Greg Delanty: I have lived in the US for over half my life but never lost my Cork accent

Having spent over half of his life living in the US, the question of identity weighs heavily on Cork poet Greg Delanty

Fri, 29 Sep, 2023 - 20:00

Greg Delanty

Folks often ask me here in the US, when they hear my accent, where I’m from. By “often” I mean at least a few times a week since settling here in 1986. I am called Irish, both by myself and everyone else.

I am just about to turn 65, which means I have lived in the US for over half my life. I often joke about which half of me is Irish and which is American. Slice me down the middle, from my brain to my gluteus maximus and say the slightly bigger side is the US Greg.

All the cells in my throat must be still Irish though, and more than that, still Corkonian — my accent has seemingly not changed since I came here. I have no idea why it hasn’t changed — it must be my voice box cells won’t give up waving Cork’s red and white flag, the blood and bandages of my teeth and gob. But seriously, who are we? Who am I now?

We’ve all heard the notion that our body cells renew completely every seven years. This is literally not accurate as there are body cells which don’t change. The eye’s visual cortex cells remain the same from a person’s birth to death. Cells in our cerebellum don’t change once formed a little after birth. Most body cells do change but each type at different rates.

On average the cells of a human skeleton take 10 years to change completely, muscle cells of an adult change every 15 years, red blood cells change every four months (and travel over three miles in their lifetime), liver cells take between 300 to 500 days to renew completely, skin cells take two to three weeks, the cells of the gut take five days, sperm cells take three days.

With all this change who are we, a conundrum made all the more complicated as I have lived in one country for a little less than half my life and lived in another country a little more? Therefore, my skeleton has changed around four times in the US, whereas it has changed in Ireland a little less than three times.

My skeleton is definitely American now, and so too the other cells that change at an even faster rate and times over. They must be flying old glory, or rather the Vermont flag (I live in Vermont) and Vermonters see themselves as separate from all other US states.

There is even a movement to secede from the Union. And, since I lived in the city state of Cork until I was 28 there must be a biological war waging within my body about who I am.

And this is before taking-into-account that I return to Ireland, mostly to my home in Kerry for between two to four months annually. This yearly return to the old country means while I am back that my gut and skin cells become as Kerry as Kerrygold butter or the Kerry cow and my red blood cells have settled as natives in the Kingdom of my body.

I won’t mention my liver cells while in the Emerald Isle due to the Guinness treatment. And as for my sperm cells, they don’t count anymore — I had my prostate out earlier this year.

It is enough to do your brain in and then I start considering other countries I’ve visited since 1986: India, Mexico, Greece, England, Scotland, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Morocco, Portugal, Canada, as well as Russia and Ukraine back when they were part of The Soviet Union in 1987, just after the Chernobyl nuclear accident — we travelled near the accident site, the first people to meet the victims of the disaster from outside the Iron Curtain.

I was a member of Cork CND and we were invited to a world peace conference that was held on a boat as it cruised down the Dnieper River to Odessa and the Black Sea. I swam in that river one day when we were docked and saw dead fish floating, victims also of the accident.

This reminds me how the technique of measuring the age of cells came about at the start of this century. The biologist, Dr Jonas Frisen, remembered how nuclear weapon testing was carried out above ground up to 1963, and that as a result of the testing the atmospheric concentrations of the isotope Carbon-14 was altered throughout the globe which provided a way of measuring the age of cells.

Whoever I am, no doubt, I am an amalgam of all the above and much more; for example, since we have all heard that we are what we eat, I am also today’s lunch: Part Atlantic salmon, local mushrooms, my own garden tomatoes,

lemons from Brazil, tea from Assam, and milk from a goat (from who knows where — ditto the sea salt).

Am I a more than less different person than the person I was while I lived in Cork? And what about my spirit? Given there is such a phenomenon.

It is believed the only way to the spirit is via the senses. I am confused when I think about it and sometimes even when I don’t. (An example of the latter set inspired a poem included in my latest book The Professor of Forgetting.)

The Professor of Forgetting by Greg Delanty

Birthdays

7 pm, Eastern Standard Time, Burlington, Vermont

An American dog-day, yet it’s the same gray,/
that overwhelming greyness of an Irish day.

Where am I? I look from my back garden /
over mercury-leaden Lake Champlain

to the mountains of upstate New York. /
I can’t help think I’m looking at upstate Cork

—the Beara mountains across Kenmare Bay— /
from my limestone house above the Kerry Way.

Tricks of time and place. Who am I? I am sixty-three /
tomorrow, which it is now in Inisfáil, Isle of Destiny,

the Old Sod, Greyland. I wish myself a happy birthday. /
I’m the gray-haired man with the twenty-nine-hour day.

Greg Delanty was born in Cork city, and lived there until the 1980s. Since then he lives most of the year in Vermont where he teaches at St Michael’s College. He has been politically active and ran for the Vermont Green Party in the 2004 US elections. He returns each year to his Irish home in Derrynane, Co Kerry. He has received numerous awards, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry Award.