Bee Smith

I like to tell a little joke:

I consider myself trilingual in a single language.

Boom, boom! The snare drum thumps. The high hat taps a little nervous tattoo. And then you hear the sound of a Catskill Mountain stand-up comic dying on her feet.

Unlike Woody Allen, I never had to entertain New Yorkers escaping the city heat. But the cultural idiom resonates. I know who patronises the hotel. I know how they talk and can guess how they vote and know where they buy their clothes.

But like a stand-up comic who pitches the joke wrong, who misses, is off the beaten track, I also feel outside. I understand the idiom but it never really felt like my voice; to reach into myself and pull out something authentic I needed to move far, far away.

Unlike many of my fellow Americans (now there’s a stock phrase out of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s administration) I was unusually precognisant and bugged out of the States shortly before Ronald Reagan was sworn into office.

For twenty years I lived in England, first in London and then in Leeds in Yorkshire. In 2001, just after 9/11, my partner and I moved to a tiny hamlet in a very remote corner of the Republic of Ireland.

When I landed in London I found the ambience more spacious spiritually. This marked the start of being an apprentice writer/poet. The journeyman phase still hasn’t finished.

Like many young writers I was steeped in the academic traditions of American literature. Landing in Hackney, East London, I joined the local Poetry Circle and began to do lit crit with a group of very astute amateurs. It was a very diverse bunch — a Palestinian Jew who left after Israel was founded, an ex-air-raid warden, a wigmaker for Chassidic women, a punk rocker, a young psychiatric occupational therapist fresh from her training, a post woman, a librarian, a failed RADA auditioner. Most had never reached university level education but all were exceptionally well read. Between this group and feminist writing groups led by Alison Fell and Gillian Allnut I loosened up and shook out; they helped me unlearn pedantic writing habits.

In Leeds I met a vibrant poetry performance scene and my range widened. The voice wasn’t completely assured yet but it was getting there. Being a ham actor I wasn’t shy about getting up and reading in public.

In a roundabout way I am illustrating that I was learning lots of different idioms and various dialects. I lived with a Northern Irishman. I was conversant with Cockney rhyming slang, could do simultaneous transliterations of Lancashire or Yorkshire for visiting American friends and did not need subtitles for Trainspotting.

In England they always knew I was American. In Ireland they hear the overlay of English diction and pronunciation. In America they know I have an accent and it’s not one of theirs.

At fifty years of age I think I have finally made my peace with the fact that even though they don’t recognise the accent, that the accent sounds sort of foreign, my cultural mind map is American. I carry two passports and feel comfortable in two foreign cultures but not in my birthplace. Was Henry James British or American? Oh, he had the British passport, but by golly, he is most certainly an American novelist. His preoccupations, like my own, were written in the womb.

Unlike many immigrant Americans I don’t have an “ethnic identity”. I did have a German grandma, but like her son, my father, she had died by the time I was five. The extended family that moulded my consciousness had long left the Old World. My mother’s family are descended from either Quakers who colonised southern New Jersey in 1677 or Puritans who dreamed of a theocratic Utopia on the Mayflower. Yet despite this pedigree I always felt like an interloper, an alien who could never quite find their place in the scheme of things. Like all colonials, we know we come from elsewhere, need to make a temporal and temporary place wherever the wind of history, ideology or destiny blows us.

Most writers have that sense of alienation, of being the observer taking down notes and empirical data, swotting for the Fates. Viewing from a distance, for me, has made it possible to write and experiment with my multiple voices.

I now live in a far-flung corner of West Cavan in the Republic of Ireland. Half of my village lies in one county and the other part is in Leitrim. The River Shannon and the Black Pig’s Dyke mark the divide between the ancient kingdoms of Ulster and Connaught. As the crow flies I am roughly five miles from Northern Ireland. I deal in two currencies on shopping expeditions.

Given my family’s loose grip on sticking with any one place now in middle age I am enamoured with an acre an a quarter of rather soggy, peaty land. This attachment to place has also grounded my writing in ways that I never could have suspected. In this shifty border country of multiple historical loyalties I finally feel at rest in my skin.