What is Gaelic Re-existence? (Part I)

Wayfaring with Re-existence series

“Decoloniality is engaged with the question of delinking: the question of re-existence, of producing a movement in time that has to do with a return but not a conservative return. Rather, the return of what has been erased. It claims a hope that is not individual but rather a historical hope that we carry in and against the oblivion that confronts us.”

— Rolando Vázquez (2018)

What can ‘re-existence’ mean?

Re-existence is a term that has emerged from decolonial scholarship and practices in recent years. The term speaks to the most deeply radical potentials of ‘living’ and ‘embodying’ the decolonization process: of re-existing in spite of modernization, colonial violence, ecocides, categorical logics, and the continuous attempts at erasure that threaten and desolate the very bases of existence for humans and other beings. Achinte (2008) articulates re-existence as “the redefining and re-signifying of life in conditions of dignity”, which Walsh (2021) suggests are achieved through “the mechanisms, strategies, and practices that human groups employ against racialization, exclusion, and marginalization.” I might add that it is not just ‘human groups’ that are and have been engaged in attempts to re-exist.

Achinte’s formulation of re-existence implies that modernity/coloniality imposes undignifying conditions upon all life. These conditions are unevenly distributed depending on whether one is raven, domesticated cow, flower-labelled-weed, human-labelled-white, or human-labelled-not-white. A full and dignified life is scarcely had by any being anywhere on the planet. The hierarchization of life is on a continuum across all life forms, not just limited to how humans have been hierarchized and racialized. The processes of racialization have placed peoples within hierarchies of being/knowing that positions white Europeans as civilized and ‘forward’, or as representing the ‘now’ of time and history, while non-white peoples to varying degrees are understood as uncivilized and ‘backward’ in time and history, thus closer to nature and other non-human life forms; at least until or if they assimilate into the white Eurocentric cultural parameters of what it means to be ‘human’, and even that is no guarantee of a full and dignified life.

Re-existence is about going ‘beyond’ just resistance, to re-inhabitations of ways of being and knowing that by their very existence generate an interruption to the death-drive consensus of modernity/coloniality through their radical affirmations of life. This is part of what I think Achinte is articulating with ‘redefining’ — refusing to accept the parameters of reality and struggle imposed by the colonizer, and seeking to re-define, through the living of life, what it means to exist in “these present times in which both hope and existence are fading.” (Walsh, 2021)

If existence itself is threatened, denied, and fading, what would it mean to re-exist? And how?

Re-existence in the Gaelic or Irish context

In ‘translating’ the praxis of re-existence into the Gaelic or Irish context, I/we obviously have to be cognizant of and responsible to the complex ways in which we (modern Irish people) have been racialized as white. Which is not to say that all Gaels or those with Gaelic ancestry or a connection to Gaelic culture are white — just undoubtedly a majority at this time. All people in the world are racialized by colonial systems in some way, and racialization as ‘white’ is still racialization. This reality makes the struggle against the processes of racialization different for those of us who have been racialized as white in a white supremacist world, but it is a struggle against the same dehumanizing processes nonetheless. To be racialized is to be dehumanized. The day-to-day bases of what makes racialization historically legible, and of vast material consequence, in our historical timespace needs to be addressed by all people — not just people racialized as non-white. For people racialized as white, this task is not a ‘favour’ to those who endure worse suffering and violence as a result of racialization, for there is little dignity in gaining any kind of material benefit from the suffering of others and the planet. Whiteness is also an impoverished and undignified way of being/knowing in itself, largely vacant of any substance or meaning outside of commodification. It leaves people ungrounded and untethered, perpetually spinning with a sense of meaninglessness and existential dread. It relies not only on violence elsewhere to subsidise its illusions, but the continuing suppression, erasure, and marginalization of ancestral cultures and traditions that preceded the cultural transformation of people becoming white in now-white-majority places. I have written some short pieces considering whiteness as it relates to Ireland elsewhere on my Substack, but my Decolonization in Ireland online course goes into more depth.

The notion of re-existence draws our attention to the vital question: who and what are given permission to exist within modernity’s parameters, when these parameters are set by the devastating violence of coloniality?

Returning to Walsh’s quote about re-existence at the beginning, it’s necessary to ask: who and what has been excluded and marginalized in the context of Ireland? Or: from whom, where, and what does the Gaelic lifeworld¹ face erasure at this juncture? We can safely say that in the Republic it is not the British Empire doing the erasing anymore and hasn’t been for a while – it is the Irish state, Irish society, and Irish people. Modern Irish people are not the ones being marginalized, and modern Irish culture does not face erasure. Instead, we are inheritors and active beneficiaries of modernity’s erasure of our own ancestors and their lifeworld. As living remnants of this lifeworld, Irish Travellers and the Gaeltachtaí also face both marginalization and erasure in Ireland. I have written about this ‘self-colonization’ elsewhere and it is a central focus of my Decolonization in Ireland online course. It is a seemingly paradoxical thing that it is our own ancestors who have been excluded and marginalized, not modern Irish people, but that is because we became something else culturally and societally. We’ve had a cultural untethering from our ancestors. They’ve been siphoned off into modernity’s myth of the ‘past’ by modern people. Their existence and lives have been rendered irrelevant to meaning-making within the neoliberal zeitgeist of modern-day tax haven Ireland, which has some serious business to attend to — it has no time for such romantic and quaint ideas!

Existence-based struggle

It’s common in Ireland to hear people bemoaning what they perceive as other people generally not ‘doing anything’ about social issues, or in other words not being that bothered about the day-to-day operation and normalization of modernity and capitalism. And it’s true in Ireland that there are currently no significant political movements or organizing forces or anything of major note that even problematize coloniality, let alone threaten its normality. When I was younger and fervently involved in street-based protest, it used to perplex and trouble me that there wasn’t a bigger turnout, or even just more people interested. It’s become clearer to me now using this ‘existence’ lens through the framework of modernity/coloniality that because the broad swathe of the population of Ireland have been subsumed (over centuries) into the sanctioned parameters of existence set by modernity, our day-to-day existence and way of being is not threatened by the continued operationalization and scaling-up of modernity/coloniality. Thus people broadly do not feel a need to ‘act’ since the foundations of day-to-day modern existence persist despite systemic fissures and cracks, which are usually packaged up and sold as remote problems with remote solutions. Except it’s all an illusion of course — our existence is threatened, and the ‘problems’ that surface are not remote but paradigmatic of Eurocentric colonial civilization. The existence of our species is under grave threat and Ireland occupies a particularly precarious position within the colonial world-system. With the continual devastation of nature, and the modern economy based almost entirely on ephemeral foreign corporate capital investments, Ireland is dangerously dependent on the continued functioning of global supply chains for food and other materials for survival — a situation that could literally collapse overnight.

Contemporary political movements tend to have a small base and are localized to a specific issue or site of conflict. Some of these movements could be considered as ‘existence based’ struggles, but they tend to have little staying power beyond their initial spark. They don’t generate ancestral/ecological rootedness or intergenerationality, as for example the actions of the Zapatistas do. This is not a criticism – the kinds of cultural, social, and economic shifts necessary for rootedness to become a horizon of communal political possibility are significant, particularly as Irish society has broadly been going in the opposite direction of that in its zealous pursuit of modernization. To take a popular quote of Marx’s slightly out of context, people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx, 1852).

Take this contemporary political landscape in contrast to the 70 odd years it took for the burgeoning British Empire to destroy the Gaelic order throughout the 1500s. The length and brutality of this struggle is because it was fundamentally a struggle over terms of existence: who and what could be allowed to exist, and who and what could not — and how, and what for. The Gaelic modality of existence was incompatible with new modern/colonial forms of existence (or de-existence) that the British Empire sought to operationalize. It was a fight for a new ‘normal’, and we still inhabit that new normality. While the story is far from straightforward or simple, rife with shortsighted collusion and backstabbing, it was the onto-epistemological² bases of Gaelic existence that were at stake and that have faced marginalization and erasure since. Irish people, subsumed into modernity, no longer have our existence threatened as our Gaelic ancestors once had. Our continued inhabitation of the modern modality of existence is itself active participation in our ancestors’, and the land’s, continued erasure. This is the site of tension that the decolonial project of re-existence speaks to: how do we honour our responsibilities towards our ancestors and nature while continuing to inhabit a way of being that is structurally dependent on their erasure and destruction? How do we push against the enclosures of modern existence by seeking and creating ways of re-existing ‘otherwise’? How do we do that while maintaining sobriety about how far along we actually are and the reality of what is possible in our short lifetimes?

Keep an eye out for part II of this essay coming soon

Decolonization in Ireland online course can be found here: https://gaelicreexistence.com/decolonization-in-ireland/

References

Achinte, Adolfo Albán (2008) ‘Interculturalidad sin decolonialidad? Colonialidades circulantes y prácticas de re-existencia’. In: Villa, Wilmer and Grueso, Arturo (eds) Diversidad, interculturalidad y construcción de ciudad. Bogotá: Universidad Pedagógica Nacional/Alcaldía Mayor, pp. 85–86.

Marx, Karl (1852) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm (Accessed 6 August 2023).

Vázquez, Rolando (2018) ‘What we know is built on erasure’. Interview by Carolina Rito, The Contemporary Journal, 17 February.

Walsh, Catherine (2021) ‘(Re)existence in times of de-existence: political-pedagogical notes to Paulo Freire’. Language and Intercultural Communication, 21(4), pp. 468-478. Available at: DOI: 10.1080/14708477.2021.1916025 (Accessed 6 August 2023).

1. By ‘lifeworld’ I mean knowledges, language, cosmologies, ways of being, ways of understanding what it means to be human and the human’s place in the land, and the land itself.

2. ‘Onto-epistemological’ is a compound of ‘ontological’ and ‘epistemological’. Ontology has to do with being, ways of being, existence, and our experience of reality. Epistemology has to do with knowledge, systems of knowledge, ways of knowing, ways of producing knowledge including what gets considered as ‘knowledge’ or worthy of ‘knowing’ at all. Putting them together speaks to the irreducible intertwinement of ‘being’ and ‘knowing’. These categories only become discretely legible through reductive modern/colonial ways of conceiving the world.