SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13
Christmas is planned…a house/pet sit just outside Madrid, caring for two cats. Next is figuring out the six weeks between now and December 16…a lot to accomplish in the next few days. And Chloe doesn’t feel well.
First stop of the day — the Saturday market in Skibbereen in pouring rain. Next, still dumping rain, Saffi’s walk around the loop. The rain doesn’t bother me…I love the way it feels on my head and face, the sound to it, the many sensations.
FAMINE EXHIBITION EVENT
O. gave us two tickets to the closing talk for “Coming Home: Art and Great Hunger,” an exhibition at the Skibbereen Art Gallery. We arrived at the Town Hall, where the event was taking place, 30 minutes before the doors opened. A long, chatty line had formed, and most people seemed to know each other. Much to our surprise, women were wearing skirts and dresses…we had come to think only pants were worn in this part of the world. But this was a mixed crowd, crossing all socio-economic lines…the sophisticated, skirt wearers with farmers; doctors and professionals with fishermen.
The people of West Cork have a particular stake in the famine story as it is very much their story. West Cork was a part of Ireland hardest hit during the famine years, between 1845 and 1849. Though the art exhibition, “Coming Home”, opened in Dublin, the attendance numbers in Skibbereen were nearly 100 percent more than there. 30,000 people saw the show in this small city of 3,000. In Dublin, a city of over half a million, 60,000 people attended.
THE SPEAKERS
The event consisted of four panelists, each of whom spoke separately.
PRESS COVERAGE
The first presenter was a journalism professor who contextualized the depiction of the famine from 1845-49. The famine received almost no coverage in the English press. He showed a couple of slides, but focused on one from 1848 in the London Illustrated Times showing a starving Irish woman with her two clinging, starving children. In the interview of the woman, she described losing her baby and 13-year old son and what it felt like to wait for her own death and that of her other two children. An extraordinary article for the times, not only because of the subject matter, but interviews were extremely rare, if non-existent, in the 1840s. It wasn’t until 1859 when American writer and publisher Horace Greeley interviewed Brigham Young that an interview was taken seriously and even then it was considered a lowly form of journalism. In the British press, interviews weren’t included in newspapers until the 1880s.
Aside from this one depiction, the only telling of the famine story was by vicars and non-journalists. The job of journalists in the 1840s was primarily to report on inquisitions and deaths.
THE ARTISTS
The next speaker was a woman whose deceased husband had a painting in the exhibition. She, with her husband before his death, lived in County Cork. He was born in Scotland, lived in England, but was of Irish ancestry and during the conflicts in Northern Ireland in the 70s, at the height of his career, he renounced his English citizenship and moved to West Cork. The move, and changed citizenship, negatively impacted his career. The English who had lauded his art, abandoned him when he became Irish.
The third speaker was an artist who lived near Skibbereen. She had a sculpture in the exhibit, a shark skin stretched over a traditional fisherman’s boat frame. She talked about her investigation and preoccupation with loss in her work.
BOB GELDOF AND STARVATION STORIES
The last speaker, Bob Geldof, was the star of the show, but until he started speaking I certainly didn’t think he would be. While each presenter spoke, he slumped at a long table where the speakers waited their turn, his long, stringy white hair hiding his face. It looked like he was doodling when the others spoke and nervous. I felt anxious for him as he walked to the podium.
His bent body soon straightened when he reached the microphone. I realized he was wearing expensive, tailored, stylish clothes. Rock star clothes, pants of a deep, burnt orange and a subtle cream-coloured jacket over a soft purple, crumpled cotton shirt. He kept his hair over his face for several minutes, until it must have annoyed him as much as it was annoying to the audience. His voice was strong and fierce as he spoke of how a visit to Ethiopia in the 1980s changed his life, and why he left music, and organized live aid to raise awareness and money for famine victims.
With hair parted, he revealed a finely chiselled, deeply wrinkled face and bright blue eyes. He spoke about how it is impossible to describe the excruciating pain of a person dying from starvation. Then he attempted a description. A starving person, he said, loses their ability to talk. Mouth and eyes stay open; flies gathering along lids and lips. The head is huge by comparison to the emaciated body. He held a two-year old who felt weightless. He said starving people don’t seem human; their bodies are so disfigured.
When he was raising money for the Ethiopian famine, Ireland was the most generous country, giving proportionally more of their income than anywhere else. This generousity, he explained, comes from the knowing Irish soul, the ghosts everywhere that people live with.
After speaking, Geldorf answered questions. One question sparked a response about politics and his opinion that political systems that worked in the 20th century are no longer working because everything changed, he said, with the creation of the worldwide web in the 1980s and social media later. Our political systems are outdated and incapable of dealing with what confronts us, like climate change and migrations. New political systems, he said, must be created or we will see the continued disintegration of democracy as we have known it.
