McCann on Cultural Song
by Gerry Dukes, Irish Independent
So far there has been a collection of short stories, a volume of novellas and now a fourth novel. Colum McCann's 12-year career as a writer has been productive, to say the least.
It has also been exemplary in that with each successive book McCann has moved into new territory, exploring areas and investigating experiences beyond the purview of what is ordinarily called Irish writing. The last novel, Dancer, loosely based on the career of Rudolf Nureyev, offered its readers an extraordinary insight into the 'drivenness' of a certain kind of creativity and, at the same time, subtly manipulated them into tolerance of practices which, until quite recently, were considered criminal and which blighted the careers of many.
This new novel is again loosely based on the career of a real person - Bronislawa Wajs, otherwise known as Papusza, a Romani poet born in Poland in the first decade of the last century who survived the two great upheavals undergone in Europe before the collapse of Communism.
For McCann's purposes she is transformed into the person of Zoli Novotna who was born just a few years before the annexation of Czechoslovakia by Hitler's Nazis with the active collaboration of the indigenous Hlinkas. McCann's second chapter opens with an oblique account of a fascist mass murder, an account all the more harrowing because it is not presented directly.
Zoli and her grandfather escape towards the east, constantly evading capture, living on their wits, surviving in the chaos of war. In due time Zoli is recognised as a singer of rare talent, an authentic voice for her nomadic people. As well as that she discovers her own, private talent for poetry and drawing - two forms of graphic expression deplored within her own gypsy culture.
In short order and with the assistance of a number of men with impeccable cultural credentials, she is recruited into the prevailing orthodoxy which proclaims and celebrates the equality of all. But the inexorable logic of equality blurs the notion of difference, insisting that the nomads become settled.
It is here that McCann's novel transcends its surface manifestation as an historical novel and reveals itself for what it is - an unblinking meditation on the significance, value and challenge of cultural diversity. It is a novel about now and here, about how we cope - or fail to cope - with the others or Others in our midst.
McCann's novel is a rare feat.
