Advertisement

We need your help now

Support from readers like you keeps The Journal open.

You are visiting us because we have something you value. Independent, unbiased news that tells the truth. Advertising revenue goes some way to support our mission, but this year it has not been enough.

If you've seen value in our reporting, please contribute what you can, so we can continue to produce accurate and meaningful journalism. For everyone who needs it.

Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland

Sebastian Barry on his acclaimed new book: 'If I was wise I'd probably have done something else... but I'm not a wise man'

We speak to the Irish author and Laureate for Literature about his new novel, set in 1870s USA.

“MY NAME IS Winona…” So begins Sebastian Barry’s new novel, and from these words on us readers are transported to a world that feels in so many ways unlike our own.

A Thousand Moons is set in 1870, following the American Civil War. It’s a world that will already be familiar to Barry’s regular readers, for the novel is a sequel to his previous novel, Days Without End.

That’s where we were introduced to the characters Thomas McNulty and John Cole, two young men who meet, fall in love, become soldiers, and by the end of the novel have adopted a young Native American girl, Winona, as their daughter.

In A Thousand Moons, it’s Winona’s turn to tell us her story. Like its predecessor, this book plunges us immediately into her world, thanks to Barry’s straightforward yet lyrical rendering of her life. The language in both books is sometimes startingly uncompromising, while also wonderfully evocative.

Barry – the current Laureate for Literature, following on from Anne Enright – takes the reader by the hand and leads them into the often dark, dirty and difficult life that his protagonists lead.

The Dublin-born and Wicklow-based Barry writes poetry, plays and books, and has tended to write novels that all orbit around the same family. Roseanne McNulty in the multiple-award-winning The Secret Scripture is Thomas’s relation, while another relation – Jack McNulty – makes an appearance in The Temporary Gentleman.

Barry does this while also tapping into his own family lore, as stories of a long-dead relation who fought in the American Indian Wars led him to write Days Without End.

Wise men

When TheJournal.ie speaks to Barry, it’s at a particularly strange time. It’s just before the first major restrictions come into play in Ireland in order to curb the spread of Covid-19. We were supposed to meet in a city-centre hotel in Dublin, but this is changed to a chat over the phone. Barry’s having to do all of his press for the book from his home, where he will soon have to stay indefinitely. 

Barry says that the book was partly inspired by family experience of adoption. “So it’s been in my mind, that whole issue of the power of that relationship,” he says. ”It can be very redeeming for both sides. And so, I wasn’t afraid to having written or having met Winona through Thomas’s eyes in Days Without End and I wasn’t chary of claiming her as our own. I mean, it’s a disgraceful thought in a way, and a complicated one, but to go back and say ‘well there’s his daughter’ so I can wander slightly left or right of the actual supposed DNA.”

It’s clear in Days Without End that Thomas “adores” Winona, but this also means he “idealises her, and perhaps sees her with that semi-blindness of parental love”.

“And I was very anxious, in a way, to see if she would like to tell her own story,” says Barry. But that wasn’t easy. It wasn’t a matter of just sitting down and writing or imagining, as he explains. It’s more like the muse landing when the muse decides to. 

“Then you get into the weird area where the writer is sitting in their workroom more or less waiting for someone to impart what they want to say. And that’s what I did for a year here in this very room I’m talking to you because of the coronavirus,” says the author. “It was an immensely poignant thing to feel that you could, by hook or by crook, by making it up, maybe you could to some degree authentically accent a human being who lives in the time that she’s talking about in the 1870s.”

When Winona’s voice first appeared, it was in the form of the first sentence in the book – and the first sentence in this piece. A smattering of other lines appeared, over a period of about four or five months.

Barry sent those lines to his editor at his publisher, Faber, and says he “got a sort of shiver when the line was written for some reason, and [my editor] did as well”.

While he was waiting for Winona’s words, he had her pictured in his mind, in the form of an image captured by Edward Curtis (who took many photographs of Native American tribes) called Qahatika Girl. 

“She was sort of my guide, I have to admit. Forgive me if I do sound like, you know, a crazy person or something. But it’s really how I operate, I have to be honest. It is quite peculiar,” says Barry of how this image helped summon Winona forth.

He tells me about when went to Santa Fe last May, after his book was finished, and drove out to the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico, which is largely inhabited by the Zuni people.

There he met a local called Sean, and showed him the photograph that had inspired him, “tentatively, because I was very worried about it as well, as a white man thing, you know, epic in his dense imagination… but I showed it to him and he said’ that’s a woman of this pueblo’,” recalls Barry. “It was like at the end of the huge pilgrimage, you know, and he was identifying her. Now, oddly enough [she wasn't of the Zuni tribe according to Curtis], but there was a tremendous feeling of being talked back to by that photograph, that ‘you’ve reached this place and don’t worry so much’.”

This meant something to Barry because he says “of course” he did a lot of worrying about the novel. “Everything about this book at some level was worrying, and if I was a wise man I probably would have done something else. But happily I’m not a wise man.”

Some of this worry came down to a question of identity. The book is narrated by a young Native American girl, and some may ask – well, what does Sebastian Barry know about being a Native American girl? It’s clearly something he has asked himself.

“Well, first of all let me say how do I identify: I have to say I’m a stupid, straight, old white man,” he says. He’s not making fun, there, of the need to identify himself as such, but more poking fun at himself. 

A Thousand Moons

He indicates, however, that he is able to get into the mind of someone different to himself.

“Having been that little boy for instance of four, so in love with his great aunt and all that she was. It was my ambition not to be an engine driver when I grew up, but a 59-year-old woman, you know,” he says.

“I wasn’t making much of a distinction between genders, so I wasn’t a young woman for a start,” he says of his novel. “I’m not a native person although you could draw some rough parallels between Irish experience in the 15th century and native people’s, but I mean with very different outcomes, and very different weights put into that history.”

He says these worries, however, “sit outside the workroom. These are the worries of the rather different human being that goes around making the coffee and shouting at the dog and all the rest of it”.

“The person in the workroom is just grateful to hear what they’re identifying as the whistle tune of a vanished person or a seemingly vanished person. I was aware of the cautions against it. But, you know, like the child told not to go into the dark wood. That’s the very thing that makes you go in isn’t it, that’s what it felt like.”

Tragedy and survival

Winona’s story is in many ways a tragic one. She is an orphan, and suffers terribly from racism. In the book, she survives an incident of sexual violence, but is unable for a long time to put what she experienced into words.

Barry says that he remembers “respecting and being quite overwhelmed by the fact that she didn’t have words. And because of course… Her real name is Odijinka, and she was given her name by Thomas because he couldn’t say the Sioux name, the Lakota name, and language is a huge issue for her because she realises she can’t even buy things in the store, unless she has good English. She says she has to speak like an empress to survive being beaten up. And so language is everything.”

He adds: “What I also respected about her was that she spotted that she was having moments where maybe she could solve her own troubles. You know that moment. It’s always a feeling of sorrow in parents when you realise your children are solving their own problems, but they have to do it.”

The book displays at full flow the racism toward Native American people. “This is the immense, one of the many disgraces of America, the way they have things set up for themselves – and that’s not an ultimate criticism of the entire country, it’s just a fact,” says Barry.

On a trip three or four years ago in the US, he went to a museum where he met a Native American woman. When she realised he was from Ireland, she divulged her own story to him, a story that made it into A Thousand Moons. 

“She said: I grew up on a reservation with my father. And every time he went into town, every time, he went into town to buy groceries or buy supplies, he was beaten up.

“It’s almost the first thing that Winona says in the book. Which I felt that was, it wasn’t so much giving the information or… it was like here is a fact – you know, put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

The book also draws on the MeToo movement, which Barry calls “a beneficent revolution for women”. 

“I think there are various ways of seeing and there is a way of seeing that is a form of blindness,” he says, and goes on to tell the story of a teenage girlfriend who he says was attacked but who did not want to tell her family.

“She said, I just told them I had an accident – don’t say anything else. And she picked herself up, dusted herself down, came out of hospital after a week or two, and continued on. Now, I saw that with my eyes. But I didn’t really see what that was,” says Barry.

“The immensity of that courage. I hope I knew the horror of what happened to her, but the actual way she dealt with it. So, because of the MeToo movement I’m looking back with at least those shutters off my eyes as a male person. I’m thinking again about that courage. I’m amazed by it.”

He says he would give a lot to have a Tardis and be able to go back in time and undo what was done. But he can’t, and so he says “a book is a gesture of that sort as well, it’s to put a marker, to notice the level of courage required. The world makes it so dangerous for our daughters, to put it that way.”

To be in any way vulnerable invites attack, says Barry. “And that’s a horrible trait in human beings, obviously.”

During his publicity trail for Days Without End, Barry spoke about his son, who is gay, and how this inspired him to write about a same-sex relationship. Yet things may not have changed that much between the days of Thomas and John, and his son’s experience today.

“I mean, even though we’ve had the marriage referendum, for instance, nevertheless, my son will attest that not a week goes by where somebody isn’t saying something to him in the street, simply because he’s gay.”

A Thousand Moons sees Winona talk about being a ‘nothing’, someone lower than the lowest in society. She and her friends who are free slaves are judged, owned, abused because of who they are. 

“When we talk about lowest of the low, the lowest of the low in society, my impulse in Days Without End was to show, contrary to what some people might think, as it were, the radiance of being gay,” he says.

“And contrary to what people generally in America, universally or pervasively might think in America about native people. I wanted to, at least, even if inaccurately, describe the radiance of one individual person that in fact, you’re putting at the lowest. A person, an individual who deserves the greatest elevation as a living human person.”

Barry is 64 now, and describes this stage of life as being “less a process of thinking and more a process of concluding”.

He says that part of his work is “to try and identify the level of danger that the individual well – in this case the young Lakota person [Winona] -  is in in the world. In order to protect them. If that makes any sense, even in history, you know, it’s like a prayer sent back, it’s like a piece of witch’s magic sent backwards in time,” he says. “Because Einstein said you can’t go back but it’s still there, it’s a message in the bottle of a novel, you know, to say We love you. We love you. We love you.”

There’s a sense that Barry feels that, having been through persecution ourselves, the Irish should stand up for those who are suffering.

“When we went to America after the Famine years in the millions, we were being called scum. I mean we were the missing link between apes and man according to Thomas Carlyle,” says Barry. “We know what this is but we’re removed from it now. But that doesn’t mean we don’t therefore have a responsibility to carry arms, to find the magical metaphorical Spencer rifles, to enact a kind of magical cure or something. It’s all quite useless and at the same time it’s in the uselessness of it, that its purpose and its proof resides.”

He says that with regard to this and his writing, he feels like he has been given a task – akin to when, as a child, he would go to the well with his great aunt to collect water.

“So I feel in the making of a book that I’ve been given by the cosmic great aunt a sort of task,” he says. “And though the child resists it at first, in the making of it an enormous satisfaction is is gained. And that’s what I feel, and I also feel in being allowed and being sort of ticketed to talk about Winona for the next hopefully year or two. It seems like a privilege to me.”

It was a privilege, too, he says, to meet readers after he wrote Days Without End. “Having people who happened to be gay, but of all ages going up and shaking my hand or saying something, and just making me feel that that you had a purpose, that you had a task.

“Without that, you know, what are you, you’re retired…”

No sign of that just yet.

A Thousand Moons is out now and available to buy online from booksellers.

Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone...
A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation.

Close
5 Comments
This is YOUR comments community. Stay civil, stay constructive, stay on topic. Please familiarise yourself with our comments policy here before taking part.
Leave a Comment
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Casper
    Favourite Casper
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:07 PM

    Seven years what a joke

    231
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Matt Connolly
    Favourite Matt Connolly
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:14 PM

    @Casper: Can only sentence what the max was at the time of the offence, in the 70′s.

    Legislation allows for bigger sentences now.

    47
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Casper
    Favourite Casper
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:19 PM

    @Matt Connolly: well if that’s the case the law needs to be changed to allow for bigger sentences, it don’t matter what decade it was or is it still has the same impact on its victims and society as a whole.

    117
    See 3 more replies ▾
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute the phantom
    Favourite the phantom
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:25 PM

    @Casper: agreed. It must be possible to classify violent rapists (those proven to ever have offended) as on-going dangers to society and jail them at the discretion of the minister for justice.
    Could even apply to people who committed such acts abroad. Not a bad way to keep out people who have done so in other countries too.

    22
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute John O'Neill
    Favourite John O'Neill
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:38 PM

    @Casper: it is my understanding that the judge made this 7 year sentence run consecutively to the 7 year and 10 months sentence he is already serving which is right and proper

    21
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Casper
    Favourite Casper
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:44 PM

    @John O’Neill: well that’s good to know

    8
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Dean Moriarity
    Favourite Dean Moriarity
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:34 PM

    Parents should be very wary of letting their kids play GAA. Far too much of this going on under the county banner.

    71
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Casper
    Favourite Casper
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:41 PM

    @Dean Moriarity: don’t be silly you can’t paint every one with the one brush, lots of good people give of their time to these clubs day in and day out and well done to their commitment, but clubs do have a duty of care to make sure that volunteers are vetted and provided training in child protection

    97
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Cultural Marxist
    Favourite Cultural Marxist
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:53 PM

    @Casper: That’s what they used to say about the Catholic Church until the full extent of the paedophilia and cover up was revealed. The GAA is run along the same lines, unquestioning loyalty to the parish coach who has access to children via a position of trust. This is only the tip of the iceberg in the GAA.

    58
    See 12 more replies ▾
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Casper
    Favourite Casper
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:59 PM

    @Cultural Marxist: well if that’s true I would assume its historical, I don’t believe that would be the case in this day and age, and I hope that people keep coming forward and put their perpetrators behind bars where they belong

    16
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Cultural Marxist
    Favourite Cultural Marxist
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 6:08 PM

    @Casper: Agreed.

    6
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Thomas Blackcat
    Favourite Thomas Blackcat
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 6:15 PM

    @Cultural Marxist: Not happening now? That’s what the RCC and GAA swore then….and it’s still happening. People are both blind and stupid…..

    12
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Casper
    Favourite Casper
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 6:35 PM

    @Thomas Blackcat: sounds like you have some information or evidence of serious crimes if you do you better take it to the Garda, and if you don’t stop blowing smoke out of your arse

    31
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Ray Muller
    Favourite Ray Muller
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 7:58 PM

    @Cultural Marxist:
    Perverts will infiltrate any organisation that will provide cover for their despicable criminal acts. Being a cultural Marxist perhaps you are aware of Bella Dodd?
    “In the late 1920′s and 1930′s, directives were sent from Moscow to all Communist Party organizations. In order to destroy the Catholic Church from within, party members were to be planted in seminaries and within diocesan organizations,” Dodd stated according to the affidavit.She also stated in her book “school of darkness” that “The homosexual and heretical pollution of the priesthood was deliberate and long in the making” and that she herself under orders placed over 1100 deviants into the church to destroy it from within?

    11
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Cultural Marxist
    Favourite Cultural Marxist
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 8:32 PM

    @Ray Muller: Calling gay people perverts and deviant, you must be a Catholic yourself. When you graduate from primary school you may also learn that there is no link between sexual orientation and paedophilia, that is why your priests molested young girls as well as boys.

    10
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Ray Muller
    Favourite Ray Muller
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 9:32 PM

    @Cultural Marxist:
    Of course there isn’t, but there is a historically connection with pederastry, or man and boy, which is what apparently occurred in this case. Its also a tag peculiar that the world leading “gay” rights group, ILGA, reportedly harboured no less that 3 of these dangerous sicko groups in their ranks for years. They even had UN funding removed because of it!
    Just saying it as it is.

    5
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Ray Muller
    Favourite Ray Muller
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 9:40 PM

    @Cultural Marxist: Of course there isn’t, but there is a historical connection, Romans and Greeks with pederastry, or man and boy depravity, which is what apparently what transpired in this case.
    Its also a tag peculiar that the world’s leading “gay” rights group, ILGA, reportedly harboured no less that 3 of these dangerous sicko groups in their ranks for years. They even had UN funding removed because of it!
    Just saying it as it is. The truth shouldn’t offend anyone?

    4
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Sinead Hanley
    Favourite Sinead Hanley
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 10:10 PM

    @Casper: My young fella plays hurling and as far as i am aware, there is no garda vetting (at our local club anyway). I often help out at things and no one has ever asked me to get garda vetted. The local parish council asked me to do some readings at the church regularly. And i had to be garda vetted. Its extremely strict at the church and so it should be with their disastrous record. So i do feel there is a risk at my GAA club that i didnt consider. Though i do accompany my son to ALL matches/training.

    5
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Jumperoo
    Favourite Jumperoo
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 11:25 PM

    @Sinead Hanley: Garda vetting is a requirement for all coaches and others involved with underage GAA teams, and has been for years. I don’t know to what extent you help out yourself, but maybe not to that degree? Would find it unlikely that your club doesn’t comply at all. Either way, it would probably be better for you to ask a club official than to throw such probably unfounded accusations around online.

    4
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Sinead Hanley
    Favourite Sinead Hanley
    Report
    Nov 11th 2017, 1:11 AM

    @Jumperoo: The fact is that even though my club are probably complying (as you say) with garda vetting etc, i as a parent have not been made aware of it. My son is with his club for 3 years since he was 4 and i have never heard a word about child “safety” except for the cul camps. I am not suggesting any problems with child safety but i think its important that the GAA highlight their stance from now on. I was taken aback when i read this article cos i hasnt considered it. Though i always accompany my child. There is a framed poster in our church for safety officers/people for children if u are concerned. Its not in our gaa club.

    4
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Gearoidín Ní Fhiách
    Favourite Gearoidín Ní Fhiách
    Report
    Nov 11th 2017, 3:05 AM

    @Sinead Hanley: Sinead, there is a legal requirement on every GAA club to have every coach, trainer or manager Garda Vetted. They are also obliged to undertake a Child a Protection course of which this subject matter is the primary focus. They must also undertake various coaching courses, but the first, the Garda Vetting is essential. It would not be possible to have every single person who turns up at a pitch checked, many are parents like yourself etc. Think about it. If your child is at a game and you’ve arranged another parent to take them home, and something sinister were to occur, there is nothing the GAA club could do to prevent that, if you follow. But a good club will take all and any precautions to ensure those with the closet contact yo kids, are safe. That said, these predators will always find a way. Can’t keep kids locked away, just in case.

    1
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute MacEochagain
    Favourite MacEochagain
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 6:13 PM

    More silence from Croke Park. They need to come out and reassure people things are done properly these days…. they had more to say about a certain testimonial dinner last week!

    #headinthesand

    35
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Sean @114
    Favourite Sean @114
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 7:39 PM

    @MacEochagain: this is happening everywhere. The aggressive atheists will tell you that the abusers all have white collars. Anywhere where adults are exposed to kids this can happen. All coaches are Garda vetted but this means little unless you have a record. I’m not sure what any organisation can say unless it’s a token apology. This is a societal issue.

    11
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Gavin Huban
    Favourite Gavin Huban
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 7:47 PM

    @Sean @114: societal problem caused by years of religious repression…..

    10
    See 3 more replies ▾
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Cultural Marxist
    Favourite Cultural Marxist
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 8:34 PM

    @Sean @114: What’s an ‘aggressive atheist’? Is it someone who shouts at nothing?

    6
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute MacEochagain
    Favourite MacEochagain
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 9:23 PM

    @Cultural Marxist: it’s a first cousin of a cultural Marxist.. ..

    4
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Sean @114
    Favourite Sean @114
    Report
    Nov 11th 2017, 12:52 AM

    @Gavin Huban: years of sexual repression maybe.

    2
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Deborah Behan
    Favourite Deborah Behan
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:41 PM

    That sentence is a joke! Three times that sentence would be a joke. Turns my stomach.

    34
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Paul O Riordan
    Favourite Paul O Riordan
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 5:59 PM

    Appalling behavior from someone in a position of trust. His children are probably victims also. No winners

    16
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute @mdmak33
    Favourite @mdmak33
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 6:03 PM

    Its time sentences were changed, instead of protecting these people.

    6
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Brian O Reilly
    Favourite Brian O Reilly
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 8:41 PM

    A pompous self denying paedophile ,No remorse ,no remission ,

    14
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Freecakes
    Favourite Freecakes
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 10:59 PM

    The Journal, I often wonder why you even bother with images. Why not show a photo of this s*umbag – we already have his name – so we know what he looks like when he gets parole in a few years.

    1
    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Martin Byrne
    Favourite Martin Byrne
    Report
    Nov 10th 2017, 11:57 PM

    @Freecakes: to protect his victims?

    1
Submit a report
Please help us understand how this comment violates our community guidelines.
Thank you for the feedback
Your feedback has been sent to our team for review.

Leave a commentcancel

 
JournalTv
News in 60 seconds