B i b l i o f i l e

 (Published: SCRIBNER 2009. 193 pages)

No Tea Party: Love and Bigotry in a North American City

Map of Ireland opens with a quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “geography is fate.” Although it is indeed true that the fate of the protagonist of this novel would have been different had she not lived in South Boston, her age and the epoch in which she lives are equally important factors. For she was a teenage secondary school pupil in 1974, the year in which violent protests erupted on the streets of her native city in response to the introduction of bussing.

Although the system of legally mandated segregation that blighted the lives of Black Americans in the Southern United States had been abolished by the end of the 1960s, thanks to the efforts the civil rights movement, the informal residential segregation that afflicted Northern US cities remained in place. Integrated neighbourhoods were a rarity (a situation that apparently still pertains) and therefore the pupil intake of neighbourhood schools tended to be preponderantly Black or preponderantly White. A number of attempts were made to integrate and improve urban education by transporting children by bus from Black neighbourhoods to schools in White neighbourhoods and vice versa, a practice known as bussing.

The decision to implement bussing in the Massachusetts city of Boston was more than a little unpopular in South Boston, a White working class urban area inhabited predominantly by people of Irish Catholic descent. There were mass anti-bussing protests. There was violence.

Buses carrying Black children were stoned. A Black lawyer died after being attacked by a group of White teenagers as he left Boston City Hall. The next day Black teenagers retaliated by attacking a White motorist, who also died.

The Boston bussing crisis forms the background to Map of Ireland. The authorities begin bussing Black pupils to the “White school” attended by Ann Ahern (the White narrator of the novel) the same year that a new French language teacher, for whom Ann develops a crush, begins teaching there. Mademoiselle Eugénie, who has come from France on a teacher exchange scheme, happens to be Black. Ann has never known a Black person before. She was already coming to terms with negative attitudes towards her sexuality; now she will be forced to cope with the racism of the community in which she lives.

Thus is set in train a series of events that will present Ann with a moral dilemma - a choice between two different kinds of betrayal - and end in her downfall. She is a victim, not of her desires, but of the social matrix within which her desires are embedded. Her pathological behaviour is a response to a pathological society.

Literature at its best can help us understand the lives of others and Map of Ireland certainly succeeds in this regard. Employing a matter-of-fact, not overly dramatic style of narration, which makes ordinary that which some observers would see as extraordinary, it gives the reader a flavour of what it might have been like to have been a White working class teenage lesbian in love with a Black female in the Boston of 1974. Many teenagers and ex-teenagers in Britain and elsewhere will feel, or remember feeling, some of the same things that Ann feels and will identify with her whatever their own sexuality or ethnicity. By entering into the life of an individual we gain insight into the roles played in society in general by gender, sexual orientation, class and “race”.

“Race” is, of course, a cultural product - hence the claim by some Black Americans in the 1990s that Bill Clinton was the first Black President - and there are a number of allusions to the social construction of “racial” identity in the novel. Ann’s radical re-interpretation of A Streetcar Named Desire is noteworthy in this respect.

The fact that the conflict over bussing primarily affected poor working class neighbourhoods is significant. Perhaps the anxieties of some South Bostonians were partly a product of the insecurities generated by their socio-economic position, of which this novel draws a creditable sketch. Those weaned on television portrayals of US affluence may be surprised at the poverty experienced by many of the inhabitants of South Boston.

Map of Ireland is a praiseworthy evocation of an important episode in the history of the United States. It is a well-written, enjoyable, realistic and serious novel, with credible characters and a believable plot. The narrative flows easily, drawing the reader in from the first line. It is a joy to read.