Prompt: Read and carefully analyze the first sentence of “In Search of the Banished Children.” What bearing does it have on the essay?
“Memory is unique to each one of us, it is familial, tribal, communal, the seepage into our minds of other memories, an intravenous inheritance, the past in our bloodstream, elixir, narcotic, stimulant, poison, antidote” (Quinn, 43). This first sentence from “In Search of the Banished Children” from Peter Quinn’s Looking for Jimmy encompasses the idea that memory, while it is an integral part of who people truly are, can leave scars on the psyches of those who have struggled.
For the most part, Quinn seems to deem the Irish Americans as fairly ignorant of their past and heritage. For example, he states that “the poor have traditionally lacked not only the education and time to record their lives, but also lacked the interest” (Quinn, 47). The unfortunate fact is that those who had experienced the Famine and held the memory of the event wanted neither to remember their story nor to inform others of their struggle, probably due to feelings of shame or inferiority.
And who could blame them? The Irish were seen by their British neighbors as a “problem, scourge, infection, perpetual nuisance, and source of national weakness and unrest” (Quinn, 53). And even after leaving the UK, those who had experienced the traumatic Famine were left with “the effects of their own powerlessness, [and] of humiliating dependency on landlords and government officials” (Quinn, 49) in America. The Famine Irish were stuck in a perpetual state of abhorrence by others and poverty, which left scars on their memories of the Famine and all events preceding and following it.
