Poetry for Students Vol. 10

132 Poetry for Students

work from then on in Irish, even though his mother-

tongue has for several centuries been a near-dead

language. His statement was artistic, it was politi-

cal, and of course it was personal; it was one of

those choices by which one defines one’s own iden-

tity. It only lasted ten years, and then Hartnett was

back to writing in English again. In some respects,

it hardly seems that Hartnett’s good intention was

worth the embarrassment of seeming shallow in the

long run. On the other hand, Hartnett’s declaration

drew attention to an issue he felt strongly about

then, and it eventually led him to a voice of his

own, a way of poetic expression more important

than either English or Irish.

The poem is an expression of pride in his cul-

ture and tradition, and readers, naturally, support

the poet in his stand against the oppressive forces

from England that had leached Ireland of its her-

itage. If cultural identity were clearly, undeniably

right, then we might be able to say that the idea be-

hind “A Farewell to English” is a good thing, or

that it is a bad thing. Strong cultural identity has as

many evils as virtues, however. For every heart

surging with patriotic pride, there is someone dead

on a battlefield somewhere, killed when the bal-

ance shifted from “love of us” to “hatred of them.”

Colonized people are supposed to forget their

old ways, to take on the ways of those who are their

new rulers. In America, our clearest example of this

is the treatment of the indigenous people who were

here before Europeans arrived. When the land was

taken from the Indians, those who were not killed

were moved onto reservation lands, where they

were allowed to follow their own traditions and

customs and speak in their native tongues. About

the 1930s, though, there arose a new way of thought

that said that Indians were being held prisoners

within their small societies; maintaining their cul-

ture was seen as a racist trick to keep them out of

the wider American culture. New programs and

policies from the thirties to the seventies were

aimed at encouraging Indian youths to leave the

reservations and assimilate. This theory was re-

versed in the 1970s, at about the time that Hartnett

wrote “A Farewell to English.” The government

came to realize that it was destroying hundreds of

years of Indian heritage in order to offer young peo-

ple a chance to make money, and opponents argued

that a better job could be done to promote both

prosperity and culture. The primacy of retaining

tribal ways was established once again on the reser-

vations.

Around the same time—in the late 1960s and

early 1970s—black Americans began to assert their

own cultural identities. The situation of blacks was

in some ways worse than the cases of either the

Irish of the Indians because they were so far re-

moved from their original situations. Their ances-

tors had been from different tribes across the

African continent, taken from the physical setting

which had formed their cultural identities, without

any relics to remind descendants of why practices

developed as they did. The culture of former slaves

should be considered the pure American experience

if anything is, since they were so detached from

their former lives and had to create an almost en-

tirely new cultural identity here. Instead, they were

rejected by the dominant American culture as well.

In the 1960s and the 1970s the Black Pride move-

ment raised public awareness about the rich cul-

tural history of African-Americans. The Civil

Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had strug-

gled to establish that there was nothing wrong with

being black, and the Black Pride movement pushed

beyond that with the assertion that there was in fact

everything right about it.

As with life on the reservation, though, estab-

lishing a cultural identity had the unwanted effect

of separating African Americans from mainstream

society, which meant that those who made their cul-

ture an obvious part of their identity could not rise

to America’s highest political or economic levels.

Today there is a debate about the language used by

America’s blacks that has parallels to the issues

Hartnett was addressing with “A Farewell to Eng-

lish.” At different times in the country’s history,

educational groups have recommended that the

public school system should accept the pattern of

speech that has developed among black Americans,

calling it Black English, or, more recently, Ebon-

ics (a phrase coined from “ebony” and “phonics”).

Recognition of this way of speaking could be taken

as a political gesture, as an affirmation of a black

A Farewell to English

His statement was

artistic, it was political,

and of course it was

personal; it was one of

those choices by which one

defines one’s own identity”