I spent six of the early weeks of lockdown watching the BBC/Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and I’ve spent the past six weeks reading and rereading from Lorrie Moore’s fantastic Collected Stories. When I saw that Moore had written on Normal People for the New York Review of Books this month, it seemed inevitable, fated. Reading it also reminded me of a Guardian article by Steve Rose I had read a few weeks before, about how the casting decisions in Disney’s Artemis Fowl – the decision to cast people of colour in supporting, rather than leading roles – reinforces rather than challenges things like the “white hero” trope. Moore, citing Toni Morrison’s 1992 work Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, raises similar concerns for Normal People, in which “[d]ecisions were made by the showrunners to do some decorative racial casting so that perhaps Ireland would not seem 98 percent white but perhaps only 94 percent.”
Both Rose and Moore assume that racial difference and colonial legacy operate in Ireland as they do in the US and UK, only on a smaller scale. While in any society in which there is racial difference there will also be racial tension, the imposition of the racial mores and issues of Britain and the USA onto Ireland is a perversely well-intentioned form of cultural imperialism.
Ireland is a small, English-speaking country and we are inevitably influenced by our large, English-speaking cousins; we listen to their music, watch their films and TV shows, and keep up to date with their news to a far greater extent than they do ours. This is only natural, and it’s not really anyone’s fault, yet the (seemingly inevitable, arguably necessary) adaptation of two Irish novels into screen media by British-American production companies and the subsequent attention they have garnered from the British and American press has led, also seemingly inevitably, to various degrees of misconstrual.
Artemis Fowl is almost certainly a Protestant – he is definitely coded as a West Brit. His family have lived in the big house, Fowl Manor, for generations. His name, Fowl, is surely derived from Fowler, a name that marks him clearly as being of Anglo-Irish descent. His arrogance, slyness and wealth are calculated to evoke an unsympathetic antihero to an Irish audience who, in 2001 at least, were the product of centuries of a culture in which wealth and ostentation were almost synonymous with Britishness, Protestantism, dispossession and deceit. In Ireland, where religion was (and perhaps, particularly in the North, still is) equivalent to race, there is already a racial element. Ireland’s growing multiculturalism has led to an increase in incidents that are immediately comprehensible to an international audience as racist ones. These incidents depend, however, on the same framework of othering and dehumanisation, along with institutional and individual discrimination and violence, that characterises Ireland’s sectarian conflict. This is a conflict on which much progress has been made, yet it is difficult to overstate the influence on the Irish psyche of both its current manifestations and its deeply-felt memory. This is Ireland’s colonial legacy, yet it is inapposite to contemporary discourse in the US and UK because it does not involve skin colour.
The quality of the adaptation is of paramount importance. At the risk of making that all too common error – mistaking verbose indignation for genuine patriotism – I cannot but call Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Artemis Fowl a flagrant bastardisation of quality, beloved Irish source material. Normal People, on the other hand, is an excellent show. It was universally lauded by critics and is almost certain to dominate next year’s IFTAS and, indeed, will likely feature at the BAFTAS in 2021.
Moore wonders, however, whether instead of inserting people of colour into supporting roles in the TV version, one of the two leads could have been played by a black actor. Given Ireland’s demographic makeup, a non-Irish Connell and Lorraine are far more likely to be Brazilian or Eastern European than of African descent, yet Moore’s challenge is an interesting one. We would all, I hope, be eager to see more people of colour in the lead roles of prominent television shows. In this case, it would probably have to be Marianne who, though she lives in the big house, is not coded as Anglo-Irish quite so much as Artemis Fowl is. Her surname, Sheridan, is non-Norman, and Rooney makes no mention of a generational attachment to the house or to the landed gentry. If Connell and Lorraine were Black (though, of course, they do not have to have the same skin colour) and Marianne white, one would risk reinforcing the tired trope of the single Black working mother or the Black son of a single working mother which, though immediately comprehensible to an American audience, leaves the casting director open to accusations of perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Similar criticisms have been levelled at Lucy Bevan, casting director for Artemis Fowl, for casting Nonso Anozie as Butler, the big, Black scary manservant, who is explicitly Russo-Japanese in the original text. Bevan was simultaneously accused of white-washing by casting Lara McDonnell, a white Irish actor, as Holly Short, who in the book is described as having “nut-brown skin”. There remains, of course, the possibility that the Butlers are Russo-Japanese but of African descent, though their accents remain mysteriously English. All the same, Normal People could have had an all-Black cast: it was so well made it could have been convincing even while flying in the face of Irish demographic realities. Convincing but surreal.
Of the main cast in Artemis Fowl, seven are British (Anozie, Smart, Dench, Patel, McGuire) or American actors (Gad, Chau), three are Irish (Shaw, McDonnell, Farrell). This is cultural imperialism. Of the British actors, only Judi Dench tries for an Irish accent; unlike the brilliant Edgar-Jones but like many British and American actors before her, she is gratingly unsuccessful. This is cultural imperialism. An “Irish blessing” plays a key role in the film: “May the road rise to greet you, may the wind be ever at your back,” et cetera. This blessing is an Irish-American invention from the 1980s. While Irish people are generally happy to see Americans proud of their Irish heritage, the likelihood of an Irish person giving this blessing in earnest is nil, about as likely as an Irish person saying “Top of the morning” which, incidentally, is a line Dench delivers in Artemis Fowl. This is cultural imperialism. Of the people of colour in the main cast of Artemis Fowl, not one is Irish, which implies, contrary to the casting of Normal People, that Ireland doesn’t have so much as one talented actor of colour. This is silly.
Moore and Rose impose, however magnanimously, the contours of racial discourse in the UK and US on Irish society. This is, unfortunately, cultural imperialism.
It is unlikely that progress on racial issues in Ireland can be achieved if we accept uncritically the primacy attributed to skin colour in the racial discourse of the US and UK. Skin colour is a tremendously important aspect to Irish racial issues. It exists, however, alongside issues such as that of the Travelling Community, who constitute a distinct ethnic group, our large Eastern European population, and the ineradicable legacy of Ireland’s historical status as colony, a legacy which continues to animate sectarian hostility throughout this island. How many Protestants have had the graves of their loved ones systematically defaced? How many Catholics do you know who support Rangers?
Normal People, which was written, acted, and directed by a tremendously talented group of people, avoids many of the postcolonial pitfalls into which the shoddy Artemis Fowl stumbles. Technical accomplishment correlates strongly with positive social messaging. This isn’t surprising.
