The Suitcase Archive by Martina Cleary Projects

The Suitcase Archive

On Southern Island - Sept 5th 1954 Did you know that Over The raincoat The telephone book The overcoat drying out The rain The hedge rows no trees The thatched houses The flowers Cheerful, open people warm and loving all look like cousin's red cheeks and hair Sound of the cart around the corner.

I think I will have to go away again, Life here is like clinging to a rock , Long nights wondering how to get by, It would be nice to sleep soundly for once. What next? Where next ? How to make ends meet, There isn't time to do everything.

From a family of four three must go and leave a living for one Much is consumed here More than any other country. No wash lines No dust No erosion No signs No coffee No litter No decay or neglect except the people. Emigration is part of the Irish way of life Three out of four One out of three boys and girls will be living outside of Ireland. It's normal to get on the ship They have to take to the emigrant ship.

The house The garden The plot of land The repairs The bills that keep coming. The winter closing in again The darkness The rain The endless wind. Why hold on? Why have I been holding on for so many years? Because this is my small corner of the world Because I own every stone and blade of grass on it. Because I’ve been wandering in the world for so long I'm afraid I might fade away, if I have to go out there again. Stubbornness, Digging in, Recalcitrant, Unlike the porous bedrock. I get that from my father, Or so I'm told. I wouldn’t know. He was gone before I was born.

Clear and tended the roads are never dry They glide like birds-single and in groups over the roads.

The nettles and brambles thick around the fences. The endless routine of keeping things at bay. The wilderness The chaos The entropy. The house is like myself, a thing in need of constant check. A room left idle and invasion takes root. Isolation has a way of growing into you. Things cling here, To walls To trees To any solid structure. There isn’t much to put roots down into, Bare rock and air. So you set out feelers to entwine in any direction that offers a mooring, Things survive here, in the spaces between, on the sharp edge of chance opportunity.

Ireland before the famine There's no palpable urgency For I believe I've got things going Congregations The church The creamery The fair Emigration Congregations Symbols The temperament and the weather The head of the countryman Who is everywhere in the world.

Few women attend these meetings, Where countrymen discuss the price of things. Land Livestock The weather The government The law Things that matter. All the women are waiting elsewhere. The land travels from father to son. The women marry or leave.

How many women survive alone here? I’m still searching for that route through the land. Along the roads, Through the years, A journey full of men Puzzled by my question. Or was that only me? Making things more difficult for myself, again.

The welcoming hand on that family Of her twenty-four, where are they? Who will have the girls in Mass? Sailing of the ship Where to go to church? Who gets the farm? Tom Who saw the passage? The aunts Who will meet in NY? Two aunts How long lived in this house? Who else is going? Maybe John Maybe Ann How many in the family - six. The mud in the road Does marriage figure?

As we walk he tells me, His people have been on this land six generations. It was always a case, of the haves verses the have nots. Land is the only way to survive. Sometimes itʼs better to forget, Because to dwell on things can snuff you right out. What does it mean , Thirty-thousand starving in September, Half a million by December? There are memories here, In the stones Under the feet On the wind.

The fire and the pot The bread and the hearth and the head The mother and the grandmother and the hearth The four walls including the father The table The display board and all members of the family in same position The boy at the door. The work in the haggard What one sees from the door What one sees as work goes on Work in the fields The surrounding country.

We are going to higher ground, Gathering to drive cattle to winterage. We wait on the side lanes, hazel sticks in hand, A path of clints and grykes. Calves in heifers their first season, A dash for freedom Overt treacherous foothold, We ascend into a world of grey, from sky to feet, cast from mist. Stone worm worn, by the memory of long gone seas. I am a goat now, making two legs into three. Five thousand years old Moved by instinct, Until passage over the roughest waters, hard pressed by time is second nature, Speed and agility a matter of trust.

A farm The hearth The four walls of a room, one family What one sees from the door The work of the mother The work of the father The work of the children The next house.

Sept 23rd – Thursday In the lane when the floods came It flooded So they put in a government relief scheme To straighten it out and put in dry masonry One hen and a turnip for wages.

Tuath – a clan or tribal family Tuath – ancestral or patrimonial Tuath – dynastic Tuath – ecclesiastical order.

Sept 18th - Saturday Ennis Population 7000 Drapers 48 Pubs, as nearly as these fellows could count 65 Rent £24 Rates £42 per annum Live in the shop or behind or alone up the wandering stair.

Here I am nobody’s mother daughter sister aunt cousin On the edge of the world I am a blow in On an outpost of the moon.

I awoke this morning dreaming of a girl, in a photograph standing on a hillside. A Spring morning, sixty three years ago. About to leave forever in black and white, And a dress from 1954 Coloured ribbons Yellow and green around her ankles. White ticker tape falling like rain. She’s still in America, Waiting for Thanksgiving.

Nothing changes in Ireland with frequency but the weather If I leave this time It will be forever.

Remember, What people say here, is rarely what they mean What appears, is never what it seems That paying lip service is a religion, That pulling a fast one is power for the course, That being a woman is always a strange vocation, And a woman alone Some form of madness.

What am I so to say to the stranger as the stranger? Memory rises like groundwater, Generations of it, overflowing the fields and ditches flooding the road home in January. I hear of the loss of this place, what it means to have to let go. Or to remain but never quite stay. I say time is short and The memory of home, will sometimes sustain you sometimes wear roadways through you, So wide, little remains, But the vast open emptiness of never belonging. In the end, It's how you imagined it, In the time you were given.

The hand in welcome The hand in parting.

The Photograph as a Site of Mnemonic Return Appendix (iv) Phase III- Photobook Prototype, The Suitcase Archive © Martina Cleary 2017. Including 13 images by Dorothea Lange (pages 17,22,23,66,67,68,69,84,85,88-89,96,98,100), and selected textual response to extracts from Dorothea Lange's Field notes in Ireland (1954) by Martina Cleary. Collaborative portraits made in response to Lange's work, with Ann O' Donnell and son James O' Donnell p. 24-25 & p. 99, Bernie O' Grady and daughter p. 72-73, Tess and Tony Diviney p. 82-83, Colm Mac Lochlain and granddaughters Róise Curran and Rhiannon Cloke p. 92-93 & p. 96-97.