museum at UCD, Jeanne Tiehen will direct a staging of my work An Archaeology, for which I’m making costumes. In-person only; tickets are free but very limited. Email sasha.smith@ucd.ie to book.
On November 19 at 2 p.m. US Eastern I will give the first of two lectures as the Annulet Inaugural Linkages Lecturer. I will give a talk entitled “When you get someplace new, learn to read the landscape like an alphabet”. This talk will be broadcast online, for free. To register, please click here.
On November 21, along with two other writers to be confirmed, I will read and talk with the others as part of the Trinity College Literature & Resistance Series, in the Trinity Long Room Hub. Event and booking information will be here (in-person only).
On December 10 at 2 p.m. US Eastern I will give the second of my Linkages Lectures. I will give a talk entitled “On the line”. This talk will be broadcast online, for free. To register, please click here.
So. “Being Here”. It’s useful to look back at this work, made almost exactly a year ago, when we had only been in Ireland a few months. I can see the big questions of my life in it—questions of place, belonging, migration. When I made it, I wasn’t thinking about the big picture; in fact, I felt a little unsure about why I had pitched it. It felt like I was going far afield from my central projects. But now I can see that both the method and the themes are part of the larger cloth of my life and art practice. A good reminder that I don’t always know the pattern when I’m weaving; sometimes I need time and space, need to step back and wait and then, later, return to see the pattern emerge in a larger field.
As I drafted and gathered notes toward this comic, I thought about my family’s history of emigration and my grandfather as a subject of diaspora, how that break echoed and echoes (in many different ways) in the my life, my siblings’ lives and my cousins’lives, as well as in my mother’s life and her siblings’ lives. I also thought about my name, which is on every official document, sign, placard, and water manhole here—it is one Irish word for this country—and about the way it makes me be here in a magical, linguistic way. I thought the way no one could pronounce my name growing up in the US, and how my name has been something that, in every place I’ve lived, marked me out as “not belonging”.
How strange it is to end up in a place where my name belongs, but not as a person’s name! And how strange to be in a place where the fact of my name brings all kinds of assumptions about what it means that I was given it, assumptions that make me think about family, and belonging, and place, and home every time I introduce myself.
Huge thanks are due to Kat Foyle (editor) and Debbie Jenkinson (designer) as well as to all the others in the volume, which was nominated for a 2023 Ignatz Award for ‘Outstanding Anthology’. The comic is made of painted, collaged, and cut paper with ink and pencil drawings and ink text.
Thank you for reading! See you in a week.
Absolutely gorgeous, É. I love your tiny self, and all the color, and the birds, the birds, the birds.