Irene De Angelis, Journal of Irish Studies XX, 2005

Sinead Morrissey: between Northern Ireland and Japan

In the early twentieth century, W.B. Yeats was the greatest Irish interpreter of Japanese culture. More than sixty years after his death, contemporary Irish writers still turn to Japan for content, form, or both. The most notable are Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paula Meehan, Nuala Ni Dhomnaill and Cathal O Searcaigh. Others include Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, Andrew Fitzsimons, Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldon, Gabriel Rosenstock and Joseph Woods. This remarkable Irish list offers a variety of Irish voices, and fertile new ground for literary investigation.

Recent critical work, such as Zhaoming Qian's Orientalism and Modernism (1995) and Robert Kern's Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem (1996) deal with China in English language verse. No similar recent work has focused on the Ireland-Japan connection, though in September 2002, a special issue of the Journal of Irish Studies featured Japan and Ireland. My point of departure will be Mitsuko Ohno's article 'Hokusai, Basho, Zen and More: Japanese Influences on Irish Poetry.' This collection of interviews did not include Sinead Morrissey, whose Between Here and There was published in the same year.

Sinead Morrissey is writer in residence at Queen's University Belfast. In 1995 she went to live in Japan for two years. The Japanese sequence of Between Here and There was inspired by this experience. Asked if Japan has affected her poetry, Morrissey replied: 'Oh yes, absolutely. When I went to live in Japan my writing changed immediately and profoundly. My line became much longer, the imagery more surreal. The poetry became a great deal more ambitious.'

The fourteen poems inspired by Japan vary in tone and subject. One of Morrissey's major concerns is with ritualism, characteristic of Buddhism and Shintoism. 'I think I was fascinated by the way so much was connected to form,' she says, 'it seemed to me that form was prioritised over content, in lots of different aspects of life, which is the opposite of the West.'

The poem 'Between Here and There' consists of four different sections. The first two deal with babies' graveyards. Section three is centred on the Daibutsu, Japan's greatest bronze statue of Buddha. The closing image refers to the barren rituals of a Buddhist monk. The opening lines set the atmosphere of the poem: 'No one seems sure of the reason why aprons / are tied to the necks of stone babies in temples' (46). Morrissey is referring to Buddhist statues usually associated with unborn babies. She would like to learn more about them, but there is no satisfactory answer to her questions. Tradition is buried in these stone fingers, 'squatting in Buddha-like reflection'.

The feeling of uncertainty is enhanced by the following image. Under Ikeda Mountain there is a graveyard for miscarriages. Looking at the stone statues, Morrissey meditates upon the inevitability of death: 'A basin of stone bodies in two parts: square body, round head. / Like oriental soldiers contained by a wall, they would go walking (...) with all of the energy for life that fell out of them too soon' (46). There is something peculiar about the austerity of this cemetery. Babies are represented by start soldiers, with no flowers or ornaments to surround them. The poet seems impressed by the composure of Japanese mourning. At the same time, she seems to suggest that suffering is culturally encoded, and cannot be reincoded in a different cultural system. Although Japanese spiritualism seems inaccessible to Morrissey, her attitude is that of a respectful observer.

From premature death, the poet moves on to Enlightenment. Morrissey refers to the Daibutsu or Great Buddha, an imposing bronze figure in the Todai Temple, in Nara. This meditating Buddha is portrayed in the traditional position, sitting cross-legged. The poet speculates on the symbolism of such iconography, in which 'His crossing was a falling into light.' She adds an ironic touch to the words she puts on Buddha's lips: 'Fall with me, he says, and you'll be raised to the heights / of the roof of the biggest building in the world.' Asked if she was expressing scepticism about revelation, Morrissey replied:

Sort of, it's supposed to be funny. Not expressing my scepticism about revelation, but about our own limitations I suppose. The fact that they built this huge Buddha, in the biggest wooden building in the world, to let people know about the importance of enlightenment. But because we're human beings our conceptions are still very limited. We can't help it. It's still only a wooden building after all, when we're dealing with the enormities of time and spiritual wisdom that so many of us never grasp.

'Between Here and There' ends with the image of a Buddhist monk, Nagasawa. He is the only human being in the poem, and is described as a man of great humanity: 'When Nagasawa visits the house of the dead / he leaves at the door (...) his rock hard atheism / and slips onto the tatami of the prayer room / as the man who can chant any you-name-it soul - between here and Ogaki to paradise' (46). Morrissey says of Nagasawa:

A Buddhist priest (but only for funerals) which he hated doing - he'd inherited a temple from his father and had to carry on the family line. He didn't really believe in the afterlife or anything, but he thought having a religious 'frame of mind' was important...I loved him. He supported me endlessly.

There seems to be something in common between Nagasawa's position and Morrissey's Northern Ireland heritage. She feels the fact that both her parents belonged to the Irish Communist Party 'contributed to a sense of dislocation, of belonging to neither community' (2002). To be neither Catholic nor Protestant was too far removed from the dominant frame of reference. However, dislocation was 'only one side of the coin', because Morrissey's family background also left her with a sense of enormous freedom. Asked what lies 'Between Here and There', Morrissey answered: 'Nothing. It's being inbetween that counts. It's tolerance of transitions.'

Tolerance and openness to diversity seem to be the lens through which Morrissey filters Japan. This can be seen in the sequence of poems about Japanese festivals. 'I was very surprised by the festivals,' the poet said, because they were so raw and sexual and wild. It was the underside to Japan, the one still linked to village traditions connected to harvest cycles going back for centuries. I loved them.' The sequence covers the four seasons, plus an extra poem for the local festival of Ogaki. John Gillespie distinguishes between two types of festival: 'Traditionally-held festivals are those in which Shinto deities and the people communicate through certain rites on specific dates (...) They are held in any region of Japan where there is a shrine' (1993: 276). Festivals are also mass events 'for commemoration and celebration' (Ibid.), and are known as matsuri.

Morrissey's five poems are concerned with the frenzy of these popular Japanese celebrations. In 'Ogaki Festival' Morrissey pictures herself so drunk, that her students hold her head as she cries. 'Spring Festival' almost reads like a dream, or a nightmare: 'My body has become the body of the festival: / the vaginas on shrines reduce me to the facts of life' (49). The sexual organs are associated with fertility. In some Japanese shrines it is not unusual to see wooden sculptures of male / female genitals, commonly believed to ensure a good harvest. The same symbolism can be found in the more violent 'Summer Festival': 'What do you think when you see a mache vagina / being rammed by a penis as broad as a battering ram?' (50). The language is crude, in line with the orgiastic frenzy of the scene. The ritual enacts a sexual encounter, with two enormous mache organs carried around in procession.

Sex is not considered taboo in Japan. Man has the right to search for pleasure, and sexuality is celebrated by culture and religion. Ukiyo, or 'The Floating World' refers to the red-light districts legalised under the Tokugawa Shogunate. The name itself suggests that life is short, and one should enjoy it as much as possible. Tea rooms, theatres and public baths were among the most popular meeting places in the Tokugawa / Edo period. Wood-block prints (ukiyoe) of the time show the demi-monde of Edo, Kyoto and Osaka, populated by the kabuki actors, 'jesters, (...) bathgirls and dissolute samurai' (Stanley Baxter 1984: 188). Contemporary Japan has preserved a permissive attitude towards sex and sexuality. Asked about her reaction to Japanese eroticism, Morrissey replied:

I was shocked and puzzled initially, but very interested it too. It had none of the prurience of western eroticism, at least the old fashioned eroticism didn't. It didn't seem to be a sexually guilty culture in the same way as the west is.

Besides dealing with sex and birth, the sequence about festivals focuses on gender. 'Autumn Festival' is a celebration of women's power of creation: 'In the streets I watch women who are dancing in rings / in the slow, hindered steps of the kimono. Again and again, / a festival of women. They are declaring what's been done' (51). In Morrissey's words: 'The dancing women are linked to the land, and the land is linked to them, so their experiences conjoin. What's been done to the women has been done to the land, and vice versa.' Their dancing in rings seems like a celebration of motherhood, achieved with as much sacrifice as the harvest.

'Winter Festival' is an exclusively male festival. Men drink sake to keep out the cold, gird their loins and bang on a drum in frantic excitement. The closing line casts a special light on the poem: 'In the alley there's a pyramid of bright flesh and lanterns, refusing to be born' (52). Asked if this was a metaphor for winter or more than that, Morrissey replied:

It's the stalled nature of winter, and the stalled nature of masculinity, which can't pass on life to another without women...The festivals seemed so linked to the archetypes: male / female. Writing about them, this dichotomy comes into the poems much more clearly than in my other work. I've never written as explicitly about birth and sex before.

Morrissey's poetry is multilayered. She looks at Japan with disenchanted eyes. Never disrespectful, she is not afraid of touching upon difficult issues. Spiritualism and eroticism can live side by side, she seems to believe. But if sexual activity is seen as predominantly male, motherhood is obviously exclusively female. A convinced feminist, Morrissey sees woman as Mother Earth, and contemplates unborn life with grief. The poet is not too rigid a feminist, however. She believes in the 'toleration of opposites', embodied by Nagasawa, the atheist monk to whom sex is like Zen.

Between Here and Now expresses Morrissey's concern with the Japanese language. In particular, three poems build a subtext within the text: 'To Encourage the Study of Kanji', 'night Drive in Four Metaphors' and 'To Imagine an Alphabet'. The last two poems are both concerned with the Japanese language. Morrissey's interest focuses on the Chinese character system, which offers a 'visual understanding of language.' As she explains, 'meaning comes in flashes, rather than being linear. It's so much more intricate and beautiful and multi-dimensional than English.' This observation probably depends on the fact that, unlike other young Irish poets who have been to Japan, Morrissey studied Japanese for two years. She could follow most conversations, although she found the written system very difficult.

'Night Drive in Four Metaphors' was inspired by the geometry of the kanji system, derived from the Chinese. The poems describe a night drive in Japan. Morrissey is probably in a taxi, her fiance sitting next to her. She describes what she sees from the window. In her imagination, this landscape turns into four metaphors. The straight roads through the rice fields are compared to the line through the 'kanji for centre', 'The eye of an animal skewered and shown on its side'(45). The moon 'on its back, under the shadow of its circle', becomes a smile under 'the weight of a cold ball breathing on it.' The flats for Brazilian factory workers, with shirts hung out on balconies, are seen as 'ships on a wind sea trying to sail.' Finally, Morrissey thinks about how comparatively different the world looks from her boyfriend's window. The two lovers see 'Two worlds split open to each other, stars spilling from each.'

Referring to the kanji character system, Morrissey said: 'How solid and square and tangible that language is, because it has at least three dimensions, whereas we have only two at most.' Morrissey builds up her own pictographs, imagining the world as juxtaposed geometric modules, reminiscent of a Chinese children's game called tangram. Each participant is given a certain number of squares, rectangles and triangles of paper, which can be used to create real-life images; so a square with a triangle on top becomes a house. Morrissey uses a similar technique to deconstruct the world, reconstructing it into her own poetic world.

'To Imagine an Alphabet' looks at the Chinese writing system of ancient pictographs. The first part describes language in its unity of signifier and signified: 'The character of mountain actually looks like mountain, the character of fire actually loks like fire, and so on.' As Morrissey adds, it was 'a state of innocence if you like, before the fall of language into its own realm.' Then, the mode of the poem changes, starting from : 'a mind is inside the lines' (54). From this point onwards, Morrissey comments on how people express their own psychological make-up in language. In her opinion, 'they become ideological, and their connectedness to the objects in the world which they are trying to describe becomes infused with all of these extra significances.'

The third section of the poem deals with the reinvention of language. In Morrissey's terms,

One of the things I did when I was learning a new character was to draw extra bits on so I could remember it more easily...Bringing it back to the original in a way, when sign and signified are still connected. However, I would also draw new pictures over them, my own pictures, pictures drawn from my own psychology. So the sign and the signified become severed once again.

This conflict between different systems of signification brings chaos, followed by Killing, Lamentation and Grief. Peace is restored by a deer, 'who prepares to walk and preach' (55). This sacred Buddhist animal bears the flaming heart of compassion.

'To Imagine an Alphabet' shows Morrissey's belief that Japanese culture is untranslatable. She is indeed aware of the huge cultural gap which separates Japan and the West, and knows that she does not belong 'There' (Ogaki), but 'Here' (Belfast). However, she does not define Japan in binary terms. She has avoided stereotyped descriptions of ancient versus modern, sushi versus McDonald's. The keywords she offers for an understanding of Japanese culture are 'tolerance of opposites'.

Perhaps the best way to understand Morrissey's literary achievement is the Japanese concept of ma (Galliano, 2004). Linked to Zen Buddhism, it expresses a moment in space or time in which the human mind is enlightened. It is a pause between two different stages of life, which is constant change. Ma is inbetweenness, being neither 'here' nor 'there' It is an evocation of things which cannot be expressed. This concept is strictly related to Japanese aesthetics. Japanese visual arts, the Noh theatre, the Tea ceremony and flower arranging are all centred on ma. In this inbetweenness or 'absence', in Zeami's sense, in this pause which is more eloquent than any speech, lies the beauty of Morrissey's Japanese poetry.