...there was always hunger in Ireland. She was a country that liked to be hurt. The Irish heaped coals of fire upon their own heads. They were unable to extinguish the fire. They were dependent,as always, on others. They had no notions of self-reliance. They burned and then poured empty buckets down upon themselves. It had always been so.
Colum McCannHe was standing on the little ledge of reality he had left, but it seemed to me that he wasn't getting high, just getting level. He had an affinity with pain. If he couldn't cure it, he took it on.
Colum McCannThe children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist.Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structures of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives.
Colum McCannMots clés ireland potato-famine
It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences.
Colum McCannWomen in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks.
Colum McCannThey entered the wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned with hunger.
Colum McCannMots clés ireland potato-famine
The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, taken south, strapped to a tree, whipped. His owners. They would make a spectacle of his fame. They had tried to silence him for many years already. No longer. He had been given a chance to speak out against what had held him in chains. And he would continue to do so until the links lay in pieces at his feet.
Colum McCannMots clés ireland slavery frederick-douglass
The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap.
Colum McCannHis body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.
Colum McCannMots clés slavery frederick-douglass
The short sharp shock of three thousand mother two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son's bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow - not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes. Mothers and daughters and children and grandmothers, too. They never fought the wars, but they suffered them, blood and bone.
Colum McCannMots clés northern-ireland the-troubles
« ; premier précédent
Page 21 de 23.
suivant dernier » ;
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.