A Letter to the
President of Ireland

Naming both the McAleavey and Brewer lineages, asking whether the diaspora that did not take the deal has a room to come home to.

Dear President Connolly,

My name is Marc McAleavey and I am writing to you from Indianapolis, Indiana, in the middle of the United States, from a city built on land taken from the Miami and Delaware peoples and built up by labor sorted along lines the Irish in America learned to enforce in exchange for whiteness. I am writing to you because I am not a proud Irish-American and I want to tell you why, and I am writing to you because I think the Republic you preside over has a relationship to its diaspora that has never quite been honest, and I want to offer one diaspora son's honesty back across the water.

My great great grandfather Michael McAleavey came over from Ireland in 1840 with his new wife Bridget Murphy McAleavey. They were newlyweds. They were starting their lives out. They left their home and their country and their family and their clan five years before the Famine officially begins in the textbooks, which means they were among the ones who read the wind early, who saw the land tightening and the evictions beginning and the priests already telling young couples to go before the worst arrived. They took the coffin ship across the waves of death and trauma as a young married couple with their hands still in each other's hands. They settled first in Perth and then made their way with other Irish Catholic families to Milwaukee, where they joined a parish that served each other and served the Lord in an open church before there was a building. The Jesuits came to start a university so the children could learn because no one would let our children learn. Those were my great grandfathers and my great aunts and uncles. That is the love I grew up inside.

It was a tainted love and one that wasn't very proud and one that often told stories because of that lack of pride. The McAleaveys who came after Michael and Bridget took the deal that was on offer in this country. The deal was that the Irish could stop being a colonized people and start being a white people if they were willing to enforce the sorting of everyone darker than them, and the institutions through which that enforcement ran were the police union and the parochial school and the ward machine and the building trades, and my people worked all four. The pride that Irish-Americans wear on the seventeenth of March every year is the pride of having taken that deal and forgotten what was traded for it. I will not wear that pride. I will not put a leprechaun on a helmet and call it heritage. The leprechaun was the English caricature of my ancestors, the small tricky hoarding drunk lucky figure the empire drew to make a people into a joke, and it was the template the same empire and its American inheritor used to draw the sambo and the coon and every minstrel figure that followed. To be proud of the leprechaun is to be proud of the cage the colonizer built and then to paint the cage green and call it home.

The McAleavey line goes back to the Mac Dhuinnshléibhe chieftains of the northeast of the north of Ireland, the Ulster ground, the country of the leprechauns in the older sense of that word, before the empire turned the small people into a joke. The chieftain is my homie. That is the lineage talking to itself across nine hundred years without asking the empire's permission. Michael and Bridget carried that lineage onto the boat in 1840 and the boat carried it to Perth and Perth carried it to Milwaukee and Milwaukee carried it down through four generations to a porch in Indianapolis where I am sitting now writing this letter to you.

I am writing to you because the other half of my lineage refused a different assimilation contract and I want the Republic to know what that refusal looked like in an American midwestern city. My grandparents Ruth and Sam Brewer were Deaf, and they were leaders of the Greater Indianapolis Deaf Club for many years, and the Deaf club was the place where a diaspora that is not a diaspora of geography but a diaspora of language gathered itself back into a people on its own terms. The Deaf in America were told the price of belonging was to stop signing and start speaking, the Milan Congress of 1880 having closed the gate on the language across the hearing world, and my grandparents and the people they gathered with simply did not pay that price. They built a building. They signed inside it. They held weddings and funerals and dances and card games and arguments and gossip and grief and joy in a language the hearing world could not surveil, and they did this for decades, and when I was a child I sat inside that refusal without knowing that was what I was sitting inside, and I have spent my adult life trying to name what they taught me without saying a word.

What they taught me is that there is a difference between pride and joy, and the difference is the deal. Pride is the affect of having taken the deal. Joy is the affect of having refused it. The Deaf club was joy. The Zawadi Exchange at Broadway United Methodist Church in the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood of this city, which I helped build alongside De'Amon Harges and Mike Mather over many years, is joy. The work I have been writing under the name Joy Repair for the last twenty years is the attempt to give the refusal a doctrine and a method and a portable form so that other people in other neighborhoods can recognize what they are already doing and stop apologizing for it.

I am writing to you, President Connolly, because I want to ask the Republic to consider that the diaspora it tends to imagine, the diaspora of pubs and Notre Dame and Joe Biden's grandmother's county, is the diaspora that took the deal, and there is another diaspora that the Republic has not yet learned how to see. The diaspora of Irish descendants who married into Black families and Deaf families and Indigenous families and queer families and refused the whitening contract on the way through. We are here. We are in the cities the Republic does not visit on its trade missions. We are doing work the Republic's official Irish-American interlocutors would not recognize as Irish at all, and we are doing it precisely because we inherited from the old country a memory of having been colonized that the assimilated cousins traded away for a badge and a pension.

I want to tell you one more thing before I sign this letter, because it is the thing underneath everything else I have written. My father became an anesthesiologist. He spent his career managing other people's pain. I have come to understand that this is an Irish vocation in a way the medical schools do not teach. The Irish learned to give gas because the Irish were not allowed to put the wound down. The crack is gas. The humor is gas. The songs are gas. The whole brilliant verbal culture that the world loves us for is in part a beautiful and terrible anesthetic that a colonized people perfected because the alternative was to feel the full weight of what had been done and what had been traded away and what could not be gotten back. My father gave gas for a living and I have spent my life trying to figure out what comes after the gas wears off.

What comes after the gas wears off is the longing. And the longing is what I do not know what to do with. I am not proud and I am not at home and I do not know if I am welcome in the country my great great grandparents Michael and Bridget left in 1840 as newlyweds on a coffin ship. I do not know if a McAleavey who refused the American whitening contract and married into a Deaf family and spent his life in a Black Methodist church on the north side of Indianapolis is the kind of Irishman the Republic still recognizes as one of its own. I do not know if the chieftain line of Mac Dhuinnshléibhe out of the northeast of the north has a place for the descendant who came back without pride and with only the longing and the work.

I want the rest of my life to be the Deaf Irish Leprechaun, by which I mean I want to carry both refusals in one body and walk around this city with the gold the empire could not find. I want to write the books that make that figure legible. I want to teach the social workers I teach at Indiana University to recognize the difference between pride and joy in the families they sit with. I want the language my grandparents kept and the land my great great grandparents were starved off of to meet inside the work I do for the rest of my time here.

I am writing to ask you, as the head of a state and as a woman who has spent her life on the side of people the official story does not see, whether there is a way for the diaspora that did not take the deal to be welcomed home. Not as tourists. Not as investors. Not as sentimentalists with helmets and shamrocks. As the cousins who carried the older refusal across the water and kept it alive in cities the Republic does not visit, and who are now asking, after a hundred and eighty six years, whether the country still has a room for us.

I do not need an answer. I needed to ask.

With respect and with joy and with the longing,

Marc McAleavey

Indianapolis, Indiana

Great great grandson of Michael McAleavey and Bridget Murphy McAleavey,
of the Mac Dhuinnshléibhe line, of the northeast of the north,
who took the coffin ship in 1840.

Grandson of Ruth Brewer and Sam Brewer,
of the Greater Indianapolis Deaf Club,
who refused the silence the hearing world demanded.