Book Review: White Birch, Red Hawthorn

[osprey_archer]

I found Nora Murphy’s White Birch, Red Hawthorn irritating for three main reasons.

1. This is one of those books that is neither pure memoir nor pure nonfiction but a combination of the two, and as often happens, the memoir portion is comparatively a drag. For a book that is allegedly about the importance of learning to listen (specifically to the stories of Native Americans), Murphy spends an awful lot of time talking about herself and her family history.

2. This is especially egregious because Murphy has the unfortunate habit of making shit up. She’ll start with a verifiable fact: for instance, after much digging, she discovers that her great-great-grandmother who emigrated to the US from Ireland was named Katie Hughes.

Then - and note she doesn’t have letters or a diary or any other record of Katie’s feelings, or really anything at all to go on except for Katie’s name - she writes stuff like “Still even in this silence [in a cemetery in Ireland], Katie found gifts - like the warm feeling that spread over her as they left the tombs. It was the feeling that someone was there, still watching over her after all these thousands of years.”

DID SHE NOW. I can only assume that Murphy has a telepathic connection with her great-great-grandmother that she’s too shy to cite as a source.

3. And this leads to my third frustration with the book, which is its sentimentality - in particular the weird sentimental gloss that Murphy throws over her ancestors’ life in Ireland. Murphy says things like “What I do know is that Katie didn’t thirst for her story as a child. She didn’t feel parched for connection. My great-great-grandmother’s story was woven into the very Irish landscape that reared her. She didn’t have to go out searching for a lineage.”

Well, uh, no, she was probably busy thirsting for actual food and drink, growing up during the potato famine and all. And who says she didn’t thirst for her story? She was a member of a conquered people living in a conquered land, with conquerors who were making a determined effort to stamp out her people’s language and stories. That’s not a situation that tends to give people a clear and unfettered connection to their past and their land.

To be fair, Murphy is a little better at seeing this with regard to Native Americans, presumably because she interviews living members of the Ojibwe and Ho-Chunk tribes rather than her imagined simulacrum of her great-great-grandmother and real people, unlike imaginary ones, can pull you up short.

I could go on, but at this point I’m probably beating a dead horse. Did not enjoy, do not recommend.

Comments

[sovay]

"What I do know is that Katie didn't thirst for her story as a child. She didn't feel parched for connection. My great-great-grandmother's story was woven into the very Irish landscape that reared her. She didn't have to go out searching for a lineage.”

Whaaaaaaaaaat.

Even John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952) is more nuanced about Irishness than that. And that's the lowest bar I can think of that isn't a breakfast cereal.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

And all the breakfast cereal wants is for everyone to eat the crunchy marshmallows. Not to become the foundation for a rickety spiritual structure for dismantling a history of dominion.

[sovay]

And all the breakfast cereal wants is for everyone to eat the crunchy marshmallows.

Indeed!

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you had a lot of the same frustrations with this that I'm having with Meditations From the Mat. I don't have problems with sentimentality per se, but when it turns into projections of one's own feelings and experiences into a presumed universality, especially on people and groups one has little experience with, hoo boy does that become problematic fast.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure sentimentality is quite the right word - I tried using romanticism too but that also doesn't exactly fit. But I felt that she's letting the story she wants to tell about her ancestors override the actual facts, because it's emotionally convenient and draws a strong parallel between the Irish and the Native Americans which may or may not be justified.

It's like she got the memo that a white person identifying strongly with Native American cultures is problematic, but figured that if she identified strongly with her own ancestors' culture, and just sort of projected the qualities she likes most about Native American culture onto the Irish, who after all were also a conquered people with a strong connection to trees... then that should be okay.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Your second paragraph. I hate this. I dislike the memo, but even more, I dislike the response. The response shows a really faulty understanding of the memo, for one thing. "Oh, you don't think it's appropriate for me to put my grubby, grabby hands all over your stuff? Well, I'll make it better by showing how actually it all relates to MEEE and my heritage." That's not going to make the trespass any more bearable. It's like when people say that indentured servitude was equivalent to slavery. Actually, no.

But I really dislike them memo as well: people can and should be interested in and absorbed by other lifeways. The problem comes when those people's voices about the other cultures drown out the cultures' own voices about themselves. But implying that it's bad to have an interest outside some genetic or cultural box just makes for radical tribalism, which I think is TERRIBLE.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I don't think interested in and absorbed by other lifeways is a problem, although it's also not quite the same thing as identifying with them.

Or maybe it depends on what exactly one means by identification? I was using it to mean the process by which Murphy comes to ventriloquize her long-dead Irish great-great-grandmother: she has very little information about this woman, but she seems to feel that she knows her so well that she can manufacture Katie's thoughts and feelings despite that lack of evidence (and without apparently looking into evidence from comparable Irish immigrants at the time, either).

I'm not sure identification is the best word for that, actually, although darned if I know another word that would do better. Projection, maybe? People project onto the past or other human cultures qualities that they desire, and fall in love with their own projection and believe that they have special insight into the desired culture when in fact what they have is a dearly beloved cloud-castle.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I was mainly critiquing the idea that it's wrong for people to identify with other cultures in the way that she was identifying with the Indian cultures; I hadn't been thinking about it in terms of what she was doing with the distant-past Irish culture.

What I was meaning by identification was that feeling of resonance you can get from whatever-thing, where you think, "YES, I know that/I feel that." I think people get that feeling about all sorts of things that don't come from their own personal history or past--it's what empathy grows out of, I think. (Or at least, it's something that nurtures and encourages empathy.)

I think projection is a good word for what you're describing, definitely.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Boy, that sounds like the laziest reaching for a golden past with wonderful ancestors ever.

I don't see why she couldn't just think about and talk to and explore the situation for the Ojibwe and Ho-Chunk without having to get into meeeeeeee and my peeeeeople. Or rather, I do see, but I dislike the reasons.

Also, I have an allergy to speculated motives, thoughts, and actions in the absence of any reason to speculate them.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I don't see why either. The parts where she talks about the original tribes of Minnesota are by far the most interesting parts of the book (and not coincidentally also the parts where she doesn't start spinning yarns about what people must have been thinking/feeling), and the book would have been - still not great, but all right, if it had focused mainly on that.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

For a book that is allegedly about the importance of learning to listen (specifically to the stories of Native Americans), Murphy spends an awful lot of time talking about herself and her family history.
Snerk!

But wowww, Murphy does sound incredibly annoying. Which seems to be fairly common in the 'connecting with my Irish heritage' genre, but this one really wins the prize.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've read anything else in the "connecting with my Irish heritage" genre, but it saddens me to hear that it's generally pretty annoying. The poor Irish. Surely they deserve better than this.